So with a whole 6 months to spend living it up around South East Asia, we are in the lucky position where we can take our time and move at a leisurely pace.
It's for this reason we decided to beak up our journey from the Cameron Highlands to the island of Langkawi with a one night stop over in Ipoh, a small city about 2 hours from the Cameron Highlands. Perfect.
Well, at least, it should have been.
Our bus from the Cameron Highlands left at 10am from the bus station, a happy 10 minute walk from our hostel. Spurred on by the fact we had a short bus ride and the only a couple of kilometers walk from the bus station in Ipoh to our hostel at the other end, we boarded in good spirits.
Those good spirits where soon being thrown from side to side like fruit in a blender as our bus driver turned out to be a complete and utter lunatic. Honestly I thought the guy who drove us up to Tanah Rata was bad, but this guy was something else.
His favorite move was overtaking multiple cars, on a corner, flying downhill.
That and being so close to the car in front I think he could feel its rear bumper with his knees. It was awful, I could neither watch nor stop watching. I spent a little over two hours with my heart jumping up into my larynx.
But that day was obviously not my day to die as finally we rolled into the bus station and the driver shouted "IPOH" at everyone, like a victory cheer over his own death defying driving.
I have never EVER been so relieved to get out of a vehicle - and I've been in a car crash that rolled on a motorway.
We stumbled into the bus station, and as with every bus station, train platform, ferry jetty and plane terminal in Malaysia we were bombarded by people asked us if we needed a taxi.
Luckily for us the answer was no, we had this. We had googled the crap out of Ipoh. We were armed with directions, screen shots, hand written notes and maps.
However, when we started to try and follow our map, absolutely none of the roads looked right and we couldn't see or find any of our points of references we had marked.
We thought maybe we had just walked out the wrong end of the bus station. But obviously things could not be that simple for us.
A quick check on Maps.Me soon showed us the magnitude of our situation. The coach driver had obviously given up on taking us to the bus station that was actually printed on our ticket, the one we had paid for.
Instead he had decided to drop us 15km away. At a bus station near no public transport, where the taxi drivers didn't even know the area our hostel was in, and it was so far away the chances of us walking that far with no map and heavy bags was absolutely zero.
Bastard.
It began to dawn on us that we may never make it into Ipoh, we held an EDCM, Emergency Department Crisis Meeting, and decided we should take advantage of the fact we were in a bus station and may as well just try and find one going to Langkawi and hope and pray that the hostel would have room for us arriving a day early.
As head of Public Relations it was down to me to go and ask one of the many people at the booths selling bus tickets if and how we could get to Langkawi today. I approached the nearest guy and the conversation went something a little like this:
Me: Hello, we need to get to Langkawi today, is there a bus?
Him: wouef;iuwbfnaweck'on.
Me: Pardon?
Him: Last ferry is at 7.
Me: Okay.
He then turns around to the woman at the desk and she starts writing out two tickets. Excellent, I had clearly nailed this, but why did he tell me the ferry time? Surely if this bus went to Langkawi I wouldn't need to know as the driver would know.
Obviously Emma had been entertaining similar thoughts, the guy, however, looked genuinely confused when we started to ask such pestering questions like:
- Where is this bus going to?
- How much is it?
- ARE YOU SURE WE CAN GET TO LANGKAWI THIS WAY?!
To all of these he simply smiled and said yes.
Again, nailed it.
We were then rushed from the counter to a coach that was leaving imminently and less than an half an hour since arriving in Ipoh we were leaving again. Hopefully for Langkawi.
What followed was a 6 hour bus journey, which was awful. We had not planned for such a long trip, we had no food or drinks and very little in the way of entertainment. There were also no toilets. Or toilet stops.
Eventually at 6pm we made it to Kuala Perlis, a ferry port town on the border of Thailand. We then had to make a short walk to the jetty using nothing but our exhausted wits. I can see now why the guy at Ipoh told me the last ferry was at 7pm.
Tickets bought we made our way onto the crowded ferry full of screaming children and spent the next 2 hours going over a less than calm sea to the island of Langkawi.
We arrived, thank god, so near now to the end of our journey. We grabbed a taxi and headed for the hostel.
The Sweet Monkey hostel. We had heard good things from other travelers and it had decent reviews online and after being on the road for nearly 12 hours all we wanted was a place to rest our weary heads.
What we got was a hovel at the top of a narrow flight of dingy stairs. The place was hot and humid with desk fans plastered over the walls and ceilings in place of air-con which blasted you with turbo charged hot smelly air with every step.
Honestly it was the last thing either of us wanted to see. It was very similar to Coziee Lodge, which we had fled in Singapore, except this one was filled with backpackers, which we took as a small crumb of comfort at the time. It turned out, however, that this is somewhat of a drawback as there is an alarming number of backpackers that are self obsessed, obnoxious, vapid, dumb asses that wouldn't know one end of a gun to the other and could only benefit the world by holding said gun and pulling the trigger.
More to come on that later.
Journey from hell aside, hovel filled with inconsiderate idiots aside, Langkawi itself turned out to be wonderful.
Unfortunately, however the next disaster was just around the corner.
