Post 3: Where in the sea are you most likely to get shot?

At the OK coral.

I hear it's getting a bit chilly back home. Before anyone goes getting jealous, it might be worth knowing that the first thing we thought when we got off the plane in Melbourne was "fuck it's cold". What you get for spending the preceding month on the equator, I suppose.


All told, Malaysia was pretty cool - both the Borneo part and the peninsula (map for nerds included). We did about 40km worth of trekking through rainforest and I did one trek that was 2.4 km from end to end and 1.2km from bottom to top. It was possibly the hardest thing I've ever done, and Grainne says she wishes she'd got a photo of me when I got back - something to do with looking like I'd been freed from Dachau etc etc. We also did some hanging around on beaches, and one of us got some fantastic fresian patterning on our face due to the uneven distribution of suncream.

With the amount of monkeys we saw in Borneo, it was only natural to speculate as to the correct collective noun for a group of them. In light of our experience, it is quite obvious that the correct term should be motherfucker. As in "a motherfucker of monkeys". This relates in particular to a mangy species of macaque. Not only do they look inherently evil, but they will climb in through any unsecured windows and rifle through any unguarded bags to steal what they can. More insidiously, they loiter on walkways in large groups pretending to ignore passers-by. That is until you have passed about half of them and they have you surrounded, at which point they stalk up to you from every direction growling and bearing their teeth. I had wondered why these filthy cretins were called macaques, but after that experience, the phrase "soiled macaques" has undertaken an additional dimension of relevance.

Hanging out in rainforest isn't all bad though, and one of the highlights was visiting a 50,000 hectare national park with massive cave systems. It is so big and so remote that the park HQ can only be reached via a 10 hour boat ride or the recently-installed airstrip. I've already mentioned to some that I was reading "Heart of Darkness" again to psyche me up for journeying deep into the wild jungle. As a result, it was a bit jarring to find that the cafe attached to our lodgings had the "greatest hits" of Boney-M on the soundsystem - not exactly the untamed malevolent wilderness I had been hoping for. 5 days later and I was a wiser, older man. I had come in search of forces that could corrupt the soul of the stoutest of men and I had indeed found them. "Daddy Cool" 5 times a day? The Horror, The Horror!

Whenever a few days were spent out in the wilds, we would then devote a few days to taking it easy, and this sometimes meant that when hungry and tired we would sell out and plump for western cuisine in one of the many US franchises that can be found in Malaysia. This was not something we were proud of and as it seemed that the insect population of Malaysia wished to remind us of our guilt. Of all the meals we had there - from the myriad hawker stands and little local restaurants to the occasional US dining experience, the only time we shared our dinner with cockroaches was in Subway and Planet Hollywood. And no, that doesn't mean that Bruce Willis was visiting one of his part-owned establishments. Ha ha. Anyway, lesson learnt: go local.

Although going local is a policy that should be confined to cuisine as our first hotel experience in Kuala Lumpur will bear testament to. Normally when you follow the advice of the guidebook, you find yourself in some sort of hostel with other like-minded foreigners. When this is not the case, and you end up in accommodation frequented by locals, the experience can be spectacularly different. On this occasion, our book told us to expect laundry facilities and free internet. Instead we found a box-sized room reeking of damp and other things with a window onto the corridor and with pillows black from the mildew. Not the worst thing in the world except when the room is in a firetrap-cum-brothel and you have to share one of many floors with 30 neighbours who hang their washing in the hallway and who are mostly amputees, fat weirdos and toothless perverts (usually all of the above). Moving hotels is not an option when you arrive into town bleary-eyed at 2 in the morning so we had to just put the whole thing down to experience. As any moron will tell you (and as we knew, but were too tired to consider), you will not find particularly impressive lodgings adjacent to the main bus terminus of any major city.

That all said, we're now in Melbourne where there are much fewer monkeys and fat, armless old men. We hope to have a flat soon and also look forward to letting you know all about it once the weather hots up. In the meantime, anyone who feels inclined can drop us a mail to let us know they're still alive or alternatively, leave a comment here on the blog.