Sunday, January 21, 2007
More Malaysia
I stayed in Pangkor for a couple more days. On Tuesday I took a boat trip around the nearby islands, with an American couple I'd met at Taman Negara, plus a couple others. The water was pretty clear and there were loads of fish. We knew there was another beach on the other side of the island so decided to snorkel round to it (we knew it was a really small island). On the way, there was a monkey sitting on the rock. We stopped about 30 feet away, while another dude went right up to the rock, about 2 feet away to take pictures... and that monkey went right down to him and was hissing away. The dude was lucky the monkey didn't feel like swimming cos he was ready to bite a piece out of him. We just swam on round to the bay, keeping a decent distance!
On Thursday I headed back to the mainland and took a bus up to Butterworth to catch the ferry to Penang (cost under 2GBP). Penang was unbelieveably hot, the worst I've experienced so far. It's the kind of heat that makes you not want to leave the hotel building cos you're just gonna wilt. I did manage to make a trip on a non-a/c bus round the island to a butterfly farm, which was really neat, about 2,000 butterflies in this enclosure that you walk through, plus scorpions in a tank and other creepy crawlies...
There was other stuff I'd've liked to have done in Penang, but it just wasn't gonna happen. So yesterday I took the ferry upto Langkawi which is where I am now. It's a wee bit cooler than Penang - manageable - just! I went to a seafood restaurant (figuring I'm gonna be eating a lot of fish when I get into Cambodia and Vietnam, and thinking I should get used to it while the consequenes are manageable) and had some sting ray. Afterwards we went to the bar attached to the hostel (run by an english dude who is currently irate cos an irish couple came here a few days ago and wrote up on the booking website that if you're not english you're not welcome here... I think he sent quite a few emails back to them for it!) and watched the football on ESPN. Just as the Spurs-Fulham game came on, they changed the channel to the Newcastle match as a couple Geordies were in the bar... I had to bribe everyone with shots to get to watch about 15 mins of it at the end! So today I was hungover and I don't think the sting ray agreed with me particularly either :-(. It's really beautiful here but things are spaced out a bit and the beach has no shade so I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with the rest of my time here. I've booked a flight up to Bangkok on Tuesday evening so I've got a wee bit of time to play with for now.
Have realised finally that three months is nowhere near long enough to do everything I wanted to do here in South East Asia! I think I should be able to get to Laos for about a week or so, then I start my tour on the 11th Feb and finish on the 9th March, then have to get back down to Singapore within about 3-4 weeks - and I was planning on going back down Vietnam on the Reunification Express, then hanging out on a few Thai islands and learning to dive, plus pull in to the islands on the east coast of Malaysia on the way... We'll see I guess huh?
Enjoy the cold weather back home... I envy you!
Sx
On Thursday I headed back to the mainland and took a bus up to Butterworth to catch the ferry to Penang (cost under 2GBP). Penang was unbelieveably hot, the worst I've experienced so far. It's the kind of heat that makes you not want to leave the hotel building cos you're just gonna wilt. I did manage to make a trip on a non-a/c bus round the island to a butterfly farm, which was really neat, about 2,000 butterflies in this enclosure that you walk through, plus scorpions in a tank and other creepy crawlies...
There was other stuff I'd've liked to have done in Penang, but it just wasn't gonna happen. So yesterday I took the ferry upto Langkawi which is where I am now. It's a wee bit cooler than Penang - manageable - just! I went to a seafood restaurant (figuring I'm gonna be eating a lot of fish when I get into Cambodia and Vietnam, and thinking I should get used to it while the consequenes are manageable) and had some sting ray. Afterwards we went to the bar attached to the hostel (run by an english dude who is currently irate cos an irish couple came here a few days ago and wrote up on the booking website that if you're not english you're not welcome here... I think he sent quite a few emails back to them for it!) and watched the football on ESPN. Just as the Spurs-Fulham game came on, they changed the channel to the Newcastle match as a couple Geordies were in the bar... I had to bribe everyone with shots to get to watch about 15 mins of it at the end! So today I was hungover and I don't think the sting ray agreed with me particularly either :-(. It's really beautiful here but things are spaced out a bit and the beach has no shade so I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with the rest of my time here. I've booked a flight up to Bangkok on Tuesday evening so I've got a wee bit of time to play with for now.
Have realised finally that three months is nowhere near long enough to do everything I wanted to do here in South East Asia! I think I should be able to get to Laos for about a week or so, then I start my tour on the 11th Feb and finish on the 9th March, then have to get back down to Singapore within about 3-4 weeks - and I was planning on going back down Vietnam on the Reunification Express, then hanging out on a few Thai islands and learning to dive, plus pull in to the islands on the east coast of Malaysia on the way... We'll see I guess huh?
Enjoy the cold weather back home... I envy you!
Sx
# posted by Sue Lambert @ 4:49 AM 
