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Published: September 20th 2010
It just kept raining for the remainder of our time in Sihanoukville - well it is the monsoon season! Still we managed to swim most days (30C and wet) and fill our time eating cheap food and drinking even cheaper beer and Bailey’s ($13/Ltr). Donna also picked up some very cheap Revlon cosmetics in the market but not much else.
The only notable event in the last week was we both contracted the dreaded vomiting and diarrhea virus which lasted a couple of days each in succession - first Rob then Donna went running to the loo calling out for “H-e-r-b”. It’s strange because in all our recent travels we have not had any tummy problems thanks to Typhoid shots before travel.
As the rainy days lingered on we noticed something strange about the karaoke restaurant across the road, a quite large area, opened sided with a stage at the rear set up for a singer and a small band. On most nights the singer crooned on to an audience of zero and this went on for hours! Yet there were always a good number of expensive vehicles including police cars parked in front. Bewildered as to why the
singer kept going without an audience we asked the hotel staff for an explanation. A gaming house at the rear of the restaurant the staff told us, and the singer was specifically instructed to keep singing under any circumstances as the cover.
Yes it finally fined up on the day we left to go back to Saigon! An early (6.30am) tuk tuk ride to the bus office in town for the 7am (which turned out to be 7.30am) bus to Phnom Penh. The Cambodian buses are cheap and reasonably comfortable making the 5 hour journey pleasant.
At 1.30pm we left the chaos at the PP Saraya Bus terminal in downtown Phnom Penh arriving at the Cambodian border town Bavet at 5pm, clearing Vietnamese immigration on the other side at Moc Bai by 6pm, and arriving in Saigon at 8.30pm - a 7 hour trip. We had already booked a room at the Lan Anh hotel ($20) and headed out to the Minosa Café for chimichangas, pasta and beer - 166,000dong $9.76.
Next morning we set off for the Russian Market (Yeltsin Street) cautious to avoid the large rats we had encountered the last time. On the way
Rob purchased a new blood pressure monitor (at about half the cost at home) to ready himself for the exorbitant beer prices in Malaysia. That day we had a great pho at Pho24 near De Tham street and Tamarind Prawns for dinner at the night food market.
In the evening there was a sudden thunderstorm and torrential rain as we walked home from the night food market so we took shelter in the pavilions in the park near the market. What a surprise! We walked into a Cuban/Latin American dance class/demonstration which some enterprising young people staged at weekends. Loud samba music came from large speakers brought into the pavilions and enthusiastic groups of future dance stars showed us what they could do.
Saturday 14 August after a pho lunch we caught a cab to the airport for our Air Asia flight to Kuala Lumpur ($48.64) After a forgettable McDonald’s 29 MYR meal ($8) we caught the shuttle to overnight at the airport Tune Hotel. Early next morning we flew to Borneo for a week. The main reasons for this leg of our trip were we got an incredibly cheap Air Asia/Tune Hotel deal (3 flights and 7 nights
Karaoke Bar Sihanoukville
The singer is still singing accommodation for $66 for both of us) and we wanted to see what was there.
A 5.30am start from Tune to the KL low cost terminal, kiosk checked in, printed boarding passes and dropped of the bags at the baggage counter - all this took less than 10 minutes. AK5124 left at 8am and the flight to Kota Kinabalu took 2 hours 30 minutes. An extortionate 50 MYR ($17.86) taxi fare to Tune Hotel awaited us on arrival.
KK as the locals call it is a small coastal town built around a substantial bay and shipping port. It was a British outpost in colonial times and there are a few reminders of those days in the clock tower and Jessleton Pier area which is now mostly seafood restaurants.
Mount Kinabalu dominates the landscape and the local weather - the afternoon thunder storms came most days with monotonous regularity, rolling down from the mountain and across the narrow coastal strip which is KK. Not far out of the town area is a rural belt and the jungle starting at the foot of the mountain. The main things to do in KK are trekking up Mount Kinabalu and the adjacent
National Park, and taking a ferry to a small island nearby for a spot of swimming . We only had three days and the prospect of spending two of those days slugging it up a mountain in a humid tropical jungle in the rain turned us against the idea. One thing Rob does not do any more is walk up a hill anywhere!!
Instead we decide to see what KK had to offer for retail therapy. The Tune hotel where we stayed is located in the One Borneo Supermall, a 4 story retail expanse which covers 3 connected atrium areas. The enormity of it meant we took one whole day just to cover nearly 2 floors. Apart from the overpriced brand stores mostly devoid of customers (how do these stores make a living?), there were a large number of discount shops offering real bargains - like F.O.S. the chain of factory outlet stores across Malaysia. Rob did well picking up Old Navy, Nautica and other brands for a fraction of the original prices. Donna walked right into a specials area in the Parkson Department store and cleaned up on lace underwear.
Another benefit of staying in the Mall
precinct was the vast range of quality and cheap restaurants and snack outlets in the lower floors of the Mall. Indian at Choice Indian (dosa and chicken biryni), Chinese at Hong Kong Noodles (wonderful wontons, s &s pork - even during Ramadan - and honey chicken) and fish and pasta at Secret Recipe. And to top it off we found a supply of cheap cold Tsing Tao beer - well cheap for Malaysia at 12MYR ($4.28) a large bottle.
The One Borneo Mall is located some distance from the centre of KK. A taxi to town costs 35MYR ($12.50) - a bit expensive! But luckily One Borneo runs a FREE shuttle to a sister Mall in KK, so we availed ourselves of the service several times. In KK itself we found another array of cheap clothing stores that matched One Borneo.
After 3 days of reasonable shopping, good cheap food and EXPENSIVE beer we caught the Tune Hotel shuttle to the airport for 35MYR ($12.50 and no one could explain why a taxi in cost 50MYR!) for a 1 hour 45m flight to Kuching (pronounced Kooching) on the western side of Borneo. We checked in to the Tune Hotel
and headed straight for dinner, which ended up being a somewhat expensive choice - Khatulistiwa travelers restaurant right on the waterfront, with very ordinary food (you do not cook chicken in oil used for seafood!) and expensive beer.
There is not much to do in Kuching, and that’s why we only allocated 2 days. We walked along the river front, saw the fort and the strange looking mosque across the river and headed a couple of blocks downtown. There seems to be a real divide in this town - it’s essentially a Chinese town, with the Muslim community largely occupying the areas across the river. The strong Chinese influence meant that we had a wider range of daytime food options given that it was the fasting month of Ramadan. We noticed that after sunset many of the restaurants were suddenly crowded with people who had been fasting all day. In fact some of the larger restaurants offered special Ramadan banquette dinners at good rates.
The Tune Hotel in Kuching is relatively new - the rooms while spartan were slightly larger than the airport Tune. Donna complained about the late night karaoke noise one night and had to resort
to the earplugs supplied by Tune, Rob of course with his depleted hearing heard nothing.
We had a good seafood meal at a rooftop court (can’t remember the name but it is near Tune). This was a cavernous area brimming with many well stocked stalls, sprukers trying to entice diners to their fare and hoards of people consuming vast quantities of all sorts of delicious seafood. The fish literally hung over both sides of the plate! Whole tanks of fish, prawns, shellfish, lobsters and even vegetables for side dishes adorned each stall and sold to customers by weight and some kind of mathematical formula which seemed to evade me. But it was fresh and cheap!
After touring all the convenience stores for cheap beer we found a small Chinese restaurant at the back of Tune which sold Tsing Tao (Chinese) beer for 7MYR ($2.50) and this was the cheapest beer in the whole of Malaysia!
It rained next day when we were leaving for Kuala Lumpur so we adjourned to the Hilton Hotel across the road from Tune for a delicious all you can eat (and Rob did!) Dim Sum buffet lunch. This was a real splurge
- 5 star food and service for $16 each. It was nice to farewell Kuching in such a sumptuous way. Our 7.15pm AirAsia flight arrived in KL at 8.55pm and we caught the Tune hotel shuttle. We checked in to the Airport Tune and celebrated with a couple of Tiger beers. W e slept in and then had a long wait at the LCCT terminal for our 5.55pm AirAsia flight to Bali.
Arrived in Bali at 8.55pm and soon understood the feedback we had been getting about the long, long lines at immigration, but with our APEC cards we quickly made our way to the specifically designated APEC lane and presented passports and cards. With that we were escorted by a uniformed official to the Immigration Office and shown a couch to sit while another official took all our documents into an adjacent office. Panic. What had we done? A few minutes later the official came out of his office and with a cheery greeting gave us our cards and passports with 3 month visas! That’s a saving of $25US per month for each of us! After exiting immigration we saw the first of the other passengers from our
flight just clearing immigration. We cleared Customs without the slightest glance - well we had nothing to declare - and made our way to the arrivals area where we met by a driver from Sorga Hotel.
We have stayed at Sorga before, and were lucky to have negotiated a discount rate for the 3 week stay. Sorga has put up their rates to 297 Rupiah plus 20% tax. We consider this extortionate and over the subsequent days we obtained better rates from a number of good hotels nearby in Poppies 1 and will change next time we go to Bali. Just on the question of tax which is added to some hotel and restaurant bills at rates varying from 10 - 20%, we read an interesting article in the Jakarta Post that in Bali some operators were pocketing a good proportion of the tax and not remitting it to the Revenue Department. The Bali Governor Made Pastika called for an electronic system of tax collection from tourism enterprises - the chances of instituting such a system appeared slim on all accounts.
We didn’t do much in Kuta except swim, sunbake, eat, drink and tour the stalls and shops
around Kuta. The range of merchandise seems to have diminished since our last trip - in fact some of the soiled stock looked like it had been there since then! The cavernous and cluttered Matahari Mall was less appealing and we even trekked a considerable distance to go to a Carrefour Supermarket which offered little in the way of a bargain. As it was Ramadan some of the Muslim shops were closed for the daytime or altogether.
Kuta is much the same except for the new medium rise hotel complexes - the skyline right down to Semenak is dotted with large cranes working projects such as a massive new Hilton Hotel right on the beach strip. The laneways in Kuta are even more chaotic as more and more traffic is generated by the rise in tourism - it’s now a real task to avoid having your toes flattened by a 4WD filled with surfboards in the narrow lanes. The tuk tuks have gone but more rental bikes and cars have taken their place. Touts and sprukers line most streets offering everything from massages to magic mushrooms to Viagra! “Come look in my shop, boss…cheap price”. Kuta is literally bursting
at the seams - where will it all end?
The weather was warm, sunny and humid for the first two weeks but in the last week we started to get overcast days with some rain, mostly in the evenings and heavy rain at night. The temperature was quite mild in the mid 30’s during the day and high 20’s at night making it pleasant to sleep without aircon.
The best thing about Kuta is the food, so much variety and so cheap. We particularly enjoy Mexican food so we scheduled as many evenings at TJ’s in Poppies 1 as we could. At the end of our stay TJ’s staff said “you eat here many times you must like!” The food and service are simply far above what’s on offer at competing restaurants not just Mexican. And yes we did try the other 3 Mexican restaurants in Kuta and Legian and will never return.
But our stay was not all a south of the border experience, as we relished the Indonesian food at Bali Agung (Poppies 1), Gong Corner for seafood ,that’s lots of it at ridiculously cheap prices, Campur Campur a cheap Italian affair with house specialties
chicken parmagiana and cordon bleu and FREE WIFI, Gateway to India a slightly upmarket Indian restaurant at Bemo Corner, Kuta Puri the restaurant in the KP hotel with great chicken satay, and The Treehouse a quality cheapy down Poppies 1 towards the beach. Even at TJ’s, which is the most expensive restaurant we visited, the meals bill with a beer was only $25 for 2. At the cheaper restaurants we dined for about $10 for both of us excluding beer.
The only gripe we have about Bali is the cost of Bintang beer which is now sold at the exhorbitant price of 25,000Rp for a large bottle - that’s $3.12. In Thailand a large Chang (Elephant beer) is only 60Bht or $2 and in China Tsingtao is $0.50! We think next trip we will spend more time in Phuket - cheaper beer, good food , better water quality and better infrastructure.
Well all good things have to come to an end so we departed Bali as we had arrived - on a cheap AirAsia flight to Kuala Lumpur with an overnight stay at the airport Tune Hotel. Next day we caught what was touted as the superfast train
to KL (22MYR each) and 90 minutes later including waiting time (next time we’ll take the 1 hour express bus for 9MYR) we arrived at KL Sentral and caught the Sky Train to Bukit Bintang to do some last minute shopping. We were on a tight schedule which included a lunch at Estana Indian restaurant where we had some brilliant thali curry dishes. The trip back to the airport was just as long, but we arrived with adequate time to retrieve our bags from the left luggage (which cost a small fortune) and check in for the AirAsia X flight to the Gold Coast. We got only a little sleep on the flight despite being able to spread out over 3 seats before we were woken with a loud announcement about refreshments being served prior to the decent into the Gold Coast air space.
Bleary eyed at 7.30am local time we made our way to Immigration, exited via the crew lane with our business visa cards before everyone else, but then had to queue for over an hour in Customs while a pleasantly thorough Customs officer chased an ant that fell out of a cane placemat we had bought
in Bali - he even found a specimen bottle to keep it for a later examination - and gave us a lecture on importing nasty insects from overseas.
By the time we managed to get all the things back in our bags we were the last people to exit from our flight! The last part of our journey was a bus trip to Port Macquarie (we slept most of the way) where we were picked up by daughter Susan just on midnight.
Well that’s the end of this trip - we are looking at India/China/ North Indonesia for the next one.
Tebby and Brian, thanks for the blog on your trip across Canada. We hope to make the trip when our finances are sorted out after the court battles etc.
Robyn and Gene, how is the planning for the India/Sri Lanka trip going?
Congratulations to Michelle and Stefan on the new addition to your family - Heidi. What a lovely name, hope all is going well.
Robert & Donna
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