The big relax

In short, go to them.

On our way down to KL we decided to make a stopover at the Cameron Highlands, a place not really mentioned by either the travel guide nor the other travelers we have met. Our decision to stop here was mainly fueled by my desire to go to Taman Negara, the central national park which we will unfortunately be missing out on now due to time constraints, but looking at the surroundings we’re in now, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything at all! Right now, after a relatively pain free 5 hour bus journey from Georgetown, I’m sitting high on a mountainside, literally amongst the clouds. The views are phenominal. The tourist trail runs a little colder here than most other places, both figuratively and literally (we’ll deal with the figuratively first) as is aparent by the comparatively higher prices and the slightly longer lingering looks from locals on Lauren in particular, that sounded more sinsister than it meant to, it’s more just out of curiosity rather than anything else. Saying that though, the little cafe where we are at the moment the little Indian-malay is possibly so sweet she is making my teeth rot just by being around her. She couldn’t have been more helpful to the two of us in the brief time we have been sitting here.

Literally speaking, being up in the clouds is cold. Very cold. England cold. I’m wearing my long fisherman pants, a scarf, a v$est and a T-shirt, drinking an enormous mug of coffee and I’m still freezing, but looking out of the window onto a mountainside being enveloped by tentdrils of cloud makes me forget all that. This is truely naturally beautiful, and a welcome and refreshing change to Penang’s cityscape (which, given the cultral diversity there as well as the general cleanliness ish of the city, Lauren and I both have decided looks markedly similar to North London.)

These impressions of the highlands have only been taken from a very short time here, it’s raining at the moment and a little bit too late in the day to go exploring proper, but I’m sure I’ll let you all know when I’ve had a good look around!

Bear with me on the link with this title, I promise it will work out.

So,yesterday was pretty uneventful. Penang is advertised on the telly in SE Asia and everything. Unfortunately, all of the places advertised on the T.V. seem to be within 2 minutes of each other, so once you have done those things…

So we spent the vast majority of yesterday doing nothing, a whopping3 hours spent on the internet (a heady combination of the net being very cheap and a monsoon that was so heavy it made raw sewage flood the streets) left us feeling the day had done nothing.

A bit like the first 2 1/2 hours of Stanly Kubric’s Vatican approved classic. Similar to the movie, the day then went rabid-dog mental in the final20 minutes.

Watching the communal T.V. in our guesthouse, we were 45 minutes into a 1 hour show about the assassination of Martin Luthur King Jr when a drunk Eastern European man decides to change the chanel at the last advert. It’s cool, we think, the man just doesn’t want to watch ads, no problem. He then doesn’t turn it back.

A polite request from me. Followed by an exceptionally arrogant response from him. Followed by a further, slightly less (only slighlty ) request from me to turn it back.

Then the tirade of insults begins. Eventually he backs off, I’m afterall, a clear foot taller and a few inches wider than him in the shoulders. But it seems the unspent testosterone is not ready to sleep yet. The manager assure me and Lauren that the man is harmless and just a very bad drunk so, placated, Lauren and I return to watching the T.V. while the idiot drunk stumbles off upstairs mubling obscenities under his breath.

I go upstairs to our room for a second when a loud, booming American voices thunders down the hallway at me, just as my key hits the lock.

‘Hey buddy!,’ he yells, a tall, long haired hippy type dressed only in a towel, ‘you wanna close that door a bit quieter? All night you been banging that thing and if you do it again I’m going to come down there and kick your ass.’ Brilliantly, I hadn’t been banging the door. It was my friend, the eastern European, who, upon hearing aggressive voices, couldn’t help butpoke his head out to get in on the action. Lauren and I quickly explained to the American that it wasn’t us and we were sorry if we reacted aggressively, but the American had apparently been the target of Euroboy’s insults the previous night, and the bad blood was still there.

Lauren and I returned downstairs to the T.V. the two ment still arguing. Within 10 minutes, the American, to his full credit, came down to apologize to Lauren and I for his misplaced anger, he really was a very reasonable man. So that was all good.

Upon returning to our room, the European is still out in the hallway bitching to some other guest about us and the American. The other guest is clearly just someone uninvolved who barely even knows the man but is too polite to excuse himself. I bite the bullet, walk down the hall, apologize and shake the man’s hand. He smiles and gives me a ‘playful’ punch on the chest so as not to loose too much face for himself.

I could still hear him bitching as I went into my room.  All in all, much ado about nothing.

Did I mention he already had a black eye? What a bad drunk indeed!

Did Hal have a black eye in 2001? That would make this link seem much, much lest tenuous…

Today more of the same, internet, being rained on, good food, banana shake, reading. Tomorrow we’re going to the Cameron Highlands which are meant to be nothing short of spectacular. I’ll tell it as I see it.

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