Further Wanderings

After the Cameron Highlands, Kuala Lumpur was a bit of a shock.  Hot, sticky, big and busy, KL was everything that Tanah Rata wasn’t.  But somehow, despite the change of scenery, we were still felt a bit lackadaisical during our time there.

Part of this came from the fact that Malaysia was such an easy place to travel in.  Public transport was good, everyone was used to tourists (especially in the areas we were visiting), and virtually everyone spoke at least a bit of English.  After the rigours of places like Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sumatra, it almost felt TOO easy to be exciting.

Another source of the feeling came from the nearness of our trip’s end.  During our stay in KL, the day 2 weeks prior to our return to NZ came and went.  Since booking our tickets we’d been focussing more and more on the END of the journey, and finding it correspondingly tougher to focus on the present.

The Masjid Jamek Mosque (a bit redundant, as Majid means mosque in Malay), Kuala Lumpur

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It’s always so nice arriving in a city and already knowing your way around.

Since we’d spent a day on the island of Penang in transit between Thailand and Indonesia, we had no troubles finding our way to a nice hotel, getting booked in and setting about enjoying the place.

Lens at the Penang Lighthouse Read the rest of this entry »

It was well after dark when we arrived in ‘Siantar, and things didn’t start out too well.

We were urged to take a becak (kind of like a motorcycle with a sidecar) to the nearest hotel which was “far away,” but which turned out to be about 300m down the road.  Once we arrived we discovered that the hotel had a karaoke bar that kept blaring until 01:00, and when we went out for dinner we got into a monstrous row with the proprietress of a warung (small, basic restaurant) when she tried to change the agreed price of our meal after we’d ordered.  In the end she gave us the original quoted price, but slapped our fried noodles into a banana leaf (a common carry-out container in Indonesia) making it clear that we were not welcome to stay and eat there.

I suppose all of these had their silver linings though… The staff at the hotel were very friendly, the karaoke singers got better later in the evening, and the noodles were tasty

An “Indonesian Tow Truck” on the main street in Berastagi

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Despite it’s reputation as being well and truly out in the wilds of Sumatra, Banda Aceh was a modern town, full of western conveniences brought by, or at least in order to cater to, foreign NGO workers in the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami.  In leaving the city behind we were heading down a far more adventurous road. 

There were, in fact three roads out of Banda Aceh.  We’d taken the eastern costal road from Medan on the way there.  Sections of the western coastal road still hadn’t been repaired following the tsunami.  The third option was the one took on our journey south: the mountain road right down the centre of Sumatra, through the region known as the Gayo Highlands.

Deep fried crispy vegetables were a specialty of Aceh, including these beautiful (and tasty) kumara (sweet potato) chips

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 While getting IN to Indonesia was no problem, onward travel presented some minor difficulties.
First came negotiations with the bemo (microbus) driver about our fare.  Then came finding an ATM for him to stop at so we could pick up some more Indonesian Rupiah.  Then came debating whether he’d really agreed to take us all the way to the northern bus terminal.  Then came him putting us on another minibus headed there and paying our fare for us.  So while it was a bit of a hassle, it wasn’t really all that bad.

We purchased our tickets for a night bus headed up the trans-Sumatran highway, leaving just enough time for dinner before journeying north to Banda Aceh.

Pulau Weh

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Wow. Didn’t think I’d be doing this again so soon.

In this instance the countries involved are Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, and we didn’t even use air travel!

We had some minor problems purchasing our train tickets for the Bangkok-Malaysia journey (reserved seats weren’t available all the way to our final destination, Butterworth, but the ticket agent assured us that seats WOULD be around, and that all we’d need to do was buy a ticket to Hat Yai in southern Thailand, then talk to the conductor, or buy new tickets, or uh… something, when we arrived there.)

Lights by the side of the tracks… I’ve no idea what these were about, but we saw several similar displays flashing by as our train passed them in the night

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Upon returning to Bangkok we set about achieving two important goals:

1. Have as pleasant a rest as possible in between two big spells of travel (back from Cambodia, on to Malaysia.)

2. Eat as much yummy Thai food as possible during our short stay in the country.

Statuary in the Wat Po Gardens

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The Angkor ruins are a HUGE series of buildings (mostly Hindu/Buddhist temples)constructed between the 9th and 15th centuries AD.  They were built by the Khmers when they were at the height of their power and their empire encompassed most of southeast Asia.  To give some idea of the scale involved, the whole city/complex of Angkor covered around 1000 square kilometres at its peak (yes, 10^3.  I didn’t just add a 0 by mistake) and included individual temples whose dimensions could be measured in kilometres, as well as huge resevoirs up to 2 x 9km in size.I’d been to the Angkor temples in 2004 with my parents, but Sarah hadn’t visited them before.  And if one is in mainland southeast Asia, there is no other more “must visit” a place, no more “must see” an attraction than Angkor.

In the name of simplicity, I won’t bother going into great detail about every temple we visited and every carving we saw.  I’ll just give a brief summary of how our visit to Angkor went, and then just let the photos do the talking.

Carvings on one of the Elephant Terraces in Angkor Thom

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Following our surprisingly simple journey into the country, and a very pleasant night in Battambang, we woke up nice and early to catch a bus to Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital.

When I’d visited Cambodia about 3.5 years before the roads in Cambodia ranged in quality from mediocre down to utterly abysmal. Further, it seemed that almost every vehicle in the country was designed so that only passengers under 5′2″ (i.e. many Cambodians) could ride comfortably. Combined with the fact that vehicles were routinely packed far beyond capacity (I recall a ride in a small VW van type thing with 22 people inside) I expected that our bus trip would be far from pleasant.

Fortunately things had changed. The road from Battambang to PP was paved and in pretty good shape. The bus had air conditioning and (just) adequate legroom. And while we did have to stop to repair a flat tire, it was a pleasant enough stop featuring a chat with some Cambodian-Americans back home visiting and a snack of fried spiders on a stick.

Mmm… Big hairy spider in my mouth.  These guys were a lot smaller than the last spider I ate in Cambodia, but you got 5 of them skewered on a stick.  They actually taste pretty good, though I still wasn’t too keen on chewing up the squishy abdomen

This one I wouldn’t be quite so keen on eating (though at least it proved that they were fresh) 

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A quick entry just to get us up to date:

We left Chittagong at 14:35, with the only hitch being a minor disagreement with our autorickshaw driver about exactly where he’d agreed to take us and for how much.

Chittagong harbour from the air

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