Malaysia - The friendliest place on earth

From the moment we arrived at the airport the friendliness and warmth of the Malaysian people has blown us away. Neither of us have ever been anywhere where the welcome is so consistent. We literally have not seen a single person here who has been anything other than fantastically helpful, friendly and seemingly happy as a butchers dog. Come to Malaysia and make 25 million new best friends.

We arrived at the low cost carrier terminal on an Air Asia flight and it's easy to see why they were voted Airline of the year last year. The flight was unassigned seating and we managed to hustle our way into the extra legroom seats by the emergency exits. We were so comfortable that it's a shame that it wasn't a long haul flight.

Once landed arranging the bus into Kuala Lumpur (KL) was simple and cheap although getting used to new currency is always a problem especially when you are used to seeing things priced in  tens of thousands going down to single digit prices makes everything look artificially cheap and you have to be really careful.

The bus was the quickest hour and a half ever as we were eagerly reading up on KL as this was a total spur of the moment decision and had only decided to come here two days ago. Having that freedom is wonderful and has made this trip all the more exciting.

The brilliant bus driver detoured the bus to drop us in the area we wanted and after checking out several guesthouses we chose the Rainforest Guesthouse. Our room is nicely decorated, ensuite, aircon etc simple breakfast is included and it's clean which is the most important thing. Our choice of location has been excellent. The are is known as the Golden Triangle and has lots of really nice restaurants, bars and the highest concentration of monster shopping complexes we've ever seen. We went through Chinatown and Little India later and found them to be quite seedy, a lot less clean and not such a nice atmosphere.

Of course you get what you pay for and our room is definately more expensive than those areas but it is Valentine's after all.

We got settled then walked around our area and were shocked and gutted at the price of a beer, coming from 25p for a draught beer to GBP1.50 or six times more expensive is not a good feeling. Guess it's time to reign in the drinking!! We found a tourist info booth and again the woman was so helpful we walked away feeling all warm and fuzzy. We had a ton of stuff to send home so decided that rather than waste some of tomorrow we'd get it done this evening and rushed back to pick up our stuff, found the post office and had to buy a box from a printing shop as the post office don't sell them. It was all a bit chaotic but we got it done and were the last customers in the post office.

Posting home packages is one of the great pleasures of travelling. Not only does it instantly lighten the load of the backpack but you are sending yourself a surprise for your return. We've already forgotton most of the contents of our earlier packages and it's all the little souvenirs that we will come to treasure and remind us of the fantastic times we are having.

Our first evening we wandered around a bit and saw the amazing Petronas Towers all lit up then ate at a local indian restaurant which was some of the best food we've ever eaten. We can't wait to go back and try their set lunch off a banana leaf for only 60p. We treated ourselves to a couple of beers then crashed ready for a big day tomorrow.