Right now I’m still on Peninsular Malaysia, in Senai International Airport awaiting my flight to Kuching in Borneo – same country, but a separate landmass and actually shared with two other nations: Indonesia and Brunei. I’m aiming to visit the latter, but not sure of the former yet – depends on visas and whether it’s cheaper and easier to fly to the Philippines once I’m done in Borneo. Please note that as I’m in Malaysia, I’m now another hour ahead than I was in Thailand.

Major thing, though, is I have to thank Mike and Ria for being such amazing hosts the last couple of days. I’ve had plenty of time to chill, some great food, an entire swimming pool to myself and internet so I’ve been able to get this blog back up to date again. Folks, really – thank you so much! Enjoy your weekend in Bangkok, and take good care of Cat!

The internet here is free, and provided by the cybercafe… which I’m sat next to in a fast food place. I just tried one of Marrybrown‘s “Hotouch” burgers, kinda hoping it was going to be like a KFC Zinger, but it was completely unspicy. Nice burger, though. And in fairness it’s “local food” as they’re a Johor Bahru-based company!

Well, I have half an hour before boarding so I’m going to check my mail and see who I can catch online. As ever, I don’t know what my internet access will be like where I end up so updates could be a few days away – at least ones with pictures.

I kind of slept in today. I usually wake moderately early so didn’t set an alarm. After crashing the previous night, the next thing I knew it was after 11:00. Eek. I showered and walked downstairs in time for Leah to be driving off to pick Mike up for his lunch! I looked after “Cat”, a little kitty that Ria rescued recently. He’s around 6 weeks old and the cutest little thing. Amazingly he’s not tried to eat any of Mike’s fish yet, which is good as half of them are larger than Cat himself.

After Mike returned to work, Ria offered to drive me around for a while and we went to a little cafe/restaurant somewhere off the back of the golf course for a couple of green teas. As we arrived, a minivan full of children pulled up and they bounded out, released from school for the afternoon. A few minutes later we were drinking on the terrace when the kids re-appeared in their casual clothes and dived into the mucky river, shouting and laughing. Wow – a far cry from back home where they’d be on their bloody PS3s and X-box’s with a large Coke and some crisps in front of them. No wonder these kids looked healthy.

Huge smiles and showing off for the tourists (though Ria’s almost a local in the area now). As we left, Ris started handing out One Ringgit notes to the kids, the way an auntie does when she’s visiting the relatives. Given there are six of these to a pound, it doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s enough to get some sweets or a decent packet of biscuits and without exception every single child said “thank you”.

We then drove to a supermarket, picked some stuff up and then realised it was almost five o’clock and zoomed back to dodge the rapidly building traffic jams.Along the way I spotted a lot of signs outside businessed and realised that Malay has a lot of “phonetic” words they’ve pinched from English. “Kah” for car, “motosikle” for motorcycle, “insurans” for insurance and so forth. It does make things a little easier.

Another relaxed evening with good chat and a few beers followed. After which I sat in an armchair, typing like crazy, uploading photos and having my toes savaged by a mad kitten.