mikes web log

This story is worth the restarting of the blog. One of the classroom assistants at Gina’s school has a husband who is a fire officer. He was recently called out to a school where a child had somehow managed to get his finger stuck in a hole in the flooring of the school hall. It was a hole that is usually designed to hold some PE equipment.

The fire brigade arrive and the senior officer approaches a side entrance to the school. A teacher opens the door. The fire officer introduces himself and explains why he is there. “Sorry ” says the teacher “I don’t know who you are and you have not had a CRB check, I cannnot let you in” said the teacher. “Surely you must recognise who I am” says the fire officer as he points to his uniform and the fire engine standing outside the school. “Here is my identification”. “Sorry” said the teacher “I cannot let you in, you havent got a CRB check, you must go to the main entrance”. The fire officer reluctantly and quickly goes to the main entrance where he is let in and is shown to where the child is sitting in the hall with his finger stuck in the floor. He sits down and talks to the child. “What happened?” “I thought I saw a hampster under the floor so I wanted to stroke it” said the child. This was apparently linked to some fluff that was in the hole. “OK” said the fire officer, “Let me look around the hole so I can see how I can get your finger out” said the officer. “OK” said the child as he withdrew his finger from the hole “Can you see now?”

After the event the fire officer had a very informative conversation with the headteacher about CRB checks and the emergency services.

One more day before Egypt!

With trepidation we borded the Dash at Tioman airport. The doors closed and the plane began to taxi along the runway. It stopped! Consternation….why had it stopped. It had stopped because an iguana had decided to stroll across the runway. We waited as in a leisurely fashion it dragged its four foot length body to the otherside of the runway. We then continued.

Back at KL we seemed to join the longest queue of traffic ever to get access to our hotel. Were however pleasantly suprised that they had upgraded us to a premier suite with excellent views of the city.

 Now trying to kill a few hours until we aim again at KLIA for the journey to Dubai and Birmingham. Business Class…of course.

 Its all been pretty hard work for the last three weeks, but somebody had to do it!

Just a little note on the aircraft that brought us to Tioman ( which is the Bali Hi of the musical South Pacific). The Dash 7 was built between 1975 and 1988 so it is a least 20 years old. It seems to be made of cast iron …its got that look about it. As you take off you notice smoke coming from the air vents above your head. It’s not smoke, its condensation. It must be drawing in the cooler air r from outside the plane which then makes the water laden air in the cabin condense air. It is a bit disconcerting. Eventually they must pressurise the cabin because it stops … then as we come into land it starts again.

The airfield on Tioman is titchy so it needs a plane that can land and take off from nothing.

A reminder to myself. Diffusion by waves and my theory about the separation of light bulbs and shoes by wave power.

Yep, it truly is. We wake up in the morning and sit on our veranda and watch the jungle wake up. We see the odd movements of the black monkeys in the distance watch the bats finish there night of activity and hear the awakening calls of the birds. In the short distance you can hear the waves on yet another sandy beach.

 The jungle hut is very pleasant. It is a two storey hut on stilts. We have two 42 inch TV’s, one in the lounge downstairs and the other at the end of the bed. No TV stations, however a huge collection of DVD’s that we can access. On the veranda we can sip wine from the minibar or take a dip in the jacuzzi plunge pool. It is a truly glorious environment. They have just fixed the 56K Internet access so I will not try to upload the video we created.

We walk down wooden walkways to the restaraunts. This means you avoid the unpleasant things about jungles … like leaches. There is one restaraunt on the beach and another at the end of a pier like structure which is sitting in the sea. As we walked across there last night there was a family of black tipped sharks swimming beneath us. I think they are fairly harmless! Or is it the white tipped that are harmless? We were swimming in the same waters earlier in the day……

The lovely thing about this hotel and the previous ones is that there seems to be so few people here. You almost seem to have it to yourself.

We have only one more full day here(today). Tomorrow afternoon we are back to KL and then back to Birmingham on the following day.

Would you believe it we have to travel by boat to our new hotel. There is only one road on the island and it doesn’t go to our hotel! In addition we have a jungle room and we need a ’shoe’ to climb over the rocks to get to the beach … at least thats what the hotel suggest. Maybe in contact during the week ….may not be.

Sorry for the lack of notes  We left The Aryani Hotel, Terengganu just in  time ….they had run out of wine! Would you believe it … a hotel that had run out of wine.

Also found out that there are no crocodiles in Malaysia. What we saw must have been an Iguana.

We have just completed 4 nights in a great hotel and have now arrived back on KL before we move on to Tioman Island tomorrow morning. The great hotel was the Tanjung Jara  about 50 kilometres south of the capital of the Terengganu region of Malaysia. We transferred by car - a 2 hour journey which had me in agonies for the first hour because I thought the taxi driver was going the wrong way! There I was thinking that we should be going South and instead we were going North. Gina seemed to be very happy about the way in which we were going. I couldn’t understand it. We were going North to a place that should be South of where we last stayed. The sea was on the wrong side of the road! Hell. It took me an hour to get the courage to mention this quitely to Gina…..’I think we are going the wrong way’. ‘Of course not ‘ was the quick reply ‘Whats wrong with your sense of direction?’ The result was, as expected …we were going in the right direction. I had not realised that when we arrived at Terangganu we drove North for our first hotel. I thought we had driven South. It was dark , and raining .. thats my excuse.

The last four days have resulted in knee injuries to Gina and sunburn injuries to both of us. YES..sunburn. We have had no daytime rain for six days. The knee injury was due to a slip on some steps leading to our luxury bathroom (rub it in) the sunburn was due to a days snorkelling on a Jurrasic Park type island where we chased a few turtles and met Nemo. Yes Gina has snorkelled. And she loved it, just like a duck to water. I spent most of my time trying to catch up with her as she raced from one place to another. The unfortunate aspect was that we forgot the suncream so both of us are suffering rather badly today. We have both agreed that we will go back to the Tanjung Jara resort and it didn’t run out of wine.

Tioman here we come. Here are some videos and pictures.

Firstly a sea slug that I found that actually moved. You can just see the black feet on the right hand end of the thing.

slug1.wmv

This is a few seconds of a turtle I met.

turtle_0002.wmv

Guess who this is

Our beach

Our room

Our room

Welcome from The Aryani Hotel, Terengganu. And yes it was raining when we arrived. And it rained for the next 24 hrs. But the end is in sight we have had 2 days of glorious sunshine. The hotel is fantastic, built in the late 90’s to represent a Malay Palace. It’s mostly wood and the rooms - only 20 - are all Malay type chalets. Ours faces the sea and we only need to walk 15 yards through coconut palms to get to the beach loungers. Its a pity that we move on again tomorrow further down the east coast.

The species in question are giant flying beetles. They are about 3 cm long and 2 cm wide. They have this habit of landing on shiny surfaces upside down. This then involves them in making waggly movements with their legs in the air and rather useless attempts to fly upside down to try to turn themselves over. Inevitably they get exhausted and just lie there with their legs in the air. We have taken to rescuing as many as possible by turning them over … something that they can do easily themselves on rough surfaces. As the amount of shiny surfaces in this fabulous country increases I suspect they are a doomed species.

Another species I cannot understand is the firefly. We saw our first last night and so did the ten strong family of ghekoes that inhabit the wall of our veranda. I suppose its something to do with sex but with these minature dragons around I think I would try it in the daytime when they were asleep. Saw a three foot lizard today making its way into a mango swamp …do they have crocodiles here?

To Tanjung Jara tomorrow.

It doesn’t seem to want to rain today. It’s our second day in Kuala Lumpur and its not raining…..pity that we are about to leave. The rain withstanding we have visited the Orchid Gardens, The Aviary (The biggest free flying aviary in the world), China Town (by accident) and been on the monorail and eaten in some very nice places.  The hotel is great even though we overlook what looks like the local city centre sewage system.

One thing we will never forget is the ‘coffins on wheels’ – as quoted by the taxi driver. They are small motorbikes which behave like ants…getting everywhere. At traffic lights they weave through the stationary traffic until there are small hordes of them waiting for the red flag to drop. Then off they go…

coffins1.wmv

It rained for hours yesterday, started at 5.00 and was still raining at 12.00. A dry patch today allowed us to visit the Botanical Gardens in Penang. Great place. Lots of orchids and other exotic plants and trees and of course monkeys. Then what did it do … it rained and rained. At least it is warm rain and if you are sitting next to the pool …who cares. Going on a spice tour tomorrow. I wonder when it will rain?

An orchid