From Admiral Marina we sailed up to Port Kelang where we moored in the estuary after running the gauntlet of the endless huge container and oil ships that dock along its banks. We spent the night there and left thankfully the next morning for the island of Pankor, where we hired a car and driver for a day to visit the island. The beach shops in Malaysia are a little different to those found in a typical English seaside town...

My sister, Jeanie, loves dragons, and so I tend to notice them on her behalf. One day I will make her a collage of all the dragons we have collected in our travels. I thought this was a particularly splendid one.

All the countries we visited in the Far East love small dried fish and the quantities we saw drying out in the sun and in the shops for sale was truly astonishing. We found it hard to believe that such numbers could be fished every day without totally depleting the stocks in the near future.

...and Chris pretending to be one of the kitchen staff returning from the market gardens outside the city with the day's supplies of fresh vegetables and fruits.

This sleeping Buddha, who was inside the temple above, was too long for me to completely fit him into the picture.

While we stayed at Rebak we were able to hire hotel staff cars for about £8 a day; they all functioned well enough  but looked fairly beaten up.While out one day, looking for somewhere to lunch, Chris and I were seduced by a rather nice looking hotel, and having driven in and had our old jalopy valet parked, it was a bit hard to escape. Architecturally it was a stunning hotel, and beautifully decorated, but we felt that the £60 we paid for lunch had been very foolish when a delicious meal for two would typically cost around a fiver

While we were there we took the dinghy up an estuary to look at the mangroves and try and find the sea eagles, unsuccessfully, unfortunately.

After our cruise around Langkawi we took a ferry over to the mainland to Alor Star, hired a car and visited the Sultanate of Kedah. Our first trip was up to a Thai border market where there was an incredible profusion of goodies to buy. I was fascinated by the snack items, which you can see on the right, Far Easterners seem to 'snack' a lot of the time!

Hung Tatt has a wonderful friend in Alor Star called Wai Sin who totally took us under her wing and made sure that we ate at all the right places every evening. She was invaluable because these were real Chinese restaurants, not tourist places, and we had no idea what we were eating until her chosen men arrived in front of us! From left to right you can see Pauline, Hung Tatt, Wai Sin standing, Fiona and Chris, with plates full of tasty food in front of us.

When we returned to Langkawi in November 2008, both Chris and I were decidedly overweight. Because of the operation on my knee we had done very little walking while in France, and had been superbly wined and dined when we went to visit friends and family in Denmark before leaving Europe. We put our tummies onto a strict shrink diet... small portions, the only way to do it... and joined the yachties' Pilates class run by a great American woman called Gaylor. This is actually a small class, we normally overflowed the sides of the covered floor. I was able to carry on most of the exercises in Carelbi's cockpit when we left for Thailand, although only when we were anchored in a nice flat bay, not to be tried on passage, and I thoroughly recommend the workouts to any yachties who want to try and keep fit when afloat.

Our first port of call in Malaysia was Admiral Marina, in Port Dixon, a delightful little place just up the coast from Singapore, where we checked into the country without hassle. The weather was still hot and humid and the swimming pool was a definite blessing. 

We hired a car and visited Malacca, which is a fascinating port, full of history, old Chinese and colonial quarters and good restaurants. We could have taken a decorated rickshaw, as below, but we chose, masochistically to walk!