Random Rambles

On day three of our stay in Tanah Rata, we tackle trail No. 9. It begins on the outskirts of town.

At the start, the trail is conveniently paved with bricks.  Eventually these give out and become a muddy track, with frequent downed trees to negotiate around.

We come across interesting botanical specimens.

There are no markings on the trail, so when it begins to deteriorate, the going gets rougher.

This plant has striking blue leaves.

Something that looks like a coffee bean.

And giant prehistoric-looking ferns. Here’s one in the fiddlehead stage.

Eventually, the trail peters out into an up-and-down titanic struggle against steep hillsides and thorny brush. 

We get so lost, we abandon what’s left of the trail and bail out at a vegetable farm.

We get lost along the road, too, despite having navigational doodads on the IPhone. Before we have to resort to cannibalism, we flag down a passing taxi (thank you, God!) and ride in luxury. We save a 13-kilometer walk, mostly uphill, back to Tanah Rata. You gotta know when to fold ’em.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Tanah Rata

We spy some pitcher plants.

These are carnivorous. Besides bugs, they also chow down on any small  vertebrates unfortunate enough to fall in. Why does this make us think of the Little Shop of Horrors?

From Georgetown, we take a bus to the Cameron Highlands.

We book a room at Father’s Guest House, a quiet, slightly Alpine-looking place off the main road in Tanah Rata.

It’s, um, high.

We walk the boardwalk in the Mossy Forest, a cloud forest north of Brinchang.

They don’t call it the Mossy Forest for nothing.

There is a lot of tea here. We visit a tea factory and plantation.

Strawberries are grown intensively. Half the area in the valley seems to be covered in plastic-roofed strawberry grow-ops.

Hiking is big, too.

Atop an observation tower in the Mossy Forest. You can see here my recent buzzcut, courtesy of an overzealous barber in Georgetown. My hair hasn’t been this short in decades.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Cameron Highlands

There are lots of Land Rovers in the Cameron Highlands. Hundreds.

Many well-aged and full of character.

This puts the germ of an idea into our heads: if we end up in South Africa again, we purchase a Land Rover from some farmer (city dwellers see them as status symbols rather than practical workhorses, so would probably want more $. Sort of like North American urbanites and pickup trucks.) Then we drive it to Kenya. And back.

Hmm…

Welcome to Georgetown part II.  When in Rome and all that – because Malaysia is a big producer of batik, we go shopping for some new duds to replace our de rigueur elephant print articles bought elsewhere in Asia.

We also visit a museum of batik painting.

Walking around, we bump into Georgetown’s interesting street art everywhere.

Some people burning baseball-bat-sized sticks of incense in a Chinese temple, possibly in preparation for Chinese New Year (February 16th – Year of The Dog, FYI).

We take another bus ride out to the Penang War Museum. They don’t allow durians on board. They’re banned from our guesthouse as well. Maria is determined to try one. I’ll pass.

The bus ride is an hour and forty minutes through different neighbourhoods. Lots of high-rise apartments, many with more interesting designs than we see at home in our own particleboard palaces.

The Penang War Museum itself is a private museum. The location was a fortified position built by the British before WWII to repel a Japanese attack from the sea. (They attack from the rear instead.) It spends the occupation as a Japanese base – the usual atrocities are committed: torture, beheadings, etc.

After the war, it is abandoned and reclaimed by the jungle, until its private owner uncovered the original structures and added some cheesy and fantastical additions.

The original stuff is pretty cool. Also, we get a great view of the bridge.

This isn’t the Penang Bridge we came over on – this is a second bridge, the Sultan Abdul Halim Muadzam Shah Bridge. Why Penang would need a second bridge at such Hellish expense is beyond me. My guess is they were smooth-talked into it by the Chinese to keep Malaysia in hock. Or the Sultan really wanted his name on a bridge.

It’s 24 kilometres long.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Georgetown Part II

Easy moneymaking idea for some local entrepreneur: import a container or two of Pathein umbrellas from Myanmar to Malaysia.

We bought these in Mandalay a few months ago as parasols and use them daily.

At least a dozen people a day here comment ‘Nice umbrellas!’. Using umbrellas against the sun is popular here as well, but they’re the usual el-cheapo Chinese-made kind.

 

After leaving Koh Phayam, we catch a night bus to Hat Yai and a van to Georgetown, on the island of Penang in Malaysia.

From the border, we travel impeccable four-lane highways and cross the 13.5 kilometre Penang Bridge to arrive here. Georgetown is like a combination of Miami Beach and Havana, Cuba.

We love it here. Its eclectic mix of ethnicities combined with lots of nifty colonial architecture is right up our alley. And it’s so clean, which panders to our bizarre Western idiosyncrasy of  preferring order over squalour.

As usual, we do a lot of walking.

Always something interesting going on.

We visit the Blue Mansion, former home of Cheong Fatt Tze, an early Penang tycoon.

It’s now a swanky hotel & restaurant.

We get an entertaining and informative guided tour by a voluble and very funny local lady.

Outside are some old rickshaws. These are real rickshaws from the old days, not the prettified modern tourist version. We imagine skinny coolies sweating between the traces while hauling people around town.

In search of the lost museum.

Some young mosque-goers.

We take a modern city bus to the bottom of Penang Hill and a funicular railway to the top.  We’re rewarded with this great panorama.

Good food abounds at the hundreds of lively street eateries at night.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Georgetown

As a mini-excursion, we take the ferry across the busy straits to Butterworth on the mainland and back.

While in Butterworth, we see this Singapore-registered vessel, a small oil tanker.

On the way in, we notice a few crew at work – and a fully-dressed mannequin on the top deck. On the way back, we notice  there are in fact about a dozen of these dispersed around the ship. And rolls of barbed wire.

It dawns on us that this is an anti-piracy tactic. The mannequins give the impression there are more crew members, to dissuade pirates. The barbed wire is to repel attacks. Piracy and the threat of violent death on the high seas – Somalia’s gift to the 21st century.

It’s two years since our bunny Blackie ‘joined the angels’, as Maria likes to say.

Her passing was instrumental to this journey of ours.

Planned years and years ago, our departure was always conditional on Blackie, an integral part of our household, ‘not being around anymore’, as we euphemistically phrased it.

The plan was, I would leave IBM in September 2016, Maria would leave her permanent government post a year later, then we would stay put as long as Blackie was alive.

As it turned out, Blackie developed a tumour in November 2015. Shortly after we returned from a trip to Brazil in February 2016, her quality of life had reached the point where we had to say goodbye.

We were devastated. Grief-stricken. Neither of us could go to work for a week. Without Blackie around…

‘How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!’ – Hamlet

…so we felt. That was it, we thought. Our hearts weren’t really into working any more. We  began to plan our escape in earnest from this point in time.

We originally found Blackie abandoned by her previous owners in a park near our house on a freezing cold January day. We’d been Jonesing for a pet and she just turned up at the right time. ‘Luckiest day in her life’, people would say later. Luckiest day in ours, we think.

• Funny Blackie story – ever since learning she was a year-old female, we never though of her as anything but ‘she’, a little princess. But for ten years, our closest friends and family regularly referred to her as ‘him’ and ‘he’. Maybe people connect rabbits with males, as in ‘Peter Rabbit’ and ‘Bugs Bunny’.

We took her everywhere with us. For instance, to the cottage every weekend from spring to fall. 

In her first year with us, her front left paw became paralyzed and she suffered from seizures. We drove her to the Vet Sciences lab of the University of Montreal for an MRI. (Have you ever tried to get an MRI for a rabbit? Available in only 2 places in eastern Canada – Guelph and Ste. Hyacinthe, both connected to university vet science faculties.)

This condition couldn’t be treated, but it never got worse. She got around quite well on three limbs.

Very educational, living with a free-range bunny. She loved chewing stuff – carpets, bedsheets, clothing – and we learned to take it in stride.

We learned a lot about rabbit psychology. We learned what a binky is.

God, we were ga-ga about that bunny. Not a day went by in ten long years that we didn’t get a kick out of having Blackie with us.

We still exchange anecdotes about Blackie. We shake our malaria medicine container and are instantly reminded of how Blackie would rush to us from anywhere in the house whenever she heard this sound – to her, it meant she was about to get a papaya pill, a treat for her because they were sweet and chewy.

If she were still alive, we’d still be in Ottawa. She’s with us still in memory.

This is our penultimate full day in Buffalo Bay <sniff>.

We’re sorry to leave.  We’ll miss the dramatic sunsets.

No more squawking hornbills first thing in the morning.

And

Lots of other birdlife, including some kind of soaring eagles and pretty yellow things. Apologies for the ornithological incertitude.

Other interesting wildlife. One morning, all the beach dogs start barking furiously. A few dozen metres offshore we see a family of seals.

The bay is popular with the sailboat set. There are usually 8 or 10 at anchor. (Richard from the UK refers to the owners as ‘yachtie snotties’, but to be honest, we haven’t rubbed elbows with any.)

Good food, too.

But of course, that’s available everywhere in Asia.

Sight or Insight of the Day – on the way to Buffalo Bay

So we have to make our way to Ranong on the mainland and take a night bus south. Not too much of a hardship in Thailand.

In great contrast to buses and bus stops in Myanmar. The Burmese are wonderful people, but we recall one bus stop in particular that resembles a  puddle-strewn garbage dump in which a pair of heavy trucks had just unloaded a few tons of restaurant waste. And yet many of the buses stop there. (Lunch? No thanks.)

In Thailand, the long-distance bus stops look like Vegas at night.

Inside is an aircraft-hangar sized variety of food, drink, and shopping.

In the previous post, I said ‘I don’t thing it’s gonna happen’, about finding another Lazy Beach scenario.  I may have to eat those words. Instead of paradise lost, we may have a case of paradise regained.

We decide to stay a couple of weeks here.

(Then our 30-day visas expire.)

After scouting the eastern side of the island, we find these near-perfect digs. Maria spends the day swimming and exercising on the beach.

I spend my time reading in the hammock.

Not bad for CAD$20.00 per night. The only drawback is patchy internet service, hence the long lapse between blog posts.

We’ve even changed our minds about renting motorscooters. Touring around on a scooter is pretty sweet!

Our trusty scooter takes us to places like this around the island.

We are also happy to meet our friends Ulf and Susane once more.

They have been to Koh Lanto and Koh Pangan. We convince them to visit Koh Phayam.

Ulf and I mount up.

To get to this village, we pull ourselves across an estuary on a self-service ferry.

On our return, we find the ‘ferry’ on the opposite side. Maria volunteers to swim across and retrieve it single-handedly.

At last, we go to Jens’s restaurant (where we rented the scooters) before Ulf and Susane catch the boat to Ranong. They spend  a few days in Bangkok before returning to Hanover after 5 months in Asia.

Insight or insight of the Day – Paradise Regained

Remember the giant monitor lizards we saw in Kanchanaburi? We have them here as well.

In fact, one took up temporary residence atop the wall in our bathroom.

We named him Lorenzo, for the sake of alliteration.

Oh, and in case you ever wonder what a pineapple looks like when it’s a’growing, it looks like this.

From Kanchanaburi, we go back to Bangkok to catch a bus south. We take an overnight bus to Ranong, then a speed boat to Koh Phayam.

(This entry will be brief because we check out soon to move to the other, better side of the island, which may or may not have WiFi available. We may be incommunicado for a week or so.)

As we move south, we look to repeat the experience of Lazy Beach. I don’t think it’s gonna happen.

We google ‘lesser-visited islands in Thailand’ and come up with, among others, Koh Phayam.

From the place where the boat arrives, a trash-strewn village full of stray dogs, it’s not overly impressive. We spend a few nights at the giggle-inducing Nitiporn Resort.

We rent bicycles and explore. Things get better. The sun comes out. The island is largely forested with rubber plantations.

Rubber is like maple syrup, the gunk slowly drips into containers for collection.

Bicycling is good, even with the hills – we need the exercise.

On the other side of the island, we discover nicer places to stay.

We find a bungalow overlooking Buffalo Bay and move in.

This is the River Kwai, in Kanchanaburi, western Thailand. We arrive here after another overnight train to Bangkok from Chiang Mai, a taxi across town to the Thonburi trains station, and a few more hours by rail.

Below is the bridge on the river Kwai, as it appears today. In fact, it’s not a teakwood behemoth as built  by Alec Guinness in the eponymous movie. (Mention of which elicits blank stares and a background sound of crickets chirping when speaking to anyone under oh, say, age 45).

It’s a smallish steel bridge, destroyed several times during the war, the last and final time in 1945 by a 24-year-old Canadian pilot.

The movie plot is entirely fictional, but Kanchanburi was near kilometre zero on the Thai side for the Burmese Railway, a Japanese project to facilitate the invasion of Burma and beyond into southern China. Built by slave labour, 100,000 people (80% of which were fellow Asians) died during its construction from disease, starvation , beating, and neglect as Japan pursued its insane butchery of tens of millions of souls Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

A better movie about goings-on in the area at that time is the Railway Man, with Colin Firth, which is based on a true story.

The zone around the bridge today is a zoo. Acre upon acre of market stalls selling crap, food stalls, parking lots. When I was here decades ago, none of this existed. That’s progress.

Just kidding, it’s a shameful freak show. Thank God the Commonwealth War Graves in the middle of town are as immaculately kept as all the other CWGs in the world. 7,000 men are interred here, mostly transferred from graves along the track.

Besides the bridge and its lore, Kanchanaburi is a pleasant riverside town.

We have a wonderful lunch by the river at the Blue Rice Café.

On a blue theme, we stay at the Blue Star guest house, also by the river.

Among other attractions, we have alligator-sized monitor lizards on our property. You can’t see the scale in the photo – no pun intended – but this bad boy is about 5 feet long. The green stuff is some kind of pond growth..

You can see someone else’s giant Kanchanaburi lizard video here.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Kanchanaburi

Well, not quite Kanchanaburi. I forgot to mention when we touched down at Don Muang Airport in Bangkok, flying from Phnom Penh: it has a golf course in-between the runways. I’ve never seen anything like it.

After the overnight sleeper from Bangkok, we arrive in Chiang Mai for the third time this trip.

We’re here to meet our nephew, Danny. He’s been rock-climbing down south in Ton sai. Also here in the area of Chiang Mai.

We take in a few sights we haven’t seen, such as the Royal Gardens at Phuping Palace. Our shorts, modest enough for entry into temples, don’t cut it for entry to royal sites. We fabricate some impromptu longis.

We also visit the nearby Doi Suthep temple. We put our names on a piece of cloth that is wound around the pagoda. Hey, can’t hurt.

Among other things, Doi Suthep has a great view of Chiang MaI.

Nice tinkly bells, too.

It’s great being with Danny. We try to be good guides. For example, we take in a few markets.

We visit a few more temples, whose names I forget.

While resting, I come under attack from the temple guard dog, a merciless beast. I barely escape with my hat intact.

On the way to a dinner of roast duck, we come across a tournament of sepak takraw. The players move a rattan ball over a net with balletic overhead kicks.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Chiang Mai

January 10 is the birthday of both Danny and Maria. On the day, Maria buys candles from a shop around the corner, and sticks them in pieces of fruit.

Turns out they’re trick candles that keep reigniting. We finally douse them in water.

Danny and Maria treat themselves to massages as a birthday indulgence. We celebrate with a great lunch in an upscale-but-kitschy-in-an-Asian-way restaurant.

Danny returns to Vancouver via Phuket this afternoon.