23. A change of Direction
We left Taiping well before first light to try and beat the heat and headed towards the coast again. By 9am we had covered 50km (ok 49.8km but if it hadn’t been for that last few hundred meters of gravel….) and my shirt was so wet I could wring the sweat out of it. I wonder if our water filter can recycle that??? 
We’d made really good time and wound our way through lots of little lanes on a pretty route. The last section however was on the main road, which wasn’t too busy but with our trusty flag sticking out we had no problems with traffic. Eventually we turned off...
22. Muggy Malaysia
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...
Read More21. The sun never sets on the (old) British Empire.
Always a picturesque start to the day We had a couple of nice days cycling through quiet lanes and tracks on our route south before emerging into Butterworth – a very odd name for a town in Malaysia. The ex RAF Butterworth is on the opposite side of the water to George Town, the old heart of the British Empire here and we cycled through the old RAF base, now with a RAAF contingent stationed here alongside the Malaysian Airforce, to catch the ferry to Penang Island. The ferry used to take cars and there’s a dual carriageway on ramps looping out over the water to get you to the...
Read More20. The Other Side
Hello Malaysia We cleared immigration into Malaysia easily, it being the best organised border crossings we’ve done. We could even remain with Tilly for all the formalities instead of having to leave her outside. The only odd thing was the Malaysian Muslim officers spent about 30 seconds looking Linda up and down and comparing her online declaration with her passport and just glanced at me and mine! It’s Ramadan here so we have to try to eat discreetly during the day apparently. So we found a Chinese temple and plonked ourselves down on a bench and had lunch whilst deciding...
Read More19. Man overboard…
We’d been told that the national park south of us wasn’t even a hill by some fellow tandemers, who shall remain nameless, so after a lovely couple of days relaxing for my Birthday, we merrily tried to cycle up an 18% “not-a-hill” and did what a Corporation would call, “an involuntary dismount” or as a football crowd would much more honestly chant “He fell over!” We were fine going down the not-a-hill before the up bit, but that was too steep, too soon and I failed to get the right gear quickly enough and we went over sideways and missed the...
Read More18. Hot hot hot
We’ve been quite lucky with the weather so far, almost no rain, just the one 10 minute deluge and we’ve generally managed to finish cycling before it got hot hot. Hot is fine but hot hot is not! But the last few days it been getting up to the mid 30’s and with the humidity that’s hot hot. We’ve also arrived at a part of the coast where there are few hotels and no tourists. The beaches are full of washed up debris of palm leaves and plastic and not very nice and the whole area is nice to cycle through but very undeveloped and poor. Beach debris The...
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