Adventures By Design

In which the travelers bask in the coolness

As we were waking up this morning we kept hearing what sounded like a fire-alarm bell. The first time it went off around 7:30 both us were about to run for our lives when suddenly it stopped again after only a few seconds. Huh, whatever, back to sleep. It went off a few more times but we ignored it. When we finally dragged ourselves out of bed around 9:30 or 10:00 there was no alarm bell, but there was the sound of many children yelling and playing. It seems that our hotel is right up the hill from a primary school and the ‘fire-alarm’ was actually the school bell. We guess that it’ll happen every morning here, but now that we know what is it, the bell shouldn’t be so alarming (tee hee, bad pun).

Ric decided to take a shower before breakfast, and Gin wished him luck (see yesterday for info about the shower). However, this morning the water pressure and temperature were great so maybe we won’t have to find a new hotel after all.

After breakfast we fired up the Eee PC to try to make contact with the outside world. Our hotel has wi-fi internet in their cafe (that almost reaches to our room, but not quite) and it only costs us 5 Ringet for our whole stay (about $1.75). We definitely got our money’s worth this morning and afternoon. We talked to Ric’s mom on Skype for at least an hour; while we were talking with her, Gin’s parents came online too so she chatted with them for a while. Then, while Ric was talking to his mom, and Gin was typing to hers, our friend Allan also tried to call us on Skype. Wow, we felt really popular this morning!

Once we finished all that talking and internet action we were starving so we walked down to the town, Tanah Rata. It is a very tourist-oriented town with tonnes of stores selling kitchyness, including lots of strawberry motif items, since there are lots of strawberry farms up here. For our Korean friends, we figure the character Dalki would fit in great around here! After walking around town trying to find a suitable restaurant we ended up at the same place we ate at last night and had a great lunch (on a metal plate, no banana leaf today) for about $1 each! After that we headed back to the hotel and Gin read while Ric tried to fix some obscure problem with the blog. Unfortunately after spending hours on it, when Ric went to test his solution to the problem it still didn’t work properly!

Tomorrow we plan to head out on our own and walk some of the mountain trails here. Because the Cameron Highlands are so high up in the mountains the temperature is about 10 degrees cooler here than it is in the rest of the country. When the British colonized Malaysia they found this area and established a bunch of guesthouses and tea shops so they could escape the heat of the tropics once in a while. We’re glad they did it, because it has been so nice to be able to walk around without getting all sweaty. We’ll see how we do tomorrow with a bit more walking around!