2004-05-22 - 4:37 p.m.

Kual@ Lumpur, Malaysi@.

So back in the place where pollution comes to die for a couple of days and some kind of cultural festival extravaganza which requires the press to wear identical t-shirts like children on a school trip.

The days on the island were punctuated by late nights working up bar tabs that barely required you to break into paper money and sweating my way through various outward bound activities the following mornings. The first challenge was a whistle-stop snorkeling tour of the surrounding islets, me hoping that my breakfast would stay down and not make a spectacular high-pressure exit from my breathing pipe. The sight of the fish was actually enough to distract me from my physical pain. Let me tell you, you might not think it, but the amount of activity going on under those waves is nobody�s business. Billions of fish, just tooling around, without anyone�s permission or so much as a by your leave. The thrill of looking onto this multicoloured subaquatic world was unnecessarily heightened by the sighting of a real life shark, nosing around the seabed � I�m not sure if the immediate ingestion of gallons of seawater as your mouth opens in pure shock is an effective detterent, but it seemed to ignore me, even though I was very much on the verge of emitting a certain amount of liquid fear. As a hangover cure, though, you can�t beat it. Our toothless fisherman guide laughed very hard as I launched myself back onto the boat, shouting as he did �Shark is vegetarian!� in between his unbridled hysterics.

Day two was more of a constant, grinding torture as opposed to the short sharp shock. Call me a bluff old traditionalist, but if I go on a two hour jungle trek to see the marvels of a secret waterfall, whilst sweating pure alcohol and nursing a head like an angry gibbon in three hundred per cent humidity, I expect the sight to be something to remember � grandiose columns of foaming water cascading over the vertiginous cliff face. Instead, we get there, and you could have got the same effect by bribing a couple of children to spit over a rock. The two Japanese pensioners that accompanied us seemed to be impressed, though. The whole way, we would be lagging behind, and they would stop and force us to march in front of them. �You go first! You march now!� - it was like being in Tenko.

Anywazza. Back to the big city. This morning we were hauled up the Petron@s Towers, the second tallest in the world, though the tops are just huge long spikes, which is cheating a little bit, I think. Before the vertigo-inducing ascent, we had to sit through an overly dramatic corporate video on the gleaming twin colossi, which kept referring to them as �like a continuous symphony of stationary music�, which is kind of hard to imagine, though not as intriguing as the sky bridge which connects them, which was �an eternal portal to infinity�.

NanananananananananananananananaBAGWAN! is our city guide, a strange chap who told us about his first time taking Viagra within about five minutes (�It came on two hours too late!�), something I�m sure isn�t really within the realm of vital cultural information. He points out all the landmarks but refers to them only in relation to how far they are from his house. He also makes the traditional guide�s joke about the cheapest hotel in town as we pass the local jail, which coincidentally sports the longest painting in the world. Boring but true. He became increasingly eccentric as the trip progressed. You don�t mind (or care) when he points out the city�s biggest bookshop, but it�s hard to keep a straight face as he extols the virtues of the country�s third biggest covered bird sanctuary, or the second best Police Museum in South East Asia.

Tonight we�ll dress to unimpress in our matching blue polo shirts and meet the king, who I�m sure will be exempt from the Having To Look Like a Gimp ruling. Then tomorrow the crampothon of the flight back.

In other news, it appears I am to be a published author, but more on that when I gets to Blighty.