TravellingStrom

Thursday 21st March

Today was a relax day after 2 days riding. I had no internet yet but I did some basics, like washing, I have not seen a washing machine for ages! Amzah rocked in about 11 as promised and he took me for a drive around town and to a shopping centre. As I was now in a flat, rather than a hotel, I could sort out my own food for a change, so here I bought same basic stuff and we had some lunch at a chook and rice joint. Although, as I had bought a roast chook for later, I had the stewed beef 🙂

Amzah is also a world traveller. But, when he retired from the navy he could not just up and leave his wife and farms for a few years, so he had to split his RTW trip into segments. His next leg is in north America in July, his blogsite is rideabiketravel where you can see he is at the dreaming/planning stage 🙂 This can be fun but I usually find all my planning goes out the window when I hit the road 😉

I ended up finding a phone store here that checked my SIM card and they found that although it was active for internet, it was not activated?? Anyway, a quick push of a few buttons and Bob’s your uncle(well, he’s my cousin actually, but that’s beside the point 😉 ). But, I have 3G and internet connection 🙂 Once we got back to the flat I soon had the iPhone connected to the laptop and started to do some blog updates and check mail etc.

Late afternoon I found myself inside while an extremely noisy storm raged outside. This was serious tropic weather and I found out that because of all the tin mines that are in the area, the number of lightning strikes were tremendous!!! I was expecting a bolt to come through the roof at any time, they were right overhead with absolutely no delay between flash and bang!!! But, I survived 🙂

The storm raged for about an hour before settling into just torrential rain for another few hours. I was fine, I had beer and food, I had internet and an aircon room, happy as 🙂

I had a very late night. I had no plans for going anywhere tomorrow either. There was a Canadian rider in KL who was maybe going to turn up, and Amzah was busy that day also, and so as he wanted to come for a ride with me, we planned on the following day, a Saturday excursion to the Cameron Highlands.

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Friday 22nd March

Today was a relaxing day, getting some more blog posts done, I was so far behind again 😉 With that and doing some study on the route we would use tomorrow took some time anyway. I was also amazed by the number of Geocaches in the area! There were about 15 just in the local area, but after careful study I realised they were all in caves or near caves and from the log attempts, quite a few have gone missing and they all involve hiking. This is not the weather for hiking as once again today another storm unleashed its fury. But, it was a short and quick one, which gave me a chance to wade across the paddock to the local shop to buy some ice. Can you guess what this bus is used for? This is today’s language quiz 🙂

And the reason for the ice was?

Yep, a few beers and a rum or two as well, but not many as tomorrow was ride day and Amzah was coming here at 07.30!!!! Now, do you remember this picture I posted the other day?

It was a whole plantation of tall sticks and I wondered what they were and why they were like that. Well, lucky for me Amzah knows the answer. They are palm trees obviously, but they have been poisoned, on purpose. It seems these particular trees used for the production of palm oil, have a productive lifespan of 25 years, after that they start to get less fruit and are too tall by then anyway. So they inject the trunk with a poison that actually rots the tree from the top down. Over a period of time it will slowly dissolve and not fall over causing problems. The down side of this is it is a wasted resource. It can be time consuming to chop them all down, but if they are chopped down, then the remains can be shredded for mulch and fertiliser., so there you go 🙂

Cheers from Batu Gajah
TravellingStrom