Travel Notes

Tue Apr 30 04:54:14 2002 (rr) Book: Moon SE Asia Location: Penang all the hotels have 'health centres' or 'fitness clubs'. I wonder what they call the real fitness clubs? gyms, I suppose. our current hotel has huge rooms, with tall ceilings, western saloon swinging doors in front of real doors, bathtub w/ hot water but shower only cold, and a little courtyard downstairs that has an open ceiling so it gets the rain and is a strange sight but cool. British tourists drinking wine near the front entrance. nathan's complaining that many establishments in penang are touristy. I think if this is touristy, wait till thailand. just a hunch. we ate lunch at the touristy Green Planet (wooden furniture, walls, huge notebooks full of traveller's notes (excellent resource) and smoothies). saw Hart's war, combination of WWII and trial/crime drama. Left our Lonely Planet Malaysia there, and it was gone when we went back to look. do have Moon Guide though -- a lot less verbose than LP due to the need to include all of SE asia. Lots of rain and lightning and thunder every afternoon. Hopefully we'll get to visit Penang Hill today before said storms. head out on train for Thailand tomorrow. My first train with a sleeping berth, but our train gets in in the late evening, so it will perhaps be a gentle intro to sleeping on trains. lots of cool sounding places in southern Thailand. I want to do some kayaking there . Probably visit Khao Sok Ntnl Park, maybe I will work out a kayaking trip near Trang if we're lucky, and perhaps a stop at Ko Tao on the eastern coast to do the island thing... reading list -- recently read Middlemarch (excellent!)(G. Eliot), now into Tomcat in Love (Tim O'Brien) very different from The Things they Carried. Nathan's reading Round Ireland in Low Gear (Newby). And as always, extensively reading various guidebooks and last months Ntnl Geographic. Nathan is going through Economist withdrawal, since all the magazine stands here sell three-week old copies. So we read the New Straits Times. Tue Apr 30 04:50:00 2002 (nmcfarl) Book: Moon SE Asia Location: Cameron So before Penang we spent a few days in the Cameron Highlands. These are the mountains in the north central region of penisular malaysia [near ipoh]. It's what the Brits called a hill station, which basically meant a place to go to escape the heat. The tempuratures are in 70's when down here they are in the 90's. There are Tea plantations, which look like miles of hedgerows, and jungle trails, which since it is cool, it's fun to hike. Also while there we tried Steamboat, also lamely called chinese fondue, but really its a communal soup that you cook on your table. It is about as much fun as findue thou. Recomended. Tue Apr 30 04:33:41 2002 (nmcfarl) Book: Moon SE Asia Location: Penang So Penang is a pretty cool place though our first day was not so good. We pulled in after a 6.5 hour bus trip from the Cameron Highlands. We were beat and headed to a 'nice' hotel that our books recommended. We got a good deal but a mildewing grotty room. Bad, not fun. Still we stayed that night 'cause we where very tired. We got out of the room though. Saw a very weird Bruice willis movie ( all that was showing) 'Hart's War', and had sushi at one of though conveyor belt sushi resturants. That was new experience, and as it turns out is much fun. The basic set up is that there is a conveyor belt that circles the room, and you just lift youre sushi from it as it goes by. The plates are color coded so at the end you just tally up the plate of a color and mulitply by the plate cost. What is cool is you see everything go by, It's all impulse buying. The next day we switched to a cheaper but much nicer old hotel with huge rooms, (we inspected before we paid). And then we wandered the streets for hours seeing much of Millionaires lane and china town. This city is very well preserved. Some really cool architecture. Deco/perinakan and everything else including a fort built in 1807. Unfortunatly we are off the Thailand tommorrow. But then again, That should be fun.

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