After parting ways with Nazir, we took a ferry over to the mainland an waited for our sleeper train. The heat, lack of solid sleep, walking, and jet lag were really starting to wear on us, so we kept nodding off as we waited.

About an hour after it was supposed to arrive, our train came in, we boarded and immediately crashed.

We woke up 6 or 8 hours later just out side of KL. We organized whatever came out our packs or pockets as we slept (which I don’t think was very much since we were both so exhausted, despite us still be shower-less and wearing the clothes we started in four days ago), and headed over to our hostel.

We had booked a 2 bed room at _____ for roughly $9/person/night. Jason thought we were staying here for 2 nights, which I didn’t think was right, but we thought was confident about, and so we checked in. The place was very nice. Situated three blocks away from a popular mosque/attraction, near a college and a sort of financial district with lots of bank headquarters, and walking distance from both Little India and Chinatown.

There, we met a girl, Kat, from outside of Manchester in the UK. She was planning on going to some canopy walk (which ended up being closed for the Muslim holiday of Mohamad’s birthday) and then to the Batu Caves, a Hindu temple hidden in these caves outside of the city. I had read about these caves and wanted to see them, and the pictures of the canopy walk (think ewok-style rope bridges 30-40 ft up in the trees in the jungle) looked pretty cool, so I asked if she minded us joining along.

We stopped by the Central Market to pick up some rice lunches to eat in case there wasn’t food at the caves and caught a #11 bus all the way there. This was pretty easy to do since just about every person that worked there knew where we wanted to go before we even opened our mouths. This probably should have been our first warning, but I think we all over looked this.

The caves ended up being kind of interesting, but were seemed like more of a tourist trap than anything else. The majority of the caves / temple were free to enter, but there was a side trip one could do to do some spelunking (the normal / temple part of the caves where very open), and stores selling food, offerings, and silvorines. There was even a snack shop, and photo place in the caves after climbing the 280 something stairs all the way up there.

This all being said, I wouldn’t say that it was a waste of time or $1.33 in bus fare going here. There were real Hindus that came here, many of who had a really pale paste pasted over their heads which I wondered what it was, and the caves themselves were cool to look at. And then there were the monkeys in the parkinglot and on the stairs that you could give food if you were careful enough to do so before they tried to steal it from you, which was pretty fun.

The next bus home got us back to the hostel around 2-2:30, and we decided to shower and nap. This nap, our first in real bed in four, or was it five days?, quickly turned into a small day’s sleep, as we didn’t get up till 9 at night.

Famished, we set out for food, and found a Chinese night market. This was pretty cool, but incredibly touristy. I’d be surprised if there were more of a few stands that sold anything other than nock-off watches, fake designer hand bags, cheap tee shirts, or new sneakers.

We then set out to try and find a good spot to take a picture of the towers in KL. This proved more difficult than we would have thought, but was a good excuse to walk around the city. We did sneak into a really nice hotel which had glass elevators running the outside of it, which we thought might lend to a nice view, but due to other buildings around it, really didn’t provide much other than a little excitement and the tenative idea to come back another time to use the pool. All the walking got us pretty turned around, and it was getting sort of late, so we caught a cab back to the hostel and called it a night.

Ok. So the traveling finally begins and the posting falls off. Nothing new. We’ve been in Malaysia for 3 days now and are on a sleeper train headed for Singapore. I’ll try to do the last few days justice, but know there’s no way that will be possible.

The interesting stuff all begins pretty much as soon as we landed in KL. We picked up our bagage (with out any trouble!) and headed out to the bus stop. It was pretty easy to find and there was a guy, Nazir, sitting there waiting for the bus that we later we would later become friends with. We checked with him to make sure that we were at the right stop for the bus we wanted and waited a few minutes.

After getting on the bus, an old guy (who we now refer to as A.Star) started asking me where I was from and such and so I moved over to talk to him. It was clear from a distance that he wasn’t entirely there, but we were on a bus filled with a lot of people, so it was pretty safe, and so I figured I’d talk to him. He told me stories about how he went to the US, used to play guitar with McJagared, and knew The Rolling Stones, amoung some other rock stars.

At this point it was easy to see he track marks on his arm, his eyes watering when he talked, the sole tooth in his mouth, and that he had a ‘pos top, so I was taking everything he was saying with more than a grain of salt, and found my way back to my seat after singing a verse of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” with him. Later Nazir would tell us that he didn’t know this guy’s full story, but did know that he had been to the US and played with big bands and so it was possible that his stories were reasonably true…

So we finally arrive at Komta Square and get off the bus with A.Star, and Nazir. A.Star tried to talk to me some more but Nazir brushed him away for us. Starving, we took this act of kindness as an opportunity to start talking to Nazir and asked him if there were any good places to get some food. He told us of a place andwas going in the same direction and offered to show us it.

We walked maybe 10 minutes or so with Nazir ang go to know him a bit. Grew up on Penang. Was a graphic designer. Had four kids, ages 4(?) to 12. Etc.

When we got at the resaurant/street vendor that he recommended, I offered to buy him lunch (which would cost about 5RM / $1.75) for showing us there and being so nice. He declined lunch but stayed to get a milk tea and talked with us.

He was great, and it was a lot of fun talking to him and getting to know a real local, and apparently he thought the same. It turned out that the woman that worked where the poster he was carrying and had to deliver was out today and so he didn’t have anything to do and offered to show us around. We didn’t want to intrude, or take advanatage of his generousity, but he persisted that he nothing else to do, and so we had our own local guide.

Nazir showed us all around. Where the local backpacker inns were, which was on Lover’s Lane. This was apparently also where all the ‘Lady Boys’, a local term for men in drag, hung out which seemed like an awkward thing to mention, but I don’t think there was anything else to it. He showed us some pre-WWII houses, the local school, some old colonial buildings that had been renoated an repurposed as the local court house. He also showed us the esplenad, and commented on how the beaches that used to be here were, and how all of the construction in the area ruined the water.

We walked past the first fort built on the island by the British, which was supposed to be used to protect the island from the Dutch, but was really used to take control off it. He showed us the local beachnut tree and fruit which the island was named after and then the financial district.

He then took us back next to where we got lunch and into his mosque. He showed us where they cleaned themselves before prayer and the original well built there back in what I think was the 1800’s, and explained a bit of it’s history. He explained how often they were supposed to prayer, which we asked if he was missing today, and he told us how he was also supposed to be kind to others and that this was a special day and that it was ok. He gave us some material on Islam and terrorism, and how not all Muslims believed in such extremes. He commented that he wasn’t trying to convert us at all, but that he really just wanted us to educate us and kind of clear the name of his religion a bit. I know that I at least felt really honored by him showing us all of this, and think Jason liked it to. It was definitely an experience we would not have had on our own if we had not met him.

It now had to be at least mid afternoon, and he wanted take us to his classmate’s food stand and buy us a snack. We stopped by and aquirum/fish and pet store on the way there, and had more milk tea and some of the brightest neon pink colored tapioka sweets and some traditional donut like pastry. Both were pretty good, especially if once you were able to get over the extreme color.

It was now about time to go and catch our ferry. We took a longer route back, passing by the esplinade again on our way to Penang. Nazir told us it was a shame that we only had one day on the island and that if we came back he would find us some scooters to use and show us more of it.

After a second calculation on how much time we needed to catch our train, we found out we had more time to kill, so we offered to share one more milk tea with Nazir before leaving. I thought about offering him something for spending litterally close to 8 hours showing us arround, but really think that it would have been rude, and so got his address instead and am going to send him something later ( a book on Whitey Bulger maybe, since we talked about Boston a bit, and he said he liked to read biographies and mobsters).

I’m not so sure what Penang would have been like if we hadn’t met Nazir, but since we did, it was amazing. Especially since this was the frst day of our trip. I really can’t imagine a cooler way to have kicked it all off.

Barely a stone’s throw from Boston, its pretty safe to say that we spent more time checking in, going through security, and sitting on the runway, than we actually did in the air, but it’s an easy first flight for a trip as long as this.

Everything was going pretty smoothly. We landed without hassle and headed over to the Continental Service desk to see what we had to do to get our next boarding pass. They directed us towards the Malaysian Airlines desk in the terminal where our flight would leave.

In talking to the girl here, I gave the girl my boarding pass and sleeve for it. Earlier Jason and I had talked about how we both used to save all of our flight stubs, but how I no longer wanted to do this since I fly so much now and they just become clutter. So when the girl gave me my ticket back I tossed my sleeve in the rubbish to lessen the number of papers I had in my pocket, and put the used boarding pass back into my pocket, thinking it might still be useful.

Once we arrived at the Malaysian Airlines we discovered that they didn’t have any day flights, so their desks were all closed till 7pm. We wondered the concourse for a while and grabbed a bit to eat before heading back over to the ticketing desk.

At 7 we got in line and the people in front of us were served, and we made our way to the front of the line. We checked in, got our boarding passes and then they asked for our baggage slips…. which were on the sleeves to our original boarding passes… Great..

It turned out this was no big deal. We just ran over to the Continental desk and they showed us that this information was actually on our passes as well so we were fine. But this lead to us to think, “Why did they need this anyways?”.

When we checked in originally, the bag tags said Penang, and we were told our bags would go straight through. But from what we could tell, Malaysian Airlines in Newark had to manually write down all of these numbers, and then search through what we imagine to be a mountain of bags stuck in luggage purgatory…

Its been about 30 hours since we last saw our bags, but I’m pretty confident that it will all work out. We’re at the airport now before our last connecting flight in Malaysia so we’ll find out soon!