We missed a lot of Malaysia. Then again, I really didn't know what was here until we arrived. There is a lot to see, transportation runs smoothly and on time, and most everyone speaks some English. Then again, the goverment is putting a lot into its tourism campaign, promoting Malaysia as 'The World's #1 Toursim Destination'. So, it has its ups and its downs. But there is certainly much to come back to.

We only got to see some small parts of East Malaysia (also known as the Malay penninsula). The first glimpse certainly wasn't the best, as we arrived at the Kuala Lumpur bus station at about 4:45am, when the place was filled with people who you would generally want to avoid. We managed to make our way over to the Green Hut for a few hours of sleep before heading out into the city. Actually, the Green Hut was a pretty good, central location - about 20 min walk to Petronas Twin Towers in one direction and 20 min to Chinatown and the KMT (Train) station the other way. The Kuala Lumpur website is pretty informative, and we used it to figure out our way around town. We never did go up in the bridge between the two towers - the one day we walked over there, all of the tickets for the day were gone (get there early if you want to go - tickets are free but are only good for the day - opens at 8:30am), and our last day there we couldn't quite bring ourselves to get up that early. Then again, the skybridge is only on the 41st floor... not too impressive. The shopping on the other hand, is quite impressive, if you have the money. Every designer brand you could want probably has a very large store somewhere in the city center, and if you can't afford that, well, there's always even more knockoff designer stuff in Chinatown. We also went out to the Forestry Research Institute of Malaysia our second day there, which was a nice short trip outside of the city. It was a long and sweaty walk through the forest up to their canopy walkway, but the views out over the forest and of the city were quite nice, as was the breeze blowing up there. No large animals were sighted, but a number of smaller lizards were on the walk up and down, which looked pretty much like untouched jungle.

A cheap but comfy bus ride and 2 hours later, we were in Melaka, a historic port city originally settled around 1400. It sits right on the Straits of Melaka, so it has been an important port city with merchants and shippers ever since. We stayed close to the old Chinese quarter, which reminded me a lot of Hoi An in Vietnam. It was a good couple of days there, although the temperature was suffocatting at mid-day. We did get to see the weekend night markets on Jonker Street, which was a huge collection of delicious food and junk for sale, new and old. Well, mostly junk, espeically the new stuff - but some of the older stuff in the shops was certainly worth a second look.

From Melaka it was only a 5 hour trip to Singapore, of which 1 hour was spent in customs, and so ended our quick excursion through Malaysia. It was an interesting country - seemingly much wealthier than all of the countries we had been in up to that point - and the price of food, rooms, etc. supported that assumption. The mix of cultures was also strikingly different than the rest of SE Asia - and maybe this is biased because we only saw two cities - but the Malay Muslims, the Chinese, and the Indians all seemed to make up a sizable portion of the population. There was no singuarly dominating ethnicity like the Thai, Lao, Khmer, Viet, or a dominant religion. From what few conversations we had with Malays (cab drivers, hostel owners) it seemed like there was a fair amount of distrust between each. But for a country only officially formed in 1967, and then having a few issues after that with the neighbors, I reckon they are doing okay for themselves. If only they could keep down the cost of beer!