Malaysia

Malaysia

Malaysia is a country in Southeast Asia, largely located on a peninsula of the Asian mainland and partly in the northern part of Borneo. The west (the peninsula) Malaysia shares a border with Thailand, is a bridge linking the island state of Singapore. The coasts are situated on the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca. (East Malaysia Borneo) shares borders with Brunei and Indonesia (Kalimantan).

Climate

Malaysia is close to the equator and there is therefore a predominantly tropical climate. Temperatures are high throughout the year, averaging 28 degrees Celsius in the lowlands near the coast. Only in the mountains there is a slightly cooler climate. The humidity is high, averaging 80 percent. The noordoostmoeson blows over the South China Sea from October to March and provides heavy rain on the east coast of West Malaysia, Sarawak and Sabah. Kedah and Perlis, too far to the north to the biased noordoostmoeson, have a dry period at this time. The zuidwestmoeson between May and September provides dry weather across the country, with the exception of California and has some rainfall in the time of the year. Even during the wettest months it rarely rains all day.

Destinations

Kinabalu Park the entrance to Mt Kinabalu, is located at 1,585 metres above sea level and is the main starting point for the summit trail that leads to the top of Mt Kinabalu. Its covers an area of 754 sq km and is made up of Mount Kinabalu, Mount Tambayukon and the foothills.

Mount Kinabalu (Malay: Gunung Kinabalu) is the second highest mountain in Southeast Asia, with a height of 4100. The top of the mountain can be climbed by a person with a good physical condition without special equipment to climb mountains.

Bako park is a nice park where you can make beautiful walks. One of the highlights of the park is the Proboscis monkeys, or The Dutch monkeys called by the locals. And I thought that the French had big noses.

Personal note

It was time to start travelling, but we didn’t have a clue where to go. We went to a tour operator with the question we want to go on a vacation for 1 month and it must not be expansive. The lady starts talking about Malaysia and we didn’t know anything about this country. But it sounded nice and before we knew it we had bought the plane tickets. This was by far the worst prepared holiday. I had the Lonely Planet but hadn’t opened it so far. My travel mate was for his work already in Singapore , so I had to meet him there. From Singapore we took the bus to Johor ( Malaysia ) and from there we took the plane to Kota Kinabalu ( East Malaysia ). This was much cheaper then flying from Singapore . We wanted to Kinabalu for climbing Mount Kinabalu . It was not really climbing, you could walk to the top although it was pretty hard.


We had some trouble with the weather, due to El Nino id hadn’t rained for a long time and it was raining season. In this period the farmers on Sumatra burns down parts of the rain forest for creating farmland. But the fires were out of control and Malaysia had severe problems with that. In the north it was quit ok, but in the south the government advised the people to stay inside with the windows closed. A lot of flights were cancelled and we were also a bit afraid that they would cancel our flight. But luckily they didn’t.


East Malaysia is not very touristy and we didn’t saw many tourist. In fact I liked this very much. There was not much culture to see in East Malaysia , it was only nature, nature and nature.


It was a very pleasant trip.