Our first land border crossing in southeast Asia would happen going from Singapore to Malaysia.  The bus pulls up, you get out (don’t forget your passport!) and get in line.  What usually happens is the immigration officer looks at your photo, looks at you, looks back at your passport, stamps it, and hands it back to you without saying a word.  This would change when we entered England (STAY TUNED!)

We had three stops in Malaysia.  Kuala Lumpur and two islands: Penang and Langkawi.

We decided while in Kuala Lumpur that we’re not big fans of larger cities while traveling and prefer beaches (crazy right?) and smaller towns. KL as we’d come to call it, was ok.  The public transportation was easy enough to get around the city, it’s just that there wasn’t much charm to the place.  Because Ramadan was going on, the people running our hostel cooked dinner for us one night and it was amazing!

Of course we went and saw the Petronas Towers, once upon a time the tallest in the world:

We also took a day to go see this famous Buddhist statue.

Mandy had to pay $2 to rent a Sarong to enter.

I had to take a break halfway up and keep repeating to myself, it’s not that high, it’s not that high, it’s not that high, holy crap those people look like ants, it’s not that high.

We’d move on to a small island called Penang, off the north coast and it was here we’d have the best food of our entire trip in a small city called Georgetown. This food stall was busy every night of the week, and we always had to wait in line. He was serving up the best noodles we’ve ever had.  Sadly, I never took a picture of this dish before devouring it.  We also found a Chinese food place serving a simple chicken & rice dish that was clearly sprinkled with crack or something because it was the most amazing dish we’d have here.  I don’t know what was so special about it, other than the crack obviously.

The other important thing we’d do here is apply for our 60 day Thailand visa.  Normally, when you enter Thailand by land, you get 15 days or 30 if you arrive by air but I knew I wanted to spend way more time there.  So there are visa services here that will take your passport to the local Thailand embassy here and get your visa for you so you don’t have to wait in line.  Trust us, it is worth the extra cash for both the time and not having to stand in line at the embassy.  You simply drop off your passport with the cash, and pick it up the next morning.  You have 90 days to use your 60 day visa, which was great because we had one more island to go to in Malaysia before we’d enter Thailand and almost never leave.

We also went on a scavenger hunt here for what is quite possibly the worlds most extensive street art project in the world.  We had a map and it took us three entire days of walking around and finding these paintings, here are just a few.  You can see more on our Instagram

We took a boat to Langkawi after a few days in Penang and spent a couple of days on the beach, researching what exactly we wanted to do in Thailand (More beaches…noticing a pattern here?).

Langkawi was nice, but it wouldn’t hold a candle to what we’d experience in Thailand.