Welcome to uncle Joni's travel stories

Greetings from Kuala Lumpur! After spending some days in jungles it's nice to be in a guest house again. The jungles we saw in Cameron Highlands and Taman Negara didn't seem to be as dangerous as many people might think. We didn't, unfortunately, meet any tigers or other big mammals but were lucky enough to see some lizards, squirrels and insects.

Climbing didn't really go as planned since Mount Batu Brinchang was covered in fog and we weren't able to see squat from the top. In addition to that the summit is reachable by car so it took away much of the fun. The other peak, the highest one in the area was supposed to be only a kilometer or two away from the first one, but apparently the map they sold us sucks big time. A local guide told us that it'll take three hours to get there and another three hours to get back. We had to get our laundry by six o'clock and the route was muddy as hell so we decided to turn back.

On the other hand in Taman Negara things went pretty well. We thought that we are forced to take a guided tour in the jungles if we want to spend a night there but soon we found out that a guide isn't necessary. After convincing Inna it was time to go. Our first destination was the longest canopy walkway on Earth and then we headed for a watchtower nearby to spend a night there. An officer at the headquarters of the park was kind enough to tell us how to get to the tower but 'forgot' to mention that there's no bridge for crossing the 50 m wide leech-filled river.

Anyway we survived the river and on the other side I felt like the Phantom himself - running through the jungle trail wearing only my underwear. The tower turned out to be a lot better than we expected and the night was great with all the jungle sounds around. Have to get back to a jungle one day for a longer expedition! Oh, I uploaded some new pictures too: Asia 2010 pictures

Finally temperatures well below 30 degrees Celcius! We just arrived here at Tanah Rata in Cameron highlands and it seems to be surprisingly popular among tourists. Yesterday we walked around the old town of Ipoh and checked out Kellie's castle, an old haunted place not far outside the city.

After a mosquito-filled night we woke up at 6 am to head to the biggest limestone caves in peninsular Malaysia. Straight taxi ride would have cost 40 RM one way but we took a local bus and taxi and saved over 50 RM. The caves themselves were beautiful and the three and half hour excursion was pretty good, although the group of ours was a bit too big. During the first hour of the tour we walked along stairs and checked out the biggest 'rooms' but after that the real action started. Not too long after we found ourselves crawling in the cold and murky water to find the way out. I can't wait to do this again without a big group and guides!

Now our plan is to relax for a couple of days in this wonderful colder climate and maybe climb some of the small mountains around. Perhaps I'll finally have time to add some photos here soon.

Inna added a report from Crimea in Russian. Go and read it but remember to force your browser to use UTF-8. The server decides to add wrong character encoding to the http header and I can't change it.

Our train to Kiev leaves in the night and tomorrow we'll be flying to Bangkok. I hope we'll find malaria medication there. Over and out for a while.

The page is under heavy construction but in the future I'll write some short summaries of my trips here. And there will be pictures too!

Most of the stories will be here with a (hopefully) small delay but there will be some 'real time' updates also. Stay tuned!

For the moment I'm too lazy to hack the page to work properly with IE. Change to a better browser for optimal viewing experience. Feel free to report any bugs or ideas in IRC (Milton @ Quakenet, IRCnet and Equnet) or by email, milton_fi at yahoo dot com.