annarti | Malaysia photos batch 3 ~ Lake Chini (Reply)

Finally getting around to finishing these off. Three more batches after this one, and I'll actually do all the resizing and saving of them tonight, so all that'll remain is to babble about them :D

So, after leaving the fabulous gloriousness of Club Med, Cherating Beach behind, we set our sights on the big smoke of KL. As I said in the last batch (...several months ago *cough*) we rented a car to drive back to KL with and stop off along the way. We aimed for Lake Chini, known for its lotus flowers and general tranquillity. Not so well known for its accommodation.

We stayed here. Our room was just barely big enough for four very thin mattresses on the floor, had a shitty fan which really only served to keep the mozzies off, and, despite the complete isolation from everything and everyone, was full but for this one room of British school girls who would not shut up until they had to leave for their plane flight back home at about 5am. I pride myself on being able to sleep anywhere as long as I'm lying down, but that night? Not a wink. At some stage, Dad got up to go to the loo and ended up falling down the steps and also part of the hill.

Next morning, we all woke up cranky (except me. I didn't have any sleep to wake up from :DDDD#) and particularly peeved at the stupid Pommies. Mum was feeling guilty cos it was her suggestion that we stay there to go to the lake the next day. Dad was feeling angry because he'd possibly cracked a rib and also had to pay about $12 for each of us for the night in that place. It was barely worth that sum total, let alone times four people =/

The village this place was in. Very, very rural Malaysia here. It took literally two hours to just FIND the place, even with three maps and Colin's GPS, because it's not exactly on main roads. Through ACRES of palm plantations and a couple of likewise tiny villages where people didn't really speak English. In the end we found it through Mum asking directions in Bahasa Indonesia (very similar to Bahasa Malaysia except a handful of words, really) and finally got there close to sunset.

Anyway, back to Lake Chini. So, tired and cranky, off we trekked down this CLEARLY stable little jetty to where the boat wasn't quite waiting for us yet. But then it came! And we woke up because we saw stuff like this:

Mum and Colin at the front of the boat, and the bottom picture is of the other potential accommodation, but they were renovating(/rebuilding/expanding?) so we were stuck with what we had.

Boating across the laaaake :D This was beautiful. The only sound was the boat's outboard, which conked out at one stage so we were sitting in the middle of the lake without a sound~ <3 Once I got Dad to shut up about the driver taking the outboard apart behind us, anyway. It was all beautifully relaxing *^^*

First taste of the pink lotuses. More to come.

REAL JUNGLE *.* This, for me, made the complete shittiness of the previous night worth it. This boat ride was my favourite bit of the trip, so I told that to Mum afterwards and she cheered up :D It was GORGEOUS <3 Giant trees bigger than the tallest building in Adelaide, plenty of collapsed trees so you could see their HUGE buttresses, all dark and warm and with bright sunshine dappling through... it was just beautiful.

When we were planning the trip from Adelaide, we all said one thing we particularly wanted to do. Colin wanted to do the Petronas Towers in KL, Mum wanted to buy some gold in Singapore, Dad wanted to do Club Med, and my thing was a jungle trek. This boat ride through the jungle? Even BETTER.

Also? On the way back to the lake again, another two boats went past us at once. Two people in each boat had the telltale blue shirt of the Club Med GOs. Unfortunately didn't recognise any of them, but we did lol XD That tour that we'd effectively just done for roughly $100 including 'accommodation' for four was I think~ $150 per person from Club Med. Hah~ suckers.

And of course, the lotuses, for which we didn't plan but somehow landed right in the middle of lotus season, anyway. Srsly, that never happens. When we go on holidays, we miss out on these kinds of things by week. These lotuses apparently used to cover the entire lake like this, but now they're only in this one patch. I think we're blaming the palm plantations for this, I forget.

In any case, what we saw was, again, beautifully tranquil. Our guide shut the engine off (deliberately this time) so we just sort of drifted through the lotuses, so that huge one there came right up to the edge of the boat. Dunno if you can tell from the photo, but it was roughly a foot across. Faaaaabulous.

More reeds and such on the way back to the village.

Leaving Lake Chini behind~ and off properly to KL now. This is from the top of one hill we went over about three times checking various service roads and dirt tracks in the hopes that we'd find the village. There was no signage anywhere, it was really confusing XD;