The ATM at the Edge of the Jungle

---

I decide to have a peek at some other travel blogs to find out what others write about. One fellow blogger calls himself "His Dudeness". When I first start reading one of his entries there were lots of mentions of GPs, and I assumed he was a doctor. But no, His Dudeness, who comes from the Netherlands, isn’t a doctor at all, and his connection with the medical world is that he funds his trips by participating in drug trials. He goes into a lot of detail about the side effects, none of which sound pleasant. He says that he's just finished a trial involving being dosed with a new antibiotic intravenously, twice a day, for an hour at a time, for eleven days in a row. He describes the side effects as including heart palpitations, nausea and dizziness, but he says that the worst was the aching in his arms from the drip. He says that all the volunteers had to change arms every couple of days because their veins became sore and unusable. He describes the aching as excruciating and says that it went right down his arms and up into his chest, and everyone in the group had the same problem.

Getting yourself injected with experimental drugs strikes me as a slightly unusual way of going about funding your travels, and I start to wonder how many other travellers do this. I haven’t noticed a lot of needle marks in the arms of any fellow tourists recently, but then again I haven’t really been looking all that closely. I wonder if there’s a limit to the number of drug trials they let you participate in before your body gets so souped up with exotic chemicals that they all start interacting with each other and no one can tell what works and what doesn’t. I wonder why they’d inject you with an antibiotic if you didn’t have anything wrong with you, and how they'd know if it had worked or not if you weren’t sick in the first place. One other thing that strikes me about His Dudeness’ post is that it doesn’t actually have much to do with travel. I fund our travel by going to work every day at an office in the city, but I don’t think anyone'd be too interested in reading anything that I wrote about that. Then again His Dudeness’ post has had 145 views, which is a whole lot more than any of ours have had, so maybe I need to rethink things. I wonder if more people read your posts if you use the word "drug" in them.

We’ve just about run out of Malaysian cash. We can charge food and activities at the resort to our room account, but the nice cheap restaurant that we went to outside the gates yesterday only takes cash, and I’m pretty sure the man at the rustic shack in the palm trees behind the amazing beach we went to yesterday wouldn’t be too interested if I gave him my Visa card to pay for a coconut. We Google ATMs on the island, and are a bit surprised to see that the Google machine thinks that there is one (and only one), and it’s in the small village near the resort. Google Maps shows it as being on a very small side street right at the edge of the village, on a small plot of land between the street and the edge of the jungle. We take careful note of the directions and set off.

The village is very rustic. It seems to have a lot more goats than people, and they seem to be doing a very effective job of chewing their way through the local garbage. Issy tries to pat one of them but they don’t seem to be all that friendly. I thought goats were too stupid to be unfriendly, a bit like sheep. The village seems to be getting progressively more rustic as we get further away from the "main road" (that description's probably overstating the case just a tad) and closer to the ATM. We see a small shop that looks like it sells groceries. It’s not where Google Maps says the ATM is, but there's nothing else around that looks even vaguely like a bank or an ATM, so we go in. We struggle to get the young shopkeeper to understand what we're looking for. Amazingly there’s a credit card machine on the counter. We eventually work out that we can buy things here using a card, but only if it's from a specific Malaysian bank, and shopkeeper girl's not too interested in our Aussie plastic. We ask her if there's a bank in the village, but it seems there isn't. We walk to the spot where the ATM's supposed to be, but there's nothing there at all, not even a building; just a small patch of grass between the edge of the bitumen and thick jungle.

We head back towards the resort through the village, which is now starting to look increasingly like a zoo - monkeys charging back and forth along the power lines, and a couple of large monitor lizards darting off into the jungle past some of the goats. I thought that monitor lizards were harmless, but it seems that not everyone shares this view. We watch on as two young Asian ladies try to scramble up the nearest tree to get away from them.

We head into the restaurant outside the resort’s gates to see if anyone can point us to an ATM. They tell us what we’d always feared - there are no ATMs at all on the island. So it seems we'll be spending most of the rest of our time here in the resort. My faith in Google Maps is now shattered.

We settle in for the afternoon on some sun lounges on the beach. I swim out to a pontoon where the water's deep and I think I can see a coral reef and some small colourful fish through the waves. It took me a long time to get out here, and I'm now thinking that perhaps I should have taken Issy‘s advice and brought a pair of goggles.

We decide to eat somewhere different tonight so we head to the "fine dining" restaurant next to the beach. I’ve noticed that resorts only seem to have fine dining options when they’ve also got other eateries, which they presumably regard as providing lower class food for their less discerning patrons. The menu is predominantly Italian and very expensive. The setting's very nice, but Issy isn’t all that crazy about Italian food and I think I preferred the selection at the restaurant we've been to the two previous nights. It all feels very posh. A singer and guitarist turn up to serenade us, which always makes us feel uncomfortable. They ask us to choose a song. The poshness of the place suggests we should probably go with Beethoven’s Fifth, but as usually happens we revert to our default position of letting the musicians choose.

---

Photos

The ATM
This is where Google Maps said the ATM was.