Malaysia in ten photographs

Malaysia was one trip, five days, and it covered both halves of the country — Borneo first, then the peninsula.

Kota Kinabalu is where it started. We dived, which is the one part of the trip with no photographs of us in it at all, only a turtle working along the coral and somebody's fins in the blue above it. Above water it was palms, a flat sea and a road running beside it, and a temple that looked better at dusk than it had all afternoon.

Then the interior. The train from Tenom to Beaufort runs through jungle along a river, and it is the kind of train where the windows are open and leaning out of one is the point. That photograph is the trip for me — two of us hanging out of a moving carriage, grinning, somewhere in the middle of Borneo.

On the peninsula, Kuala Selangor has silvered leaf monkeys that come down out of the trees and sit on you. They are completely unbothered. One of them has a baby with her and is not remotely interested in the fact that you are there.

Batu Caves is the other kind of place — a limestone cave with a temple built inside it, gold statues at the top of a staircase that goes up into the dark.

We finished at Bentong, in the hills above Kuala Lumpur, where the air is ten degrees cooler and the view goes soft with haze. A stone Buddha sits in the trees there. I am at the bottom of it for scale, which is the only reason you can tell how big it is.

One trip, one badge, and a country I would go back to tomorrow.