(written by Nancy)

Well, we had a slight turn of luck last night – the water came back on in the villa. So thankfully no middle of the night runs to another room to get to a working bathroom were necessary. Thank goodness for small favours I guess…

We had breakfast at the hotel (it is included in the exorbitant room rate) – Dave tried the local noodle dish and decided he would have eggs tomorrow. We cleaned out the bread for toast – peanut butter toast fills the hunger gaps a little bit. After breakfast we got onto the internet to try to work out some accommodation for the nights ahead after we leave here. It is a real struggle to try to find places to stay, as the coming week is the end of Ramadan holiday as well as Malaysia’s national day. We have not had any problems finding a spot to stay so far in Malaysia but we called numerous hotels today to try to see if there were any rooms available without any luck. All a bit frustrating and discouraging.

Thankfully there is a Warmshowers host in a town about 130k from here who is willing to host us for a couple of nights. We had planned to take two days to ride there after we left here but it looks like we will have to make the distance in one day as we cannot find a room available between here and there. From there we will go to Penang a few days early to scope it out before family arrives. We think we have a place sorted in Penang but are waiting for confirmation – fingers crossed.

Feeling slightly discouraged we caught a cab into Pangkor town to try to get some lunch. It is only a bit over 2k into town but the mid-day heat was pretty fierce – too hot to go strolling for 2k. The cabs have a monopoly here as there are very few cars so Dave had no luck negotiating the cab fare. We wandered the town a bit to see what was available and eventually stopped at a small little stand for fried noodles with seafood. It actually was very tasty – and only 4 RM per plate. Many folks stopped on their scooters to pick up some food – one family of four all on one scooter, the kids squashed between the parents (see photo below – family and their take away food). We have seen this a lot – the parents sometimes wear helmets, the kids hardly ever. And they are often very small kids. I don’t think accidents are all that uncommon so it’s surprising to see so many kids without helmets.

After lunch we headed back to the villa to cool down in our air-conditioned room. The hotel has two English-language channels, one of which is a movie channel so we watched bad movies and tried to catch up on some chores. We are now sitting in the same restaurant we went last night waiting for our food – it is much busier than last night so we are just people watching and drinking our Chinese tea (with ice!). Two more days of hanging out here – hmm, not sure what we will do but I am sure we can find something – perhaps watching some more bad movies or perhaps sitting on the beach for a bit… We also try to get our Aussie taxes done – life goes on when you are travelling.

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