Rudy (short for an obnoxious name) and Karthik are the 'Buddies' (russell peter style ;) am (VJ) making this trip to Malaysia with. Being a Singapore expat can take its toll when there isn't much to see on the island nation. However, we are just S$1.5 away from Malaysia; Phew! what luck !
We meet at Commonwealth MRT at 11pm, a one hour delay in the earlier plan, to collect the travel documents for Rudy and Karthik. This was another thing bothering me, whether they would get the travel documents on time, if not the whole trip had to be postponed for later. Finally, its well past 12 midnight, when we collect the travel documents, exchange SGD for Malaysian Ringitts and we are all set. We scout around the famous "Mustafa" shopping center looking for some things to buy (Yes! Mustafa is open 24hrs), things that may come in handy for the trip and it was decided that we buy nothing from Singapore, "Everything is cheap in Malaysia and we will pick up everything there" (We ended up not buying most of the stuff from malaysia as well :p ). We will soon find out if it really is.
Day 1: Saturday 22 Sep, 2007
So here is the plan as on friday night/saturday morning - Take a chill pill and we'll figure out the plan once we reach
Johor bahru. (I trust Rudy and Karthik to come up with the plan - Not like i have a choice ! :) We crash (metaphor for hitting bed (metaphor for preparing to sleep)) at about 3 AM.5:00 - Alarms go off ! Given that these two 'beeps' are banking on me to wake them up, I had to actually get up :| Despite Rudy's repeated refusal to have breakfast, he does manage to gobble down quite an amount of Upma (YENGO ?!) :p
6:00 - Finally leave my commonwealth place. We may be running late by 30 mins but what the hell ! that can be covered by our driving skills (Yo man ! we are driving in Malaysia ! Yooohooooo !)
Travel tip: Getting to Malaysia from Singapore. Reach Marsilling MRT (on the Red line), cross the road and take Route No. 950 to Kota Raya Bus Terminal.
Kota Raya bus terminal is in the city of Johor Bahru, Malaysia. You will have to get off and get on the bus a couple of times, once each for Singapore immigration (before the bridge) and Malaysian immigration (after the bridge).
7:30 - We clear the immigration on both ends of the bridge (one side is Singapore and the other is Malaysia ;) and reach Kota raya bus terminal. We bargain with the taxi guy (looked more like a guy running his own car as taxi). Enroute we bug him with queries about Malaysian driving, places to go for etc.
8:30 - We reach Senai airport (JB's lone and domestic airport). We are supposed to find the IPRAC car rental folks - no signs of them. We call them to only realize they don't have a office at the airport! (How are we supposed to know Airport city lounge is not at the airport but at the bus terminal we came from :-w ) We dump those guys and decide to hire from AVIS.
Travel tip: Around the Kotaraya bus terminal, there are some car rentals available, but the working hours is only between 9am to 6pm. If you plan to pick up the car anytime after this you will need to do it at the Senai airport (keep your fingers crossed if you decide this, as the car company sometimes may not have someone working at that hour :) ). To get to Senai airport, you can either hire a cab or you can go by bus. Buses operate between 8am to 10pm and cost 8 Ringgit. The taxi ride cost approximately 40 RM. So don't pay more! The prices would start at 50 RM, bargain and get it down to 40.
9:00 - Car booked finally ! Meanwhile, we buy a map of Malaysia and chart out the POA. Karthik and Rudy have done their homework and can readily point out the roads we need to drive on. Thanks to wikimapia and virtualmalaysia, they have figured out most of it. The car we hire is a Proton Wira 1.5L Automatic Transmission. Proton is a Malaysian Govt flagship brand and its the most widely used car in Malaysia. Something like Maruti in India.
9:55 - Flag off ! :D We are on the roll people !
10:30 - We pass the Kota tinggi junction. Earlier in the day, we had decided to chuck KT owing to 'fears' of encountering an overcrowded and over-hyped 'silly' falls :)
We talk about road signs - what those solid/broken divider lines mean; when is advisable attempt overtaking and otherwise. Torque - Rudy gives us gyaan as to what torque means and has a tough time explaining it to me in laymans terms :) We also relive those splendid drives through karnataka - Mangalore, Coorg, Chitradurga, Jog Falls and the places around Kaveri River. Power plants - Rudy and Karthik give a first hand account about the technology behind hydroelectric power generation.
Roads are amazing out here in Malaysia - A Drivers Delight ! Much to the woes for the not-so-lucky animals. We see squashed dogs, cats, monitor lizards etc. squashed as in .. mashed up over and over again ! Chindi chitranna :D
11:45 - We take a pee break (having your own car lets you stop just about anywhere anytime ;)
Rudy gets onto the wheels. Starts belting (clears up some of the myths about automatic transmission :) Gets to feel the torque and is driving like a WRC driver :p
11:55 - We chance upon a FM station (90.9 Mhz) playing a hit from the movie RHTDM. Torque shoots up :)Travel tip: Only the high end versions of Proton come with a CD player or may be an MP3 player. All the other models come with a cassette player (its sounds strange I agree). If you are planning to rent out a car, make sure you carry at least one or two tapes (we dint, and don't ask us where you can buy tapes from :p). But the good part is the FM stations beam signals to every possible place, some of them play English music too. And yeah! if you know Tamil, you are set to have a great time, there are at least 2 FM stations in every state that plays freaking Tamil music!
12:30 - We reach Mersing. Pick up loads of food stuff from the supermarket just outside the town. Karthik uses his tamil magic on the two indians we meet at the supermarket to figure out a place to eat. They show us a place inside the town and in return we carry their huge stash of palm oil !
13:50 - We finish lunch and start from Mersing. Rudy gets to hear about road sense from Karthik. We now head towards Pantai Penyabong. Its absolutely delightful to belt 110-140+ on those S-Curves ! Rudy is having a ball of a time :)
Travel tip: Getting used to the Malaysian sign boards can be quite a task. All the boards are in Malay. Malay doesn't have a script of its own. The script is English. Carrying a Malay to English dictionary is a must (just kidding). Picking up a few important words will do. Here are some :)
AWAS - Caution (You will find this road sign every 2kms :D)
BERHENTI = Stop (Equivalent of US Stop Sign)
BERI LALUAN = Give Away
PERLAHAN = Slow Down
KAWASAN ---- = Some area (school/accident)
KURANGKAN LAJU = Reduce Speed
JALAN - Road
SELAHA - One-way
Few others
PANTAI - Beach
TASIK - Lake
TANDAS = Toilet (Can come in very handy in times of desperate needs :P)
Coca-cola's ad campaign in Malaysia would fail miserably if they say
"Tandas(s) matlab Cocacola" ROTFL :D
14:55 - We reach the small fishing town of Penyabong. Nothing to do at this place, except gaping at the beauty in front of us, talking about the beautiful island groups in the South China Sea. There are a couple of nearby islands around here and we express our 'desire' to take a ferry around it. With some difficulty we are able to break the language barriers and strike a deal with one of the fishermen to take us around in his boat. We take up 'front seats', spot dolphins and have a nice chilled out time ;)
What looked close by ended up in a good two hour boat ride. The greenish-blue waters with the island groups in between them was enchanting.
On the way back from Penyabong, suprisingly these guys allow me to drive back till we reach the highway :) I make good use of the opportunity ;) For someone with not much driving experience, i seem to take automatic transmission as either 'ON' or 'OFF' driving - this 'Digital' behavior is perhaps because of my computer science background :p
18:15 - Caught by cops !The route that we are on, runs right next to the coastline. Finding a by-lane going closer to the beach we just barge in. Just when we are taking snaps and arranging our stuff, a cop car pulls over and asks us a lot of questions. Most pissing off was 'Are you muslim ?'. Wonder why he put that question to us ! anyways, they go away after a thorough check of the car and our travel documents. After which, we spend sometime watching the sunset marked with the 'ray of hope'.
18:45 - We take off again. This time our discussion is focussed on the ford assembly line, detroit and slowly moving to the software crisis of 1968. We are so engrossed in the discussion that we miss a turn and head about 10 kms offtrack. Thanks to Karthik, we realize this soon enough (this guy has an amazing sense of direction :)
19:05 - Pass through the sleepy town of Pekan. Lifeless ! perhaps because of the saturday.
20:10 - We reach Kuantan. We fill up the tank ! Ask for directions (which we heard as a mumble, asked the lady again and eventually gave up pretending we got what she was trying to convey).
20:40 - Driving through Kuantan was a big mess. thanks to the town authorities, they took care of confusing the driver upto a point where we would end up wandering around the town (why should we take the blame ? :p ) At one point, we thought we were heading on highway 3 and upon reaching a junction with no signs whatsoever, take a road that seems posh (posh hence the way we head towards :) we end up at a dead end .. dead end as in DEAD END at about 60kmph, wonder how we managed to take control of the situation quickly!
We realise that there are more than one routes to Terrengganu - Apart from the highway 3, we have the Expressway 2 (E2). Thanks to Rudy, we avoided the expressway (which would take us away from our destination, Cherating).
Kuantan is one messed up town!
We missed our exit from da highway for cherating beach and feel we are nowhere close ! we decide to pull over at a reataurant to get re-oriented , karthik comes up wid a brainwave , lets pick up some stuff at da restaurant , he approaches a man and asks , this was hilarious behold , the malay dude sez " muslims are not allowed to buy stuff. Karthik is like so ? " , But after that, Karthik is deeply disturbed by this comment of the local and we let him be for a while ..... by the way malaysia is a Muslim dominated country.
Travel tip: If you are headed towards Cherating or anyway north of Kuantan, DO NOT reach here after sunset. The roads are extremely confusing and finding your way out can be quite a task, even with a map. Make sure you take Highway 3, whatever the board might say, just stick onto Highway 3!
21:45 - Reach cherating finally ! The mood was pretty somber as we had a tough time figuring our way out of Kuantan and small incident at a restaurant (where we stopped to ask for directions) got down the energy levels. Do a quick survey of the small town and decide to check out the italian place for dinner. I must say, it was almost authentic Italian 'coz the lady who cooked for us was an Italian married to the malay Owner (YENGO ?!). That night, Liverpool-Birmingham match was going on and we were offered a seat opposite to the TV - we opt to stay away from it; the objective of the trip was to unwind and unwire ! Dinner was a lengthy and chilled out affair :) It starts to drizzle during dinner and it gets windy and cold too.
As we dine, Rudy goes and finalizes the place to stay for the night - sesky place (Payung Rest house) it was :)
23:30 - Cherating beach is just 2 mins walk from resthouse. After the wine and dine, the energy levels are as high as ever. Whoa! We chill out on the beach watching the lightning over the horizon - yeah till it starts to rain on the beach. We decide to head back to the cottage, after putting our things back in, we look at our watch and we tell each other that its only 12:30am and we might as well check out the place next door. Right next to our cottage, there is a live music and karaoke bar. We hang out there for a while. No karaoke happening or any live music. Just one locally known singer taking requests. He entertains a hindi song request as well from a certain Mr. Singh (who later makes a fool out of himself trying to sing and 'spurlge' money on the lady singing - what a cheap ass !) We also find a lot of 'Phirangs' who seemed to have settled down in Cherating, getting high on cheap liquor among other things :P
2:00 - We call it a day and crash, but before that we do put all our gadgets for a quick round of recharge !
Travel tip: Make sure to carry a converter along with you, Malaysia and Singapore both use the flat square pin plugs. You might not be able to find a converter in remote places such as Cherating.
Day 2
5:30 - 6:20 Alarms go berserk ! I was again put on duty to wake the others (am wondering why do I get sucked up into doing this :-? ). It takes me quite a struggle to wake up (Karthik even wonders why i was standing next to the light switch for a long time .. its a battle dude ! )
6:40 - We catch the sunrise on Cherating beach (the cliffs on the side block the view though).
They remind us of the Kudle beach, Gokarna. I force myself to jog along the beach to drive away that teeny weeny bit of sleep lurking inside me.
Gyan: The sunrise in Malaysia and Singapore is usually at 7am in the morning
and sunset is at 7:30pm, that may be surprising for most people. Also, the longitudinal location of Singapore and Malaysia is the same as Bangkok which is GMT+7. There are two possible reasons for this, the Western part of Malaysia (KL side) is on the same time zone as the eastern part of Malaysia and since Singapore was also part of Malaysia, the timezone of the eastern part has stayed on as the standard time. Another possible explanation, to stay in the same timezone as Hongkong for business reasons, which makes sense for the present day KL and Singapore since it acts as the financial hub.After some photography of the sunrise, the white sands were tempting us so much that we decided to play frisbee, and we literally played till our fingers bled. The frisbee had a sharp edge and it cut our fingers after sometime :(
7:30 - There is a turtle sanctuary close to cherating and we decide to take a look. Apparently the sanctuary doesn't open till 10 and even after that we would get to watch turtles kept inside glass enclosures :|
Picking up a hint from the caretakers, we offer 'donation' to take a look at something else. He gets a small tub with 7 tiny turtles (born the previous night); he says we are gonna release them into the ocean ! We download a lot of gyaan about turtles and how they are trying to help them survive and we also get to see whether or not they orient themselves towards the water irrespective of the direction in which they are placed.
10:00 - On our way to the place, where we halted for the night, we spot a stable. Karthik and Rudy are all charged up to try
horse riding. We approach the guy and he agrees to take us around the small garden sized 'field'. we are still wondering about the mysterious smile on that guys face - he just kept smiling throughout.11:00 - Coming all the way to the beaches and not getting to take a dip was bothering us and we head to the Cherating beach itself. Again, no one on the beach. How could no one bother to try the sandy beach. The beach was extremely shallow. Even after walking into the water for about 200m we were just in knee deep water. We figured that out after a while - JELLY FISH ! We were lucky enough to not get bit by one of them. Heard they sting ! But we did spot these nice looking creatures in the water.
9:00 - We head to Balok - supposed to be one of the top ten beaches for surfing. However, we find the ENTIRE beach empty ! Off season again :| we got 'Biscuited' :D , this is when we came up with the concept of what we call a "dedicated beach" :-) , if u wanna get involved wid any of the water sports make sure u dont head out at the same time of the year as we did , usually post monsoon is a good time for big waves and high winds for the surf !
The waters were murky and the sands were not comparable to those in Cherating, we decide to head back, a good 30km drive. This time VJ is on the wheel again and yet again, he makes it look so simple, gets us back in half the time (VJ: Ofcourse it is simple .. automatic transmission is like driving a huge activa and as for the 'style' - been watching lot of hollywood chase sequences :D ). Digital driving at its best. Rudy dozes off and catches some sleep.
12:15 - We spot a decent restaurant by the road side and decide to have our lunch , menu looks decent but ..... kitchen is closed !!!! take a wild guess its the month of ramzan , we are like why the "beep" are they open if they are fasting man !!! We grab a bite of cheese sandwich and head to Lake chini. We choose highway 2 over the expressway hoping it would be scenic. It was scenic indeed - winding curves through the typical rain forests was an amazing experience. Either sides of the road was covered with lush green vegetation with the terrain changing rapidly from mountains to plains. There were some really nice resorts at frequent distance. They all looked like the really expensive ones. After heading on the highway 2 for nearly 90mins, we take a detour and head into the tropical rain forest.
15:00 - Ah ! a pothole atlast :p
Rudy drives over a pothole and we start to realize it was the first pothole in the 650 kms that we had driven through Malaysia ! Discussing about this we come to a consensus that this was the first one we had 'managed' to hit - Thanks to Rudy :D
15:30 - We reach lake chini boat station (on highway C19). Lake Chini is Malaysia's second biggest freshwater lake and it lies in the center on Pahang state. After a brief conversation with the locals, we figured out that there were two ways to reach Lake Chini one by boat and he other way by road, which would be around 100kms from the Boat Station. We arrange for a motorboat to take us around the lakes (the idea was to visit 6 "apparently" nearby lakes out of 12 that made Lake Chini). After we got onto the boat, we got to know that we are on Pahang river, we were wondering what the connection between Pahang river and Lake Chini, we had no clue of how we were going to reach Lake Chini from this river. The river was huge, the width in certain sections was unimaginably big. We traveled along the Pahang river for about 5 mins at full throttle and then we hear the roar of the engine going down and we are approaching the other bank. But just when we thought it was a bank, we realized that we are wading our way upwards towards Chini River. Chini river is a tributary to Pahang River. This was initially scary. The Chini River runs through dense tropical jungle. The entire stretched is covered with canopy on top, there is very little sunlight entering this zone. The ride was at a slow pace as there were fallen trees and the path of the river was twisting and winding. Nizam, the boat guy, is probably the most
talented driver that we have seen. After a good 15 min ride upstream on the Chini river, we hit a small cascade, when we just thinking that the boat would take a U-Turn, something wonderful happens. We hit this small man made structure called locks (refer to Gatun locks or Minaflores locks of Panama canal), to lift/lower boats to a water body of different height. After this we continue to make our way upstream through the dense tropical forests, we see Monkey highways and just manage to miss spotting an Iguana :). Finally we are out of the jungles, we finally see sunlight after 30 min of near darkness. We stop at the Lake Chini-River Chini boundary to take some photographs of lotuses, July-Sep is the lotus blooming season and its a treat to watch. Lake Chini looks like an ocean, it is nestled between high mountains and acts a good catchment area. It comprises of 12 lakes in total. Our boat man picks up speed and cruises perfectly between narrow patches of water interconnecting the lakes and finally we make our stop at a tribal village on the banks of Lake Chini. Here, we get to see the blowpipe (used by Tribals to hunt animals, using a very well crafted bamboo pole and some poisoned spears. The poisons, we learnt, were made from some poisonous plants. We get to the see the tribesman showing off his skills at the blowpipe at target, similar to dart :) and we got to try it too. We manage to get close to the target, ofcourse with a lot of effort. We check out the different souveniers and decide to head back. Its a good one hour drive back to Pahang river Boat Station from the tribal village. Just as we start, the unexpected happens, its starts pouring cats and dogs. We have no choice but to get drenched and keep going, its approaching sunset too. We cant risk being in the forest at night. Nizam switches on his turbo mode and gets us back in half the time. Brillianto ! We finally reach the locks, lower the boat to the pahang river level and finally we are back to the place where we started. It was one of the best things on the trip that we got to do. The boat dude, Nizam is a terrific navigator. He was negotiating the hairpin bends of the narrow pahang/chini river through the rain forest with stunning precision ! Just plain Ossumm !17:45 - we start from Lake Chini Boat House.
20:00 - We are starving and decide to take a dinner break at the next place we find ! We halt a place near Bera. Karthik finds the tamil restaurant owner to pour his heart out to (or was it the other way around ? :P ).
This restaurant guy, sankar (but his visiting card reads SAKR, Karthik asks him if he is really sakr or sankar, what a weird name sakr) is rich but apparently his maths skills weren't complimenting his monetary success, you will soon find out. We feast on Nasi Goreng (Malaysian Fried rice), some Prata (Malaysian equivalent for Parota, not paratha) and some omlettes. The funny part is he asks Karthik to look for lorry drivers with Malaysian license and send them over to him, our dude promptly agrees to do it ! This is the best part, we decide to settle the bill and our man Sakr has to add up 2, 2.80, 3.60 and 1.75. He picks up the calculator, starts entering the digits in the order mentioned pressing MR and M+ and M- in the calculator after every entry. We were stunned at the way he was calculating and thought this might be a new innovative way to add things up. He does this a couple of times and every time he ends with a ten digit number 2280360175. Our dude s'k'r is confused, he is wondering how do I ask them to pay up 2.2Billion ringgits ! Finally he gives up and admits that he doesn't know to add up. Phew! we heavy a sigh of relief and burst out laughing. We leave the place bidding a goodbye to s'k'r.
23:00 - Stopover at McDonalds in Segamat. We order tea - all geared up for an all night drive to JB.
2:00 (24th sept) - We took the expressway on the way from Yong Peng and manage to reach Senai airport much earlier than we had anticipated. After scrounging around for a gas station, we manage to locate one pretty far from the airport. We park inside the airport parking lot and we had to sleep inside the car - all the chairs inside the airport are occupied (by who else - other 'sleepers' ! )
3:30 - You can imagine what happens when the windows are almost completely rolled up, No A/C, 3 guys breathing inside the car - Am sweating and had to get up. In my attempt to get some fresh air, i open the door - Off goes the car alarm ! Shortly after that, the airport security comes up and starts questioning us. Karthik handles them nicely, he gets out of the car and hands them the Indian driving license, NTU ID Card and EZ-Link card all at once without being asked to do anything, they are confused about the NTU ID Card and the EZ-Link card, they are wondering what these are, when asked for the passport he says its somewhere in the boot of the car, he confuses them and we are left in peace. Phew ! yet again !
8:30 - AVIS guys arrive and we hand over the car keys, pay up the rent and take the next shuttle towards Kota raya bus terminal - back to where we started from.
10:30 - we are back in Singapore. A weekend to remember ! One of our best drives till date !
[ Although this blogs seems to be mine .. it has received large contributions from both Karthik and Rudy :) ]
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