Dim Sum, Any Old Iron, Koi Et Un Petit Morceau De La France Dans Le Foret Tropicale

I love having a car: I am able to drive wherever I want and I decide I want to head out of town. With two guides (Charles and Garmin) to help me, we start by having dim sum on Jalan Ipoh (delicious) and browse the goods of this man selling antiques by the side of the road – a collection of old irons, Chinese coins and a telephone (rather eclectic, to say the least).

Dim sum lunch over, we head down Jalan Ipoh and turn into Sentul – where the Malaysian Railway Works used to be, but has been turned into, amongst other things, a Performing Arts Centre. I see a few fliers for "arty stuff" that I will probably give a miss. It’s an interesting place, architecturally, but we are chased away by a rather over zealous guard for taking photos. 


Oh well, I managed to get a few snaps of the park anyway.

There's also a Japanese Koi farm here, which has a load of concrete tanks with increasingly older and larger Koi in each. As I approached the tanks, they all swam towards what I suppose to them is a watery dark shadow, jumping out of the water, clearly waiting to be fed – poor, starving fish! I'm glad they were not piranha...

Bukit Tinggi, about 30 km away, is our next stop: there are Botanical Gardens, a Japanese Tea house and, weirdly, a mock French village. Anyway, sounded interesting, so we hit the road north west of the city towards the Genting Highlands (gambling heaven, apparently): Bukit Tinggi is a bit further away, but in that general direction. We stop at a McDonalds drive through to get a coffee, despite being against my principles to give any money to Ronald. Still, there was nothing else about, so it’d have to do. I then thought that I ought to get a Touch’N’Go card to flash at the tolls on the way to and from work. Alas, like many things in Malaysia as I have been finding out, there are a lot of good ideas, but then nothing in place to keep them going – so it was actually quite difficult to get hold of one of these Touch’N’Go cards... I buy curry puffs instead as compensation.

Coffee and curry puff in hand, we head up towards the highlands and start to climb... higher and higher and there were times that I thought that the car wouldn’t make it, and as I had never driven an automatic before, I wasn’t really sure how to handle almost vertical hill climbing in a huge limousine! I pissed about with the gears and somehow sorted the struggle out and the car moved again.

First stop The Botanical Gardens and Japanese Tea House. We walked through the forest, taking photos of all the magnificent plants and trees up there – it was slightly cooler here, with a breeze that was totally refreshing and so much more pleasant than the humidity and mugginess in the city. 


It’s really lovely, and after munching our curry puffs we head back down to the car and make tracks for the Colmar Tropical French Resort, just over the road.

Hmm – a little bit of France in the Malaysian rainforest! It’s very tacky, but funny nevertheless. We have a coffee in the ‘Patisserie’ and there was a special deal on, where you could have a basket of three pastries and a coffee for 15RM – a bargain, seeing as a coffee on it’s own was 12RM. Typically though, when we asked for two of these baskets, there was only one left and the servers didn't seem to be able to decide whether we could make up our own 3 pastries from the other selections. Oh well, it wasn't worth bothering about, settled for the one basket instead – which consisted of a warm croissant, two fruit muffins and, oddly, a slice of bread. I assumed that it was there to absorb moisture from the warm pastries and stop them from going soggy, but I’m not convinced that any baskets went back with the bread still there…

It’s approaching 5 and I didn’t really want to be driving about these very winding and steep roads in the dark, so we head off back to KL, via a small village (Kampung Bukit Tinggi) stopping to take a look about the village, and at the fantastic selection of local fruit and vegetables (including red bananas!), which we eat with some delicious steamed fish whilst letting the torrential rain (almost) pass over.