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Published: July 13th 2010
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After months of overtime and stress at work, holiday time finally came around and a new country to visit - Malaysia. We had two days to explore Kuala Lumpur before heading off to a paradise island for five blissful days.
In KL we stayed at a little place called Classic Inn in the Golden Triangle area and started each morning with their yummy breakfast of roti canai (hot flatbread served with cold curry), a small cake or pastry and fruit. We skipped Chinatown, funny that, and wandered the streets of Little India - lots of brightly painted shop fronts and market stalls packed with saris and headscarves. Maybe I should’ve bought one as we weren’t appropriately dressed to go into the Masjid Jamek mosque so we ended up in the Coliseum Café, “a colonial relic” for a small beer.
We also took in Merdeka Square, which was once a cricket field and where Malaysian independence was declared. It’s flanked by a mock tudor-style building on one side and a great-looking Moorish building called Sultan Abdul Samad Building on the other which houses one of the High Courts. Then we hopped on the monorail back to base for a quick
rest before checking out the dinner options. I really wanted to soak up the atmosphere sitting outdoors with some tasty street food and a beer, but we somehow ended up fine dining at a restaurant called Frangipani. So we had fussy fusion food and wine sitting in a serene dining room, surrounding a reflecting pool instead!
The next day the plan was to wander around a traditional Malay area, but we were stymied by the weather. The heavens opened as we got to Chow Kit market. The market is undercover, kind of… leaky tin roofs and canvas mixed with debris from the meat, fish and veg stalls made it pretty yucky underfoot, especially in flip flops. So after squelching our way through the tightly packed stalls we bailed and headed for another kind of shopping experience at the huge Suria KLCC mall at the base of the Petronas Towers. We made a beeline for Kinokuniya - Japanese book chain and book heaven! It’s fair to say that we are not well served in China for English language books, in fact it’s downright crap! So we were like kids in a candy shop for the next hour or so, my
stack of books getting higher and higher. But I was travelling light, so then had to carefully choose just a few and put the rest back.
Giddy with our new purchases, we skipped out into KLCC, a lovely big park and made our way over to the Skybar for an aperitif while we waited for nightfall and the Petronas Towers to light up. Here we sampled their Guinness “perfect pint”, aka the “tiny pint”, by the pool! After a second perfect pint we went to Jalan Alor, the main food street in the Golden Triangle and this time we did Malaysian food properly. After perusing the rows of eateries we were persuaded by a very lovely and chatty lady to dine at her establishment and she went on to explain the whole menu to us. We chose squid, malay style chicken, soup and fried rice washed down with the local beer, Jaz. It was delicious!
We enjoyed KL, but the real attraction was the Perhentian Islands, described in the Lonely Planet as “A tropical paradise. Full stop.” Oh yeay!! An hour’s flight, an hour’s taxi ride and a 40 minute hair-raising speed boat trip and we arrived at
Perhentian Besar, the larger and more sedate of the two islands. And we weren’t disappointed. It was beautiful - white sandy beaches, crystal clear waters, palm trees…
We stayed at Abdul’s Chalet which is at one end of the short stretch of beach. The section just in front of Abdul’s was so quiet; at times we were the only people there. So we settled into a routine of a breakfast of pancakes and fruit at Nan’s caf with the sand between our toes, gazing out to sea, reading, swimming, a bit more reading, a bit more gazing, dinner at Tuna Bay resort (the only decent food on this stretch, apart from Nan’s but that was only open during the day), and then watching the World Cup.
When we felt slightly adventurous we hired a water taxi and hopped over to the smaller party island, but that only happened once. I also tried snorkelling for the first time and was bitten by a fish. The cheeky bugger dive-bombed my ankle! There’s a coral reef not far from the shore so you can see the fish in really shallow water, so even Paul donned a snorkel.
Getting back to
Shanghai and work was all a bit too sudden. Our flight was through the night arriving back at 7am Monday morning and we went straight into work. Annual leave is on the stingy side here, so we couldn’t afford the luxury of a day’s breather. Roll on the next holiday…
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