KL

ok, if that guy doesn't turn his alarm off someone's going to get hurt. By someone else obviously, I'm not about to confront a native on his own train, I just muttered a couple of idle threats from behind the safety of the curtain, the sheet, and possibly the pillow.

It was about 5am, and this guy had robbed me of an extra hour or so of sleep, unforgivable in my eyes. The train had made up the time and we got into KL at about 6.30am. The station at Kl is great, huge, clean and organised. I put my bag in the left luggage place and had a hot shower for the first time in god knows how long. I had an authentic McDonalds breakfast which didn't sit well at all, and we headed into town.

The only thing I knew about KL was the pretonus towers so we headed there on the metro. I don't know why but I love riding the metro lines in different countries, makes you realise just how bad the tube is in London.

We got out at a shopping mall in the bottom of the towers and went on a kind of science-y museum tour of the Petronus company, showing us how much they cared for the environment and how there were working to preserve the natural resources of malaysia. For a bit I almost forgot they were an evil oil company hell bent on the rape of the natural world.

However they did have some really cool toys and things to play on. Matt has a great picture of me on a digger. We ended spending far too much time wandering around this little play house, and were in danger of not actually getting to see the outside of KL, so we rushed through the last couple of rooms and headed outside.

We couldn't go up the towers as all the tickets had sold out for that day, which was a shame, but I got some good photos of the towers from the ground. We walked to the KL Tower (the 4th highest telecommunications tower in the world, and looked almost identical to the Stratosphere in Vegas). We went up and got some really good views of the city and the twin towers.

By this time it was almost 1 and our train to singers (that's Singapore to those in the know, which I'm not, so I will refer to it as Singapore from now on) was at 1.55 so we had to get a shake on. We arrived at the station with more than 30 minutes to spare, Matt went for another McDonalds and I had this curried fish with rice and potato bravas, really nice. On the way out I noticed that the TVs were showing a preseason Liverpool game, I hadn't noticed and missed most of it, and didn't have time to see any more, it was like someone was taunting me.

As expected the train was late, but not too late so it was alright. The journey took about 7 hours, and passed with a mixture of sleep, ipod, watching film trailers on the TV, and playing solitaire with my FHM cards (I don't think the Muslims were impressed with that.

Another train border crossing later and we were in Singapore. After the giant station in KL I was expecting something more than what I got. I was very much underwhelmed with the Singapore train station, there was nothing there. Nothing. No signs saying welcome to Singapore, no information desk, a small cafe and a ticket office. It was about the size of Brighton station, which considering that Singapore was a country, and Brighton was just a seaside city in east Sussex, is a bit shit.

We hadn't booked anywhere to stay and so walked around with our stuff for about an hour until we got in a cab, who took us in the general direction of where all the other backpackers were, we had a bit of help from a friendly cafe owner, and then Nicky (who had been with Matt and me in Laos) told us where she was, so we headed there.

A quick shower later and we were out. Nicky had been in the Phillippines for the past 2 weeks, and had met a new friend called Vanessa, a Brazilian girl who lives in London. I think Matt took a shine to her so I acted like the good wingman and when we went to Ministry of Sound danced all night with Nicky so he could work his magic on her. I also met an American guy called Eugine, he works “for uncle Sam”, his business card says he's Special Assistant Office of the Secretary. I've no idea what that means but he travels a lot and never stays in the same place for too long, which could only mean to me that he's some kind of CIA hitman. During the night I also got chatting to 3 Irish people (seriously are they following me?) a lad called Damien who lives here and his 2 sisters Neve and Louise. It was great fun watching the protective brother watching his sisters on the dancefloor.

When we got kicked out of there we went to McDonalds for breakfast, Eugine said he'd pay but ended up ducking out of it, typical CIA hitman behaviour. we were sitting there for about 2 hours, and had a really good chat. Eugine had to get a flight to Australia in about 2 hours so didn't bother going to bed, we got in a cab together, the cab couldn't stop outside the hotel where he was staying as it was a diplomatic hotel and there were motorcades all over the place, very strange at 7am. After he got out we chatted to the cab driver for a while, turns out he's part of the Singapore Mafia, and was on the run for 10 years for drug trafficking, it was quite entertaining listening to his tales of border jumping through Thailand and Cambodia, but then he got caught but because of his mafia connections he got quite a good lawyer who got him off.

Didn't believe a word of it, but entertaining nonetheless.