Road Trip 2012

  • Family travel,  food,  Malaysia,  Road Trip 2012,  Terengganu

    Road Trip – Day 3

    Sadly, my husband and I have to cut short our road trip as he has a very important work to attend to. Work is priority. We will resume the trip next month, continuing from where we left off.

    So, at the end of Day 2, we put up a night at T’ Lodge, a newly opened lodge. It has operated for just 5 days. Promotional rates for Standard room is RM80 (normal rate is RM100) and Deluxe RM100 (normal is RM120). We took the latter. The room is quite spacious. Sorry no photo because I only thought about it the next day, when the room was in mess! But funny thing is, I did not forget to capture the scene from the balcony.

    T’Lodge is situated near the bus station in the heart of Kuala Besut. A walking distance to the Jeti to Pulau Perhentian. I slept around 4am to edit my Day 1 entry. Woke up around 9am and my son has already been pestering about getting a fishing rod. He developed this new hobby from his uncle.

    A happy boy with his very own fishing rod.

    We had a good breakfast at C Putera Café, situated just beside the lodge. Food was great but the service was too slow. I had hard time making the waitress understand, in pure Bahasa Melayu, what I want. One must speak fluent bahasa ‘Ganu’ it seems. After talking like a teacher to a kindergarten student, she finally understands. Hah. We got our breakfast after waiting for about 45 minutes although we were the first one to order! Lucky, the food was great. I hope they will improve over time.

    After breakfast, we headed to Pantai Bukit Keluang to let Yassin tests his fishing rod.

    While letting son and dad, doing their own thing, I observed rocks formation along the left side of the beach. It has few caves opening.

        

    Click to see larger photos

    The rocks consist of small rounded stones held together by clay and sand. I dig some information on the Internet and found that these rocks are cretaceous sediments, in other word, Jurassic. It is dated back some 200 years ago! According to an article by the Department of Geology UKM, the rock units consist mainly of conglomerate at their base, gradually fining and thinning upwards into sandstone and shale.

    While Pantai Bukit Kluang is ONE good tourism attraction, there are things that should be taken into consideration; from local authority right down to the public.

    One, the walkway should be restored. Unless the local authority wants it  to be part of the cretaceous sediment some 200 years in future, then it’s fine.

     

    Two, keep such eye-sore views like these (see below photos) away! Oh please! I saw litter bins all over the beach but how come some people were just plain ignorant, they did not want to walk to the bins.

    Being a mother is not a an excuse to leave diaper everywhere you like.

    One can walk to the stall and buy a drink but cannot walk to find a litter bin.

    My heart is in pain. This is not what I want to see along this road trip. I talked about it with my husband and we both agree that an all-time HUGE nationwide campaign should be set-up to curb this problem or habit or norm to some people. Educating the public should be first on the list.

    After few hours spent here, we drove along the coastal of Terengganu. We made stops at Setiu, Merang and Marang before making that long journey back to KL. Total mileage we made from KL Day 1 back to KL Day 3 is 1445km. From Kuala Besut we travelled on Route T3, T1, 3685, T100, 3, T119, 3, T6, T131, back to 3 and finally E8.

    Sea eagle.

    Rapunzel cloud! Look at the long ‘hair’!

    Somewhere in Setiu.

    Somewhere in Merang. Credit to my husband for taking this photo. That was me and my son sleeping under the shade haha.

     

    Marang.

     

  • Family travel,  Malaysia,  Perak,  Road Trip 2012

    Road trip 2012 – Day 2

    The breath of fresh air and the smell of trees and paddy is amazing. My son wakes up early to go fishing with his uncle. So far he got a little fish and is so proud of it.

    I wanted to capture photos of the little fish but leeches got in the way! More than five of them! Bloodsuckers!

    I am going to go packing now and buy some breakfast. Leaving around 10am.

    ———————–

    It is 10.10am now as we are leaving Pendang. Now on Route K151, on the way to Sungai Tiang (K17) passing by Kg. Belukar Luas and Kampung Baru. I notice that houses here are mostly brick houses; some semi-wooden. Very hard to find real wooden Malay house. This is mainly because bricks are most cost-effective. As much as I love to see more wooden houses, I guess it is better to leave it that way. Now we don’t want to chop off those trees, do we? We need to save the trees. Read the effort of PEKA about curbing destruction of natural resources, mostly trees.

    At a junction to Kg. Baru

    From K17, we took K153 passing by Kg. Kuala Berok and Kg Kuala Ruman among others. We later took K10 passing by Jeniang.

    Somewhere in Jeniang.

    From Jeniang, we took K15 until we reached Kg. Mengkuang. From there we took route K173 and later A173 (Jalan Baling-Gerik) leading to Grik, Perak.

    Route K173, 11.25pm.

     

    Route A173, 12pm.

     And from A173 we just go straight ahead on Route 4 (Jalan Grik-Pasir Puteh) passing by Lake Temenggor.Here are some photos from the route:

    We stopped at Pulau Banding at 12.56pm. It’s lunch time!

     

    After lunch, we just drove on Route 4 until R&R Titiwangsa to take pictures on Titiwangsa Range.

    We later drove without stopping until we reached Kuala Besut. Routes taken after Route 4 are D20 and D7. We stopped by Pantai Bukit Keluang to let Yassin has his dip. We put up a night here at a newly opened lodge, T’Lodge.

     

     

    Blogging live from my phone – Jan 22, 2012. -Emila

    Edited off-mobile – Jan 23, 2012

  • Family travel,  Malaysia,  Perak,  Road Trip 2012

    Road Trip 2012 – Day 1

    Hello world! I am on a road trip along with my husband and son. My first destination is Pendang because that’s where my mother is. Started the journey as early as 5am.
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    I took the advice of the Travel Time Advisory Schedule to travel before noon on North-South Expressway (E1). I thought I was smart to travel before dawn. I was wrong. Everybody seems to choose to travel before dawn, making a huge traffic jam very early in the morning.

    Expressway versus trunk road

    My husband decided to take the exit at Tanjung Malim (Exit 121) and drive along trunk road (Federal Route 1) to avoid further jam. We don’t mind the long and winding road. The sight is better than the expressway. Not a scene of drivers overtaking one another in dangerous ways. I feel safe traveling on trunk road than expressway.

    The first stop we took was at R&R Temoh, located somewhere between Kampar and Tapah, around 10am. Yassin had  to take his morning shower and we put in RM1 in a container as per instruction note  glued on it. Facilities here include toilet, shower, surau and food outlets. While taking our breakfast, my eyes wandered around. Saw some interesting subjects to photograph. Took my camera out and snap.

    Can you do bird-watching on the expressway? No. Take the trunk road. You will even see chicken cross the road.

    We continued our journey and reached Gopeng in about half an hour. I asked my husband to stop for a while as I want to photograph some windows to add to my Windows Collection on Flickr.

    Clock tower and windows of Gopeng (Gopeng-hagen, as my husband put it. Haha)

    We drove on further slowly and saw Gua Tempurung sign. As it is just 5km away, we decided to drop by. Gopeng is also well-known for s such as the Gua Tempurung, located approximately 5 km from the town centre. Gua Tempurung is a well-known limestone caves in Gopeng and the longest cave in Peninsula Malaysia. Part of it has been developed as a show cave with electric lighting and walkways and there are a range of tours of different lengths and difficulty. Knowing that I am not that fit, my husband bought tickets for the shortest tour. Haha.

    Tickets are very cheap; RM6 for an adult and RM2.50 for children. The tour we took was Tour 1: Golden Flowstone. Tour is about 40 minutes and starts every half an hours from 9am to 4pm.

    I was pretty impressive with a speleotherm that looks like ‘Monalisa’ (right bottom).

    Gua Tempurung (Tempurung Cave) existed since early 8000 B.C. The cave measures 1.9 km in length and 120 metres in height and situated inside Gunung Tempurung that stands 497 meters high.The mountain is an erosional remnant near an ancient coastline. Years of mineralisation of the limestone rocks yielded deposits of tin, with some tungsten minerals and other minor ores. For more information about the cave and tour, visit Gua Tempurung website.

    After Gua Tempurung ,we drove 20km more to reach Ipoh. My husband wanted to find his favourite Nasi Kandar spot he used to visit years ago. But it wasn’t there anymore. We just drove around Ipoh looking for another Nasi Kandar. But could not find any on the route we were on.

    Ipoh town.

    We just took an exit back to E1, did not stop at any R&R as they were visibly full all the time. It’s school holiday, what do you expect. But thankfully, the E1 was less congested. We reached Pendang at 4pm. Spending the night here catching up with my mother.

    We’ll be taking route K153, K17, K10, K15, K154, Federal Route 67, K171, K173 and Federal Route 4 (the West-East Highway connecting Grik, Jeli and Pasir Puteh).

    Good night, everybody. Till tomorrow.

    ~Emila, Pendang | 2259hrs