A whirlwind tour of a part of Malaysia

Oh Malaysia we hardly knew thee. The story of how we ended up visiting Malaysia is like this: we were poking around wanting to visit as many places as we could and we found out an airline had a sale going on where flights leaving Kuala Lumpur started at $24 (but with paying to pick a seat- mandatory and everything else they ended up being like $55) so we figured we would trek down and then fly to Cambodia to prevent backtracking.  So we hopped in a mini van and headed down first to Buttersworth/ Georgetown then onward to KL (that's what those of us in the know call Kuala Lumpur). 

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Beautiful Wonderful Blue Beaches

We decided an exurison to Ko Phi Phi was in order next since it's not everyday you get to visit the place where these two gems were filmed. I'm not gonna lie... it wasn't everything we expected and more. It actually disappointed quite a bit...

Except for this! I thought maybe Batman had tracked me down...

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Thailand: Some of the best days of my life

After a pretty hellish trip (2 buses, 2 layovers, one really long hot walk, riding in the back of truck and then another realllllly long hot walk) we got to our hostel in Krabi. Krabi became our base for all the fun trips we took everywhere in south Thailand.

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Bangkok with Brittany and Brent!

So another of my dear friends decided to come join us on our crazy SE Asia adventure, so we got to have 2 friends on the trip.... for like 8 hours. Yay!

So the rest of Bangkok was happy/sad. Happy because Brittany came, but said because Brent left. And because of our trip to the Sriracha Zoo.

Both Brittany and Brent reallllly wanted to pet a tiger while they were in Thailand, so we found a place they could a bit outside Bangkok. It was called Sriracha Zoo, and to get there you had to hire a driver and drive for about an hour and a half.

Although I'm glad Brent and Brittany got to cross something off their bucket list, it was incredibly sad to see animals treated so poorly (and expensive but YOLO or carpe diem or you can't take it with you right?).

We all kept thinking Brent and the driver were holding hands

The first sign this place was sketchy was that this statue greeted us. I actually have no words for it.

Then we went to the “elephant show” for about 10 seconds until I started to cry because they had horrible sharp poker things to 'guide' the elephants.

Another sign this place was bad news was this. You could pay to shoot a BB gun at containers of meat above tigers. And while it was kinda fun to watch them fight a bit over it, I kept wondering what happened to all the missed shot BBs and if anyone ever hurt one of the tigers with them. 

Anyway, after that we went and took pictures feeding baby tigers. They were pretty awesome and cute and I was excited and terrified all at the same time. They didn't name the tigers (wah wah) so I decided mine was named Tony.  

I got to pet the biggest one

Then Brent and Brittany went and got pictures with an adult tiger.  

Shere Khan here was looking to eat somebody - except that he was limping around the saddest concrete enclosure you ever saw.

Brent tried to feed the Crocodiles they had there, but the Crocs just weren't interested in the dangling chicken carcass.  

Chad is really strong

I took a picture of this little guy because I felt bad he was being ignored by everyone else

 Finally we went to the tiger show. It was a mixture of fun and sad. My feelings were very mixed... and honestly more than once I thought a few of them were like “yep had enough I'm gonna eat this guy now”. I was rooting for them to the entire time.

See the tiger not on his perch? He was sending the guy mad shade and acting like "I'll get on that when I'm good and ready" 

After that adventure Brent left us to return to boring old Utah. So because the boys were again outnumbered we went shopping. There is a HUGE weekend market in Bangkok with at least a billion vendors and it was a lot of fun to walk around and see everything. We almost bought a $250 leather weekend bag... but decided it might not be the best investment at this time.

Incidently this was the best Thai Ice Tea we had there

We maybe wandered into another protest sight....

 After all that shopping it was time to head to our overnight train (or as Chad and I liked to call it our Midnight Train to Georgia... even though our doing so probably made Brittany second guess her decision to come. Also, follow that link, you won't regret it.)

Did I mention Brittany came after having knee surgery so she was brace and caned up most the trip?

Don't we look like seasoned backpakers?

 So a fun thing happened while we were at the train station. We kept trying to board our train compartment, but people kept saying no, which was hard to understand since, you know, we don't speak Thai. Then, while we are on the platform the train leaves. Just leaves us and the last few cars stranded at the train station... we start freaking out because our gimpy friend wouldn't be able to run and hop on, but some Thai people on the platform try to charade to us that it's okay and not to worry. About 10 minutes later it comes back and we are able to board. We assume they had to change a car out, but really we have no idea what happened. 

We got sleeper beds and it was pretty great. They are significantly better than China trains. Do you see how big that seat is? It's like twice the size of China train seats. 

This little old lady was sitting across from me and her husband was across from Brittany, we were trying to offer to switch but she didn't want to... I think she thought we would make her climb up to the top bed  if she switched.

Our ladder to the top bunk, which folded down quite lovely like from the ceiling

Our train compartment guy... super nice happy guy

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Bangkok with Brent

We arrived in Bangkok pretty late in the evening due to a delayed flight, and had the joy of going through customs and getting a cab around midnight... which means we probably overpaid for our cab, but we just wanted to get there. When our cab dropped us off at a creepy side road somewhere in the seeming outskirts of the city, we knew we were in for an adventure. He just pointed down a side road into the darkness of nothing and insisted (from what we could understand) that we had arrived.

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Hong Kong Part 2

Our last day in Hong Kong... at least for this leg of the trip. We had an action packed day and a deadline to get to the airport for our flight. Turns out we had plenty of time... I'm a nervous traveler.

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Macau you later k?

Hahaha... that's my attempt at a clever blog title. Anyway, our friend Brent decided he was done with doing good things in the Philippines and came to hang out with us in Hong Kong. So we decided we wanted to go check out the other city in the bay that was once not part of China, so we got a boat to Macau.

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