Coverage / Malaysia
Malaysia
Southeast Asia
Where Malaysia earns a visit: 10 activities across 16 curated destinations.
10 activities · 14 pairings · 19 verified providers
What you can do in Malaysia
Culinary / Cooking
- George TownJan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug DecGeorge Town is the place to learn Malaysian food at its source. The old city, UNESCO-listed since 2008, grew up as a trading port where Malay, southern Chinese and Tamil communities lived side by side, and their kitchens blended into a cuisine that Penangites will argue is the best in the country. The proof is on the street: assam laksa, a sour mackerel-and-tamarind noodle soup, char kway teow fried over roaring charcoal, char siew and Hokkien mee, Indian nasi kandar and mee goreng, and the Peranakan or Nyonya dishes that came from Chinese-Malay intermarriage. A cooking class here is the best way in, and the good ones start where the cooks start, at a morning wet market, haggling for fresh turmeric, galangal, belacan and just-caught fish before heading to an open kitchen to cook a spread and eat it. Between classes you can eat your way through the hawker centers and heritage shophouse cafes. For anyone who wants to understand South-East Asian food rather than just tick off dishes, George Town rewards a few days and an empty stomach.
- Kuala LumpurJan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep DecKuala Lumpur is the easiest single place to eat across all of Malaysia's food cultures, and a good cooking class here uses that mix as its syllabus. This is a city built by migration, and its food shows it: Malay nasi lemak and satay, Cantonese and Hakka hawker cooking in the Chinatown stalls, South Indian banana-leaf meals and roti canai in Brickfields, and the mamak stalls that stitch it all together and stay open half the night. A hands-on class typically opens at a wet market such as the one in Taman Tun Dr Ismail, where you learn to read the herbs, chillies, coconut and fresh fish before cooking a multi-course Malaysian meal from scratch. Because KL sits at the crossroads, one class can move from a coconut-rich curry to a stir-fry to a sambal in a single morning, giving you techniques you can actually repeat at home. Add the sheer depth of the street-food scene for the evenings, and the city works both as a culinary destination in its own right and as the arrival point for a wider Malaysian food trip that might carry on to Penang.
Scuba Diving
- MabulApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov DecSipadan is the best-known dive in Malaysia and one of the great walls anywhere. It is the country's only oceanic island, a coral pinnacle rising more than 600 meters straight off the seabed in the Celebes Sea, and the drop-off means big pelagic action within a few fin-kicks of the surface. Barracuda Point draws the tornado of chevron barracuda it is named for, green and hawksbill turtles are on nearly every dive, and schools of bigeye trevally, bumphead parrotfish and the occasional gray reef and hammerhead shark patrol the blue. To protect it, Sabah Parks caps access at 176 permits a day, issued only through the dive resorts, so you book a package on Mabul or Kapalai and your operator secures the permit. Base yourself on Mabul and you also get some of the world's best muck diving on the doorstep, with frogfish, flamboyant cuttlefish, mandarinfish and blue-ringed octopus around the stilt villages and artificial reefs while you wait for your Sipadan day. It is warm, current-fed, world-class diving that suits confident open-water divers upward.
- Perhentian IslandsMar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep OctThe Perhentians are where a lot of travelers get certified, and for good reason. The two islands sit inside a marine park in warm, clear water, the reefs start in the shallows straight off the beach, and the diving is gentle enough that a first Open Water course here is relaxed rather than daunting. Green and hawksbill turtles are common, blacktip reef sharks cruise the shallows at sites like Shark Point, and there are bumphead parrotfish, cuttlefish, moray eels and healthy hard-coral gardens. For something with structure, the Sugar Wreck, a cargo ship that sank in 2000, sits in around 18 meters and has become a soft-coral-covered fish magnet, with a couple of other wrecks nearby for qualified divers. Prices are among the lowest in the region and the pace is barefoot and unhurried, which makes the Perhentians a natural counterpoint to the deep, current-fed diving of Sipadan on the far side of the country. Come outside the monsoon, when the islands are open and the sea is at its clearest.
Trekking / Hiking
- Gunung MuluMar Apr May Jun Jul Aug SepThe Pinnacles are one of the most striking treks in Borneo and one of the hardest days most walkers will ever do. Gunung Mulu, UNESCO-listed for its caves and karst, hides on the flank of Mount Api a field of razor-sharp limestone spires up to 45 meters tall, rising straight out of the rainforest. Reaching them is a three-day, two-night trip: a river journey and jungle walk to Camp 5, then a brutal 2.4-kilometer ascent that gains around 1,200 meters up roots, rock and ladders, using fixed ropes and rungs near the top, before turning around at a viewpoint over the spires and climbing all the way back down. It is guided-only and seriously tough, for fit, sure-footed hikers with a head for heights. Mulu rewards the effort beyond the Pinnacles too: Deer Cave releases millions of bats in a spiralling exodus at dusk, Clearwater Cave is among the longest cave systems in the world, and the Sarawak Chamber is the largest known cave chamber on earth. Come for the Pinnacles, but leave days for the caves and the canopy.
- Taman NegaraFeb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug SepTaman Negara is a walk through primary rainforest that predates the Amazon, a forest so old it survived the ice ages intact, and you feel that age the moment the canopy closes over the trail. Most trips run from Kuala Tahan, reached by a scenic riverboat up the Tembeling, and build from easy to serious. The gentle end is a climb up Bukit Teresek for a view over the forest and a walk out to one of the world's longer canopy walkways, a swaying series of rope bridges strung 40 meters up between giant trees. Night walks and river-hides give the best chance of the park's shy wildlife, from tapir and deer to, very rarely, signs of elephant and big cats, and a visit to a Batek Orang Asli camp shows how people have lived in this forest for millennia. At the hard end sits Gunung Tahan, a tough seven-day return trek to 2,187 meters for experienced, well-guided hikers only. It is humid, leech-prone and gloriously wild, the definitive rainforest trek of Peninsular Malaysia.
Wildlife Safaris
- Danum ValleyMar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep OctDanum Valley is the wild counterpoint to the Kinabatangan. This is primary rainforest that has never been logged, a 130-million-year-old ecosystem older than the Amazon, and walking into it is walking into Borneo as it was. The trade-off is that wildlife is dispersed and shy rather than concentrated at a riverbank, so sightings are earned on forest trails and night drives rather than handed to you. The rewards are the ones serious naturalists come for: wild Bornean orangutans building nests in the canopy, red leaf monkeys and gibbons calling at dawn, Bornean pygmy elephants, sambar and mouse deer, and, for the lucky few, the clouded leopard, one of the hardest big cats in Asia to see. The birdlife is exceptional, with Bornean bristleheads and rhinoceros hornbills among more than 300 species. A canopy walkway, guided day and night walks and 4x4 night drives make up the days. Come for the wilderness and the quality of the forest itself, and treat every big mammal as a bonus rather than an expectation.
- Kinabatangan RiverMar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep OctThe Kinabatangan is the easiest place in Borneo to see wild orangutans and a lot else besides. Decades of forest clearance have squeezed the region's wildlife into the strip of jungle that lines the river, so instead of trekking for days you sit in a small boat at first light and let the animals come to the water. Wild Bornean orangutans nest in the riverside trees, troops of proboscis monkeys with their heavy noses gather to feed at dusk, and this is one of the better chances anywhere of crossing paths with the Bornean pygmy elephant, the world's smallest elephant subspecies, which moves through the floodplain in herds. Add long-tailed and pig-tailed macaques, silvered langurs, saltwater crocodiles, monitor lizards and eight species of hornbill, and a two-night stay at a river lodge usually delivers a remarkable tally. Mornings and evenings are spent on cruises, with night walks and oxbow-lake trips filling the gaps. It is wildlife watching without the hardship, and it pairs naturally with the deeper primary forest of Danum Valley for anyone wanting both the numbers and the wilderness.
Best months at a glance
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