Thursday, May 26, 2005
Tekam
Quite a lot to say...
My Malaysia trip wasn't as good as i hoped. We had a terrible tour guide who really just ruined everything for us. Firstly, we paid for a 3 star hotel as part of our package. When we got there, the hotel was a far cry from 3 stars. It looked more like a hostel, and most of it was under construction! Disgusting brown water came out from our taps, and i felt dirtier after bathing. See the irony? Felt stupid brushing my teeth also. The water tasted so bad that i nearly wanted to puke. I had to rinse my mouth with mineral water after that. Meals at our hotel were horrendous! It's unhygenic, unappetising and unfresh. The whole place was swarming with all sorts of bugs from the usual houseflies to the evil weevil, of which i found one on my bread. The plantation tour wasn't any better. The tour guide talks as if they're so proud (they probably are) of their plantation, "malaysia this, malaysia that, biggest in the world" crap, and he goes on and on and on about 3 different types of oil palms, Dura, Pesifera and dunno what other crap palm lah, but i felt like asking him which part of my face spells the words, "i'm interested". Urgh, it was terribly boring, certainly not my kind of 'holiday'. We were CHEATED! Yes, we were. By the tour guide. First he says we'll go kayaking. We ended up in some retarded team-building exercise place for youths, and we all ended up making our own raft with barrels and sticks, you know, like those OBS things lah. So much for travelling 6 hours to pahang to do something we could have done back home for cheaper and better. After that we were promised flying fox. Like, "yay". It was pathetic. The equipment was wet because a previous group used it to cross the river. The ride down was short, slow and nothing out of the ordianry. I've been to better ones, like in Perth, where i flew fox down a hill over fields in a valley over cattle herds. Now THAT is flying fox. The one at Tekam (pahang) is flying chicken. And speaking of chicken, the tour guide explained to us that when a snake at the plantation is about to attack, it'll make the same sound as a rooster (go figure). We (the youths) started joking around, making a snake action with our hands and making a crazy rooster sound. It was hilarious!
The next day was even more disappointing! We had our usual depressing breakfast before heading about 2 hours to some ulu place with a big river. Ah yes, we were supposed to visit the tree-top canopy thing. Sounds exciting enough to me, because he promised us a canopy walk, kayaking (we didn't know we already did it) and river rafting. We hiked about an hour and a half in the forest, stopping occasionally to wait for the adults as well as to hear eddie (the tour guide) rant about tongkat ali and the other uninteresting native plants. Finally, we reached the canopy walk, but the entire place was swarming with pests like bugs and tourists! It was so crowded that eddie told us we couldn't go on it. That moron. Talk about him having 12 years experience, my foot! He should know that it would be this crowded and thus pan the trip earlier. But he didn't. Unreliable madness. After that we disappointedly made our way to the jetty where we were to catch a boat to some place for lunch. We ended up waiting almost a whole hour for the boat, but luckily andrew impressed all the aunties and uncles with his iSound and Zen Touch, and we burst out in merry singing of Don Moen and Hillsongs. We also met an Englishman who was a Christian as well and he was very friendly. We invited him to our church, so who knows, we might see him again someday when he visits Singapore again. We got to the lunch place where we had meal of rice and a few dishes. That was probably one of the better meals of the trip, as we were all very hungry by then. We also played the guessing number game, with Joanne, our new friend we met on the trip. She's a Christian also. We had great fun in fellowship and we did truth or dare as well. Cheryl's brother Alvin got saboed so his dare was to go to his aunty janet and ask for her number. It was quite funny. After lunch it was back on the boat again. We were expecting the boat to take us to the waterfall or to another place where we could do river rafting as promised. Of course none of that was fulfilled. In fact, the boat made a super long detour on the river, then made a u-turn. Twice it did that. How very annoying and boring. Oh here's the worst part. The youths were quite upset after the boatride to nowhere that we approached eddie and demanded out kayaking. And he innocently replied, "sure, up to you, you choose what you want to do". So okay, we got what we wanted, or at least we thought we did. It was another 2 hours bus ride back to tekam and it was already almost dark by the time we got there. And guess what?? There was NO kayaking!! Why? Because it was vesak day!! I mean, gee how was i to know that? You as the tour guide know about it and you didn't tell us?? And even worse, because it was dark already and the pahang town was another few hours drive away, we were simply told, "no dinner". FUCK how convenient.
What an unpleasant trip.
10:34 AM |
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