Week 31. Monday 12th February - Sunday 18th February 2007

In the morning we hit the beach to continue my swimming education and I successfully got my 5m front crawl badge -hooray. However, I did hold my breath the whole time so its not that great. We then took a ferry over to Pangkor island where we tested my new found skills by going snorkeling along the beach. Swimming is alot more fun when you don’t have to worry about drowning so much I found though we did have to avoid crabs and jelly fish. After bumming around a bit more we got the ferry back to the mainland and hit the road back to Kuala Lumpur, kipping for the night in a motorway services. The joy of life on the road.
Arriving back in KL on Tuesday we found that the carbs were detuning themselves. Another trip to James’ was in order but he assured us that it was just a matter of changing the o-rings on the carb screws. We also got a quote for cleaning the car for shipping to OZ (it has to be “clean as new” to meet Aussie customs requirements - they don’t want another cane toad incident eh?). The quote was about 200 quid but we figured we could knock it down to 50 by cleaning and repainting the back cabin ourselves so thats what we did.
The next two days were spent taking everything out, slinging most of it in the bin and setting about cleaning and repainting. A torturous job it was and for a while I thought it was going to be a rum finish but after the second coat of white it actually looked pretty sweet.
Friday we went back to the garage to see if we could do anything about our LPG issues. The little black controller box for the switchover had nuked itself so I knocked up a new system with a few relays. It works nicely but we found that the engine just doesn’t like LPG and dislikes re-starting on petrol after using LPG. We decided to sod the LPG and not use it. That night we headed to the inauguration party of Albert’s new house. The custom is to have a bit of a housewarming before moving anything in then leave it for a while to let the wandering spirits make themselves at home.
Sunday we decided we’d had enough of KL and made haste to hit the road to Singapore. Too much haste because I forgot my passport and had to get the bus back to get it then up again to get back into town. Nearly 4 hours of bus rides ensued. Joyful. Still it was done and we managed to find a luxury coach to Singapore. Now the Malaysian idea of a luxury coach is a far cry from the English idea of a luxury coach. The English idea of a luxury coach is a normal rumass coach with luxury written on the side. The Malaysian version had seats with electrical full reclining, electrically adjustable calf supporters and foot rest, an individual TV screen for each seat from which you could choose from a range of movies and computer games. Awesome. We didn’t want to get off but Singapore customs made us to get our stamps which thankfully was a quick and easy process. We arrived in at 10.30pm and walked to the “Little India” quarter to find some cheap accommodation. After a ridiculously priced pint (nearly 4 quid) we decided we wouldn’t be doing much drinking here and would have to amuse ourselves by stamping around like colonialists and patronising the locals by telling them we invented the country. Much better fun.
While all this was going on we were emailing and calling companies to try to arrange some shipping for the Landy to Oz. Unfortunately, it’s Chinese New Year and most places have shut down until Tuesday so it may be a while before we get something concrete in place.
Dwyer