Eating my way through Malaysia

The one serious area of improvement in my travel life is trying new foods. Many of you know I'm a horribly picky eater. Trust me, I've tried to become more open and experience foods but the fact of the matter is I'm not crazy about food. I receive constant critizism from other travelers so try to resist the urge comment and tell me the food I NEED to eat this kind of food, or try this out - chances are I won't.

Malaysia, somehow, became a place where I couldn't stop eating. Everyday I would go to the "street food" street and wander from stand to stand. I embrassed this part of my trip as the food stop and ate as much chicken rice, nasi lamak and roti as humanly possible.

In between my binges I did mangage to see a couple cool things in KL. The first being Batu Caves which is essentially a temple inside these caves right outside the city. Of course, there were greedly little monkies there which everyone fed but I was more interested in the scenery:

My second day trip was to an elephant "sanctuary" a few hours away from Kuala Lumpur. I asked a million questions before commiting to the trip. Is it truly a sanctuary, do they treat the animals okay? I was assured over and over again that it would be a fun, cool way to see elephants. Which, by the way, I'm not a huge elephant fan but had read the book "Water for Elephants" about circus life in the 1920's or 30's and I grew to like them much more because the elephant understood Polish. Anyway, needless to say parts of the day trip were a total scam and the documentary that they showed us before seeing the elephants explained that they needed the sanctuary because people were getting angry that the elephants were walking through their fields and ruining their crop. My question would be, then why don't you make space for them and spare them of the insane process of tranquilizing the animals and then transporting them to the sanctuary? At some point I needed to just let go and try to have fun. And trust me, riding an elephant was fun but I soon found out by the crazy rash on my hands that I'm probably allergic to those big guys.

Check out the photos:

Next stop Thailand and the islands, ahhhhh.