Malaysia:

Once I'd finished walking the causway to Malaysia, the border process was fairly smooth and I was at once thrown into the usual collection of hustlers and taxi touts wanting my business. Once at the large bus station, I eventually found the right bus I needed to take me to Mersing on the East coast and was then treated to my first 2 1/2 hour backpacking wait for it to leave. Like airport departure lounges, its amazing how quickly the time actually goes and before I knew it, the tedious 4 hour bus ride had begun. I made the mistake of talking to a scruffy looking Norwegian behind me but quickly realised he was a wild eyed mental case who was living on income support but somehow travelling over here. Thankfully he got off in Mersing and wasn't coming to Tioman Island.

The boat to Tioman cost 35RM and took 2 hours and I had been planning on getting off at Air Batang but after getting chatting with some others, it was decided that we were all getting off at Salang at the top end of the island. It turned out to be a good choice as I spent the next few days drinking way too much with my new backpacking buddies and enjoying snorkelling and walking around the place. The island was purported to be one of the most beautiful in the world some years ago and I'm please to say it was all rather pleasant.

Despite the island being fairly cheap and meeting loads of fun people, going through a bottle of Vodka or Jack Daniels each night does little to make the budget last longer so after about 4 days, in order to save my liver, I headed back by ferry to Mersing and a 5 hour wait for the next bus to Malaka on the West coast.

Rachel and Skip had recommended a nice guest house in Malaka called Kancil Guest House run by a chap called Doud. As the owner was away for a few days, the place was being looked after by a Mr Miyagi lookalike called Mark who was an entertaining chap to say the least.

Although there wasn't an awful lot to do in Melaka, it was a pleasant enough place and luckily the hostal wasn't too busy, so I hung out with a few of the other guests in the garden and probably spent too much time in the local Hawker markets eating great Satay for about 70p.



After 3 or 4 days of that, I decided it was time to get myself up to KL to see a shipping agent about a bike.

Intro:

Ok, so technically I'm not actually riding from Singapore to Scotland but from Port Klang near Kuala Lumpur where I shipped my bike from Melbourne however 'Port Klang to Scotland' doesn't really make a very catchy blog title does it? So while I'm waiting on my wheels coming in to the port on 24 May 2008, I've turned into (shudder) a backpacker in the meantime just so I can really say I know what it feels like to wait 5 hours for a bus.

Anyway, after spening a few months in Melbourne, my Australian visa was nearly up and not having time to ride all the way to Darwin, I shipped my 06 Suzuki DR650 to Malaysia where I'll pick it up and start the ride home to Scotland. I made the mistake of accepting a job with a complete arsehole which didn't work out plus finding employers happy to shell out $$$'s on a sponsorship visa turned out to be not that simple especially as my profession, Building Surveying is actually a completely different thing in Australia. I'd pretty much seen most of Victoria by bike but little else so before leaving Australia, I had a quick flying tour of some of the main sights namely Cairns, Sydney, Ayers Rock and Darwin. Once again, thanks to the wonderfully global Horizons Unlimited site, I was very kindly put up and extremely well fed by several of the Aussie HU community despite not actually having a bike with me at the time which took some explaining!

Skip and Rachel in Cairns

Ian and Carolyn in Sydney

Ian and Dale in Darwin

From Darwin, I flew to Singapore, home of Tiger beer with Tiger Airways, a sort of Malaysian Easyjet if you will at the startlingly dreadful time of 12.50am getting in to Singapore at a cosy 3.40am. Now the trains from the airport don't start running until 5.30am so I treked around the huge and surreally empty terminal for a while until I found a coffee shop open which entertained me until around 7.30am which I foolishly thought would be a good time to get into Singapore, totally forgeting about such things as rush hours. Anyway, the hostel I'd booked were going to charge me an extra day if I wanted a bed before 12pm so once I'd found it, I dumped my stuff, got showered and moved on to the days important tasks, namely getting some urgent paperwork sent off to my bank as they are underwriting my Carnet.

I somehow slept well considering the persistant Indian pop music blaring most of the night from the street (well I was in Little India). The hostel bathroom faced the backs of local houses and each morning you could awake to the sounds of local men loudly bringing up phlegm from their bathrooms, a sort of 'Hack'ophany if you will.

Unfortunately I didn't want to spend $25 on a Singapore Sling

I wasn't really that excited about Singapore to be honest though. Apart from some nice Colonial buildings, I seemed to wander from one huge air conditioned mall to another to get out of the humid heat however the bizarely popular sounds of Kenny G usually meant I didn't linger in them for very long.

As I have no guide book and some time to kill, a young Malaysian guy in the hostel suggested going to Tioman Island the East coast of Malasia. So instead of taking a few hours by bike, I caught a local bus to the border where you get out and queue for a while, then following signs for the buses and asking a policeman with a machine gun to be doubly sure, after going through a security gate, I somehow ended up on the causway between Singapore and Malaysia carrying my luggage in the midday heat while tourists in air conditioned busses whizzed past to go the Malaysian border about 1 km away.