Training Log Archive: blairtrewinIn the 1 days ending Nov 14, 2019: |
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Thursday Nov 14, 2019 #
Note
(rest day)
Very early start today - getting a 7.30 train out of Butterworth so needed to leave the hotel at 6.15 to get the boat across to the mainland. Breakfast was somewhat improvised - I'd hoped to pick up something at the station but no-one seems to have yet worked out that if one of the main train departures of the day is at 7.30 then there's money to be made by selling food and drink before 7.30 (a bit of a surprise in what's a fairly entrepreneurial part of the world).
The day's sequence was train to Kuala Lumpur Sentral, then a local train to the bus station, then bus to Melaka. Those parts all went reasonably smoothly, and the bus even slowed down when we hit a downpour. (Malaysia seems to have an incredible number of long-distance buses - considerably more than it has passengers to fill them by the look of it). Saw a lot of palm oil plantations - at least in peninsular Malaysia they're no longer clearing rainforests to plant them (the Malaysian companies are clearing Indonesian rainforests instead). These are mostly quite clear underneath and I imagine form the basis of most Malaysian orienteering maps, although of the ones I saw, many were dead flat (and often swampy) and the non-flat ones were covered with contour ditches.
The most awkward bit of the trip was the last - from the Melaka bus station to the centre of town (about 5km). Since I was disinclined to do business with the taxi touts (who are reputedly the worst in Malaysia and would have charged 2-3 times what I'd paid for my ticket from Kuala Lumpur), I got the local bus instead and thus spent as much time as I did travelling from Kuala Lumpur - it took over an hour for one to turn up.
Melaka's an old port city - at various times, Portuguese, Dutch and British (it ended up becoming British in a swap with a British port in what's now Indonesia). Some interesting buildings as you'd expect with that history, but perhaps the most striking sight was the lavishly decorated trishaws (Hello Kitty seemed to be a fairly common theme).
Eventually got my fix of Penang laksa (a bit more sour than the version you get in Australia) in the food court at KL Sentral station.
The day's sequence was train to Kuala Lumpur Sentral, then a local train to the bus station, then bus to Melaka. Those parts all went reasonably smoothly, and the bus even slowed down when we hit a downpour. (Malaysia seems to have an incredible number of long-distance buses - considerably more than it has passengers to fill them by the look of it). Saw a lot of palm oil plantations - at least in peninsular Malaysia they're no longer clearing rainforests to plant them (the Malaysian companies are clearing Indonesian rainforests instead). These are mostly quite clear underneath and I imagine form the basis of most Malaysian orienteering maps, although of the ones I saw, many were dead flat (and often swampy) and the non-flat ones were covered with contour ditches.
The most awkward bit of the trip was the last - from the Melaka bus station to the centre of town (about 5km). Since I was disinclined to do business with the taxi touts (who are reputedly the worst in Malaysia and would have charged 2-3 times what I'd paid for my ticket from Kuala Lumpur), I got the local bus instead and thus spent as much time as I did travelling from Kuala Lumpur - it took over an hour for one to turn up.
Melaka's an old port city - at various times, Portuguese, Dutch and British (it ended up becoming British in a swap with a British port in what's now Indonesia). Some interesting buildings as you'd expect with that history, but perhaps the most striking sight was the lavishly decorated trishaws (Hello Kitty seemed to be a fairly common theme).
Eventually got my fix of Penang laksa (a bit more sour than the version you get in Australia) in the food court at KL Sentral station.