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Published: August 9th 2007
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Today was our last day in Penang, and seeing as we had decided to do the City tour yesterday and our bus to Kuala Lumpur was at 1.30pm, we made a plan to see if we could manage a whistle stop visit to the Tropical Spice Gardens further up the Island as they were meant to be really nice.This meant getting up nice and early, bags packed and ready to go.
We had another broken night's sleep by various diggers and roadworks right outside our window, and I somehow woke up in the middle of the night and thought I'd shoved my ear-plugs up my nose instead of my ears for some reason (very wierd dreams) and had decided to wake Pea up and tried to snort them out onto her face.She cleared it up for me that they were in fact still in my ears and we went back to sleep. We all managed to drag ourselves out of bed and fumble around getting our stuff together at 7.30am (Pea made a noise at 8am) and we booked a taxi to the spice gardens yippee!
It took us about 35mins to get there and it was a lovely
Tropical spice gardens
Like a tropical rainforest like a tropical rainforest on a sunny day. We just managed to get there in time to book a tour round the gardens with a guide and were introduced to a funny little man called 'Danny' who immediately commented on how young and beautiful we were (wait until you see the pictures, I'd say more haggered).We were sprayed with illuminous green citronella to stop the buggies biting us, although we knew this was a totally pointless task, we set off with a Canadian couple (travel writers...abit like us then!)on our tour,meanwhile Danny is still telling us how pretty we were. He said we all looked about 16 (i like this man), and at this Pea felt she had to shout out 'but Beans really old and not sweet 16 just never been kissed!!!', which prompted Danny to point out a phallic shaped flower and ask if I knew what it looked like, and if I did, I'd definately been kissed. Silence from the Canadian travel writers.I felt less than pretty!More...sweaty I'd say. And bitten already.
Anna's camera was out of memory so I got busy with some snaps straight away. Danny stopped along the path, describing and pointing out
various plants and flowers, and picking them to put in our hair! The tour was really interesting. He told us about the wild spices and what they were used for, and we came to a little clearing where there were buckets of dried spices that we could all smell. I think our favourite was cinnamon. We climbed up a little hill through a mini rainforest and came to a big swing with a net underneath. We all had a go. It was so relaxing! Danny was still saying we were beautiful.The tour took about and hour and a half and it was so beautiful!Lots of amazing smells and fresh green plants. Anna nearly wet herself when we saw another monkey. It wouldn't surprise me that she steals one and we get stopped at customs in Singapore Airport for illegal monkey smuggling. She just wants to have breakfast with them!!!
The tour ended and we were ushered into the gift shop. We bought a few souvenirs for loved ones back home and headed to the most important place...the restaurant and had some lunch. Everyone was happy, but then the heavens opened and it started to pour down, but that was
ok because it made the gardens smell so nice and we had a nice wet walk back down the hill. Waiting for the taxi back, Pea was approached by an dashing stranger (he introduced himself as being 45 and then proceeded to show her pictures on his phone of an 'ugly' girl he had met-get your coat Pea he seems like a catch).
Time to get a taxi back to 'Stardust Motel' (!) and head for the bus to Kuala Lumpur. We got to the bus station and waited for our luxury coach as usual and climbed aboard. Anna and Pea were alseep within seconds-we were all so tired! The aircon on the bus was aggrivating Anna's contact lenses so she popped on her sunglasses and settled down for a kip. Much laughter from myself and Pea as we made her dance like Stevie Wonder behind a keyboard. We stopped off at a dubious truckers convention (asked several times where we were from), took a trip to yet another dive of a toilet and bought 3 cups of sweetcorn. Back on the bus and Stevie Wonder and Pea fell asleep again, while i played slapsies with a cute little
boy sat in from of me! We arrived in Kuala Lumpur at about 8.30pm and fell off the bus into the welcoming arms of a taxi driver who scooped us and our bags up and reccommended a hotel called 'The Star Inn Hotel'. It sounded very nice so we headed to it, welcome of a nice hot shower and a freshen up. Although we had eaten our usual coach-junk-food all the way there we were hungry again as usual we went in search of a nice place to eat, and found a little thai restaurant with a very friendly waiter called David who turned out to have lived in York for 2 years and we had a lovely coversation about the Gallery nightclub and various changes to the city since he was last there!Very random, and he has emailed Pea already with pictures of himself he was so cute!
We were all very knackered and went straight back to the room after tea and collapsed in the room. Alarms were set (pointless for us!) and we all squeezed into the small double bed, measuring how much sheet we all had, and the usual discussion of how cold to have
the aircon. Feeling very old!
The sacred lucky fortune tree
Pea woke up in the night with indegestion, but other than that a fairly decent nights sleep.Ready for shopping the next day!
By Bean - photos to follow. Thanks for reading!!! x x x
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anonymous
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Specsavers...
I think 'Danny' needs to go to specsavers!!! :-)