Kathmandu and beyond
 Our final month in Asia (by Mark) I know we have an annoying habit of not putting anything on the blog for weeks at a time and then throwing on two or three long ones at once so I will endeavour to try and keep this one short and sweet. After our enjoyable stint in Sri Lanka we took an early morning flight to Kuala Lumpur but didn't have a very clear plan of what to do next. Rather than stay in the capital however, we decided to head a few hours south to Melaka. With its eclectic mix of influences (*) (Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese & English), it's artistic tendencies and relatively small size, The city is a delight to explore and once we had arrived we were in no rush to leave. We spent our days wandering the streets and taking in the sights, drinking very good coffee and eating great food, for Melaka is the place to head for in Malaysia for some truly superb nosh. There are Chinese (**) dishes that for once don't include claws and God knows what else (although I am sure you can get that sort of thing?), delicious Malay food and even the odd McDonalds to boot (we need a fix every now and then, 'don't you judge me!'). We were in Melaka during Ramadan and one late afternoon the owner of our guesthouse took us to a street market that is set up especially for the month of Ramadan and had all sorts of amazing stuff on it. It is real torture walking up and down making your purchases as snacking is not an option (normal behaviour on any other Asian street market) and by the time we got back to the guesthouse we were starving. But for us it was the Indian food that kept winning our custom. Melaka's 'Little India' has all but been swallowed up by 'Chinatown' but it still has a handful of excellent restaurants serving yummy south Indian dishes and sweet, milky Chai (tea). I know we had just come from Sri Lanka but arguably the food is quite different and you can never have enough of a good thing right? Any way, we reluctantly left Melaka, headed back to KL for a few days and are now back in Thailand, enjoying a bit of R&R and a final few rays of sunshine on Ko Pha-Ngan before the final haul up to Bangkok and our flight back home. In the words of Vinnie Jones; 'it's been emotional'. (*) for 'influences' you could read 'invaders'? (**) talking of China, we have noted that our blog entry entitled 'A Chinese Disaster (by Mark) (24 Mar 2012) only has photos on it that were taken on our phones so we have updated it with some taken on our 'proper' camera.
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Diary Photos
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