May 29th, 2007 by Farmer Dave
Milo, Markets, Mobile Phones and More Festivals than Melbourne- .oh and a kid Madonna would bitchslap Angelina for
Leaving Malacca turned out to be quite the epic. Firstly I bore witness to the best buffet breakfast ever assembled in the history of a morning meal. My goodness, whatever you wanted,it was there - 8 kinds of eggs..yes 8, beef bacon (for the pork haters), and an entire Japanese section (I left that alone), typical intravenous Western fry everything section, fruits cereals yoghurts etc etc etc section, pancake - n- waffle section, then the Malay section, the Indian north and south section, and of course the extensive Chinese food area (needless to say- I stayed well clear of anything resembling Rowdy and chooks bits other than between the neck and thigh).Maybe the reasonI had to return some undies- I bought at a department store the other day and go for the extra large had less to do with me being a giant compared to these locals and more to do with my love of all thing "put-in-mouth-able".
I mean we were hooning past Maccas late last night and all the hijab-wearing staff had Shrek ears on so, I had to try their green everything meal, it was gooood, as well as a hotdog snack at the bus terminal, it tasted Rowdy-ish but, I did finish it which is a bad sign. Back to the epic of leaving Malacca, other then my trying to eat the joint out of food, we were running a little late for the bus due to my insatiable appetite for all the markets of Malacca. Luckily we spied a trishaw, which is a flash name for a bicycle with a seat stuck on the side. Most of the trishaws in Malacca were over the top Rio Carnivale affairs, but this one even had twine and sticks keeping it together so we decided to give him our custom.
The old bugger turned out to be 64 and putting his high school aged kids through school.. I was more concerned about him having a coronary on the pedals.Finally we caught the bus back to KL, as it appeared we had just missed the direct bus to Cameron Highlands. It was rather fortuitous because not only did we have the delight of one of the world's cutest kids (hope Angelina isn't reading this otherwise that critter is marked) but also the cover of darkness when the world's most insane bus driver hurtled us up cliffs and gorges to 6000ft in the driving rain.The only other thing keeping our minds off our impending deaths, via a drop off the edge of the narrow road into the forests below, was the constant blaring of mobile phones.
Back home it's of the utmost importance to have a discrete ringtone and answer it as soon as possible. Here it's the opposite, rap on steroids is a favourite, and usually you get to the bit in the track where you Mother %#^@ing B*&%% get your $#%@ing . gets announced, which is a cracker considering the owner is a demure lady in her hijab with her 4 grandkids next to her!!
We reached the summit of undemarcated height just in time for the mist to set in and give a remarkable view that is typical of alpine heightsnothing but greyish cloud. Not too worry because on the down side we were given some spectacular views of our target destination "Boh Tea Plantation". It was a sight to behold, steep mountain slope after steep mountain slope ofvarying shades of green tea carpet. In our haste to get to the plantation and run like Julie Andrews up the slopes, we headed off on one of my famous "shortcuts", which actually brought us through some extremely interesting terraced farming communities, with their patchwork of vegies and crops.
Long story short, we survived that and several more "shortcuts", which I won't elaborate on, 'cause my mum reads these andI don't want her fretting, especially seeing as though I will be out of contact in Vietnam for a while.