Selamat Datang again from Malaysia,

We are now at Penang where we are stopping for a little while. We have a few admin things to organise before shipping our bikes to Australia.

We left Malacca and headed for Pekan and Cherating on the East coast of Malaysia as neither of us had been to the East cost before. Pekan was a quiet little town (too quiet actually) and the people there were very friendly. Cherating was a bit nicer and had a lovely beach. We met two fab guys at the hotel, Oliver and Richard, they do installation work for oil companies from huge crane vessels. Richard kindly offered his house in Krabbi in Thailand to us while we are there so we'll be dropping in on our way up North.

After Cherating, we headed for the Taman Negara National Park and stayed just over the river from the park HQ. We had a short day trip in the park which included a jungle canopy walk, a series of suspended cable walkways high above the jungle, very cool stuff.

We then headed for Fraser's Hill and stayed at Ye Old Smokehouse, a mock tudor style hotel which is quintessentially English. A lovely quiet and cool place is Fraser's Hill, and less than 100KM from Kuala Lumpur. We had planned to go to the Cameron Highlands on our way to Penang, but the guidebooks suggest that it is now quite developed, and we felt that after beautiful Fraser's Hill, we'd be a little disappointed, so we rode straight to Penang instead.

The ride to Penang was quite long, but the expressway made for a quick and easy ride. We stopped for a little bit to let a tropical downpour to clear as our visors were fogging up, we didn't have to wait for long. While we stopped we met a Malaysian on a Honda Goldwing.

We stayed at the Eastern and Oriental hotel at Penang for the first three nights, but we moved to a different hotel as the E&O is a bit pricey. But we had to stay there for at least a little while to experience the old colonial luxury there. Picture the porters wearing tropical long shorts and pith helmets and you have an idea of how colonial the O&E is.

We are planning to depart Penang on Wednesday all things going well, and heading for Krabbi in Thailand.

We'll update you all next from Thailand.

We miss you all.

Liz and Steve.