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Published: December 5th 2005
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Marble Hills
These are the hills that surround Ipoh. Some have caves that you can visit and a lot of them are quarried for marble. October 10th - 23rd
I'm getting fancy with the titles :-) I thought adding the date would be helpful since I'm finally bloging this a month and a half later!
We are combining the blog entries for the sixth and seventh weeks because not a whole lot happened to warrant separate entries.
The highlights of week six were my IWA meeting and a rafting trip we took with Phil’s coworkers. The meeting was interesting because our guest speaker was Penang’s chief of police. He presented some information on crimes that are of interest to women (purse snatching, rape, etc.) and compared them to previous years in Penang and to the other states of Malaysia. In general we are on the low end, though the police force is infamous for requesting and accepting bribes in exchange for not writing tickets. Of course the police chief didn’t talk about this, but we were all thinking it. At the end he had a question and answer session for IWA members. Some women had very serious problems with officers not taking them seriously when they went to file a police report and the chief did help them, even took some reports personally,
Local style
At the rafting put-in site, these buildings are in the traditional Malay housing style. but other questions it seemed like he was saying just enough to appease us and not really give a straight answer. I can imagine that he was a little nervous facing a room of annoyed foreign women!
Phil and his coworkers went rafting on Friday for a teambuilding event and I was invited along. We left Penang at 6:45am so we could have dim sum for breakfast in Ipoh! Apparently this is very famous dim sum, and it was worth it. We drove through Ipoh on our trip to KL a couple weeks ago (it’s where Phil’s debit card was eaten, and we still hadn’t received the replacement yet) and it was nice to see it in the daylight this time. The mountains before the city are really beautiful. After dim sum we drove to a little town nearby and met the rafting guides. They took us in small vans to the rafting site. The road we traveled down was a tiny strip of pavement through the jungle, probably 8’ wide at most. Even though it was a tiny road we passed all kinds of houses and little communities. I’m sure it’s not as wild and rural as I
thought it was; it is just so foreign to see a house rising behind jungle vegetation. The setting makes it seem much more exotic, when it really is no different than driving by miles and miles of farm land and suddenly seeing a tiny farm house. We arrived at the site and suited up in helmets and life jackets, received a little bit of instruction on how to maneuver and then we were off. In all there were 6 or 7 boats.
I think we got stuck with a bum instructor. Maybe he was new to rafting or this particular river because I swear we got stuck on every rock in the river and I don’t think we went down a single rapid without flipping around or going sideways. I know the guides sometimes do things to make the trip more interesting, but this guy just seemed clueless. He would actually guide us into the completely wrong place and then we would spend 5 or 10 minutes getting unstuck. At one point we were stuck between two rocks and right in front of us was a huge tree branch hanging down into the river, precisely what we should have
avoided and I swear the guide put us there on purpose. Eventually Phil had to get out into the river and help the guide get the boat unstuck. It was crazy!! The guides even said that it had been raining really hard lately so the river was high. Thank goodness it did or we never would have made it down the river. After the last big rapid the boats pulled ashore and they let people float down the rapid and swim in the calm pool below. Phil went down (see the picture) but I didn’t. The rest of the rafting trip was quiet and slow except for getting stuck on rocks because it was too shallow. At the end we had lunch waiting for us. We were supposed to then take our bus to a nearby waterfall and hike up that, but everyone was exhausted so we went home instead. It was a nice trip.
The seventh week was even less eventful than the sixth. We did the normal daily things. There might have been something interesting, but I don’t remember now. That weekend we went to the botanical gardens in Penang and were rather disappointed. Compared to the
How engineers de-stress
There's nothing like a little water fight to release some tension. Singapore botanical gardens, well, it doesn’t compare. I’m sure at some point it was a very nice garden, but now it feels unused and neglected. There are many plant houses for certain species or collections, but they are all locked. The plants are all alive so someone must take care of them, but the public is not allowed in. Maybe we visited at an off time, but I would think that everything would be open year round. It was interesting, though. The canon ball trees, the monkeys (lots of monkeys), and you can access hiking trails to Penang Hill from the gardens. That was it for these weeks. More exciting things to come!
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