The drive just outside KL, approaching Taman Negara exit (the jungle we are going to this week) and on our way to Kuantan, which is the halfway point between KL and Merang.
This was the delicious pool at the Sutra Beach Hotel in Merang. After the crazy long car ride, we all could not wait to dive in.
Our lovely room and mini verandah right on the South China Sea.
Hannah ready for bed...but not really ready for bed.
Phrase of the Day: Mana perjabat Post? (Where is the Post Office?)
With the help of Anton’s GPS, we do perhaps one too many roundabouts on the tangled highway-and-overpass maze of KL and head for Kuala Terengganu via Kuantan. Actually, we are heading to a tiny place just past KT called Merang. Not Marang; that’s just before KT. Merang is where we have booked a special treat hotel for our family before we head off via boat the following morning to Redang Island, paradise of all paradises we are told.
With our gastronomically excessive lunch in tow, we head out on some crazy curved highway, past the Genting (pronounced ‘gunting’) Highlands. We realize, after a short while, that we should have given Jordan some gravol for his carsickness. The road is one crazy winding road up mountains and down mountains (hence the term ‘highlands’), and we are keeping pace with the rest of the traffic at 120kph. So we pull over by a lemang stand (lemung is glutinous rice with coconut milk cooked inside a bamboo stick) and load him up. Ali then excitedly suggests we should grab some lemung, that it’s a yummy local delicacy. He seems to have completely forgotten the quantity of food we already have with us. Let’s stick to getting some gravol in Jordan, I politely suggest.
We head back out and pass some of the most beautiful mountains and jungle you can imagine. Speed limit is 110kph, and although most traffic surpasses that limit, we do occasionally pass tiny rickety trucks – that look like mini army jeeps – filled with durian or bananas or watermelon along the way.
We eventually stop at a roadside rest area for our picnic lunch. The roadside rest area is beautiful, with incredible greenery: flowering bushes, tropical plants and lovely shelters. The kids discover this really neat tiny plant amid the grass that, when you touch it, retracts all the ‘petals’ of its leaves as a means of protection. (Hannah later discovers the same plants outside our chalet on Rendang and spends close to an hour, in her own world, “shutting” them all down).
Off we head, and shortly after passing Kuantan (a city halfway up the coast), we run out of highway and are now on a much smaller road. Think the road to Rupert, except with foodstalls, shops and gas stations on either side, and an average traffic speed of 100kph. Oh, and motorcycles travelling in the opposite direction on the dirt on your side of the road. Oh my God. To add to the lethal cocktail, everyone is constantly passing, because it is a single-lane road, and who wants to be stuck behind yet another rickety durian truck? In no time at all, Ali gets into the swing of it all and soon we too are doing a respectable job of keeping up with the locals and passing at the slightest possible opportunity. I was wide awake at this point, as you can imagine. Despite our kamikaze spirit, it takes us forever to get there. We left home at 9:30 and pull in to Merang (after a slight detour in KT looking for a bank machine for cash, which I found, and a Post Office for stamps, which I never found) about 5:30 to the most stunning beach hotel ever (photos coming soon to a theatre near you.) We check into our connecting rooms (they will not allow us one room only), open the massive glass doors, oooh and ahhh at the ocean front... and then race to the massive pool which dribbles over a wall metres from the South China Sea, to relax and cool off before having a deliciously late dinner. (We had the sushi and wine on our room’s deck, practically on top of the ocean, first).
Did I say deliciously late dinner? I meant late dinner. Skip the delicious part. We order various items, and mine arrives first. It is a crab and avocado salad – sounded good – and I dig in with a big mouthful and swallow. The crab is warm, wet and bad. No, it’s not bad, it is VILE. I get up and spit it out over the edge of the restaurant platform (outdoor restaurant). Not one to normally be put off food so easily, I am totally put off this, and feeling quite disgusting. Hannah’s “chicken chop”, which was supposed to come with a bbq sauce, comes with an odd-looking tartar sauce. I immediately tell her not to touch it. Ali’s oxtail soup is not tasting so great either. And Taz’s pineapple garnish is shall we say, effervescent. I end up leaving and eating nothing. The rest of the family finish up, but not before Ali gives them a piece of his mind, in rapid Bahasa Malaysian fire, ending with something along the lines of “your chef is obviously asleep”. So, expensive fancy place...but no restaurant turnover, as far as we can see, and hence a rather scary kitchen scene. (Actually, I don’t even want to imagine the kitchen scene.)
We do have a fantastic night’s sleep, however, thanks to the sound of the massive waves, only feet from our front deck. We head back to the restaurant for breakfast and have some sort of food. I decide to play it safe and stick to a Malaysian classic: rice, ikan bilis (tiny fried crispy fish) and boiled egg. I peel what turns out to be a completely raw egg, spilling it all over my rice and fish. The eggs were sitting in a steam table filled with dry rice, the way you might have oysters-on-the-half-shell sitting in coarse salt. However, given the ridiculously indecisive passivity (is that even a word?) of the female servers here, no one bothered to tell me that the eggs had only just been put out and were not cooked yet, DESPITE the fact that there were 4 of them hovering (shyly) behind me. Doing nothing except smiling demurely. What the?!.
Oh well, we have to catch our boat at 9am anyway, so off we shoot to the jetty, a five-minute drive away.
No comments:
Post a Comment