Fake birthdays, more temples and organised monkey crime in Kuala Lumpur!

It is only from writing these journals that I see how many ports we visited in Malyasia and one of the longest tours I remember was from Kuala Lumpur.

As was standard for 2008 it was the main highlights tour as usual, spending hours on our tour bus passing through the wonderfully scenic container port area or as I like to call it sleep time! Once a senior had mentioned to me that they were hungover and couldn't deal with PAX asking them questions the whole bus journey so once every cruise he'd get on the bus and introduce himself 'Hi folks my names (Redacted) and i'm your cruiseship videographer and it was my birthday last night so I'm a little worse for the wear so I'm going to sit at the back and catch up on some much needed sleep, whoever wakes me up when we get to the first temple I'll give a free copy of the Reflections DVD!'

I was never sure if this actually happened but i was feeling rough this morning so I thought i'd give a try 'Hi I'm Neil and...yada yada yada' thankfully most of the bus laughed and I got an impromtu happy birthday despite my birthday being a few weeks away! I almost got caught out when one of the PAX turned up in the photo gallery to give me a picture they'd taken of me asleep on the tour bus, as I wasn't there they gave it to one of the photogs and the PAX mentioned I must have had a good birthday! Thankfully whoever the photog was just nodded and took the picture from them!

You can see another hot sweaty day in Malyasia by clicking on the video above and as another first time in the port my tour that would take us to the iconic Batu caves, a Batik factory, the National war memorial and then on to the a brief photo stop at the twin Petronas towers before a long bus ride back.

One of the most popular Hindu shrines outside India the Batu Caves (Batu literally meaning rock) was the first stop and when most of the PAX saw the steps up to the cave and the amount of time we had to climb the steps, see the caves and then get back to the bus a fair few of them thought better of it and just snapped some pictures from the bottom. 'Well thats why we have you' one of them said 'get a move on so we can see it on the video later'.

As impressive as the interiors might have been I had very little time to shoot them before I had to run back to the bus and also it might have been my first time seeing wild monkeys and I may have got distracted by filming them

It doesn't look to far away but it bloody well was and on the way down I had to deal with a hysterical passenger!

There signs up everywhere saying 'do not feed the monkeys, do not pet the monkeys and do not get too close to the monkeys' which of course the passengers do all of that. Walking back down I see a woman posing behind a monkey trying to get a picture with it, quick as a flash the monkey wrenches a necklace of her and runs away back to the top of the temple.

'My necklace, my necklace, somebody do something' she yelled directly at me as I just happened to by walking past her when it happened. I'd already lost track of the monkey and we needed to be back on the bus in about 10 minutes. 'I'm afraid its gone mamm' I replied, thankfully I think she realised fairly quickly there was no getting back but as I took one last look I could have sworn I saw a monkey near the top jumping onto a mans arm and dropping what looked like a necklace into his hand!

Thats right we had stumbled onto an organsied monkey crime syndicate! Speaking to the tour guide he told us thats the reason to avoid the monkeys as they are trained to steal pretty much everything then hand it over to their trainers/master criminals !

After the excitement of monkey crime our next stop at the Royal Selangor factory was maybe not as thrilling but gave me the opportunity to get some good mechanical style shots of the processes the workers did to produce what is a world renknowned brand.

As you can see I was thrilled by the trip especially as there seemed to be more time in the tour given over to the gift shop portion of the factory than the actual tour, this was in the days before we filmed interviews at the locations and looking back I could have made a nice little mini doc on the history of the factory etc. But when you are in a different country most days you don't always have time to know the full itinerary of each days tours and mostly you had to run and gun it.

We then stopped at the Malyasian national war monument known as the Tugu Negara which commemorated Malyasia struggle for freedom against Japan in World War 2 and the following years.

Our final stop of the day was at the Petronas towers which between 1998 and 2004 were the largest buildings in the world.

This was the last stop of the day and everyone was knackered and emotional from monkey crime also the weather was starting to turn but you guessed it, my job was to run out in a thunderstorm and get the shots! Its a shame as we learned nothing about the building or its construction, it was jump out, get a quick picture and back on the bus.

I'd return to Kuala Lumpur a few more times over the years and I never had a day off in port as there was always so much to do and see but you usually ended up in many of the same places I visited on my first trip.

On the next cruise diaries - Island hopping in Langkawi