The long delayed Krabi post

So continuing my mini world tour here…

After Beijing, I headed further south to Krabi, Thailand.

After the bone chilling freeze in Mongolia and blizzard in Beijing, I’m taking this trip as a acclimatization program, slowly getting my body used to the warmer weather.

Coincidentally the Krabi trip was planned sometime in March this year due to a promotion from AirAsia. So it was just nice that we get to enjoy a little more before coming back to work.

^ That’s where we stayed for the duration of the trip. It came highly recommended and is clean and convenient to the main tourist belt. Highly recommended (now from me).

^ There are more cats here than Kuching. Probably because they are so loved that this cat has his own seat on the sofa (at the reception area). Tze Lun love it here ;)

^ Krabi! Trees, shades and shops. Shemales come out only at night so it’s still safe for kids.

 

^ Our first dinner place. Thinking we’d catch some nice Thai food but got con by the nice deco instead. Doesn’t taste nice and the price is expensive. Instead we got a better bargain further down the road – buffet dinner for only 250bath (RM25).

^ Just like Gurney drive, when evening comes, stalls spring up in place for finger food.

^ The sunset is dramatic here. Too bad I didn’t bring my camera so this is the best I can do ><

^ Maya Bay! According to the local guide, this is where Leonardo Di Caprio spent 3 months filming “The Beach”.

It’s a cozy little bay but too bad it has since been spoilt by commercialization (which I’m guilty of as well) :P

^ Voon Siew took this pic for us.

^ There are 2 ways to get to Maya Bay. Either by long tail (above) or by speed boat. We took the speed boat option but if a little adventure is preferred (such as capsizing or getting sunburned for the hours spent going back), the rickety boat above looks mighty nice.

^ So we’re the exception here. Long tails aplenty!

^ Water here in Krabi is not really that clear. If there’s a need to pick sides I’ll gladly pick Lang Tengah. Probably it’s due to the season, or we’re not even diving deep enough to encounter clear waters.

^ Phi Phi island is one of the many island that we hopped over. In terms of natural beauty (read: forest) it’s nice. But in terms of fun (read: shops), it’s a little behind Krabi. Also signs of over commercialization is everywhere.

^ This is what I mean. When you have too many bars on a strip of sand, and you need signboards to warn them not to dive when drunk (drunks are excellent readers), you have one too many bars.

^ Phi Phi is a tropical island, and with anything tropical, mangoes, pineapples and Bougainvillea comes to mind. If walking around is your fancy, Phi Phi is not a bad place to be. It’s just odd to come all the way to ‘walk’ rather than taking to the seas.

^ Next stop, Bamboo Island!

DON’T LAUGH! THERE’S NO GIRLS AROUND OK! Any old man had to do so you get a scale of the seas beyond.

Bamboo island in my opinion is better than Phi Phi. For my tastes, it’s exactly the right amount of facilities (benches, tables and toilets ONLY) and all natural sun, sea, and  sand. The waters are clear and the wind is fresh.

^ Adding to effect, it’s raining on the horizon so the sea really dazzles in the contrast sun. Also, the wind picked up so the waves are stronger and after a tiring swim, it’s just nice to sit on the beach and get beaten by the waves.

^ I don’t see a boat anchored to this rope. But it makes a nice picture. Just need to bump the white balance a little (regret why I didn’t bring a proper camera).

^ A little wonder why it’s called Bamboo island when there’s no Bamboo trees around. But there’s lots of trees providing shade and contrasts well with the white sandy beaches.

^ It was extremely tiring after all the island hopping and snorkeling. Choose to stay on dry land for a change. And since the tourist belt (where out hotel is) does not face a nice beach, we just took some time off taking pics on the beach.

^ Sook Teng joining in the fun!

^ Hit Krabi town for a visit. Unfortunately the place was a little deserted since it’s a Sunday and the shops are closed.

 

^ Interesting traffic light design. Monkeys carrying concrete blocks.

^ Temple under construction. Only the roof and the dragon is painted.

^ This is what happens when the sun is too bright. Girls hiding in the shade.

^ Krabi town is slightly similar to any towns in Malaysia. Only with more decoration and better walkways. I guess being a tourist hotspot and small in size it’s easier to develop and branch out in an organized manner, rather than retro fitting everything like in KL.

 

^ Most of the pharmaceuticals are manufactured in Thailand, so not surprisingly things are cheap here. Happened to found this little jewel for sale. SEXY motherPUCKER!

^ Saw this BSOD in the airport on the way back. Nothing to say.. it runs on Windows

^ Leaving Krabi after 4 days of R&R. Tried playing with the exposure out of boredom. Wondering why there must be a 2 hours check in time for International flights ><”

The long delayed Beijing Post

Feeling sheepish. Finally found the time to kill this off 2 weeks later.

Anyway as a continuation from my Mongolian post previously, I took off on a Saturday morning for Beijing. Travel time is 2 plus hours from Ulan Bator so with luck we got there around 2pm.

This trip was an afterthought. Initial plan was to take off from Mongolia on Sunday, catch a transit in Beijing and head home. However after some thought, me and my colleague decided 1) we can leave Mongolia earlier and 2) we can probably get some light travel done with a 2D1N trip.

 

When we reached it was a balmy afternoon in Beijing. Took a cab which costs us a total of 90RMB (about RM45) and travel time to the city is considerably faster than KLIA->KL at 30 minutes tops.

We can’t help but notice how clean the place was. I can hardly see a scrap of garbage on the streets and everything is well kept.

Oh yea, also notice the amount of CCTV everywhere.

We quickly dropped our bags at Beijing Oriental Peace Hotel (Dong Fang Zhi Jia – a couple of blocks from Wang Fu Jing) and went out sight seeing.

While walking around the place, I notice that cultural decorations is really strong in Beijing. Granted it’s the capital of China, nation of history. But I find it bordering on the extreme (in a good way) that almost every house and hotel is finely decorated in traditional motif. Take the house from picture above. Extrapolate the lions to every household and hotels and hawker stalls to get an idea.

We walked on, both of us first timers in Beijing. Thinking once we hit the city center we’ll get used to it. But there’s no getting used to the huge crowds that’s everywhere! For the first time we couldn’t find a place to sit down. Imagine that, 2 young tourist, walking for hours non-stop and couldn’t even find a place to rest and end up sitting on the stairs at entrances to shopping complexes (that’s also filled with people).

There’s queue’s at fast food joints, cashiers and even queues to toilets!

Wang Fu Jing is famed for it’s snacks. There’s alleys full of shops peddling their snacks such as live scorpions, noodles, candies, meatballs etc.

The live scorpions caught our eyes obviously. Originally it looked good, but upon seeing bowls of hot water with labels clearly stating it’s used to detoxify the scorpion stings we decided not to bet on it to ruin our short trip.

^ Pictured: The famous Hong Kong pissing shrimp balls!

 

Nightfall… and more shops sprung up along the streets. Here, officially sanctioned stalls serve local delicacies. Candies like “Bing Tang Wu Lou” (molasses coated fruits) are aplenty, as are dessert and soups.

Again, notice the clean streets. No kidding the place is clean!

 

We found a few churches nested among Beijing’s busy streets. But with anything Chinese, a fusion of crosses and mandarin poems dedicated to God blends together neatly.

Beijing’s other food attraction is their roasted Beijing duck. Unfortunately we didn’t have the chance to taste them as the restaurant (above) is packed to the brim. Reservations are full for the next 1 week and even then there’s no guarantee that a table is not shared. They could earn bigger bucks by bidding out the tables.

We walked to Tian Nan Men on our first night just to take in the night scene and to familiarize ourselves with the roads so we can reach there again bright and early tomorrow.

It’s 20 minutes away but the fresh night air and scenery makes it worthwhile. The phrase on the walls says “Long life to the Chinese citizens and their republic | Long life to the people of the world in unity”.

That’s the next day. SNOW! Yes no kidding!

God flipped a switch sometime last night and it went from Autumn to Winter in an instant.

^ That’s my colleague up there. Pictures taken with flash shows how strong the wind was, blowing it right at our face. But we had an important visit to make. A visit to Beijing is never complete without going in to the forbidden palace!

The insides are huge! Rumors that claim you will never finish walking through all the exhibits in a day is darn real. Due to lack of time we end up hopping from room to room, snapping pics at random and merely speeding past the borings bits. And 3 hours later we’re still not finished.

The good news is guided tours are available for cheap. If there’s a second time I’d definitely spend a couple of days here just to make sure I got the complete walkthrough ;)

PS: There’s also GPS enabled guides that talks while you walk around the place. Whenever you go near a point of interest it’ll start by itself! Nice!

^ Those are Mongolian characters on the right. Yuen dynasty is basically the Mongols era.

It was tiring walking non stop the whole morning with the snow and all but it was worth it. Managed to slot in shopping, trying out the local snacks, hitting the forbidden palace, enjoying the night scene, spending both autumn and winter in Beijing both within 2 days is priceless.

Note: Got lots of photos but they’re all in Facebook for now. Upload to Picasa is still in progress so have patience!

Skytrek 2009

Yea.. it’s the same place again ;)

Originally I heard the new extreme trail is ready for registration so went ahead and started getting folks to join in. But the expected turnout seems to be all newbie’s and thus we went for ‘Big Thrill’ instead.

Jeannie (above) went along for the trip as well. You can see her climbing up the first challenge.

 

She managed to reach the top platform without breaking a sweat (yet).

^ Notice the leather biker gloves ;)

 

I’m un-ashamed to say most of my pictures are of Jeannie and Shan Shang. Simple reason because they came in behind me and in this course, there is no options for overtaking as each challenge is passable only one person at a time.

You can see Jeannie above chilling out on the mega hammock (that’s what I call it).

 

In this picture above, you can see one of the challenges (zig zag walk the plank). Also notice the safety rope that’s always on top of each challenge. We are expected to always keep at least one of the two carabineer clips anchored on  the safety line AT ALL TIMES!

 

Everyone unanimously agreed that the above challenge is the hardest (for Big Thrill). Reason being it’s free swinging and to safely cross over required exceptional control over your chakra footing. Always maintaining your rhythm and keeping a low center of gravity is key.

 

If you have an eagle eye or I really suck at Photoshop, you might realize all the photos in this blog post is taken with my hand phone. As such it requires an insane amount of post-processing before it can be served on public domain… LOL!

 

I DID NOT OVERKILL ON THE GAUGASIAN BLUR! It was just out of focus.. DUH!

Anyway that’s Shan Shang over there ;)

—–

 

I have a photo below that will show you the height that we’re playing at SkyTrek.

Celine’s IFTC Fashion Show @ BTS

Invitation courtesy of Celine. This would be her last show as she’ll be graduating soon.

I agreed to come over to cover her creations on video since I’m working around the KLCC area and travel time to BTS is minimal. Also partly the organizers promised a show start right on the dot at 7pm but we all know the chances of that happening .

Since I’m not the official videographer guy I had to make do with the best position I can find short of standing right in front of the video crew, so I end up standing next to him instead. The lack of a tripod means I had to hold the video cam right through the hour long show. Lucky I’ve perfected the perfect elbow lock pose so I don’t tire out and get shaky cam. (The disadvantage of that is my arm was numb for 30 minutes after the show. Ouch.. )

I didn’t take much picture (obvious as I’m there for videos) so there’s not much to display here. I am however uploading the videos in HD to Facebook as of writing so feel free to drop by the video section on my profile (sorry, friends only).

I do have a couple of pictures from the dinner afterwards. You can see Celine up there caught before she managed to throw up a “V-ictory” hand sign.

We ate at this dessert shop (LG@BTS) served by an auntie with an attitude and a healthy dose of cold water. All she ever does is to advice against the yummiest looking pictures claiming they are unhealthy. Really weird~

Dwayne was there as well covering the shoot. Not shown in picture is his heap of equipment ready for paparazzi work at short moment’s notice.

This is the unhealthy drink I end up ordering anyway. Sprite + lemon + blue peach?!?! Anyway do check out the videos once they’re all uploaded (means to check my profile often, no blog updates for that ;)

Labuan: Weekend

Let’s hear my thoughts on Labuan after spending one week here.

My impression of Labuan starts with the people here. They are warm, friendly and works very efficiently as compared to KL folks. I might argue that the pace of life here is slower and thus they had less to do thus making for effecient work.

We had a couple of times surprised by the people here with well spoken English even at mamaks and other eateries. The same applies to our clients where they place a higher priority over us than their work. This in turn gave us a good impression of them and we’re thus more willing to give them some leeway when they needed some time to finish their work. We managed to get what usually needing 3 weeks here in KL done in 4 days. That’s saying a lot.

Labuan is the same as any other island with lots of greenery. But since it’s primarily a port town, there is a heavy influence of industry with oil and gas being the biggest spender in this little island.

I still haven’t got the time to really go strolling around town as I’m writing this but will do so later and possibly take some pictures of the areas.

Being an island, the weather here is odd. It seldom rain here and even when it does it usually is a passing rain. The air here is clean with the odd silence punctured with air horns from the nearby harbour.

NO TRAFFIC JAMS! That’s the biggest advantage of working here. You can get all sorts of cars at cheaply discounted rates.

I can see there’s still lots of areas for improvement, especially in the area of quality goods and entertainments. Labuan should take advantage of its strategic location and natural forest reserve to develop eco trails and tourism. But before all that can begin, they will need to improve on their ‘packaging’. Just a day ago I ordered a Zinger burger from KFC and upon opening it I saw this:

 

The burger is all messed up and the vege leaves lots to be desired.

Packaging is a big issue here. Taking shopping as an example, it is cheap, but the quality of the packaging just can’t give me the impression that it’s an original product. Given their KLCC is like Sinar Kota here in KL, it really doen’t give lots of confidence. But nonetheless I’ll try to see what I can get later in the day. Update again later this evening.