the last leg

Captain's log:

star date - 05.01.07

location - Kuala Lumpur

weather - bloody hot

Sat next to the computer terminal on which I type are two tickets. The first is for a three day jungle trekking trip to Taman Negara (Malaysia's most famous national park). It records that I leave tomorrow morning at 8am, am entitled to 'economy shared' accommodation in the park, and that I will be returned by bus to KL on the evening of 8 January. The second is a one way second class train ticket to Thailand. This ticket records that I will depart from Kuala Lumpur on the evening of 9 January arriving in Hat Yai some fourteen hours later. Between them they give you an outline of the plans I've made today, and a rough picture of my next four or five days.

It's been an administrative day as you can perhaps tell. I spent the morning riding a bus back up to Kuala Lumpur, having first had a dosa (aka dosai, thosai, or dhosa) with masala tea for breakfast (thanks for getting me hooked Raj). I got back to KL around 12pm, booked the above tickets, and also checked myself into the Pudu Hostel. It's competitively priced, I'll give it that, but I'm not sure the chi is right. If I remember my Feng Shui rightly: ideally buildings should be located in front of a mountain and behind a stream. The Pudu manages neither. Its rooms are located on the third floor of an old office block building opposite the bus station. I appreciate it may not be practical to run a river through Jalan Pudu now, or build a mountain behind, but they could bung a few more plant pots in reception and get some new throws for the sofas. Until they do - bad energy.

Yesterday was pretty uneventful. Except that whilst at the Dutch Cemetery in Melaka, I was compared to Daniel Craig.

Find something funny?

I suppose to be fair the comparison was made by a complete nutter. He accosted me at the entry gate and also told me that he had met Princess Margaret in Harrods, that the Da Vinci code was all lies, that he had ridden a horse through Hyde Park, rounding up by asking: did I have any idea how to find a telephone line to Jesus? His ramblings went on for about half an hour, while I tried to find a polite way to remove myself, but no break in the stream of verbal incontinence ever came, so in the end I just had to say as best I could that I was leaving and goodbye. 'You think I bullshit. You think this bullshit! CANNOT BULLSHIT THIS!!' was how we left things. He gave me a headache so I went over the bridge to Chinatown, and had a quiet sit down and a Coca Cola.

It's just started thundering outside. I'm glad. It hasn't rained for ages in my vicinity and it will be good for the heat to break. I'll blog again when I return from Taman Negara.