The Malay Peninsula

The Austronesian language family covers half the planet so who are Austronesians, where do they live and where do they come from?

Going off-the-beaten-track half way round the World with people you don’t know, food you’ve never tried before and what appear to be extreme weather conditions. What can possibly go wrong?

A few tips on how to get the best out of your small group tour to Southeast Asia

Our favourite Malaysian Museum There’s a lot of competition in Malaysia in museum terms with plenty of great and varied offerings in Kuala Lumpur, George Town/Penang and Sarawak’s Kuching in particular – while we’ve always liked Malacca’s unique Museum of Enduring Beauty – but the low-key, admittedly somewhat obscure, but fascinating Time Tunnel in Cameron Highlands’ Brinchang Town definitely weighs…

Kuala Lumpur Relatively speaking, Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur, commonly abbreviated to KL, is one of Southeast Asia’s youngest capital cities. History says it was originally founded by Chinese migrants as a remote tin mining settlement during the 1850s before eventually emerging as the capital of the newly independent Federation of Malaya some hundred years later in 1957. Since 1999 the even…

Malaysian street food Sampling local street food has become an essential element of overseas travel and indeed offering street food and street food tours is increasingly seen as an important draw for foreign visitors. A brief scan of any of the myriad ‘best street food’ kind of articles includes entries from right across the World with cities as diverse as…

What to see and do in Kuala Lumpur? As with Malaysia as a whole, its capital Kuala Lumpur – more commonly abbreviated to simply KL – does manage to live up to Tourism Malaysia’s marketing slogan ‘Malaysia Truly Asia’ with its rich ethnic mix including many of the myriad various Indian and Chinese cultures along with indigenous Malay, while Indonesian…

Kellie’s Castle When construction of Kellie’s Castle began in 1910, it would certainly have been rather remote – lost among the jungle and plantations of central Malaya – although today it’s rather conveniently placed aside Highway 8, just outside Perak’s booming state capital Ipoh. Nonetheless, the site is now well-preserved, set among gardens and lawns and the ruins still ooze…

Malaysia World Heritage – Cultural Sites With just 2 cultural and 2 natural sites inscribed on UNESCO’s Malaysia World Heritage Sites list this section is going to be brief. Now, at first glance on a map, the little blob tagged onto the bottom of the Thai-Malay Peninsula does appear quite small, however, once you’ve added Borneo’s states of Sabah and…

Malaysia UNESCO Sites Malaysia UNESCO sites currently include 2 cultural sites in the Peninsular and a national park each in Borneo’s Sabah and Sarawak States. A further 2 candidates in the tentative section add a second national park in Sarawak, plus the famous Taman Negara in West Malaysia. Considering the country’s rich cultural heritage and stunning landscapes, that’s a relatively…

Chinatown Penang Following on from our recent aerial pix of Penang’s George Town, post here are a few shots of some of the lovingly restored buildings of UNESCO-listed Chinatown Penang (Pinang) at street level. First up – the 19th-century Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion in Leith Street is probably the most iconic of George Town’s Chinese heritage buildings and certainly one…

George Town Penang That’s aerial as in being high up rather than actually in an airplane or taken by a drone, since we took these George Town Penang views from the top floor of the town’s Komtar. Think it was the 65th floor – more of a helipad than a ‘floor’ as such since it consisted mostly of steel mesh…