Day 189 – 06 February 2010: Goodbye to BOT (and Malaysia), and hello to ‘very nice person’ in Singapore

Malaysia Photos

On the last ride on the Big Orange Truck, we gather a tip for JC, all of which will probably be going on a plane ticket to get his girlfriend out to KL, as he is stuck with the truck for another five weeks. There are tears from some, but I just give him a big sloppy kiss.

goodbye to BOT

the ceremonial last bag

Going through the border to Singapore on a bus, we have to get off and onto it three times with our luggage to go through customs and Immigration. It’s a lot quicker going through the border without the truck, but the bus conductor tries to charge us each an extra Singapore Dollar to arrange the visas, so Lucinda does the Visa run herself armed with all our passports. The bus conductor probably never met such a cheap skate bunch of westerners.

In Singapore, we are staying at the Welcome Inn hostel in dorms. It is indeed very welcoming, with an electronic voice complete with local accent bleating out ‘Welcome’, or rather ‘wackomb’, every time someone steps near the door. The Lady owner of the hostel introduces herself as a ‘very nice person’. She is very helpful, but has a school marmly manner about her. There are notices scattered about the premises such as in the toilets: ‘if you don’t flush, I kick your ass. I mean every word I say! PS I am very nice person.’

Part of the first wave of Asia economic development, with its colonial past Singapore has a large expat British community, and the majority population is a mix of people of Chinese, Malaysian and Indian origin. Being a city state, it is also the third most densely populated independent country in the world, although the experience of walking the streets is nothing like the average Indian or modern Chinese city. With the rise of China and other South East Asian countries, Singapore is no longer in boom times, but it is still the most expensive country we will visit in Asia and there are still skyscrapers being built, including a ‘triple tower’ with what looks like a massive oil liner resting on top of it.

However, our hostel is in the Indian quarter, and I accompany Big John, Tracy, Pete and Pam to an Indian restaurant which is both tasty and cheap. I feel I missed something in India, as every time I eat an Indian outside of India, it’s better than what I ate when I was there.

enter Singapore

Day 188 – 05 February 2010: oops, another kangaroo court?

We will be leaving the Big Orange Truck tomorrow when JC drops us all at the bus station to get a bus to Singapore. We will then be travelling through Indonesia by ferry and buses before flying on to Darwin.

There is a group truck clean this morning, which I only discover when Brian comes back to the room with my tent and sleeping bag, as everything has been removed from the BOT. ‘Oh, bugger’, I say to myself, remembering the kangaroo court I was subjected to when I missed a truck clean in Turkey. By the time I straggle to the car park where the truck is, the cleaning has been done. However, since leaving China, everyone has chilled out and, approaching the end of the trip, everybody just laughs when they see me coming. Even hair trigger tempered Pete doesn’t swear at me.

After the truck clean, I go to the Maritime Museum, which is largely a display of naval history and warships, as well as a replica of Portuguese Man-o-war ship ‘Flora de La Mar’ which sunk after its crew looted Melaka in 1511.

Unfortunately for JC, the shipment that the truck had been booked to be sent home on has been cancelled, with the recession in the west causing a slump in demand for Malaysian exports. This means that JC will have to wait in Malaysia for another month to get it on the next one. He had been looking forward to going home to see his girlfriend, so in the afternoon we go for a walk to find a suitable bar to help him drown his sorrows.

Suitably drowned, on the walk back from the bar we come by a bus that has been left empty and unlocked at a bus stop. It occurs to us that, although we aren’t able to take the truck to Singapore, we might get away with taking a bus. Settling into the driver’s seat though, JC finds that the keys have (fortunately) not been left with the bus.

Caz joins us for the looting of a bus...oo arrr

Day 187 – 04 February 2010: The culinary capital of Malaysia

I am with hangover again. We have a late morning departure to Melaka, and the friendly Classic Inn hostel staff invite us to leave messages in marker pens on the wall, and they gather to see us off as we get onto the truck.

At Melaka, I go straight to the hospital to have my ears looked at again, taking Jen with me for company. Here, I find the kind of hospital which could only have been a private one in the UK. I am sent straight to an ear specialist doctor’s office, and I have to wait behind only for one other patient. In the UK, getting your ears cleaned out involves a painful process of warm water being pressed via a large syringe into your eardrum to flush the wax out. Here, they have a little electric ear hoover, which gently sucks it out. This has always struck me as the way it should be done.

Nearly all the doctors in the hospital are UK trained according to the medical centre brochure in the waiting room. The doctor I am seeing qualified at the University of Edinburgh. I think most doctors who work in the NHS would be quite envious of those working in this hospital, a fairly recent construction with individual doctor’s offices and the newest technology.

As a token of gratitude for accompanying me, I take Jen to lunch. Melaka is supposed to be the culinary capital of Malaysia. We go to Pizza Hut. ‘I’m quite proud of that’, says Jen.

To be fair, we did pass an outdoor food hall / market, but it’s unpopulated and looks closed. Melaka has a lot of new buildings, such as hotels and shopping malls, and much of the more traditional architecture look like replicas. With its culinary reputation and its history as a major port, there has obviously been a lot of growth here based on tourism, but the streets are largely empty. It must be low season.

Afterward lunch, full of Pizza, I am sleepy and stay in my room for the rest of the day and evening. American Brian, who I have been rooming with since Laurie’s boyfriend joined the trip in Vietnam, is thankfully otherwise occupied, so I am left undisturbed.

Day 186 – 03 February 2010: Buildings in space

I am a bit hungover, but get up to get a pizza with JC before we visit the KL Tower. The pizza I have would be great except for the beef pepperoni being too fatty and salty. JC’s is a caper pizza which I have a bit of, and with everything else being near perfect, it’s competing with the one I had in Siem Riep….9/10 (loss of at least half a mark for the pepperoni).

To the KL Tower, which is the one with the disc near the top and, with an antennae that reaches 421m high, is still the second tallest telecommunications tower in the world. I don’t feel entirely comfortable with heights, and I haven’t been on a flight for about a decade, unless you count a 25 minute flight from Heathrow to the Isle of Wight and back again as a bit of failed therapy. However, as we go up the elevator I feel like I am taking off and getting out on the observation floor, I can’t help feeling that buildings really weren’t meant to be this high. 421 metres may not seem that high when you say it, but it bloody is when you get up there. I keep expecting aircraft to fly by the window. I get JC to get my picture to prove I made it and get back in the elevator to go down within thirty seconds of getting out, leaving him up there to feel the building wobble.

While the KL Tower does have a communications purpose, the site of it has been constructed as a tourist attraction with fenced grounds. There is a revolving restaurant in the upper part of the building, but I think it would get messy if I tried to eat there. At the bottom though is a kind of amusement park, with a small zoo of exotic animals, like an albino python. Other animals there though are quite easy to see roaming about out in the cities of south-east Asia, so I just feel sorry for these being locked in cages. Indeed there are a couple of monkeys in the zoo, and I am sure that the ones that I saw stealing someone’s ice cream off the table in the café while I waited for JC to come back down the tower were having a much better life.

Besides the zoo, there are a handful of incongruous activities to take part in. There’s somebody offering donkey rides, but the rain is starting up, so this isn’t popular. JC and I have a go in some F1 simulators, but they are set in child mode so are too easy (we both come first) and might have seemed technically exciting when the Tower opened in 1996, but have been somewhat overtaken by simulator advances.

After my cowardice up the tower, I am not keen on visiting the even taller Petronas Towers. Anyway, the rain really starts pouring down, so we catch a taxi back to the hostel. We end the day drinking beer on the hostel balcony lounge, and playing ‘Name That Tune’ on my kazoo late into the night, possibly annoying other guests.

entirely relaxed...

Day 185 – 02 February 2010: Hospital

The hostel has strong hot showers, which is a first for me for some weeks. Generally I haven’t really needed the heat, but it’s always nice to relax under the massaging heat of warm propelled water.

In Thailand, I did something to my index finger while playing volleyball on the beach and it is now bent down at the end. Also, my ears have been feeling clogged up since my diving experiences. This prompts a visit to the hospital to get these checked out.

The hospital is clean and fairly modern and there are about thirty waiting outpatients there. After a 45 minute wait, I am called in by a nurse, who takes my pulse, blood pressure and weight and height measurements. I am then sent back to the waiting area. Another 45 minutes later,  I am called in to see the doctor who tells me that I have snapped a tendon on my finger and that it needs surgery, and also that I have to see a specialist with regards to my ears. One won’t be available for a couple of days at least so, as I won’t be in KL by then, the visit was a waste of time really. I did have to pay twenty odd pounds worth of Ringgits, but nothing to worry the insurance company with.

Later on, I do a reccy with JC to scout out locations for his leaving drinks. We are leaving him and the Big Orange Truck when we enter Singapore, and we will be travelling by public transport through there and Indonesia. JC will be hanging around in Malaysia until he can get the truck on a boat to ship it back to the UK. The first place we stop at is an Irish bar called Finnigan’s, where we savour some tasty bloody red meat as well as a few Guiness’s. It’s not the cheapest place to drink in KL for sure, but it’s the last place on our reccy too. We go back to the hotel briefly to tell everyone where the gathering is, before quickly returning to the pub.

Day 184 – 01 February 2010: I can’t get no shitisfaction, to KL

Today is another early start, as we have a 6:15am bus to catch to get the ferry back to the mainland.

The ferry turns into a torture chamber, as the TV is on again and this time the sound is on way too loud. There is an attempt to show some movies, but the film keeps juddering to a disturbing halt after five minutes then starting all over again. Someone must have changed the channel from a remote location because after a while we find ourselves watching a ten minute lab experiment which turns out to be an advert for engine oil. I begin to wonder if this ferry ride is some sort of experiment itself. After this, another movie comes on, still with the sound on too loud and with accentuated treble, and this time there is lots of crappy tinny Malay pop music on the soundtrack. I try to find some crew to turn the TV down, or preferably off, but there is no one to be found, the one door with a ‘crew only’ sign on it being locked. I start to think there could be a mallet on board for smashing windows in case we sink and that this could also be used for emergency speaker smashing. However, the only safety equipment I find is life jackets in the over head compartments. These each have a sewn in tag declaring that ‘the products have been inspected by the Nantong Office of the China Classification Society with shitisfaction’ (sic). I decide that they will do for ear mufflers.

Back on the truck, we have a long drive to Kuala Lumpur. Lunch is at a service station, but here the opposite applies to what you would find at a British service station. I have three fleshy sticks of fish, tofu kebabs, and a sandwich, all for less than the equivalent of £2. Good food at bargain prices.

Coming into KL, I go out onto the balcony of the truck to take some pictures and get some wind in my hair. We get lost and go half way around the city and back, so I get lots of angles of the Petronas and KL (or TV) Towers in the distance.

At the Classic Inn hostel, our home in central KL for the next few days, there is a bit of resentment as the single people have to stay in dorms, while couples get their own rooms. However, it is comfortable and clean, and very welcoming. Also, toilet standards are generally much higher in Malaysia and it’s the first country in Asia that we have been to where you can flush toilet paper down the loo!

Opposite the hostel is the Times Square shopping complex, thirteen floors including not just a hotel but also its own indoor amusement park with rides. I never thought I’d find myself doing the loop-the-loop on a roller coaster in the middle of a shopping mall, but you’ve got to take these opportunities where you find them. Now in my late thirties, I am conscious that I must be the oldest person in the amusement park barring parents taking their kids, not that there are actually many people being diverted from their shopping. I am re-assured that the wristband I am given upon paying my entrance fee reads ‘Adult Rides’. The roller coaster is exciting and sweaty, given that the ride reaches corners of the mall not covered by air conditioning.

For dinner, I go along the Jalon Alor, where hawkers serve local dishes in open air street restaurants. Fortunately, there is a sheltered part of the restaurant, as the rain comes down heavy while we are waiting for our meal. I have bullfrog porridge, which is a rice soup with bony bits of frog. For those uninitiated to frog, yes, like everything, it does taste a bit like chicken, but with a fishy edge to it. However, I would say that the pictures on the menu that they show people to entice them into the restaurant turn out to be more appetizing than the food itself.

Times Square Shopping Mall

Day 183 – 31 January 2010: Langkawi Geopark boat trip

Bless Laurie. Having witnessed me write a song for Meg & Dave when they left the trip in Beijing, and having me test out songs I have been writing for the whole truck and knowing that I am writing a song for Jen as a special Valentine’s Day surprise, she is jealous that I have not written her a song and she leaves the trip when we get to Singapore. She says there is still time for me to be ‘re-dumped’. I think she means redeemed.

I have a sweaty morning lying on the beach with Jen and Lu. Jen refuses to let me protect her delicate pale skin from the sun with sunscreen preferring Lu’s less gentle hands. Perhaps it was a mistake to remind her that I was extra careful last time I put sunscreen on her, as on that occasion I was perhaps overly conscious of the paleness of her skin around the buttock area….

In the afternoon, I go on a boat trip to Langkawi Geopark, a park of islands like a film set of a tropical paradise. I am joined by Gary and Laurie, as well Belgian Sam and Caz. The trip is no cruise, as the boat has 400hp engines. I put the life jacket on the right part of the body for this one.

Our first stop is in a small bay where the boat’s driver throws some bait sized fish out for a descending convocation of eagles. With these imposing birds of prey once being near extinction, it is exciting to see them cascade onto the water viciously plucking at the food on the surface or swooping down to catch the small fish in mid-air.

After that, we stop at an island for a couple of hours, where we are greeted at the mooring by more monkeys (Macaques I think) before walking along a jungle path towards a fresh water lake. At the lake there are a marinas worth of solar powered pedalos, although very few people are taking them out. This may be because the nearby cave is called ‘Crocodile Cave’. There is a cordoned swimming area in the lake too. At this point, I had not known that there were crocodiles in Malaysia, and I am still doubtful that there were any around this island, but I wasn’t so confident of this that I swam outside the cordoned area. In fact, I decide that the cordon would be no barrier to a determined croc in any case and I don’t spend very long in the water.

After our swim and walk back to the boat, our final stop is another island seemingly inhabited only by a couple of traders in bamboo huts selling soft drinks and snacks. Here there is a quiet beach with clear waters showing off small coral reefs and lots of small fish. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of those micro-organisms in the water that seem to bite, leaving you with an itchy rash.

Somewhat incongruously, there is also an opportunity to do some parasailing off the back of a speed boat, but I’m too much of a cheapskate at this stage to be tempted at the price.

In the evening, I go out to dinner with Gary and Laurie. We have been told about a bar down the road called the 1812 Pub, which is run by a Bolton Wanderers fan. We saunter down there, but it’s shabby looking and is populated only by a handful of people watching football over beers and crappy loud pop music, so we don’t stop.

Wandering further along the road, we come across popular pleasant looking restaurant serving mainly seafood. I have had my fill of seafood and, as they have venison, I decide to get a rare red meat treat. However, I regret it when I see and taste a little of Laurie’s ‘Tiger Prawn’ dish. What they call tiger prawns here are like small lobsters. Cooked in butter and being nicely fleshy, they taste as good as anything I have had on this trip, including the lobster on the beach in Vietnam. My mouth waters now at the memory.

We finish the evening with a beer or two on the beach, listening to the waves crash along the shore and checking to see if Belgian Sam is going skinny dipping again.

feeding the eagles

solar powered pedalos

Day 182 - 30 January 2010: jet skiing and a balcony party

It is Louise’s 40^th today, and 9 or 10 of us go for a birthday breakfast. The restaurant would win no prizes on Saturday kitchen as the omelettes take up to 40 minutes to produce…and never mind the muesli I order. By the time we finish, and after an hour on the internet, it is one o’clock.

Later, after staying out of the sun for most of the afternoon, I go Jet Skiing with Sam. Jen decides to hitch a lift with me too. At 110 Ringits (c. £20), it is the cheapest half hour price we have come across in Asia, and the Jet Ski has 130hp too. It is plenty quick. I am glad we go half an hour and not a quarter hour, as it takes me 5 minutes to get the confidence to go full throttle. When we do, it gets the adrenaline flowing and the shorts wedging up our bums. Also, these things are surprisingly safe. At one point, I accidentally turn too sharply, and the jet ski goes 180 degrees, and stops before I put the throttle on and go zig zagging through the wake I have just created. There was much wooping from both me and Jen. I never looked at my speedometer as I didn’t realise it had one, but Sam did on his, and his peak speed was 52kph. Even with Jen on the back of mine, our machine was actually outpacing Sam’s, so we at least did 55. Not a bad experience for my first time on a jet ski.

Afterwards, we gather on the balcony outside Louise’s room for punch her roommates have made. It is potent enough for me to be quite merry after two cups. I am wearing a t-shirt I bought on Jen’s recommendation, hoping it’s because she thinks I would look quite attractive in it. It is a comparative luxury item, having been bought from a Tesco’s in Thailand. However, any hopes I have on this matter are somewhat handicapped by the two and a half months I spent rooming with Laurie, possibly the most flirtatious girl in the world. I am still having to deny any goings on even now, despite her boyfriend now being with us.

Day 181 - 29 January 2010: Exit Thailand, to Malaysia and Langkawai for barracuda fillets

Thailand Pictures

Still being a little drunk (and Shay still being a lot drunk) I decide today will be a day of flirtation with Jen, our skinny, pale but cute Leeds lass. I give her a massage on the shoulders with the edge of my passport while we are waiting for the truck at the border crossing, which she says is nice. She tells me that now that I am an Advanced Open Water Diver, I am in with a chance of consideration….

Again the border crossing is very quick for the people, but slow for the truck. This is the last border we will have to do with the truck though, with it being shipped back after it drops us at the Singapore border in 10 days or so.

Belgian Sam (perhaps now the prefix is unnecessary), who is now feeling somewhat fragile, regales of events after I had left last night. They had gone to the ‘Pink bar’, where they found a sort of Karaoke going on, except the all female singers seemed to be ‘professional’. Shay and Sam decide to invade the stage to try their hand at it, only to find that all the words were in Chinese script, and the songs were Chinese too. There follows a bad and probably insulting take off of singing in Chinese (Mandarin?, perhaps not), with Sam inviting the audience to ‘come on, everybody!’.

After the border crossing, it is another few hours of drive time, which I pass sleepily, until we reach the ferry port to go to Langkawi, our next destination. The ferry is comfortable, although we are forced to watch an awful movie that was filmed on the island (and the ferry). It’s like a Malaysian remake of ‘The Three Stooges’, for those of you who have any idea what that was.

After the ferry, there is another 40 minutes or so on a bus to our hotel. When we get off the bus, I ask Jen which room we are in. ‘Not tonight’, she says.

Later I meet Gary and Laurie for dinner. To go to a place by the beach, but have to move tables to avoid the over bearing sound of a local band on a stage singing soft rock covers in Malay tinged English. I consider requesting some Black Sabbath numbers but decide I already know the answer. Myself and Laurie have Barracuda fillets, which are very good, but a little on the economy size. Gary’s meal doesn’t quite satisfy him either, so we head off to share a pizza down the road. We end up having two between three, myself having a Quattro Stagioni with pepperoni, olives, mushrooms and gorgonzola. The base is a little soft, but basically sound, and the flavours are good. 8/10.

Dessert is a biscuit base indulgent banoffee pie. mmmm