Two days after arriving in Kuala Lumpur, Lisa smiles at her foresight for dying her hair darker to blend into the crowds in Asia. It is working. Only half of the men on the train stare at her. That same day she enjoyed her first experience with an asian toilet. She survived but our paper map of the city didn't fare so well.

Between sampling the great food, we managed a visit to the Butterfly Farm and the Islamic art museum where we learned that Islamic art prohibits the painting of sculpting of human figures as this is Allah the Almighty's job. We also made a visit to the Petronas towers the tallest buildings in the entire world, a set of twin towers taller than the World Trade Center was in NYC, but far more ornate.

Although we fell in love with the non-stop energy of Kuala Lumpur, somewhere between the Bruce Lee Battle Zone Internet Cafe and the fish head soup we decide we'd had enough of the big city and began our trek northward toward Northern Thailand.

Waiting at the Bus terminal in Kuala Lumpur a sense of excitement rushed over us. We are developing a strange condition where after two or three days of visiting a place we are excited to move on. This excitement was slowly replaced with panic as the bus had not yet arrived and it was well over an hour past our departure time. We wandered around the terminal speaking to anyone who could speak English inquiring about the bus' status. It turned out with only three people scheduled for the 3:30 PM departure they cancelled it and put us on the 4:30 bus instead. Apparently, telling us was not important as we would figure it out eventually anyways.

Three hours later, swerving around a paved narrow mountain road with daylight quickly fading on the windy mountain road through the Malaysian jungles to the highlands, we realized we were breaking a promise to ourselves not to ride buses at night (statistically the biggest killer of tourists). The bus frame seemed to shift on the chassis with every turn as we patched duct tape over the air conditioning vents to ward off frost-bite. Arriving in Thana Rata in the Cameron Highlands we shot a "thanks for not killing us tonight" glance at the bus driver as our feet hit the ground and we stepped off the bus.

That night our heads melted into our pillows at the hotel in town and we slept until noon the next day. At breakfast we met two Canadians from Ottowa and invited ourselves into their conversation baited by their distinctive "North American English" accent. We would spend the next 11 hours with these two guys, Mitch and Jamie, just talking. Two guys travelling together can raise eyebrows in some areas. But these terminally girl crazy, self deprecating lads had labeled themselves "the ambiguously gay duo" and this really made us laugh. Our English speaking counterparts in Africa would never have appreciated the humor behind this. We were glad we met these guys. We talked about everything that was North American. It felt good to appreciate who we were and where we came from. It was cathartic, as we had not spoken to anyone from North America since Kenya in early November. They understood our sense of humor and we appreciated theirs. We talked politics, school, jobs, television shows and movies, and the hours passed quickly. We even joined them on a tour they had arranged of a local tea plantation and several farms.

The next day we wrote off as a travel day, departing under the cloudy misty remnants of the Malaysian monsoon season. Swerving back down the highway in daylight to Tapah Road train station where we would catch our 11:46 PM sleeper car to Pedang Besar on the Thai border then on to Hat Yai one hundred miles up the peninsula. The last bus was at 3:15 PM so we arrived early and burned the time with broken English conversation with the railway staff. I was even learning to speak broken English myself, talking in short sentence fragments with long drawn out spaced between words and lots of hand motions. They had never seen a digital camera so we took some pictures and showed the results to them on the miniature screen. Boyish grins and laughs erupted from their hardened faces and occasionally a glance of their eyes, blackened with shipwrecked dreams, would betray their envy. At times they would stare without shame and it sent a chill up my spine. One man, probably my age, asked if we had any coins from our home that we could give to him because his daughter collected coins. So I dug into my pack and produced several coins from Namibia, Botswana, Kenya, and Tanzania. Lisa thinks that he was being polite about asking us for money. Maybe so, but I'd like to think that his daughter added my worthless coins to her collection and her awareness of the rest of the world. Sometimes having your head in the clouds helps you invent memories from things as simple as patterns in the dust. It had been a long day and we slept well in our private first class room with beds on the train, as well as can be expected. Lisa is still in shock after learning that the contents of toilets are just dumped on the tracks as the train speeds along. Note to self: never put your lips on a train track rail to hear if a train is approaching.

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