Flight of Fancy

We arrived in Kuala Terrenganu and found a hotel. There was never going to be a lot to do here. It was really only a hub point from which we would cross to the island of Penang on the north west side of Malaysia, rather than heading back through KL for a third time. Between KT and Penang lay the now familiar Cameron Highlands and the idea of traversing them on a bus did not fill us with a lot of enthusiasm. We spent the best part of a morning searching for the world's best hidden tourist office, to ask for advice. It was lurking around the 5th floor of an office block with no signs out front alerting you of it's presence. In the end, they couldn't tell us anything we didn't already know, but they were keen to get us to sign the visitor's book and in return we got a goody bag with patches pens and badges. The guestbook hinted that we were the first tourists to set foot in the door in a fortnight. We added the collectibles to our growing collection, first begun at the tourist information desk in Kuching. We would enter one more tourist office again before the end of our time in Malaysia and get book marks and two packs of post cards which would round off our collection nicely. A visit to an internet cafe and we found a reasonable low cost airline who could fly us across the highlands for what turned out to be not much more than the bus. We booked the flights and then killed the next couple of days that sat between us and the west.

This is where we first encountered the internet cafe culture that has since plagued us ever after, and inhibited the opportunities to keep you lovely, and presumably rather bored people abreast of our exploits. The internet cafes are not really geared up for internet surfing so much as for online gaming. Rows of networked PC's are full of screaming boys about 10 years of age who shout at the top of their annoyingly piercing voices, and make all kinds of other noises, previously reserved for the animal kingdom. Every PC had got a decent sound setup too, after all the shops want to offer the best experience to attract the market. The result is every PC at full blast with the noise of machine guns, explosions, swords, screaming, helicopters, wizards and goblins and all else inpixilated. The onslaught tends to hit about 3:15 when the schools kick out and continues until around tea time when things generally quieten down a bit, though never completely. There is something rather insidious too about the sight of rows of boys, all with a slightly drawn looks on their faces as they stare, into the very close monitors, hunched over the keyboard and mouse which they move with the dexterity you might write with a pencil. It becomes absolutely impossible to think when descended into the noise and we have had to give up several times when we have timed things wrong. However, we couldn't give up until we had managed to book our e-tickets for our flight, we fought through the chaos and the system and eventually left, with a ticket outa town.

The next day was spent with a trip to the market, and a walk around town before the third day when we got a taxi to the airport only to discover that the flight hadn't sold enough seats so they had just cancelled it. In the end, we did fly out in the evening but it left us with another day to spend repeating the previous day and marvelling at the cyber-racket.