{"id":521,"date":"2023-12-18T00:34:19","date_gmt":"2023-12-18T00:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aerowalsh.com\/cr\/?p=521"},"modified":"2024-01-10T03:44:36","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T03:44:36","slug":"sun-18-dec-krabi-thailand-penang-malaysia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/?p=521","title":{"rendered":"Sun 17th Dec – Krabi (Thailand) -> Penang (Malaysia)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A month into my time off, I have my first border crossing. It’s an extremely long day, about 9 hours in the car. I have a terrible night’s sleep, have fever and a weird but painful ear ache. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My grouchiness is not helped by one of the Brits (not the coughing one, the other one) starting breakfast at our scheduled departure time (7am). This is infuriating, as we sit in the van and wait 20min for her to eat, knowing we have a large travel day ahead. When we stop at a shopping centre for lunch before crossing the border, the guide implores us not to be late because our current Thai van and our Malaysia van will both be waiting for us. She is again, incomprehensible in a small shopping centre, 20 minutes late. After pulling this every day for the last week, I am furious. I confront her and ask her to be more prompt, telling her she is wasting many people’s time. I don’t think our guide is willing to do this, as we rate our guides at the end of their trip and I have been told it impacts some part of their annual renumeration… She initially just walks away from me. This is a response I haven’t seen much from an adult and is underutilised given its physical comedy impact. I request an acknowledgement and she shrilly says “we all have needs, I don’t know why you are picking on me, mind your own business”. For the next 12 hours, she turns her back to me whenever we are together, which is again comedically intriguing in a group of five. I believe I have made a positive change in the world though, as she is on time for the two meetings we do have later that day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Penang itself seems really, really cool. Being an island, it was heavily used for shipping trade back in the day, and this has lead to an accumulation of different cultures. There are Chinese, Malaysians and Indians. Penang’s colonial buildings are prized and protected. As we drive in, I already know I want to return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Breakfast at a servo. In Thailand, every servo has hawker stalls set up with delicious food. I will really miss that.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Enormous stretches of rubber tree farms towards the southern Thailand border. I remember Steve Backshall highlighting similar monoculture in Borneo.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Shopping centre for lunch. It is clearly the beginning of school holidays. These kids were excited.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The shopping centre has zero english signs and I order this whole meal in Thai, including an additional “Ning kai” (one egg). I am feeling very pleased! A stranger comes specifically up to me when I am eating and asks “how is the Thai food” and my response “ahroy!” (Tasty) generates great fanfare and even a personal welcome to Thailand. My extremely limited, entirely food based control of the language has been fun. I anticipate being laughed at by the ladies at Chat Thai in the future.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Coming into Penang over South East Asia’s second largest bridge (26km) that connects the island to the Malaysian mainland.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Dinner at a hawker centre. Penang is known for its satay. It is tasty, can confirm.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Incredibly, I get a resolution to this small mystery. The copy I see floating in the lobby of our hotel actually belongs to Crazy Australian! I spy him reading it on the van trip to Malaysia today. I ask him about it in the evening and he describes it as “not very good” so he is “flicking through it”. The first is fine, each to their own. The second is more confirmation of his light mental derangement – I have never met someone to flick through a 700 page novel…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Malaysia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":517,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-holiday","category-summer-2023"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1053,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions\/1053"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}