We tried to flag down a taxi at 7 this morning but they wouldn't stop. Mikey asked the hostel to call one for us and it had arrived by the time he'd come down the stairs. Like all public transport, the air conditioning was freezing, which made getting out again so much harder! The train station was quite busy even this early. We changed the last of our Singaporean dollars into Malaysian Ringgets and waited until the train arrived. We had to go through customs again, with big signs saying DEATH to drug traffickers, and we didn't get a stampin our passports even though I asked for one. We should get one on the way out of the country though.

There weren't that many westerners on our part of the train, they probably went first class as it wasn't that expensive. And the train wasn't that full, either, which was nice. Old train, but lots of leg room. We only went for about ten minutes until we all had to stop and go through Singaporean customs and then it ws back on the train and over the causeway into Malaysia.

There were a lot of large buildings directly over the border but immediately the differences were clear - while many of the tower blocks were new, there were a while lot more that were ancient, with grey and black peeling paint, masses of rubbish strewn along the railway line and little tin-roofed huts with chickens children and goats in. We travelled through jungley forest for a couple of hours, with tiny stations every now and then. Several of these looked like they'd been freshly swept and had flowers and shrubs in pretty pots, but only yards further down the line were the rubbish dumps again. It was quite apparent that Malaysia is not nearly as wealthy as its southern neighbour, Singapore.

The journey was not umpleasant, there was a restaurant car selling fried rice and chicken curry for breakfast and not that much else, and the seats were the traditonal ones where the headrest is in just the wrong position no matter how you sit, but they had 'amusing' animal home movie clips and a film made a very long time ago about someone doing something in America, and there were plenty of beautiful Hindu and Chinese temples and one or two mosques to see, so the six hours passed quite quickly.

We saw KL a few minutes before we arrived there, the familiar H-shape of the Petronas twin towers visible from miles away. And then it was gleaming office blocks and skyscrapers and we were in the station. We decided to get a taxi as we weren't entirely how to get to our hostel, so we asked at the information counter whether or not we needed a taxi voucher like we thought the man on the train had said. While I was there, I asked how to say 'thank you' in Malay ('Hello', 'Thank you' and 'Delicious' are supposed to be the three most useful words in any language) and after making sure that I had the five syllables correct, we tried it out at the taxi coutner. And we were greeted with huge grins and the right response, so we were very pleased with ourselves!

The taxi driver didn't know where to go, but fortunately Mikey had found directions on the internet. The hostel was hidden away up narrow steps through an almost-hidden door and above a restaurant, so it was hard to find. It was very clean though, only open for a month, and not that busy. Very small, weird bathrooms, air-conditioning in the room, and inexpensive, so we were fine!/p>

Once we'd looked around and paid for three nights, it was about 5.30 and time to go exploring. We had a quick glance at the rudimentary map in our book and then set off into the wilds of KL. Fortunately, our hostel was within the area called the Golden Triangle which meant it was more or less downtown. We took a few random turns and then saw the huge Petronas Towers quite close and headed for them. It only too half an hour and we found that there is a massive shopping centre there, to rival anything in Singapore, with scary-looking expensive shops. But the first thing I saw was a doughnut shop, and so we went straight there for a snack. I didn't feel like doing too much more than that, so we found the cinema on the fourth floor and bought tickets to see Collateral, a film we'd never heard of but had Tom Cruise in. I felt very under-dressed - everyone looked wonderful in long, brightly-coloured dresses and headscarves and there were masses of people there. We were just in time, as the queue took about thirty-five minutes to get through.

The film was quite fun, but very jumpy because the Malaysian government cut out any swear words, kissing or anything that might encourage free thought. An advert for KFC before the film had the disclaimer that 'Items apper for illustration purposes only', which was funny. After the film we had a burger because it was there. Every now and then a woman dressed all in black with a veil over her face and only her eyes visible would walk past. They are very, very scary and make me think of the dementors from Harry Potter, that want to suck out my soul. It was rather disturbing. Especially when they wore jeans and trainers underneath all the black. We eventually went back to the hostel to sleep.