We’d had a lovely hotel suite in George Town, complete with a seperate lounge and had thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, but from about lunchtime onwards it was just too hot to go out and we ended up using our air conditioned lounge a lot!
Much of the city slows down around the hottest part of the day, but even come the evening we preferred to sit inside an a/c restaurant than on the pavement as many tourists did. You just got a soaking t shirt if you stay outside and we have that enough cycling thank you very much!
This had set us off on one of our many talk-ourselves-into/out of-something moments.
We are always happy with the decisions we make on where to go, stay, routes etc, but sometimes we get a bit obsessed with a problem and end up going round the houses a few times, eventually carrying on with our original decision and then wondering why we’d made such a fuss in the first place!
The heat was one of these. Was it now too hot to carry on? We can cycle in it, yes, but it’s unpleasant and you’re soaked from about 2 minutes into the ride and then thirsty for the next 3 months. Seriously, I drink a litre of water then immediately think, what can I drink next. Rinse and repeat… No need to even wash your t shirt though, just sprinkle some soap on it before you set off… Edit: I’ve been reliably informed by someone not a million miles away that that doesn’t cut the mustard. Oh well, back to washing it daily in the shower…
Anyway, back to the heat. It’s been positively unpleasant with a very high humidity and temperature and we had almost convinced ourselves to bail out there and fly home. Until we said “But it’ll be minus 20C at home and we’ll soon wish we hadn’t left the steam room of Malaysia!” So we plodded on.
So leaving George Town we were up at 6am and the weather forecast was for an inch of rain between 6 and 10…. We set off from the hotel down to the ferry and being a Sunday morning the roads were very quiet as was the ferry. However, we got accosted by a JW on the boat who was mute and communicated by signs and writing. I think he was trying to convert our heathen ways, shaking his head in despair at us, but we had a nice sort of chat and leaving the ferry set off through Butterworth to continue our journey south.
It was a very easy quiet route and wound our way though lanes and bigger roads and a new town development that looked like it came straight out of the Netherlands. Very stylish.
Naturally we didn’t have any rain and the clouds hung about all day making this our first hatless/no sunscreen cycle of the tour. We had planned a short ride to beat the heat and could actually have gone on a lot further had we known it would be so cloudy. Oh well..should have learnt by now not to take any notice of weather forecasts..
We’d decided to make more effort to route ourselves via more decent looking hotels as we’d so far had some very poor ones in Malaysia. It’s odd that it’s richer than Thailand, but the roads, hotels and shops are all much less inviting and pleasant.
The weather forecast was now showing it allegedly was going to be cloudy for a while, which we really didn’t mind at all! So we were now feeling glad we hadn’t bailed out and had carried on.
Our next stop was Taiping, a city created by an agreement between the British and the Chinese and Locals who were fighting each other. It means Great Peace and it’s got lots of old Colonial buildings, some of which have almost totally collapsed and others that have been renovated and look amazing. There’s loads of old British telephone boxes too. It must have been like being back in Europe when it was first built. Even the railway bridge looked straight out of Harry Potter.
We’d had a gorgeous cycle to get there, tiny lanes through fields and by canals with hardly a car anywhere as the mountains got closer and closer and the temperature crept up above 40C in a cloudless sky. (Weather forecast got that one wrong again)
Arriving in Taiping our first stop was at the Coffee Museum where they make their own coffee from the raw beans on the same site as the Chinese family who started the business when the town was built. It was lovely coffee and they obviously felt sorry for the dripping tourists as they gave us some free coffee flavoured toast, which was actually very nice!
We then cycled around the town seeing all the old Colonial buildings and the historical murals painted in many places, which were really good but by the time we arrived at our hotel we were exhausted and Linda was desperate to get in the shower and stay there for the afternoon.
These days you don’t walk up to the reception desk and give them some money and they give you a key and 30 seconds later you are in the shower. As I’m sure you all recognise from personal experience, you need to have your passport photocopied, pay the local tourist tax, ask the receptionist to give you the right change as they charged you double, fill in the no Durian or Smoking in the room form, sign the terms, wait for about 5 minutes whilst he types his life story into the computer, have the keys coded, let him write the room number on two slips of paper then rummage around in a draw and find a sleeve, then insert the cards, slowly fold the card over, double check the computer to see if it has suddenly changed it’s mind and finally he gives you the card, explains everything very slowly and then slips in “the bar is closed until 4pm.” Ouch.
Once that was done we were invited to cycle Tilly up to the 6th floor car park.
This didn’t go down well with Linda and frankly she was now getting a little fraught. She once nearly got arrested in a Spanish hotel and I recognised once again I needed to whip out my blue beret and calm her down or the poor receptionist was likely to get his key cards and Durian forms shoved where the sun doesn’t shine….
We asked if we could bring Tilly inside and a quick look at a Yarmouth woman about to go super nova and a quick chat with someone else who advised discretion was the better part of valour and we wheeled Tilly into the service corridor where she could be safety kept during our stay, and at last got to our room and drank everything in site!
But this wasn’t the end of the Fawlty Towers of Taiping saga which continued the next day when our key cards didn’t work.
We’d had a very nice morning, having extended our stay to see the Public Park which the town is famous for built over an old tin mine. We’d first got a taxi to the Commonwealth War Cemetery which was as usual immaculately kept and quite moving, with two graveyards, one for Christians and one for the rest, before walking back to our hotel via the first Anglican Church in Malaysia, the old officers mess and other grand colonial buildings built in a cross between British and local architecture and then lastly a wander through the gorgeous landscaped park.
It had been a relatively cool morning, but by now the sun had won the battle against the cloud and the temperature skyrocketed so we had decided to go back to the hotel to enjoy the pool and a lazy afternoon with our wonderful mountain view..
So, finding our keys not working when we got back we returned to check in, did the obligatory queue for 10 minutes whilst someone else checked in, had our card rekeyed and returned again to our room.
By now one of the lifts wasn’t working and a conference party had turned up so the lifts were crammed full and being a modern computer controlled hotel the lift would only accept 2 of the 12 floors at a time. So there was a game of Jenga whilst everyone kept shuffling round the lift, swiping their key card and pressing their floor, which then illuminated just long enough to step away to let someone else do their floor before the light went out again.
We did eventually reach the lobby having done 230 steps in a lift and learnt a new dance routine. Nice little work out…The queue for check-in was now about 3 days long and food and water parcels were being handed out by the red cross, so I asked the concierge to see the manager who said she would get our keys sorted and send them up. In the meantime time she despatched the concierge to go with us to let us into our room.
Repeating the lift shuffle we reached our room and naturally the concierge also couldn’t get into our room as he thought we had the keys. His haircut was all razor edging and shadows, definitely the smartest part of him…
He then said we needed to go back to reception to get a new key, which we declined and said we’d sit on the floor and wait while he did that for us, eventually returning with a new key… that didn’t work… so again he disappeared, this time coming back with tools to remove the lock and new batteries, which solved the problem..and finally after two and a half hours of all this we managed to get in at 14:30 by which time the heavens had opened and we could hardly see out of the window, let alone our wonderful view. It turned into one of the worst storms we’ve ever seen, lasting for the rest of the day and leaving the hotel swimming pool out of bounds for the remainder of our stay because of the “inclement weather”.
Think we’ll just give up on weather forecasts completely…
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