It's a Man's World....

I am not a sexist... sorry, I really am not... I was raised to treat men and women equally, have no problem buying tampons for a girlfriend or crying a little when watching poor Leonardo die on that wooden door.... but for a few days now I feel extremely annoyed by the other sex... what happened? Not sure, I started traveling with Francis and then Claudia joined us in Pulau Tioman. The whole thing started becoming a Boy vs. Girl thing, shopping vs. hiking, tanning vs. hanging out in restaurants... carrying around half your belongings vs. traveling with bare minimums... yours to figure out which belongs to who, but I all of a sudden could not wait for Manfred to join the travel. Now this is the skinny in a nutshell... went to Kuala Lumpur and ditched (or got ditched, mutual) the gals the night before Manfred arrived... the thing that I feel bad about is that he was supposed to go traveling with the gals while I will be climbing in Krabi next month, but oh well.

Anyhow, we left KL immediately (he s been there before) and made it up to the highlands. Since then my heat rash has disappeared (it is a moderate 20Celsius here every day) and we have been hiking plenty, spending most evenings drinking beer at the hostel and talking to other travelers... much more my style than spending hours in aisian shopping centers "looking around".

Yesterday we hiked almost 6hours up the longest and steepest trail to the top of the highlands, and followed several miles of tea-plantations down to town, an incredible sight. The humid environment and constant temperature are an ideal ground for these plants and they are cut to the perfect size for the workers to pick the leeves, as seen in the pic. At night they had a big go away party for the cook of the hostel, and man did they! They roasted a big ole pig and we sure took advantage of having burned 1000s of extra calories!


Yum!