Welcome to Asia!

                Hello, nice to meet you and welcome back everyone for more stories from around the world. This time I find myself in the Far East in search of ancient relics, indigenous tribes and spectacular adventures.

                But let’s not kid ourselves. The ancient relics are national monuments that have westerners crawling all over them, the newly discovered tribes of the last century have cameras better than mine and great adventures involve staying on the top deck of leaky ferries.

                Even still, there is something magically different and backwards on this side of the world.

                This time, oddly enough, I am joined by my good friends Samantha, Tim and Melissa. Together we have begun to navigate our way south from our starting point in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to the end of the peninsula.

                A week has passed and everything has proven to be anything but dull. This has created some problems on keeping this blog updated in a timely fashion. To make things simpler and keep this blog moving with our group, this first post will be almost like a photo journal through our first week here.

                So, without further procrastination….

               

We were not long into our journey when we hit our first snag. While cruising to JFK airport in our friend Phil’s car, singing Bette Midler’s rendition of "Boardwalk" completely out of sync with the cassette player, we heard a pop. The car shuddered a bit and five minutes later we were on the side of the interstate watching Phil lay on the hot pavement as he jacked the car up. The rear right tire of the car was shredded to bits. Ten more minutes of driving and we would have been grinding along on steel.

                Forty-five minutes, an undercover cop and some road flares later we were back on the way. Albeit, without Bette Midler.

          Eventually, we did arrive in Kuala Lumpur. One of the coolest things in KL is the fact that you can eat to your heart’s content. KL is now world renowned for its street food and hawker stands. Five star foods for a one star price are hard to beat.

Flavorful fish soup, spicy squid, delicious dumplings and anything else under the sun that you can imagine, you can get. Not to mention the shear energy from the hustle and bustle of people going about their day in the make shift cafeterias is an experience in itself.

               

            Kuala Lumpur is mammoth and unorganized as all hell. There are no maps that make any sort of navigable sense and traversing the city on foot seems suicidal at times. Motorcyclists zip in an out of traffic, only pausing momentarily to zip across three lanes and a divider. The best way to cross a street is to clump up with a large group of locals and make a go for it as a whole. Strength in numbers, I say.

        
      The monorail system is easy to use though and taxis are relatively affordable, given that you haggle a bit and don’t let the drivers take you for a sucker. The city is also home to the Petronas Towers, the largest twin towers in the world. These steel and glass structures tower over the other buildings in the city. Usually I’d say that is pretty idle as far as a land marker but due to the twisting streets, finding your way virtually anywhere can prove to be troublesome.

 In the far northern corridor of KL is the Chow Kit market. Not a place many westerners visit for its reputation of pickpockets and dodgy areas. I found the market to be no different from any of the other many outdoor food markets scattered throughout the rest of the world.

         
    Meat vendors butchered and sliced meat in cramped, hot stalls underneath the patchy sheet-metal roof. Traces of light occasionally crept through cracks to illuminate the smiling faces and waves from the locals. We must have been the first tourists in the market for a long time. In good gesture I purchased some lychees, sweet pit fruit with a spiky outer shell, from a vegetable stand.

              
    After spending a couple days in KL we began to make our push south towards Melaka. During the week the town is a sleepy place where locals hide from the oppressive sun and sip beer at bars and restaurants by the city’s canals. The city itself was founded by a runaway Sumatran Prince several hundred years ago and was once South East Asia’s largest trading port. That is all before the East Indie Company moved in during the 1800s. Much of the city’s Dutch colonial architecture is still in place and fairly well maintained.                         

We visited a sobering monument to the rebel fighters of the city against the Japanese Army during the Second World War. The city also has the oldest Chinese cemetery outside of China. Some of the tombs date back to the 13^th and 14^th century but also has tombs that date as recently as 1990. The odd contrast of the old and new is accented by new tombs placed by some that have full grown trees sprouting from the tombstones.

Much more has happened in between all of this, Hindu wedding crashing, rooftop parties and accidentally wandering into the Malaysian Parliament, but it will have to wait for another time. Look for more post to come in the following weeks as we train, plane and boat our way from one island mishap to another.