Dangerous Dave's Dlog

For the duration of the stay in Malaysia, most days involved a swim in the pool. The sun was very hot, and the air was very humid.

We visited the local markets, where many people buy their fresh produce, meat and fish. Oddly, the market consisted of about 1/3 cellphone shops. Seriously, they were everywhere. I have no idea how they all stay in business. The markets are also full of counterfeit clothes, DVDs, games, and shoes. Pretty much what I expected, but still a shock to see. We bought some crabs, and some of each fruit we didn't recognise, and had those for tea. We tried some durian, supposedly "tastes like heaven, smells like hell". In fact, all hotels ban durian because of the smell it leaves in the rooms. It's small is similar to that of gas (as in natural gas, and not the actual small of gas since it's odourless, rather it smells like the smell they add to gas so you can smell gas leaks. Maybe they add durian smell to natural gas?).

I have no idea how common this is, but in Malaysia, McDonald's delivers 24 hours, no minimum order. They may even do this in some of the big NZ cities, but not where I live. Naturally, I wanted to give it a try. So I called up the call center and after spending 10 or 15 minutes repeating the same things over and over, as the guy struggles to get my accent ("Dave, D, A, V, E" "D, E, V, E" "No A, as in apple" "D, A, V, A" "No, D, A as in apple, V, E as in Egg" "A as in Egg?" "No E, as in, uh, elephant"). And that was just my name. When we got to the address, I was greeted with the words "Sorry sir, deliveries in your suburb are only until 11pm" (it was 1am). So I never actually got McDonald's delivered. But then we drove down to the store, and there were big "We deliver 24 hours" signs on the doors. We asked and were told the same story, not after 11. English was too much of a rarity to have an argument about it.

The next day we drove across to the South China Sea, at Mersing. Mersing was the kind of place that could be a thriving tourist destination, but the beach is littered with trash and the whole place is generally run down. As a result, the tourists travel to Mersing only to catch a ferry to one of the islands in the area. We would have gone for a swim, but the beach didn't look too inviting.

The next day we caught the bus across to Singapore. Because Singapore hotels were fully booked out mostly because of the canceled flights to Europe, we spent the next few days traveling back and forth across the bridge, staying in Malaysia but spending the day in Singapore. About an hours journey, including customs and immigration. More on that in the next post.

-Dave