TravelStream™ news feed for member danandsarah on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/danandsarah en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:58:19 -0500 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1231261200/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1231261200/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1231261200/tpod.html Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:58:19 -0500 Dan and Sarah's Excellent Adventure!

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Ko Lanta, Thailand

The night train was great, this time instead of seats we managed to get proper beds which was well worth paying double for. Sarah and I decided it was the best of all the sleeper trains we had experienced on our trip, and by now we have become connoisseurs in this area!

Now, as Hat Yai is supposedly dangerouns, and we weren't really up for any more drama, we decided to try a method described in the Rough Guide that managed to avoid the danger areas. Unfortunately, what Rough Guide write and what happens in reality are quite frequently two very different things.

The theory was to go to a port, get on a longtail boat that will 'leave when full' and take us on our merry little way around the border to Thailand.

When we got to the port it was, essentially, a fishing port. We trampled through stinking fish and God knows what else and found the immigration office. This wasn't quite what we'd expected, where were the crowds of travellers hopping into longtail boats? More to the point, where were the longtail boats?

Eventually, we ascertained that we could indeed get a boat when there were 10 people to fill it and that 'shouldn't be too long' at present the total stood at 3, namely Sarah and Debbie and myself.

After over an hour of waiting the number still stood at 3. None of us could see us going anywhere. In addition, the price had doubled from the 10 ringits quoted in the book to 20 per person, it was going to cost us 40 quid if we wanted to speed things up and charter the boat!

Eventually, Debbie persuaded the border guard (our interpreter) to offer the boatman 100 ringgits (20 quid) which he accepted, he then loaded up a grotty looking old fishing boat with plastic boxes, got us and our bags in and we were finally on our way out of Malaysia and back to Thailand.

The journey took about an hour. We arrived, got stamped into Thailand and were immediately hassled as to where we wanted to go.

Our plan was to try and get to Ko Lanta that day which had seemed feasible but with the time lost at the port we were now pushing it. The guy from the travel agents, however, claimed he could get us there and after knocking 200 baht (4 quid) off the price for each of us we accepted and were whisked via Trang and a couple of little car ferries all the way to Lanta by tea time.

This island was a sprawling metropolis compared to our tiny little Ko Lipe, but we picked a beach and found a nice place a little bit back from the sand, had a candle-lit meal on the beach and got an early night.

The next day Debbie's friend Gemma joined us to take our numbers up to 4, and I found out I had an appointment the day after in Phuket. Our time in Lanta was to be short and sweet.

So after a day's sunbathing on the beach, and relaxing in a hammock, me and Sarah were off again. This time by a much bigger, much busier ferry boat.
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Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan, Malaysia

We were both quite looking forward to going back to Kuala Lumpur. Somewhere busy, developed, a bit different from the last two weeks on our little tropical island!

We had a couple of nights in town before New Year's Eve when Debbie would be arriving. We returned to the Cosmopolitan Hostel for a night before moving to another place we'd booked back in June, the first thing we booked on the whole trip!

We finally made it to the museum on a day that it was actually open. It was nicely presented with lots of interactive exhibits but if was never going to live up to the expectation we'd had after our previous abortive journey.
On the same day we went to the butterfly park, which was actually rather good. Not only some amazing butterflies, including some the size of birds, but terrapins, fish, frogs and a whole load of creepy crawlies that Sarah didn't really like!

We had a nice couple of days doing more relaxing and se shopping...Sarah even found a Topshop, and bought some new clothes in preparation for another month of beaches ahead of us. We were happy to be back in a city which we had started getting to know the last time we were there.

So New Year's Eve finally came around and we made our way out to the airport in the middle of the afternoon to meet Debbie. We took a bus out and a taxi back and it was all going great. Debbie was tired but the plan was to fight the jet-lag, see in the New Year with the fireworks and get to bed soon after midnight. After all, we were in a country where alcohol is ridiculously expensive, this wasn't going to be your typical drunken New Year's eve!

The hostel laid on a great spread of rice and meats, including some fantastic satay sticks. We ate that and as midnight approached made our way towards the twin towers, about a 20 minute walk away, as we thought they'd be the most impressive place to see the fireworks in KL.

We sat on a grass bank in the park infront of the towers where a huge crowd had formed and a presenter on the stage was getting everyone in the mood. As the huge clock struck midnight fireworks erupted behind us and the fantastic display lasted for nearly 10 minutes. As soon as the fireworks were over, the massive crowds started to disperse and we were joking about having a boring New Year's Eve as we were all knackered (especially Debbie!) and couldn't wait to get back home to bed!

Just as we were fighting our way through the crowds to the exit, my parents phoned from England to wish us a happy new year. We were still walking along a well lit, busy pathway where lots of people were leaving the display and I happened to notice a young lad of about 16 walking beside me in the crowd.. I looked at him for a second and looked away again, still talking to my parents.

Within a second I'd been hit in the face, very bloody hard. And my nose was bleeding, very bloody much. They guy tried to grab the phone. He obviously didn't realise that it was a fantastically basic Nokia bought for 20 quid in Hong Kong. The phone's best feature is a little LED on the top that you can use as a torch, and if he'd told me (and I'd have believed) what he was about to do I'd probably have given it to him. Instictively I held on to it and at the same time managed to hang up the phone which prevented my Mum having to hear anything that was happening.

As it turned out, the guy's friends pulled him off me. Sarah and Debbie, who'd been slightly off to one side, were obviously incredibly shocked but all I could think to do was tell them I was OK (despite the appearance) and that we needed to get to a hospital, as I could feel lots of little bones moving about in my nose!

We ran up the path a little and into the lobby of a rather posh hotel where they immediately brought me towels, ice and water before taking me upstairs to use a bathroom where I cleaned up my face as best I could. Coincidently, the other guy using the bathroom told me he was a plastic surgeon.

'Your nose is broken' He said, confirming my theory about the little bones moving about.
'You'll need an operation, local or general anaesthetic' General, I thought, as if I needed to decide now. He also gave me some tips not to shove paper up my nose (which I was about to do) and to just put a bit of pressure on the sides of it to stop the bleeding. Funnily enough I wasn't really experiencing any pain at this point, thank God for adrenaline!

Back in the lobby the staff tried to get one of the waiting taxis to take us to the hospital. My blood stained shirt seemed to be causing most of them to decide it was better to give me a miss, despite Sarah offering to pay them double! The staff then called for a taxi, who again didn't want to come, as they said the traffic was too bad in the city. So then they rang an ambulance, but they said it could be hours before they arrived because of the traffic. We gave up on this idea and eventually managed to convince a police car which had stopped near-by to take us. What a lot of effort just to get to the hospital....this was when it started dawning on us how much we take for granted from our beloved NHS in England.

In the hospital we sorted out the necessary paperwork, handed over a credit card and then I got an X-Ray which confirmed again the fracture, although to my amazement it was a clean break with no splintering (that was not how it felt!) I was given the option to go home and let it sort itself out, or wait for the specialist in the morning. I took the latter option and was taken to a ward, but only after a long pallava with the insurance company over the phone!

By this time it was gone 3am, poor Debbie, a nurse like Sarah, was less than 12 hours into her holiday and already back in a hospital, and that early night was long since forgotten. It took them nearly 2 hours to find a taxi to take them back to the hostel, where they eventually arrived bedraggled and bloodstained (Sarah's new clothes that she had bought the day before were covered!). As it turned out, Debbie had managed to stay up for the fireworks....and
her and Sarah were rolling into the hostel at about 5.30am on New Year's
Day. I was spending the first hours of 2009 in a hospital bed on the
other side of the city....this is one New Year that I'm pretty sure
I'll never
forget.

Morning came and Sarah arrived back on the ward at 7.30 am just as I was deciding whether I could face my breakfast of spicy noodle soup and onion salad (I couldn't). The specialist eventually arrived and explained that there was too much swelling to assess if I'd need an operation or not so I'd need to come back for him to have another look in 2 days time.....the day after we were supposed to catch the train to Thailand! I was sent home with various drugs and nose drops and just had to let nature take its course.

The bruising and swelling was immense, one punch had given me two completely black eyes, and it was too painful to wear sun glasses so I just had to live with the stares I received.

I reported the incident to the police station and eventually made it back to the hostel. In the following days none of us really felt like doing much. I didn't want to leave the room for too long, the pain wasn't too bad but we all just had been given a nasty feeling about the place. In fairness I'd just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and attacks like this don't really happen too often on foreigners, but it couldn't help the fact that none of us wanted to be there any more.

We took Debbie to the fish spa which she loved, we went to see 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' which we agreed was probably one of the worst films ever made, and we ate some nice food. Also the girls visited the KL tower, the 'other' big one in Kuala Lumpur complete with 50% price increase to welcome in the new year!

After a few days I went back to the hospital, the doctor put a scope up my nose which showed the damage that had been caused to the cartlidge but it was still too early to determine if the nose was wonky. The good news was that we could leave for Thailand and go to another hospital there. And I got a DVD of the inside of my nose, how many people can say they have one of those???

So we were off, the next evening we caught a train up to Thailand. We were all relieved. Everyone we'd met in Kuala Lumpur, with one exception, had been lovely. Particularly after the incident every person from taxi drivers to shop keepers had shown genuine concern that this had happened to a foreigner in their city. But it couldn't change the feelings we had inside and we were universally happy to be able to get back on with our trip, and Debbie could start hers properly!

]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1261963800/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1261963800/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1261963800/tpod.html Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:00:59 -0500 Dan and Sarah's Excellent Adventure!

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Georgetown, Pinang, Malaysia

Ok, so we weren't exactly kicked out of Thailand, but because of some new rules that mean backpackers like us who don't rack up a massive carbon footprint by taking little flights around SE Asia and instead enter the country by land get to stay for a massive 15 days before having to leave again, instead of a much more sensible 30.

Due to our early retreat from Langkawi this meant that while everyone back home was sitting down to leftover Turkey on boxing day, we had to make our way back to Malaysia. One of the options was to return to Langkawi but that wasn't really an option now was it? So instead we took a speed-boat over to the mainland.

We landed in a small place called Pak Bara where the only thing to do is sit in a cafe and wait for a minibus out of there. Fortunately we didn't have to wait too long before being ushered over to the other side of the road, bundled into a minibus and driven off to Hat Yai, the next point on our somewhat convoluted trip to Penang.

Hat Yai is the transport hub of the deep south of Thailand. You're not strictly supposed to go there as a westerner as it's just inside the 'problem' area of Southern Thailand, but there really aren't any other options and it's no more or less dangerous than anywhere else we've been to. Our minibus dropped us at another travel agency where we dropped our bags and had about an hour to kill. We were starving and after 2 weeks of nothing but incredible Thai food were ready to slip back into our western fast-food ways in the form of KFC.

It was a nice experience though, you get plates and knives and forks and get served at your table and it's an altogether more civilised affair than the teenage delinquent's playground that it is back home. The coating tasted a bit funny though, and the chicken was a bit grey, but the chips were better than the lousy ones back home!

Restaurant review over. The time came to leave Hat Yai and we got in yet another minibus with 6 or 7 other travelers and off we went.

It was about an hour down to the border where we hopped off the bus and the driver mumbled something to us about seeing us on the other side. So us two, two Swedish girls and an Australian guy walked up to the Thai immigration for our exit stamps, then walked a few hundred metres down to Malaysian immigration and waited on the other side for the minibus....

And we waited, and waited, and after 45 minutes we thought we might have a slight problem. Fortunately someone had a receipt with the number of the company who's minibus we were on. I called and explained the situation...

'you're in MALAYSIA?. What you doing in MALAYSIA?' screamed the woman on the end of the phone.
'erm, sorry. We thought he said he'd see us on the other side.'
'Yes, other side THAILAND!'

They contacted the minibus, but we had to walk back through the customs hall with our bags (which had been in the bus) on our backs.

Anyway, after some fairly dirty looks from the driver, who spoke next to no English, we were back on our way.

We arrived in Georgetown, the 'capital' of Penang only slightly later than planned at around 9pm, found a room and met up with our fellow passengers from the minibus for a bit of Penang street food, including some fantastic watermelon fruit shakes that only cost 20p each!

We only had one day to see Georgetown and so we got up early, starting the day with curry and roti for breakfast in Little India. Sarah ordered an Ice Tea, expecting to get the usual yellow can of Lipton. Instead what she received was a glass with loads of ice and hot tea poured into it. A very strange sensation at first, but eventually the ice won the battle and you're left with authentic ice tea, much better than out of a can!!!
We wandered around town to see what there was to see. We visited the museum hoping to learn about the British occupation but it seems they don't want to shout too loudly about that part of their history. It was rather nice all the same and had some great old cars parked outside.

We stopped off in Chinatown for lunch, went to the cinema and that was more or less that.

Oh, except that on our walk we heard a splash in the open sewer that runs a bit like a river along the pavement. I went to investigate and the source of the noise was, I'm pretty sure, a baby dragon!

Now, I'm sceptical as to whether dragons really exist, but this creature was like nothing I've ever seen before. It was long, much longer than a lizard, probably about 2 feet in total....and it swam. It also had a long tongue which slithered out of its mouth and will probably one day shoot fire.

Anyway, if you go to Penang, watch out for dragons!

We left the next morning, walking to the ferry that runs across to the mainland and catching a train back down to Kuala Lumpur to meet Debbie and see in the new year. Unfortunately we weren't booked on the Orient Express, which was sitting in the station, but the rather plain blue and grey train next to it!

]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1260875700/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1260875700/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1260875700/tpod.html Wed, 04 Feb 2009 05:16:03 -0500 Dan and Sarah's Excellent Adventure!

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Langkawi, Kedah, Malaysia

Our time in Langkawi was....erm...not very special.

Supposedly home to some beautiful beaches all we found on Cenang beach was rubbish, and not very nice sand and jellyfish in the sea!

To add to this we had a truly horrible place to stay. Vistar Travel Lodge is very hard to recommend. We were mainly staying there because it was the cheapest place we could find on a packed (for some unknown reason?) island. But it wasn't 'cheap' we were paying 4 pounds each to stay in a dorm.

The dorm was, it turned out, a little dark shed with some yoga mats on the floor to sleep on. And the toilet was unbelievable and home to at least one cockroach. We almost immediately turned around to leave, but were quite taken aback that anyone could see fit to charge for this place! (we'll add pictures eventually) Anyway, instead of leaving we actually went and paid some more money to stay in a private room that at least had a proper bed and seemed clean enough.

After visiting the nasty beach and walking the length of the road with it's stinking open drains and incomplete pavement we returned to 'The Lodge'. In this time we'd also discovered that most places were probably full the next night too so we were kind of stuck, we needed to leave this island as soon as possible!

As the previous occupant hadn't checked out earlier we left our bags in the dorm. This was a major error of judgment. In the time we'd been away the woman at reception had seemingly forgotten us, and sold the room we'd given her extra money for to someone else. Everyone played a bit dumb, and we were fobbed off with a story that some girl whose friends were in the dorm had got sick so they'd given her a private room. Later we discovered there was only one person in the dorm, a solo traveler. so his story was a bit 'wooly' to say the least.

So in the end we had no choice but to hit the yoga mats, it was evening and everywhere else was full!

Actually we spent two nights in the dorm, we survived and when we were joined by some other folks who shared our amazement at the place we actually had a bit of a laugh about it. But we left after the second night and short of Spurs being drawn away to Langkawi Athletic in the world club cup I can't see us ever going back there!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1227276000/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1227276000/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1227276000/tpod.html Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:26:55 -0500 Dan and Sarah's Excellent Adventure!

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Darjeeling, West Bengal, India

I probably woke up at about 7am. I had a vague recollection of the man in the seat opposite getting of at about 4 which meant we were running late because he said he expected to be getting off at 2. 2hrs late, not so bad I thought, we were due to arrive at 8:20 so at the worst perhaps we'll be there at 11am.

We'd been booked on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway from New Jalpaiguri (NJP) up to Darjeeling, a journey of about 80km that takes about 8hrs!!! It leaves at 9am So we would miss this, but maybe that wasn't such a bad thing, the Jeep ride is only 3hrs.

Then we got to a station, I didn't have a timetable so couldn't work out how late we were (and there is nobody to tell you) but I got out my map. We were, using the width of my thumb to measure against the scale, at least 250km away from NJP. We couldn't average much more than 40km/h so we were going to be very very late.

We finally arrived at 3:30pm, 7hrs late. This made us appreciate how good the trans siberian was, they managed to get a 6 day train to arrive within 5 minutes of its planned time!!!

The jeep ride up the mountain started in the afternoon heat of NJP train station and ended in the bitter cold of evening in Darjeeling, cold that one way or another we'd have to get used to over the next few days. We found our way to our hotel, dumped our bags, changed out of our wholly inappropriate shorts and T-Shirts and ventured off to find somewhere warm to eat.

The next day we woke up at some ridiculously late hour and went to investigate the town. It was a bright sunny day and T-shirts were back on the cards, although to wear shorts as well would be foolish.

Darjeeling, being a hill station, is quite hilly. The roads are a series of windy streets all joined together by other windy streets but it's relatively easy to find your way back to the middle, it's just quite tiring. You can't help but notice a huge difference in culture to that in Varanasi, which I assume is more typical of the rest of India. Here you aren't hassled by the locals or the shop keepers every minute trying to part you with your money. There's a very relaxing vibe and we decided to stay for a few more days than we had originally planned.

On that first day we went to the Natural History museum which was surprisingly enjoyable and well worth the 7p entry fee!!! In the afternoon we came across a cinema showing the new James Bond film, in English! So with nothing better to do and it starting to get cold in the late afternoon we bought our tickets and took our seats. Popcorn was really cheap too!

Next day we visited the zoo and finally got to see some Tigers! It is always sad to see animals confined, but the 3 tigers at this Zoo we all saved from a circus and wouldn't survive back in the wild. It is also the only place in the world to have bred snow leopards which is quite an achievement. Other animals included lots of Deer and some Red Pandas which are tiny little bears with dozy faces, very cute.

On another day we finally got to take the railway some of the way down the hill. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway was built in the 1800s as a means to get potatoes (and presumably other things) up the hill quicker than the day or so it currently took by horse and cart. It's a pretty amazing achievement and is still very much necessary today, for post and for all the people who's train from Varanasi isn't late.

We got on the special tourist train, pulled by a steam engine rather than the Diesel from NJP. The trip takes you to Ghum which is the 2nd highest train station in the world where there's a little museum. The trip is enough to give you a feel for what the journey up the hill is like, without having to spend 8 hours crammed into the little carriages. The track is on 2 feet wide and mainly follows the route of the road, often crossing over from side to side and at times passing ridiculously close to people's houses and shops. It's certainly a unique experience!

By the third night in the hotel we had taken advantage of their offer of a hot water bottle, quite why it took us so long I don't know, the first two nights really were freezing. It was also by this point that we both had streaming colds!

On our other days in Darjeeling we spent a day watching England get beaten at cricket, made an unsuccessful trip to find a tea plantation but found some nice botanical gardens instead, and then made a successful trip to find a tea plantations (this time with better instructions!)

The plantation was Happy Valley, who have recently signed a deal to supply Harrods. The plantation is very close to town and dominates the hill side. We walked down through the tea bushes to the factory where we went on a brief but very interesting tour to see how tea is turned from the waxy green leaves growing here to what we drink everyday back home (although proper Darjeeling tea is a million miles from Tetley!) All of the machines still in use in the factory today came from England around 100 years ago. We of course bought some tea (10% of the price it'll be in Harrods) and went on our way.

On our last morning we checked out of the hotel at 6am and walked off to find a Jeep to take us back to NJP. Our train was at 10:30 and we wanted to leave enough time for breakfast.

We needn't have worried. We arrived at the station with an hour to spare, sat down for breakfast and around 10am I went to find the station manager to find out what platform our train to Delhi would be leaving from. He took my ticket, looked long and hard and finally spoke.

'Five hours late' he said. Great, the journey is scheduled for 31 hours, this was the 2nd stop and already it was 5 hours late!!!!

We bought ourselves a timetable and worked out there were two trains to Delhi between now and when ours would arrive, we had Indrail passes which give unlimited travel so as long as there is space we can get on either of them. And they were both faster to Delhi than ours!!!

The system on the Indian railways is like this. If you want a bed then you need a guaranteed reservation, like on a plane. If when you buy your ticket there are no beds available you join the waiting list and then as and when the beds become available they get assigned to people with wait listed tickets. Then just before the train arrives a piece of paper gets stuck up saying who got beds and who didn't, if you didn't then you can get on the train but you're going to be sitting in the unreserved section which is a free-for-all, or just about any other spot you can find including the aisles and the bits between carriages.

It was too late for us to get wait list tickets, we'd just have to hope there was space on one of the two trains. The first had hundreds of people on the wait list and the second only a handful, so we thought we'd try our luck on the second.

When the train arrived I stood with the bags and Sarah went to find the ticket inspector who'd know if there was space. Hundreds of people shoved on and off the train and we only had 5 minutes to get on it. After about 4 minutes I decided to walk up the platform to find Sarah, as someone had told me we should just get on and they'd find us a bed later.

I spotted Sarah running back down the platform, we had bed numbers but just had to find them in coach HA1, the first coach as the ticket inspector had said. So we rushed up to the front of the train to the first coach, which was full....of letters. As was the second and third coach, where was HA1? The postman pointed back down the train, back where we'd come from so we raced back down expecting the train to pull away at any minute. And then we found it, and our beds, and they were empty and it was cool and air conditioned!!! We set ourselves for the long journey to Delhi.....
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1228870800/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1228870800/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1228870800/tpod.html Sun, 01 Feb 2009 02:30:23 -0500 Dan and Sarah's Excellent Adventure!

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Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan, Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur is a bit like a less shiny and more disorganised version of Singapore. I think it'd like to be Singapore, but it's not quite there.

For us that's a good thing, it's not nearly as expensive. We could actually consider doing some stuff, perhaps!

We arrived at the Central train station and got on the Monorail which would take us up to the hostel we'd booked into. The monorail was quite fun, I think mainly because I associate monorails with being in fun places like Disney World, or Alton Towers or....Gatwick Airport!

After standing in the middle of 5 streets spinning ourselves and our map round to try and figure out which way to walk we plumped for what we thought was the right road and happily we were right. We put our bags down in the hostel and as it was nearly 10pm and we'd had nothing to eat all day we went and had some of Kuala Lumpur's street food which as it turns out is even nicer than Singapore's, and of course cheaper!

We were staying in and area called Chow Kit, a bit of a way out of town but as it was on the monorail it was nice and easy to get back into the city centre. We later read somewhere that it was the city's red light district, after dark meeting place for K.L.'s transvestites and apparently a bit of a dodgy place to find yourself late at night, but it seemed fine to us!

Kuala Lumpur is similar again to Singapore in that it doesn't really have lots of things to do, unless you have lots of money to go on lots of day trips out of the city. No real historical sites, no great walks (not that you'd want to in the heat) so mostly you're restricted to the huge shopping malls and all the things they have to offer.

It was walking around one of these malls that we stumbled upon a 'Fish Spa'. Actually, it wasn't the first time we'd seen one, they had them in Singapore, but it was only here that we found out exactly what is involved. What is involved is basically putting your feet in a big fish tank and letting the fish eat you. The woman assured us they only 'kiss' you, but in doing so they remove all the dead skin off your feet (which after nearly 3 months of traveling was quite a lot).

At first it was unbearable, the sensation is a little bit like having hundreds of tiny little pins pricked into your feet. But after a while you get used to it, and after half an hour you really are left with amazingly smooth feet!

One sight that you can't miss seeing pretty much wherever you are in the city is the massive Petronas twin towers. They used to be the tallest buildings in the world and standing underneath them you can't really imagine you could build anything much bigger. It's possible to go up to the walkway that links the two towers about 40 stories (170 metres) up. Amazingly it's free, but you have to get up pretty early to get a ticket.

We arrived there at about 7:30am and were already several hundred people back in the queue. But after an hour or so's wait we reached the front and had a time-slot about an hour later. Apparently they give out 1700 free tickets each day for time slots throughout the day, but when we came back for our slot at 10am there was a sign saying that all the tickets for that day were sold out...so getting up early had been worth it!

After watching a fairly boring video about the Petronas oil company you are sent up in the very speedy lift to the 40th floor and set free on the walkway for about 15 minutes. The view was very impressive, and we were not even half way up the towers.....good value for money anyway!

So for a few more days we wandered around the town, visited the cinema and the bowling alley and generally just enjoyed being in a city not too unlike home.

The one time we did try to do something cultural was our last full day. We'd decided to visit the national museum which was near the train station. Unfortunately there isn't really a pedestrian route over to it, and it was raining. So we hiked out into the rain, across an ankle deep flooded car-park, down the exit slip from the road, along the road for a bit, down some stairs and across a muddy field that used to be the pavement. Finally we reached the steps up to the museum which was......closed! It's open every day of the year except public holidays of which, it transpired, today was one.

So we retraced our steps back to the station, thoroughly soaked.

After 4 or 5 nights in KL we returned back to the station to catch a train up the country to Langkawi where we would stop off for a while before crossing over to Thailand. Unlike the Indian trains we left bang on time!!!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1228410000/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1228410000/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1228410000/tpod.html Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:19:12 -0500 Dan and Sarah's Excellent Adventure!

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Singapore, Singapore

Landing in Singapore from India was very very strange. Having got used to noise, and dirt, and smells and inefficient transport and being constantly shouted at it felt, well, very clean and quiet.

We were tired and groggy, having spent 48 hours without a bed (or a shower) we hauled ourselves onto the spotlessly clean and wonderfully air-conditioned metro system. Our only snag being we'd booked a place to stay that night but a) we didn't have the address and b) it was 7am, check in would be 11 at the earliest so we weren't going to be clean for a good few hours yet.....

We knew it was in China Town, so the metro station called 'China Town' seemed a logical place to get ourselves to.

The journey didn't take too long, and we set ourselves down and had some breakfast before trying to locate the hostel. After finding an internet cafe and waiting until 9am for them to open we had the address and it was just a few minute's walk away; bang on with the hunch about the metro station :-)

Check in time, and hence shower time, was 2pm. We stank, but at least we could drop our bags off and go and see some of Singapore.

Singapore is very nice, it's well designed, clean and there are shops that sell just about everything. Our only problem was that we could afford to buy just about nothing! So we looked around big shopping malls, looked at Raffles hotel and looked at the big wheel. In fact, we spent 2 days pretty much looking at stuff and only very rarely handing over any money for anything except transport and food.

The food though is great, and very affordable. As mentioned previously, we stayed in Chinatown which meant come the evening the street stalls opened up all selling various versions of noodles and meat.

Whilst down by the big wheel (or 'Singapore Flyer', I think) and shortly after we'd decided not to pay the extortionate entry fee, the heavens opened. And it rained and rained and rained for at least an hour some of the most torrential rain I have ever seen. The Singapore Flyer is pretty much out on its own down near the waterfront and so we were basically captives, we had no choice but to sit and wait for the rain to stop.

Eventually it stopped, and we set off on the half and hour walk back to Chinatown. But then it started again. We took cover in what turned out to be a concert hall foyer. We sat down in sight of the front windows and played cards until it stopped again and we could carry on home.

We played cards for at least two hours with no end to the rain in sight before I noticed a tiny metro system logo on a sign in the lobby, pointing down the stairs.

The concert hall, it turned out, was linked by an underground shopping mall to a metro station, from where we could get back to our hostel. In fact, we could now pretty much get all the way from here to our bed under cover of some sort and not get washed away by the ridiculous rain.

We didn't really do a lot else in Singapore. On our last morning we jumped on a bus to the train station from where we would be traveling up to Kuala Lumpur and deciding what to do with the next couple of weeks in South East Asia.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1228255200/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1228255200/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1228255200/tpod.html Sat, 27 Dec 2008 07:15:09 -0500 Dan and Sarah's Excellent Adventure!

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Chennai (Madras), Tamil Nadu, India

With our flight from Ahmedabad landing early in the morning and our one due to leave for Singapore until nearly midnight we had the prospect of another extended stay at an Indian airport.

Instead we changed into fresh clothes, deposited our rucksacks and jumped on a rickshaw into town.

It was a stinking hot day, and we didn't really want to see anything in particular, so we headed for a nice air-conditioned shopping mall where we browsed for a good few hours, and had a Pizza Hut for lunch- 4 weeks of curry had driven us to crave some greasy western food!

Flicking through our Indian guidebook for the last time over lunch we figured we were in walking distance of the beach, so in a bid to burn off some of the pizza we headed out into the blazing afternoon sun and walked towards the sea. The route took us past the cricket ground where the first test had been re-scheduled to be played just a couple of weeks later. At that stage it seemed unlikely to happen, but, perhaps a little surprisingly it did take place. And completely unsurprisingly we lost.....

We made it to the beach, which was surprisingly sandy, although being right in the middle of the city the water didn't look too appealing. We sat on the sand for a while, downed a couple of litres of ice-cold water and then started to make our way back to the airport via the shopping mall for some more familiar food-subway sandwiches for our dinner!

We passed the last few hours before our flight just sitting around at the airport, but soon enough it was time to get on the plane and leave India. We were sad, but excited, it wasn't like we were going home, we had a least five more countries ahead of us and the over half the trip left to go.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1228107600/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1228107600/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1228107600/tpod.html Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:41:40 -0500 Dan and Sarah's Excellent Adventure!

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Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

This will be short and sweet......

We caught a bus from Udaipur to Ahmedabad which was suprisingly comfortable with huge seats like you get in first class on aeroplanes, or so I hear!!! And unlike the trains it more or less arrived on time, perhaps this is the way to travel around India.

It was about 8pm when we made it to the airport, our flight was at 6am so we had to check in at 4 which meant we didn't see the point in forking out loads for a hotel, we'd just sleep at the airport for a few hours.

This was not as simple as we had thought. As out tickets were for the next day they weren't going to let us into the terminal. We went and spoke to the airline we'd booked with and one of their guys went off to speak to security. He came back a while later....
'I've explained to them you're British, and they've said you can go in'
I'm not sure quite what it was about our Britishness that swung it for us, perhaps because of the attacks, although I think only 1 Brit died in that, or perhaps it suddenly meant we weren't seen as a threat. Anyway for whatever reason we were allowed in. We had a meal and picked our spot for the night.

Soon the last flight of the night had left, it was just us, security and the cleaners. And then it was just us, security, the cleaners and the builders; builders with big pneumatic drills!

We probably got a couple of hours sleep at best, but time passed quickly and soon enough the terminal starting filling up with people again and we were on our way to Chennai.


]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1227769200/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1227769200/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/danandsarah/1/1227769200/tpod.html Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:00:02 -0500 Dan and Sarah's Excellent Adventure!

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Udaipur, Rajasthan, India

Hello, its Sarah here, thought I'd give Dan a rest from writing once in a while!
So although the Taj Mahal was amazing, we were happy to be leaving Agra, but had decided to change our plans to miss out most of Rajasthan as although it sounds beautiful we were both feeling pretty jaded by all the endless touts and rickshaw drivers and snow globe sellers etc. As Dan mentioned, he'd managed to get some tickets for the cricket in Delhi so after a few nights in Udaipur we would pop back to Delhi and then head on down south to Bombay for a few days and then to Goa and Kerala.....less time beating off people with a stick and more time lying on the beach.

Sounds good, so we boarded the train at Agra (which actually turned up on time!) and settled down for the night in a relatively empty carriage. We stopped in Jaipur in the middle of the night, and I had just reached into my bag to get my earplugs (noisy Australians arguing over which bunk was theirs) when our mobile started ringing. I was still half asleep and the mobile was zipped into a little pocket in my sleeping bag, but I managed to work out that it was Dan's home number. Wondering what had happened that would mean Dan's parents would be ringing to wake us up in the middle of the night, I answered it and spoke to Dan's mum.

"Oh my God thank God you're alright, where are you?" she asked.
"On the train" I answered, a little confused.
"But you're not on your way to Bombay?"

We were about 400 miles from Bombay and it was the middle of the night, so we hadn't heard about what had been going on there for the last 4 hours. Terrorists had started shooting people with machine guns at the Taj Mahal Hotel, India's most prestigious hotel, and were rounding up hundreds of hostages - looking specifically for people with British and American passports.

We had changed our plans and were going to be in Bombay in less than a week - thank God we didn't have enough money to be staying in upmarket hotels. But then we heard that they had also opened fire in the booking hall of the city's main railway station, and killed several people in one of the popular backpacker cafes which was mentioned in a novel we'd both just read so we'd been planning on going there. So many if's and but's, and we were still hundreds of miles away, but we both felt scared and so lucky to be safe.

We started thinking irrationally...what if this was part of a coordinated attack on lots of different tourist areas, what if there was a bomb on the train, what if there were gunmen waiting for us when we stepped off the train in Udaipur?!! But the attacks were only in Bombay, and we were safe on the train. We eventually got back to sleep, and woke up at 6am to find that the train was running 2 and a half hours late (not bad, and its probably too much to ask for the train to depart and arrive on time, although they ought to take some lessons from the Trans Siberian people as that train was only 6 minutes late after running for 6 days!!).

Everything was calm in Udaipur, and we found a rickshaw to take us to our hotel. We noticed how clean the streets were, and how quiet it was compared to grotty noisy Agra. As is always the case when you have booked a hotel we were nervous that we would turn up and it would be a complete hole, but it was beautiful, and we were so happy to be there after a very surreal night on the train. We had booked a standard room, but I managed to convince Dan to let us look at the "deluxe" room, and then bugged him until he agreed that we could probably afford the extra 4 pounds a night for a balcony, four poster bed and one of those really cool "rain showers".

We spent most of the day doing nothing, trying to catch glimpses of the news and still completely shocked by everything that had happened. We actually spent the next 4 days doing pretty much nothing - we stayed in Udaipur longer than we'd planned as the cricket had been cancelled, and we were trying to decide whether we neede to change our plans or not. We had a lovely hotel, and it is a pretty chilled out place so it was nice to just relax for a bit, and take the chance to see the James Bond film Octopussy a couple of times! The second most prestigious hotel in India is the Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur - it's an island that's a hotel, or a hotel that's an island...either way the effect is that it looks like it's floating in the middle of the lake. Quite a lot of Octopussy was filmed in the hotel, and around the rest of Udaipur......in 1983. And they still wheel out the TV and show the film at most of the town's restaurant...every night! Not a bad film, some terrible acting by Roger Moore and co, but such crackingly cheesy lines as during the requisite car (rickshaw) chase....
"I think we've got company"
"Well this is a company car" before the turbo-powered rickshaw performs a wheelie to escape from the baddies.
So terrible that we were both in stitches both times we saw it!

We spent one afternoon doing touristy stuff, and visited the City Palace, which was quite pretty, but full of historical paintings of the Maharajah of Udaipur hunting and shooting tigers/bears/leopards, and kind of spoiled by all the technical lighting and sound equipment dotted around everywhere ready for the nightly sound and light show, which we both agreed we would avoid at all costs.

We didn't really do anything else of note while we were in Udaipur, just enjoyed relaxing round our hotel and walking round the town. But it wasn't until the second night at the hotel that we discovered its star attraction (apart from Octpussy of course!). They have a tortoise living there, and she is 70 years old!! At first we thought it might be a statue that we hadn't noticed before but then she started trotting across the floor towards us (she was moving pretty fast, probably faster than the average 70 year old human!!). We looked for her on the landing every time we went up an down the stairs, and the next day we were even more excited when we saw a miniature version trotting along beside its mummy...the 70 year old biddy tortoise has a 6 month old baby (IVF?????) Very very cute, I want one!

So that was Udaipur, we had planned to go swimming on our last day there as some of the posh hotels let the pikeys like us pay to use their pools, but we woke up and it was pouring down with rain.

We had spent a long time thinking about whether to carry on as we'd planned to before all the attacks in Bombay, or whether to change our plans. We had been desperate to make it down to the beaches in the south, but lots of reports were saying that they expect further attacks and Goa is one place they think may be targeted, although thankfully this has not been the case as yet. We already had a ticket booked from Madras to Singapore for after Christmas, and we managed to change the booking to fly out of India on December 2nd, 3 weeks earlier than planned. It was a difficult decision as we had both been excited about spending a couple of weeks exploring India, but hey, things are never meant to go to plan, are they?
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