Once again the boat kept us waiting for no apparent reason, but it only took a couple of hours to get to Kuala Tembeling jetty. The trees were still struggling out of their sticky cloud blankets and the night-time insects had been replaced with birds and squawking animals. The haze was such that looking at even the nearby trees was like peering through blue smoke, although it wasn't foggy. I waved at every boat we passed, and it's the law everywhere that someone has to respond to a wave, and they did.

At Kuala Tembeling we waited for our bus, which arrived and left on time. We made good time back to KL, the bus seemed to prefer to go south, perhaps cos that's downhill. At toll booths we passed sleeping men in flourescent jackets with machine guns by their sides, and more near-death mopeds. We hit KL at about 3pm, and walked the short distance to the hostel promising ourselves a long hot shower and that we'd put all our clothes in the washing machine immediately. Mikey had a shirt that got wet tubing yesterday and was now a serious biological hazard.

Unfortunately the washing machine was broken, but I had a nice hot shower instead. Then we did some email - being away left me with twelve messages to reply to and a whole lot of junk. I've never signed up to anything online but somehow they still send me junk. I've filtered out most of it, but it's still upsetting to see that only half of the messages are for me!

We had some chocolate as lunch and then went into town to see the view from the Menara Kuala Lumpur, the telecommunications tower. We arrived at the perfect time, and the city was just coming to life as the sun went down. It seems to struggle along during the day, in a trance of traffic and the dust of fumes, but at night it comes alive, moving and breathing and being what it wants to be,as if neon lights are its natural colour. That's probably true of most cities, but it was especially obvious from 1200 feet.

We took a taxi to Chinatown as our map didn't show it and it was still very hot. The driver dropped us off at a random point, as we'd requested, and we found ourselves at the entrance to a market. The markets and the ethnic quarters are where the soul of a city livesand this was the one thing that had been missing from our trips into KL.

I immediately bought a bag of lychees (proper ones with thick skin and pith) and then we dived into the crowded streets. The passageways between stalls of t-shirts and watches and bags and mobile phones was really only wide enough for a single person at a time but three lines of people were trying to push through. Designer goods of all descriptions and dubious authenticity swung out and hit us, and every pause in the throng of squashed people caused a stall-owner to call 'Beautiful watch for you, miss?' while English and American tourists complained that they couldn't understand what was going on.

At the end of each long, thin row of stalls was a food area where barrels of chestnuts were being roasted with tiny black beads of something, and men were frying large square slices of salami and offering bacon for sale. Fruit stands piled high with exotic and not so exotic produce had hawkers offering tastes of everything, and while I was tempted to try them all, no-one sold anything in less than one kilo, as my still-full bag of lychees testified. We were both very hungry, but all the street food looked dirty and greasy, so we took a taxi back to the Chinese place we had lunch in the other day, and had a very satisfying supper. We walked the couple of blocks to the hostel, often not waiting for the little green pedestrian crossing man to become animated and start walking - we'd found that as long as you step bravely into the road most traffic will see and try to avoid you.

We watched 'Shaun of the Dead' a little film that had all our favourite TV characters in it, just playing other people, which was plain wrong and sometimes quite weird. Because the disk was not an official version of the film, and the sound quality was poor, someone with a very tenuous grasp of English and no idea what the film was about, had put subtitles on it. Thus, phrases like, 'I want you to have this,' and 'Do you want anything from the shop?' became 'I luckily hide,' and 'George from the shark' respectively, which was as distracting as it was funny. In fact, the subtitles alone would have made a very surreal comedy. We'll buy the real version when we get home and see it properly then!