We spent a lovely relaxing week with Marie in Taipa, Macau; she has only been there for a couple of weeks and is working on a big new show which is being put together in the City of Dreams (Cod for short). Marie showed us round Taipa and one evening we met with some of her friends in the Flame Bar at the Hard Rock Casino where it's Happy Hour all of the time and you can get cocktails in a large skull-shaped bowl which they set fire to before they serve it - brilliant!

Marie had to work a lot of the time but on Sunday we all went across the bridge into Macau and had a look around the Grand Lisboa which is a very seventies-looking building and is huge and very casino-tastic. Marie took us to a cafe where people were queuing out of the door for Portugese egg tarts which were fab, and we had a look around the centre of town which is mostly Portugese in style but with some Chinese influence which is a strange mixture. We visited the ruins of the Sao Paulo cathedral which is just the facade and a creepy-looking crypt round the corner, and walked all around the fortress. We also took a cab back to Taipa and went into the Venetian casino which is a totally crazy place: it's enormous and, like its counterpart in Vegas, has shopping centres, restaurants and canals with gondolas. They even have daylighting so that it looks as though it's daylight even when it's dark outside. We had a really good walk round and had a go on some of the one-arm bandits (which are all digital now and the arms are there for decoration only - most disappointing). We had a look at the steak restaurant just out of curiosity while we were there and the cheapest steak on the menu ("a light meal for those who aren't too hungry") was £48. We decided that none of us was in the mood for steak anyway, so we left and went across the road to the CoD where we found a much more reasonable dinner and watched the Dragon show which was about fifteen minutes long and was incredible. It takes place inside a dome-shaped show space called The Bubble, where they project a 3D animation all around you - it really was quite impressive.

We had a few lazy days while Marie was at work, uploading photographs onto FB as we can only do that when we have access to a computer with a DVD drive, which is why it takes us so long, and Marie very kindly let us use her laptop while she was at work. On our last night with Marie, we walked into old Taipa and had a lovely meal at a Mexican restaurant and shared a jug of Sangria - a lovely way to end our week. We were a little sad that we could only stay a week as we would have liked to have been able to spend more time with Marie, but our flights to Kuala Lumpur and Melbourne had already been booked.

We left Taipa late on Tuesday evening, and arrived at Kuala Lumpur just after midnight. It took us a good hour and a half to get through customs and baggage reclaim (it took us about ten minutes just to get to the arrivals as we were travelling budget airline and had to walk miles from the plane across the tarmac and into the terminal building!) and then we took a coach for the one hour journey into town, and then we had to get a cab for the last bit. We arrived at our hostel at three in the morning, totally shattered and starving. Thankfully, our hostel was a couple of doors away from a 7-11 which despite the misleading name was in fact open at three in the morning, so we were able to get something to eat before crashing out in bed.

We tried not to sleep in too late as we only had one day in KL, and we were up and out by about ten. We took the metro to KLCC station (ingeniously named because it is in the City Centre of Kuala Lumpur) and tried to go into the Petronas Twin Towers to go up onto the Skybridge. It is free to go up to the bridge and they have a certain number of tickets to give out each day, but they're usually all gone by about nine in the morning and when we got there, there were none left. We chatted up the guy behind the counter and he let us wait for a while until there was a tour which wasn't completely full and we sneaked in on the back of it. We were quite glad we did, and it was nice to see a view of the city from the forty-second floor, but we've seen so many city views from tall buildings that we're a bit aerial-viewed out now.

After the bridge we grabbed some lunch in the food court of the adjacent shopping mall (quick and cheap), and some guy chatted to Simon in the queue and tried to pinch his wallet (it's a good thing we're used to that sort of thing now and always keep our hands on our wallets when we're out and about), and then we walked outside to the KLCC park which is beautiful. As well as jogging and walking paths, there is a playground and wading pools which were very inviting as it was about 37°, but as we took our shoes off we were told by the security wardens that the pools were for children only and that we weren't allowed in. We waited for them to leave and then went in anyway - there was also a waterfall and so we got our clothes completely wet and then sat on the side with just our feet dangling in. There were a handful of other people who also decided to get in after we did. I think when the wardens came back they were a little suspicious that we might have ignored them and been swimming anyway, and they blew their whistles furiously at us and made us get out - spoilsports.

Afterwards, we jumped on the hop-on, hop-off bus and as we only had one day in the city we decided not to hop off but chose instead to stay on for the whole two hours and just do a tour of the city. The back of the bus was open top and so we got a really good look around the city in the sunshine - not the best way to explore a city but a very good alternative when you don't have much time. We had a quick meal that evening in the local market square, and then explored the night market which was pretty much just for the tourists: fake designer everything. On the way back to our hostel we discovered a pet shop full of bunny rabbits and puppies so we detoured for a little while to say hello to them all before heading off to bed. We were still tired out from our late night travels the day before, and had to be up fairly early in the morning to get back to the airport for our flight to Melbourne. Back to Oz!