Day 39 - 25th Mar 2009

Early start today to catch our train from Singapore to Kuala Lumpar. Left our hotel at 6:30 and got a taxi to the train station. Arrived in plenty of time and filled in our immigration forms for Malaysia while we waited. There is quite a strange thing in leaving Singapore for Malaysia by train in that you go through the Malaysian arrival immigration on the platform at Singapore main train station, but then the train stops just before it actually passes into Malaysia and everyone has to get off and go through Singapore departure immigration. Which means for the first 3o minutes of the train journey you are kind of in Malaysia and Singapore! Very strange...

Train journey was fine though seemed a little long towards the end of the 6 hours. I brought us some noodles and rice from the food cart for breakfast and then lunch. It was interesting to see the country as we passed through, quite different to Australia which we had just left behind.

Arrived in Kuala Lumpur at about 2:30 and had a very cheap McD's lunch (about £1.20 for a burger, chips and coke!). We now had about 5 hours until our next train, an overnight sleeper to Butterworth, so decided to go and see some of the city. So we checked our bags into left luggage and headed off.

We caught a taxi to the Bird Park which claims to be the largest free flight aviary in the world. It was quite a nice place to wander round and have a look at all the different birds. Though to be honest allthough it was a very big aviary (large nets supported by huge posts) there weren't really many birds flying around. Maybe it was too warm for them, it was about 33 degrees C and very humid! We saw a show that they put on which was impressive but a little strange, they had parrots who could ride a small bike; put shapes in a jigsaw and a few other random tricks. We kind of wondered what the point was and thought maybe they could have told people more about the birds, but interesting none the less.

Then we caught another taxi to the twin towers. We had been to Kuala Lumpur for our honeymoon and wanted to see the towers again, plus we knew that they had a really good food court. I had a Thai green curry with a drink for about £2 and Liz had a beef stir fry with rice for even less than that!

We decided it was time to be heading back to the station to make sure we didn't miss our train. We knew that with the time of day the roads would be really busy, so opted to take the underground instead. This also turned out to be very busy and the platform was full of people, but incredibly and something I had never seen before on any underground system, people were queueing on the platform in orderly lines! So we joined the back of one of the queues and after a couple of trains had been through we were at the front of the line and then on the next one. Now more like other underground systems, we were crammed in like sardines as everyone tried to squeeze in, but we were on our way at least.

Arrived back at the station with just over an hour till our train was due to leave. Bought ourselves some Dunkin' Donuts for a very reasonable £2 for 6 (we are enjoying the Malaysian food prices already!) and headed to our platform. Unfortunately the train was about an hour late leaving, but once we were on board we settled into our first class cabin very nicely. We had a cabin all to ourselves with a bunk bed a sink and a chair. Our beds were madeup ready for us and on we went towards to Butterworth.