City Stops...Kuala Lumpur, Singapore & Hong Kong

Tonight....we rode the escalators of Hong Kong Mid-Levels! It's fab! This part of the city is built on a huge steep hill so there is a convenient set of up-escalators and down steps with lots of breaks so you can check out the funky bars and restaurants of Soho. According to the Lonely P this escalator is in the longest escalator system in the world transporting pedestrians 800m from Queens Road Central via Soho all the way up to Conduit Road in Mid-Levels in 20minutes - that's 800m UP!

Going back to Thursday last week (21st Feb) we said bye to my M&D at Phuket airport, Thailand and took a plane to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We'd bought the ticket online with budget airline Air Asia. Whilst our RTW ticket allows us 2 checked bags each the budget airlines limit you to 1 checked bag of 15kg.

Bearing in mind we'd just stripped back our rucksacks of non-essentials for our last month and overloaded my M&D with our stuff we were still over: mine by 1kg and Ben's by 3kg. And the guy wanted to charge us 660 Baht for 4 kilos excess! That's about 10 GBP/USD$20! Neither of us has ever paid excess baggage before and we already flew with Air Asia from Bangkok to Krabi 2 weeks ago with no probs so we weren't about to pay now.

So we whipped open our bags and started putting on clothes to get us down to the requisite 15kg: we changed our flip flops for trainers and socks, ben pulled his jeans on over his shorts, and we carried our fleece and rain jackets in a carrier bag. A quick check showed my bag was now 14kg so I squeezed in some more of Ben’s bits and we got both bags to 15kg exactly! Once through immigration Ben took his jeans off. Very daft really as we still took the same amount, and weight, of stuff on the plane.

Kuala Lumpur

I really liked KL. Modern City but the people in general still retained their culture and dress rather than adopting western fashions en masse like Singapore & HK. Funniest thing was the underground. Think Canary Wharf Jubilee Line. A mass of silver escalators and glass walls and doors preventing you from falling onto the platform. Well as we stepped off the escalator to the same environment but all the people were queuing nicely outside the doors whilst leaving ample space for people to get off the train! We couldn't help but giggle. And when the train arrived they did let the people off but then they cramped themselves on like the best of Londoners.

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- ChineseNew Year - Petronas Towers - KL Tower - Little India

Singapore
I was rather underwhelmed by Singapore. I think you need money to enjoy Singapore and at this stage of our trip cash is lacking. Or perhaps I should say cash for posh meals and unnecessary shopping is lacking but it is to be expected given we've been unemployed for almost a year now. It was clean but not spotless as it is reputed to be and I expected the people to be more orderly and a strong police or official presence but I didn't see a single policeman in 3 days. No one queued at trains like KL. .

We were staying in the chinese red-light district (Singapore Air Show had doubled hotel prices plus most places were booked out) so we saw the real Singapore: people crammed into huge high rise blocks of flats.

Singapore -met Anna. Raffles Singapore Sling. Sentosa. Tiger Beer. Chinese Visa.

TBC......in HK for next 4 nights... then fly to Beijing.