Lumut

I get a message from Arif who suggests driving up to one of the islands off the West Coast, Pangkor (well, to Lumut first and then either get the ferry that night, or stay over and get an early one to spend the day on the island.

We are on the highway by about 6.30pm heading to Lumut. The drive is easy and I get there in about 2.5 hours (average speed 150 km/h!) – unfortunately we have missed the last ferry to the island, so we drive around the mainland town (very busy) before parking and wandering about to see if there are any reasonable places to stay. One place looked promising, but the only room available was a VIP suite at around 900MYR – err, no.

We look at Agoda and find this place about 25 km away – the Damai Laut Swiss Garden resort and reserve a room there (it was at least a lot better than the other more local places nearby, which I found surprising seeing as this was probably a tourist hot spot). We’d noticed a steamed fish restaurant (Ikan Bakar Lumut) on the way into Lumut town, and we had to pass it to get to the Swiss Garden resort, so we stopped to try the seafood and fish there – it was completely delicious (except the calamari, which were huge and a bit greasy) and I loved the fact the drinks came in these huge tankers!

Food over, we headed to the hotel and checked in – initially there was a bit of a kerfuffle as they couldn't find the booking, but I had faith in Agoda’s system and new it would be somewhere in their system. This bunch of very annoying Chinese people in front of me, making such a fuss and asking ridiculous questions, were irritating me. They were asking things like ‘is there bed linen’ and checking, double-checking and triple checking that there were beds in the room. Have they never stayed in a hotel? Because they were fussing, the clerk serving me kept trying to help too – I felt like shouting at them just to get out, but they finally finished fussing and we were given our keys.