Malaysia and Bangkok

Hi everyone!

I hope you all enjoyed the recent sunny days you had :)

I have been all over Malaysia now and absolutely loved it there.  After Langkawi I flew to Penang which is Malysia's second largest city and famous for its very tasty food so I ate lots of nice things.  It was the first British settlement in Malaysia so there were lots of English buildings around as well as a Chinatown and a Little India.  There was also a beach but when we tried to walk along it a part of it in the middle was flooded, I started to walk through the water but began to sink so I quickly ran back!  We stayed with a Malaysian family who were really nice and we found out that their children have to get up for school at 5.30 am!  I bet none of you would like that and I wouldn't like to get up that early to teach you!

From Penang we flew to the East coast of Malaysia and then got a speedboat to the Perhentian islands.  The boat was really really fast and bumpy, I kept getting splashed!  The islands were incredibly beautiful with super white sand and the sea was so clear I could see all the fish swimming around.  We went on a snorkelling trip which was really good.  The boat took us to different places where we had to jump in with our flippers and snorkel on and then swim around with our heads under the water looking at the fish.  It was amazing under the sea...like a different world.  There were so many fish which were really bright colours and I saw lots which were like Nemo!  At one point when we were in the boat the driver suddenly told us to jump off the boat because he had spotted...a turtle!  It was huge and lots of little fish were following it, I loved seeing the turtle. 

After a few days at one beach we moved to another one which was really small and only had 6 people staying on it so we felt like we had it all to ourselves!  There were lots of hammocks strung along the beach and every night a man cooked for us all and we had our tea together.  One day he went fishing and caught a HUGE Barracuda (see if you can find a picture of one) which he then cooked for us and on the other night we had a big BBQ on the beach.  We went snorkelling again and saw another turtle, the man who lives on the beach told me that the turtle had buried her eggs under one of the chalets and he showed me where it was.  The turtle was swimming around waiting for the eggs to hatch and enter the sea.  Every night the man had to stay awake to protect the eggs because some naughty men were coming on boats to try and steal the turtle eggs because they are very valuable.  Luckily they hatched really early one morning and they didn't manage to steal any.  The female turtles are very clever and they create two nests, one of them is pretend to trick predators - see if you can find out more about it.  Petani beach was my favourite place so far :)

I was sad to leave but I was excited too because we were going to Kuala Lumpur which is Malaysia's capital.  It has the tallest twin towers in the world, they were SO big and I was a bit nervous about going to the top and then we found out we couldn't go up anyway because they are closed until Christmas :( I have been really missing cheese because they don't have it in Asia so when I found a place in Kuala Lumpur selling cheese I had a whole plate full!

After Kuala Lumpur we moved back in to Thailand.  We went to the capital, Bangkok where we met up with one of our friends from England which was good.  We visited the largest market in the world which has 8,000 stalls!! They sold absolutely everything there and it was all so cheap, you could buy t-shirts for 40p.  We took a boat trip along the canals of Bangkok where lots of Thai families live.  Their houses were built on stilts in the water and they use boats instead of cars to get around their neighbourhood.  We saw two animals like crocodiles and our boat driver said he thought they were lucky.  There were lots of lovely temples in Bangkok and one we went inside had a huge reclining buddha made of gold, I couldn't believe how big it was.

We are now in Sukhothai but we are struggling to do anything or go anywhere because Thailand has recently had a lot of rain and Sukhothai is flooded.  We walked through the flood last night to get some food and it came halfway up to my knee!  So cross your fingers and toes for me that it doesn't carry on raining!

xx