Chicken with everything

Before we left, when I told people we were going to Malaysia, there were two main reactions: "gosh, it'll be really hot" and "won't you have some lovely food!".

I'm not much of a foodie when I travel. Food is a necessity that shouldn't take up too much of my sightseeing time. As long as I get a little bit of protein every day, I don't care what I eat. (In Seoul I lived mostly on 5000-won fried rice, and in London it was, to my shame, sandwiches from the lunch chain Eat.)

However, the universal prediction that the food in Malaysia would be wonderful did have me a bit curious. More wonderful than the nasi goreng we get at home? And in what way? So much of the food I eat when I go out at home is either Malaysian or Chinese - it's hard to know what to expect when visiting a favourite dish's home country.

I think it would be fair to say that we were pretty consistently underwhelmed. In KL we had no time to find the good street food, so we ate in malls a lot. This meant we experienced a lot of different presentations of chicken with rice. In a nation that's 60 percent Muslim, pork is literally a dirty word. Sandwiches contain "turkey ham", and sausages are invariably chicken. For some reason beef is also hard to come by. In fried rice and noodles the meet is usually chicken - often, we found, diced but not deboned. Gross.

In Kuching we fared better. We had time to wander, and our wanderings were rewarded with good laksa, high-end Chinese food, many types of noodles and, unexpectedly, Italian. In KK we were back to time-short snacking - our one attempt at satay, which I love, left us both feeling ill, and the day after coming down the mountain we were so exhausted and tender we headed straight to a Tex-Mex bar and stayed there.

There have been moments of culinary brilliance. The "Borneo laksa" in Kuching was astonishing. Local soft drinks have essentially replaced our familar thirst-quenchers - chrysanthemum tea, soy milk and tamarind juice all taste so good out of a cold can on a hot day. Malaysian "kopi", intense and thick with condensed milk, is now a staple. And no breakfast is complete without mee (thin noodles).

But my favourite would have to be the bacon. Pork-free bacon, made out of beef. Malaysia has proven the internet right: if bacon did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.