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Hi there fellow travelers!

Well, we've made it back home safe and sound. We'll now be using our regular blog, www.dynotravels.com , where we will be posting pictures from our trip shortly. Thanks for watching!

More of Darcy's pictures

Here are a few more. The orangutan is from a park near Kuching and the rest are from Bako National park.

Darcy's pictures

Before my camera broke the first week, I was able to get a few pictures. These are from Singapore.
We will post more later.

Kuala Lumpur

Well we are at our last stop, Kuala Lumpur (KL). But first a couple of stories from Penang. We were playing frisbee and saw the biggest Jelly fish we have ever seen--probably the size of 2-3 basketballs! A few minutes later, the frisbee flew into water, and Ryan bravely went out to recover it (I am sure you can guess the ending to this story:) Anyway, he got stung on the leg. We were assured he would not die (although by the way he was screaming, I wasn't sure--just kidding!), we poured vinegar on it and he lived to tell about it. Another funny tidbit, we thought that we were the tourists, learning about the culture of Malaysia and seeing the sights. Turns out we are just as much of an attraction to people, as we are frequenlty the only caucasians around. As we were walking down the beach, a group of Indian men asked to get their picture taken with us (and we had seen this happen with other people too). Then when they saw us later they all waved enthusiatically.
KL is a typical city. We have found that cities in any country are pretty much same, just the dominat culture is slightly different. We had hot showers for the first time in a week, saw the Patronas towers, walked around the city in the rain, saw some "ladyboys" (cross dressing prostitutes) and ended the evening with dinner at a great chinese resaurant. There have been protests in the city due to the Indians feeling that they do not have the same rights as the other cultures. The interesting fact we learned form our cab driver is that they have been locking down the city and putting up roadblocks (and causing huge traffic jams) to prevent more people from joining the protests. From reading the papers, it seems that these peaceful protests are seen as a threat to national security and despite it being a democratic country, the citizens are expected not speak out. The system here was originally set up make sure the Malays get rights, but that has taken a turn into discrmination of other groups.
We have enjoyed our trip a lot and feel that we have learned about the people and the culture here, as well as meeting lots of interesting people, but we also do look forward to returning home.
Oh, the good news is I did finally get my luggage back after 6 days. Apparently it had been caught in the conveyer belt, but I am happy to have it back! I can finally stop washing out my underwear every night--it was extremely hard to find new underwear here.:) Recovering the bag was fiasco in itself, taking us 2 hours at the airport just to track down where they were keeping it.
Ryan says to check back in a few days and he will post some pictures from the trip. Thanks for reading!

Latest Pix

here's some more pictures from today, our trip to Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia. Please note, you can click on the pictures directly for bigger versions. And yes, I'm never coming home, we are going to earn our way via peddling away!

Penang it is!

So after much debate of whether to move on to another island or stay here, we chose to stay here, and are happy to have a few more days in the same place (although we did move 2 doors down to another hostel). Yesterday we went on a hike in the national park here, which was a nice, although at times difficult to find, trail along the coast to Muka (monkey) beach. Living up to it's name we did see, monkeys chasing each other through the trees and even saw a huge lizard-ish thing. We are enjoying the beach area where we are staying and returned home to tasty food on the beach.

We had our first day of sun here, which Ryan was hoping for, but as true Oregonians, we were soon hoping for some clouds and even a nice shower, as it is blazing hot and humid. Today we took a trip into Georgetown, the major city on the island. Saw some sites, including a Chinese Khoo Klan house, which is part temple, part meeting hall for Chinese of the same clan or surname. The stone carving both here and at the many temples in town was remarkable! We have found Indian food to be some of our favorite here, so we headed for little India, which was a vibrant colorful area, with Indian music blaring from the shops, lights and glittery paper hanging across the streets, and bright colored clothing and sari's in every shop. One funny thing we have found at almost every restaurant is that as soon as they give you the menus, they expect you to order and will stand at your table and make suggestions. We are big fans of Tandoori chicken and Roti Canai. We had a fun ride in a trishaw and our driver had moved from India when he was 7 and starting riding the trishaw at age 20 and had been doing it for 40 years!

The taxi drivers here take driving to a whole new level, it is at the same time terrifying, as they cut in and out of lanes, cut in front of people and send pedestrians scrambling, and amazing as they seem to drive effortlessly and follow some (unknown to us) code of the road. We just strap on the seatbelts and prepare for a wild ride! We have one more day here, which we plan to spend at the beach. Today we threw our frisbee for while and attracted the interest of a lot of the locals, who have asked to play with us tomorrow because we "have a good frisbee.":) Then it is off to Kuala Lumpur for a whirlwind tour and our flight out on Tuesday.

New Pictures

Brunei
Penang