Dave's South East Asia Adventure!!: Malaysia

On Wednesday night Freddy and I took a bus from Ponianak to Kuching, Malaysia. We arrived at the Malaysian border at 5am and had to walk through the border. Indo departure said I stayed a day too long (31days), but I had a police report (long story, in Sintang the popo showed up at the house we were staying at and wanted to see our passports....Freddy didn't have his on him so they weren't going to let us leave on the bus in the morning, but luckily Freddy called a friend in Ponianak who took his passport to the cops there, then they called the Sintang police. Then we got in trouble for not registering with the police, apparently we were supposed to register with the police in every city we stayed in Indo....and to register costs a fee everytime...love that gov't) saying my departure date was Dec 6. Indo departure said it doesn't matter about that document, that it was wrong, and that I had to pay 200,000 Rp. I told them that even if that document was wrong that technically I had until 2pm that day to reach 30days....did no good. I told them that 200,000Rp was way too much for 1 day overdue, so they told me that if I wanted them to help me that was the price, otherwise I'd have to wait for who knows how long in a different room and might have the same result.....they knew my bus would leave me and I had no other choice. So, I tried to bargain! haha, offered 50,000Rp, they said no, 200,000Rp was the price. So I offered 100,000Rp and they could take it or leave it, they took it :) Crazy corrupt Indo gov't.

Crossed the border and immediately you could tell you were in a different country. The roads were better, buildings starting emerging, more jungle forest...just nicer. I'd compare it to crossing the border from San Diego to Tijuana, but maybe not quite as drastic. Malaysia is sweet, the food is amazing! We almost missed our plane to Kuala Lumpur as we didn't know the time went ahead an hour, even though we didn't travel east or west...just north, crazy.

KL is a cool city, feels like a combo of Singapore and Hong Kong. Today we just checked out a bit of the city, walked around, went to a movie (Golden Compass, actually really good), ate lots of food. Tomorrow we're off to Kuantan, then north about an hour looking for surf during the monsoon season here. It's rained most of the time here in KL, probably more rain to come.