Mangrove River Tour @ Cherating

Besides turtle watching, another interesting activity in Cherating is the mangrove river tour. The boat leaves daily at 9am and 4pm, and the boat ride lasts 1-1/2 hours, for RM20 per person.

It is managed by the same person who runs the nightly fireflies boat tour. His name is Hafiz, and he can be reached at 017 - 978 9256. Hafiz is full of information on the mangrove trees, the animals and their habitat. [Update: A lot has changed since the pandemic, Hafiz might or might not be running the fireflies boat tour since our country was locked down from March 18, 2020 to April 1, 2022.]

His eyes are exceptionally sharp, and is able to spot the snakes and monitor lizards on the tree branches from afar. Makes me think of anacondas & and Stephen King.....

Me: Are there any crocodiles in this river?

Hafiz: There are, but only at specific season, and this is not it. The mounds beneath the tree stump are lobster mounds.

Hafiz: Lobsters are dug from those mounds, but one has to be careful as there is usually a cobra inside if you dug in too deep.

Attap seed (or palm seed) plant

Back at Hafiz's shop, he showed us the attap seed plants that he's growing. Can you see the little green sprout  inside? Attap seeds, or palm seeds in English, are those sweet, white fleshy seeds added in ice kacang, a Malaysian dessert made of shaved ice, syrup and kidney beans.

Related Posts:

Suria Cherating, The Good, The Bad and The Pretty

Watching Turtles Lay Eggs At Cherating

Resources:

Cherating, Pahang

Watching Turtles Lay Eggs at Cherating

Turtle watching is an experience not to be missed. It's not the same as watching documentaries. Being up close and personal with a turtle (or a few) is a life-changing experience. 

This was the first time we were in Cherating at the right season. You could be picked up at your hotel for RM50 per pax, or you could find your own way to Pantai Teluk Mak Nik (D'Monica Bay) at Kemaman, Terengganu and pay only RM30 per person. We opted for the latter, since Teluk Pantai Mak Nik was only a fifteen-minute-drive from our hotel in Cherating. 

For the fee, you get to watch the turtles laid their eggs and helped to release the hatchlings into the sea. There were four turtles that came to nest on the beach that night. I couldn't take any pictures or video of the "action", the beach was pitch-dark and we were told not to switch on any torchlights so as not to traumatize the turtles in labour. But I managed to take some shots using the night scene mode.

One of the turtles digging the sand to prepare to lay her eggs. I could hear the explosion of breath and quick inhalation as the turtle laboured and expelled its eggs. 

After the turtle has covered its eggs, the ranger removed them and took them to a sanctuary where they will hatch in 40 - 45 days' time. Once hatched, they would be released back to the sea. 

A turtle heading back to the sea after its eggs were laid 

78 eggs from turtle with tag no. 8991, to be handed over to the turtle sanctuary

The turtles we were asked to help release that night were only a few hours old. Some were going in the wrong direction....one even crawled towards me instead of the sea.

One of the hatchlings

Go baby, all the best, hope you make it, and grow into an adult turtle.

The odds are stacked against their survival. Out of one thousand hatchlings, only one or two survive to reach adulthood, at 25 years. They get caught in fishermen's nets, under a boat propeller, or preyed upon by fish, crabs, birds and humans  We can't control the other factors, but we can say NO to turtle eggs and soup. There are many other eggs and meat, why consume turtles and their eggs??!! 

The turtles' main diet are sea grass, seaweeds and jellyfish. When humans indiscriminately discard their used plastic bags at a beach or river, the garbage are carried into the sea. Mistaking the plastic bags for jellyfish, the turtles would eat them and die. So, please dispose your garbage into garbage bins only. Let each of us play a part to help protect our gentle, defenseless turtles.

Related Posts:

Suria Cherating, The Good, The Bad and The Pretty

Mangrove River Tour

Resources:

Cherating Pahang

Things to do in Cameron Highlands

Cameron Highlands is a place you either love or hate. For those who love it, like me, it is an idyllic place to relax and unwind. People who like exciting, happening venues will find Cameron Highlands boring without the hectic, hustle and bustle that a city offers. The locals are mainly farmers and the entire town is asleep by 10.00 pm or earlier. Once, we took a walk at 10pm and the main road was empty of cars and all the shops are shuttered. Compare that to Kuala Lumpur where I'm from, there are still quite a few cars out on the road at the wee hours of 3.00 am and small groups of people dining and chatting at the 24-hour mamak (Indian-Muslim) eateries.

That said, there is plenty to do in Cameron Highlands. Things that you can't do in a fast-paced city. My list is in the order of my personal preference. Yours may be different.

First on my list is be a "farmer". There are farms that let the customers pluck the vegetables and fruits themselves. Ask for a basket and scissors. You're not allowed to pluck the vegetables or fruits with your bare hand for that will damage the plant or tree. 

Since I'm not a shutter-bug by nature, I did not take pictures of all the vegetables and fruits that I had plucked. There is a hybrid fruit called Cameron Highlands Apples whose pictures I took and covered in another post here. 

Cherry tomatoes

My haul

Chili peppers

There are quite a few strawberry farms where you could pick your own strawberries. But be warned that the strawberries in Cameron Highlands are not the big, sweet, juicy ones you're used to in countries with four seasons like the UK or Seoul. They're smaller in size, and some could be rather sour. Sour as in sharp, not sweet and slightly tart. I had to smother them with whipped cream before I could enjoy them.

Second on my list is eating all the scones my stomach could handle! While scones are available in Kuala Lumpur, they are the American version, dry and dense, which some Americans, by the way, called "biscuits". They're eaten on  their own or with gravy. The scones in Britain are soft and fluffy, and eaten with jam and clotted cream. You can get these at Cameronian Inn, Tanah Rata. The ones at Copthorne Hotel are the American version. 

These are the scones I like, the British version

Trivia: How you eat your scones in the UK can tell where you are from. In Cornwall, London, Bournemouth and Isle of Wight, the jam comes first, then the cream. In Devonshire, the cream comes first, then the jam. How does the Queen eat it? Jam first, then cream. How do I eat it? Same as the Queen, of course! Not because I emulated the Queen, but because I had lived in Bournemouth and London for some years.

Third on my list is to just walk aimlessly around, admiring the flora and fauna, and tea plantations. Since Cameron Highlands is cooler, between 16 degrees Celcius on rainy days and 24 degrees on bright sunny days, cooler climate flowers like roses, lilies, sunflowers and birds of paradise thrive here. 

Birds of paradise are quite a common sight in Cameron Highlands

Thunbegia Mysorensis aka Lady's Slippers

Lilies are common in Cameron Highlands too. Tiger lilies, trumpet lilies and striped barbados lilies. Below is a Striped Barbados Lily.

There is a Rose Valley at Tringkap, near Brinchang, which houses hundreds of rose species and cacti. Do drop in if you are a plant or flower enthusiast like me. On the day I visited, there was a sudden rainstorm just after I paid the entrance fee (RM5 / USD1.12). The ticket wasn't refundable so I had no choice but to step inside and get drenched. Still, it was enjoyable, especially when I saw a black rose. No photos were taken as I didn't want to risk damaging my phone.

I've tried persuading my hubby to go again through the years but he wasn't keen. He finds plants and flowers boring.

One of the tea plantations

If you like looking at things in the past, there is a Time Tunnel that you might want to visit. It's a museum in Brinchang. There are lots of memorabilia and junk to ogle over. There was one particular pinned laminated note that caught my attention'. 

It seems there was an unusual weather occurrence on a certain day in the early 1960s. A gentleman claimed that snow fell in a small area at Parit Waterfalls for forty-five minutes. It does NOT snow in Malaysia. If it did, it was an anomaly. That was why the photo and note below fascinated me enough to take a picture of it.

Related Topics:

Where To Stay in Cameron Highlands

Cameron Highlands Apples

Resources:

Cameron Highlands Travel Guide

Book Review: 1222 by Anne Holt

I've never read Anne Holt's work before even though she's a best-selling novelist. That's because she's a Norwegian author, and her novels are all written in Norwegian. So English readers like me are lucky when her eighth installment of The Hanne Wilhelmsen series was translated into English.

After having read Snow by Orhan Pamuk, which was also another translated work, Anne Holt's 1222 is a refreshing change. It draws you in. 

Although it's a crime thriller, it is not one of those action-packed novels that I like. Rather, it is reminiscent of Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes. It focuses more on solving the puzzle of the crime instead of the crime itself. That said, I do like Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, too, so if there is going to be anymore English-translated work of Holt's, I'd be sure to read them.

1222 is the name of a hotel atop a mountain near a train station. The story begins with a snow blizzard that caused the train to derail. The survivors were rescued and taken to Finse 1222. Snowed in and unable to go home, people started to die. 

Amongst the survivors was a former police detective Hanne Wilhelmsen. Paralyzed from waist down due to a bullet that hit her 12th and 13th vertebrae, she tried to work out who the murderer was from a long list of suspects.

Even though I am more a fan of fast action novels, somehow the narration of 1222 managed to draw me into the story and it was one of those hard-to-put-down books. Imagine this....my nose was buried in my Kindle as hubby and I walked along Jalan Telawi in Bangsar.....

Book Review: Snow by Orhan Pamuk

Snow, "kar" in Turkish, is a story about Ka, a Turkish poet who lived in exile in Germany and who has now returned to Istanbul for his mother's funeral. He took the opportunity to travel to Kars, a city northeast of Turkey on the pretext of covering the story of the numerous suicides there. In truth, he had heard that Ipek, a beautiful ex-classmate was now divorced and he hoped to make her his wife. 

When he arrived, there was a snowstorm which cut the city off from the rest of the world for three days. So, in a nutshell, the plot is about Ka stranded in kar in Kars. And that's all there was to it, really. 

Yes, I know, those who have read the book would tell me about the secular state's clashes with the Islamist fundamentalists, about how a group of Muslim girls would rather commit suicide than remove their head scarves, and how the army staged a theatre act but fired five rounds of live bullets into the audience, killing some while injuring others.

They would be right. We read the same book. However, my gripe is not with the plot itself. Snow had a rather unique plot, one that broke the monotony of the plethora of bestsellers by Western authors. I'd be the last person to argue that the story wasn't interesting.

I only wished it had been written better. The story was told by an omniscient presence (the author's) who came upon Ka's notes years later and pieced them together. The 'layers' removed the reader from the story and as a result, I did not feel involved in the events taking place, nor did I feel any empathy for Ka. As a matter of fact, I felt that Ka was a drip.

If this were a movie, I would have said the wrong actor was cast in the male lead. But this is a book, so I guess it was the way the story was narrated. Orhan Pamuk could still keep Ka as the main character, but approached it differently. 

Book Review: Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre

Upon finishing Agent Zigzag by the same author a month ago, I started right away on Operation Mincemeat. I usually take less than a week to finish a paperback of 600 pages. However, April and May have been particularly busy months, and the weekends were no different. There was always one obligation after another. I was surprised to note that I took one month to finish Agent Zigzag and another month to finish Operation Mincemeat. At the rate I'm reading, it's going to take me more than one lifetime to finish all the books I have!

Operation Mincemeat was the codename of a very bizarre deception carried out by the British Intelligence to fool the Nazis. One of the person involved in the deception was Ian Fleming who was in Room 35 of the Admiralty, the nerve center of British naval intelligence. He later went on to write the James Bond spy novels.

And his colleague, Charles Fraser-Smith, was the inventor who provided Ian Fleming with equipment for his more outlandish plans. Needless to say, Charles Fraser-Smith was responsible for the character 'Q' in the James Bond novels while 'M' was based on Admiral John Godfrey.

The deception involved getting a corpse with no family and dressing it up as an officer and floating it off to the Spanish shores with planted intelligence documents to fool the Germans about the Allieds' invasion plans. I particularly enjoyed the first half of the book. Stephen King couldn't have been more macabre. 

Bentley Purchase came up with a solution. "I've got it," said the coroner. "We'll get an electric fire and thaw out the feet only. As soon as the boots are on we'll pop him back in the refrigerator again and refreeze him. 

The mouth of the corpse has fallen open. The skin around the nose has sunk, and the upper part of the face appears discoloured. The fingers of the left hand are bent, as if clawing in pain.

"....a person was formally pronounced dead without ever having been alive."

I don't normally quote paragraphs from the books I read, but those passages just stuck in my mind. Read together with Agent Zigzag and The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva, one has a better understanding and appreciation of how a war could be won even before it actually began. History lesson has never been so interesting, dead bodies do tell tales. And now I'm going to start on a fiction that has nothing to do with war....time to take a break from history. Should I read The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson or Snow by Orhan Pamuk, or......

Where to Stay in Cameron Highlands

[Updated - a newer hotel, Avillion, was added in]

One of my favourite local holiday destination is Cameron Highlands. I've been to Cameron Highlands so many times that I could be a tour guide for Cameron Highlands if I had wanted to. And with each trip, comes a post or two in this blog.

Looking back on all the different posts on Cameron Highlands, with many of them covering more or less the same hotels and the same activities - I'm a creature of habit and tend to stay at hotels which I'm familiar with - I've decided to amalgamate all the posts into two posts, where to stay and what to do.

Most people choose to stay at either Tanah Rata, the lower ground near the town centre, or Brinchang on the higher ground. Some may choose to stay at Ringlet if a golf course is what they're after. This post will cover four hotels, two at Brinchang and  two at Tanah Rata. 

Brinchang is sometimes 2°C cooler than Tanah Rata. It's also closer to the farms where you could pick (read: harvest) your own strawberries and vegetables. There are quite a few restaurants and cafes at Brinchang but you'll have to drive. Or, you can choose to eat at the hotels.

Tanah Rata is more convenient in that the cafes and restaurants are within walking distance of the hotels. It's also closer to Robinson Falls, where a number of jungle trails begin.

That said, Brinchang has its merits. There are strawberry farms, cherry tomato farms and other fruit and vegetable farms where you pick the crop yourself and you'll charged by the weight of what you had harvested.

There are two hotels that are my personal favourite in Brinchang. Copthorne, for its proximity to the street market where a large selection of fresh vegetables and fruits are sold. 

And Casa dela Rosa for its reminiscence to The Outlook Hotel in Stephen King's Shining. 

The corridor - do you hear "Wendy, I'm home!" or, "Knock, Knock, who's there? Here's Johnny!". Too bad hubby opened the door that led to the gardens just as I snapped the picture. The overall impression was lost a bit.

The room is rather sparsely decorated, not like what you would expect from a hotel, but it has a nice garden for guests to lounge around in.

The garden

The room

At Tanah Rata, my preferred accommodation is Century Pines Resort and Avillion. Century Pines is decades older than Avillion, but it has a charming garden which Avillion does not have.

This entrance is at the old wing. The new wing is not visible from the entrance.

View from the entrance

The rooms at the new wing

It is situated off the main road, so there is peace and quiet. Rows of shops and cafes are just  five to ten minutes' walk from Century Pines Resort. There're western food, fast food, South Indian food, Chinese food and fusion food.

Avillion, on the other hand, is located above a shopping complex. While it lacked a charming garden, it made up for with spacious rooms and an absolutely delectable complimentary breakfast buffet spread. My only gripe about Avillion is that I had to walk through the shopping complex from the car park to the hotel.

The room

The restaurant where the complimentary breakfast buffet spread was 

A hotel staff making an omelette for me - it's made fresh to order

Cafes and restaurants are all within walking distance. I would recommend staying at Tanah Rata if food convenience is a priority and you don't drive or didn't rent a car. The interstate bus terminal is located at Tanah Rata, across The Lord's Cafe, though I'm not sure if it's still opened now. The last time we were there, it was closed. Perhaps there was a church event that day.

Related posts:

Cameron Highlands Apples

Things To Do In Cameron Highlands

Resources:

Cameron Highlands Travel Guide

Cameron Highlands Apples

My first thought when I walked into a farm at Brinchang, Cameron Highlands and saw those plants was "What are these? Eggplants??" I wasn't alone in thinking that. A woman very authoritatively told her husband and kids that those were definitely eggplants. However, I wasn't as one hundred percent sure as she was. And hubby was certain those were not eggplants. So I went and asked one of the farmhands. He said those were apples. Apples?? Yes, Cameron Highlands' very own apples. Are they sour or sweet? Sweet. They taste like honeydew. Ohhh.....

The farmhand said all the ripe ones had been plucked. Being someone who love to try new things, I didn't want to go home without getting some. After badgering him, the farmhand said if I saw any that was yellow with red stripes, I could pluck those. But I'd have to keep them in room temperature for about two days for them to completely ripen, otherwise they won't taste good.

Ready to be plucked, and should ripen in two days

We only managed to find six apples that could be plucked. I guess there must have been a lot of tourists that visited during the May 1st holiday, as this is not the peak season. 

Today, three of the "apples" ripened and they exuded a rich honeydew smell. After chilling them in the fridge for a few hours, we sank our teeth into them. And....they were wonderful. Very juicy, juicier than regular honeydew, and sweet, those apples taste exactly like honeydew. The skin was a little funny, though. Felt like plastic. I couldn't peel them with a peeler, but after I had cut them, I could peel it off by pulling at the edge and dragging it off in one neat tug. A hybrid??

The "apples" were very juicy and sweet

Related posts:

Where To Stay in Cameron Highlands

Things To Do In Cameron Highlands

Resources:

Cameron Highlands Travel Guide

Book Review: Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre

A friend who read a review that I had written on The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva suggested that since I enjoyed reading about British double-cross espionage during World War II I might like Agent Zigzag, a true account of love, espionage and betrayal . And she was right. 

While I had learned a fair bit about how the British concocted a very daring and remarkable deception plan to deceive the Nazis, Agent Zigzag completed my 'education' and I knew all the spy masters by name now, if not their complete personality, on both the British and German sides. Well, almost, anyway. There is one more deception, a very famous dead body operation called Operation Mincemeat, which I will write a review on when I'm finished with it.

Eddie Chapman was the most unlikely hero I had ever come across. He began his life as a criminal and was a member of the Jelly Gang who used chewing gum to stick the gelignite to the safes on their heists. 

And yet, he was also a gentle criminal. He abhorred the use of violence in his crimes. He was also a very charming young man, and made friends easily, both of the female and male gender. This was a man with two fiancées at the same time! 

He was serving a sentence in Jersey when the Nazis took control of the island. And so began a story that was more astounding than fiction. His British handlers codenamed him 'Zigzag' due to his erratic personality.

The book's account is taken from documents released by the British Secret Service MI5 to the UK National Archives in 2001 and is a must read for fans of espionage. 

Book Review: The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended to by a bodyguard of lies" ~ Sir Winston Churchill

When I accessed my blog today, I was shocked to see that the last post was more than a month ago. Time flies without the courtesy of a memo. And what have I been doing for the past one month? Well, I'm not going to bore you with the minute, mundane details of my life. Suffice to say, I was minding my own business, and perhaps a friend's or two's.....yes, I can be quite interested in my friends' lives, to put it mildly.  

Hang on....what has that got to do with a book review post? Nothing. I'm just rambling.

When I buy books, I tend to stick to authors I know. Reading can be a rather expensive hobby in Malaysia, if you are a voracious reader like me, so it makes sense to stick to what you know. However, when a book is given to you for free, you are less picky. And that was how I got my first chance to read Daniel Silva's works, a free Kindle e-book, courtesy of a friend "S".

To be honest, The Unlikely Spy isn't his first book that I've read. I read The Confessor, and liked it enough to take the trouble to google him and found that The Unlikely Spy was his first book, published in 1996, and which some of his fans think is still his best work yet.

While some of the characters and events are fictional, The Unlikely Spy is based on very real events during World War II. The very complex and detailed deception conjured up by the British Intelligence totally fascinated me. Imagine producing fake army tanks, fictitious army units, and so on. It's one big massive deception that rivals Hollywood blockbuster movies. 

The story was cinematic in its scope. I felt I was watching a Hollywood blockbuster instead of reading an e-book on the small Kindle screen. I was so involved in the story that I took the Kindle with me to the treadmill when it was time to work out at the gym. It's definitely a page-turner and if you would like to learn how the British fooled the Nazis and caused Hitler to make all the wrong decisions, pick up this book. The book is based on Operation Fortitude