A Couple’s Journey

Good ole traveling, got to love lugging around all the gear on and off buses and trains, carrying it around in hot temperatures sweating like crazy!  The joys of staying in cramped hotels, artery clogging food and 0’dark 30 arrivals at train stations. Okay it isn’t that bad, close though!  We got to KL in one piece and tried to find a place to stay nearby, unfortunately the nicer hotels were out of our price range.  So we decide to go to the other extreme and find the cheapest hotel!  We surely did succeed!  It wasn’t the worst place we stayed but close.  Since we had already spent a lot of time in KL already we decided to just relax and slowly pass the time away.  The highlight would probably be seeing Madacascar 2 at the IMAX!!  It was really good although we did have to stay up till 11pm to catch the first showing.  Luckily the mall here has an indoor amusement park so we decided to spend the hours there, not the best idea.  The first ride we went on about killed us.  As the bar came down to lock us into the seat, it felt like it was trying break us!  Maryanne still has painful shoulders!  The plus side as this thing was spinning us round and round and upside down, never once did I worry about falling out!  Actually I don’t think I moved at all, except for maybe my stomach that wanted to hurl!  It took about an hour before I could get on another ride as my eyes were still rolling freely in my head!  Upon walking around the park we passed by the kiddie area.  Since it was late at night and the employees were obviously bored, they managed to convince us to get on this little train.  Thankfully we not the only ones on it, there was an Australian couple with their daughter.  So we had fun, trying to make her laugh as well as laughing at ourselves for evening being on the ride to begin with.  I also thought the kids names was Charolette, but apparently that name was in reference to Charolette’s Web.  So that was what the big spider was for, I just thought it was there to scare the crap out of the kids!  After the exciting train ride, the couple convinced us to join them on the kids jeep safari.  I had a jeep in high school, so I thought this would be a great idea. Not to mention since it is a kids ride, I shouldn’t have to worry about getting sick.  Sure enough I didn’t get sick, however unlike the jeep I used to own this one didn’t have much leg room.  Can you say ouch, and I am short!  I feel bad for tall parents.  I think Maryanne did get a little annoyed with me constantly beeping the horn.  Well the kid was doing it and since I am a big kid what did she expect I was going to do, I mean really!  If I can make some noise, I am going to do it! After the fun ride, we headed off to let out some aggression.  What better way to do that than to get in the bumper cars and ram little kids!  Okay we weren’t that evil, but Maryanne was gunning for this one kid who kept calling her momma!  Never remind a women that she is old!!  After our exciting time in the amusement park, it was time for good old fasion video games at the arcade.  What a perfect kids day!  I did find it funny though that when we went to see Madacascar 2 in the big IMAX which can hold about 500 people, there were only 8 adults!  No worries about screaming kids, throwing popcorn!  I only throw piece thank you very much!  So didn’t expect to see only 6 adults, where were the kids!  Then again it was 11pm, who in their right mind would stay up that late to see a kids movie!  Oh yeah us!  The rest of our time in KL was pretty uneventful, but we did get some good sleep in.  I needed it as I was still sore from Wakeboarding in Singapore!

We took the overnight train from KL to Penang/Butterworth.  We got in about 445am and were lucky enough that they had a place were we could store our luggage so we could take the ferry over to Penang. It was either that or spend 10 hours at the train station, which did not even have a restuarant nearby.  Now why we ever thought anything would be open that early in the morning is beyond us.  Maybe it was the good sleep we had on the train.  Oh we rode in a first class sleeper cabin.  It was pretty cool to have our own room, we even had power so we spent much of the time laying in bed watching TV shows on the laptop without worrying about the battery dying.  Anyway back to Penang, once we got off the ferry the city was sound asleep.  With no idea where anything was we headed off in a direction that had the most lights.  We walked and walked and walked and walked, stopping occassionally cause it started raining, luckily it didn’t last long.  Stupid us though as our raincoats and umbrellas where back at the train station!  Damn rain, so after 2 and a half hours of walking around the sun came up and the rain cleared.  However nothing was open even at 8am, what is up with this town!!  Finally we found a Starbucks, but just our luck it doesn’t open till 10am!  Thankfully we did find a park to pass the time playing Uno.   At least this beat sitting on the floor of the train station!  When we finally boarded the train at 3pm we were welcomed back into 2nd class train travel.  Which roughly means, smaller seats with no storage space for our luggage!  It was a long 12 hours!  We got to Chumphon at about 3am where it is a little cool and rainy!  Took us a while to get a taxi to some place to have breakfast while we wait for the bus to take us to the ferry!  So more sitting around and waiting.  I can see why travellers enjoy staying in one spot for long periods of time.  Going from place to place is kind of a pain in the arse, lots of sitting around and waiting!  So sorry for the long post, but since I am sitting around drinking tea waiting for the bus what else do I have to do!  Maryanne is watching some cheesy Vampire movie, it is in english, but it looks more like a thai film!  So that means I get to share every little detail with you all!  Now don’t you feel special! 

The plan as of now, is to stay in Koh Tao for a few days.  Might do some diving, but mostly to see old friends and clean our gear really thoughly before storing it for a few months.  Then we are off to Phuket on the 18th to hopefully work on a monkey reserve, that hasn’t been confirmed yet, but we should know in a few days if we will be able to stay for free.  We might have to pay for lodging otherwise, but we think it will fun to do it anyway.  As always we will keep you updated as best we can!

 Just got to Koh Tao today, wow what a ferrry ride!  About half the boat got seasick due to a really bad storm here at the moment. Yep I was one of them!!  Maryanne slept for most of it but I felt awful.  I did learn one valuable lesson though, that after getting sick there is very little point in taking a seasickness tablet.  It only burns your throat coming back up!  Anyway we are safe and sound now, but the weather is crap!  Good to see our friends though!

Tags: Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 6:58 am and is filed under Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.