Day 348: Signed and sent!

We were up late again this morning and initially just hung around the hotel expectantly, waiting for the documents to arrive, but as our stomachs began to rumble we gave the tracking number to the Boss and headed out to look for somewhere to have breakfast. The nice-looking café just around the corner from the hotel was shut, so we walked further up the road to another little place located at the end of an alley that Tony had suggested. However, they only served one thing: egg toast, which consisted of a very, very runny half-boiled egg squashed between two pieces of toast. This didn't look all that appealing, so we pushed on. The next place we found had stopped serving breakfast and we ended up at a funny little 'restaurant' on the corner called Ho Ping. Like the food court we visited last night, it's a sort of a street-food hybrid. While there's a proper bricks-and-mortar open shell with tables and chairs and a dedicated staff, who will seat you and serve you drinks, it doesn't actually serve food. Instead, a series of individual vendors, whose carts are arrayed around the perimeter of the restaurant, do all of the cooking. I got some char kway teow, while the others had some barbecue pork buns.

When we got back to the hotel, there was still no sign of the documents, so Tony rang DHL and was assured that they would be delivered between 2pm and 5pm this afternoon. We went back to the room to wait, decamping again when the cleaners came around to give the room a bit of a spruce. When we went downstairs to the little lobby, Tony arrived with the documents. They've arrived! We quickly read and signed them and then headed out to Kapitan for lunch before walking over to the 'shopping district' - a collection of Western-style malls – where the post office is located. Then, with the mortgage ball back out of our court, we headed into one of the malls, where we found an H&M where I found a shirt and t-shirt. We meandered about for a while, but the mall was even more soulless than the norm and we made our way back out into the warmer world. Conveniently, the area we were in is also where the buses for the Cameron Highlands – our next stop – leave from,so Kate shopped around a bit and then bought our tickets. 

After stopping back in the room for a little while we went out to Monalisa for beer, chips and cards (and a bit less fresh pineapple this time). For dinner we went back to Ho Ping, where we got some bak kut teh (a soupy pork hotpot), some char kway teow and barbecue pork buns. Back in the room, we stayed up late finally putting all of that planning to good use, booking five flights around and between Malaysia and Indonesia, starting with a flight to Sumatra in a few days' time.

Day 347: Tracking down those darn documents

We were up late again this morning, and decided to skip breakfast and go straight to Kapitan for lunch. It was raining lightly as we walked down but dry again as we walked back. At the hotel, we just hung around the room doing some planning and schoolwork. Our documents still haven't arrived, so I Skyped HSBC again to try to find out if/when they were sent. I was connected to a very helpful chap who managed to get hold of the DHL tracking number for the documents. Plugging the number into their website, I found that they had tied to deliver the documents a day or so before we arrived, but then seemingly just given up altogether, so I quickly called them – the office closed at 5.30pm and it was 5.15pm. The person I spoke to found the documents' details and said that they would try to re-deliver them tomorrow between 9am and 12pm. In the evening, we went back to Monalisa for chips, beer and pineapple, and then back down to the night noodle night market for dinner.

Day 346: Use your noodle

We were up very late this morning. The clocks went forward an hour when we got to Malaysia and we obviously didn't get a whole lot of sleep the night before, so this morning represented a much-needed catch-up. We went out to look for somewhere to have breakfast, ending up in a rather fancy hotel restaurant. We sat down, but when we said that we wanted to order some breakfast, we were told that breakfast was finished – it was after 12pm! Thankfully, the waitress spoke to the kitchen and they agreed to keep breakfast going for us. It was all a bit expensive, but we splashed out and let the girls get whatever they wanted and they (Zoe in particular) were over the moon to get some nice Western food for a change.

As we ate, the heavens opened up, and the streets were soon awash with rain, but it had finished by the time we paid the bill and headed out to do some exploring. George Town has gone to a bit of an effort to gussy itself up for tourists. The centre of the city is World Heritage-listed, and it's full of little metalwork caricature signs that depict and explain little nuggets of its history – including one marking the spot where Jimmy Choo made his first shoes. It has also become known for its street art, and we made a point of visiting a few of the better-known examples. Mostly, however, the city just looks a bit tired around the edges. Regular readers will know that I have a thing for faded grandeur and although George Town doesn't have a lot of the latter, it has plenty of the former. Many of the shops (which mostly seem to describe themselves as 'traders') have wonderfully retro large metal signs over the entrance that were obviously put up decades ago. The brutal tropical sun has stripped most of the colour out of them, giving the whole place a lovely time warp feel. Our wanderings eventually brought us to the area known as Little India, where there were lots of clothing shops. Kate and the girls tried a few on. Many of them were incredibly cheap, but of course the only ones that looked nice on weren't.

The guy who runs our hotel – 'the Boss', aka Tony - is a very friendly and helpful old Chinese Malay and he has given us several suggestions of places to eat. For lunch (at about 3pm), we visited one of these – an Indian/tandoori restaurant called Kapitan, where we got some good butter chicken, naan and tandoori chicken, and some rather watery dhal. 

When we got back to the hotel, we arranged to stay a few more nights and then when back to the room for a bit more rest and a bit of schoolwork for the girls - they finally got to the end of the workbooks Kate has been carrying around for the past few months, cue for much celebrating all round. In the late afternoon we went out to Monalisa again and got some beers and chips again, with a big free plate of pineapple again. For dinner, we walked down the road a little to where the night noodle market had set up. There were several carts set up by the side f the road, each selling a different noodle-based dish, along with some very battered tables and chairs. We tried a few different types, including the local specialty char kway teow, a very nice rice-noodle stir-fry. Not long after we got back to the room it started to rain, morphing into a nice, heavy downpour complete with thunder and lightning.

Day 345: Malaysian Mona Lisa

We all slept in as long as we could this morning, eventually getting kicked out of our beds by the train attendant, who wanted to turn them back into seats. A bit later, the train pulled up at the border, where we all got out, with our bags, to take our turns jumping through the immigration hoops – both Thai and Malaysian. The process went wonderfully smoothly for us, and before long we were back on the train looking out the window at one of our fellow passengers, for whom the process was going much less smoothly. We had all clocked this guy earlier, as he looked distinctly odd. Tall, thin, white, reasonably young, bald (perhaps even hairless, although his hair was growing back), he was dressed in a matching outfit of loose top and trousers – could easily have been something a patient would wear in a hospital. We could see him inside, talking and gesticulating animatedly with a woman we assumed was from Thai immigration (she wasn't wearing a headscarf and they seemed to be at the Thai end of the building). She appeared to be pointing back the way we had come. He didn't seem to be losing his cool – indeed, he seemed to be resigned to his fate, and sure enough, as the train pulled away from the platform, he wasn't on it. (We later quizzed some of the other people on our train but no-one knew what was going on – my best guess was that he was trying to skip out on some unpaid hospital bills.)

When we finally arrive in Butterworth, we walked up from the platform into the station, looking around in vain for an ATM and directions to the ferry terminal for the boat across to George Town on the nearby island of Penang. Kate asked one of our fellow passengers, a local man, for directions to the terminal and he very helpfully showed us to a free shuttle bus (all of the other white folks walked over). When we got there, we again looked in vain for an ATM, which then presented us with a problem – we had no local money and no source of local money to pay for our ferry tickets.

One of the ferry staff suggested that I might be able to find a money changer nearby, so I ran off in search of one. I found some police manning a desk at the bottom of some stairs and asked them if they could tell me where I could find a money changer or an ATM. They pointed to a large building some distance away across a tangle of roads and said I could find an ATM there, so I started heading that way. I hadn't gone far when I came across a few bus touts who asked where I was going. I mentioned that I was looking for a money changer and a woman asked how much I wanted to change. I looked through my wallet and discovered that I had a very small number of small-denomination Thai notes and quite a large number of large-denomination bills. I handed over all of the small stuff and got a small amount of Malaysian ringgit back – which I hoped would be enough to cover the ferry tickets. I ran back clutching my cash, which thankfully just met our needs and we went through the barriers to join the scrum of people waiting for the next ferry.

About half an hour later, we climbed aboard the ferry, which was pretty basic inside – just rows of bench seats in a huge open space. After we disembarked we looked again for an ATM, again in vain, and for some sort of information centre, also in vain. Eventually Kate found someone who said that there was an ATM across the road and behind some buildings, so I left the others with the bags and went off to search for it. This involved a long loop around the back streets, but eventually I got some cash and also found a lovely big air-conditioned café/bakery with wifi a not-too-long walk away. 

I led the others there and we found a quiet corner where we could let the sweat dry and figure out how to get to our hotel. There were even some power points where we plugged in and charged up. We bought a couple of pretty good coffees to pay them back for generously providing us with a sanctuary from the heat outside and then gathered everything up and set off. The staff told us that we could simply walk straight up one of the streets outside, which we duly did. George Town is one of those frustrating places where there's a perfectly good footpath – in this case quite a lovely one, contained in a colonnaded passageway alongside the buildings – that the local businesses consider to be a continuation of their premises, forcing pedestrians to walk in the road; the busy road populated by large buses and impatient motorbikes. 

The walk to the hotel was hot and long, but we made it eventually, checked in and were shown to our room – by a very cheerful, energetic young guy with very little English. We tried to ask about the mortgage documents that we'd had redirected to the hotel, but he just smiled and indicated that he had no idea what we were talking about with a vigorous shake of his head and said that we should talk to 'the Boss'. Never mind – the room was nice, located across the road from the reception area on the first floor, high-ceilinged, clean and spacious, with windows that opened onto the street.

By now it was after 5pm and we hadn't had lunch, so we headed out to see if we could find somewhere to get a beer and some chips. We ended up the Monalisa Cafe, a wonderfully old school place that looked like it hadn't changed in decades and had the characterful staff to match – a middle-aged Asian woman in a man's shirt and trousers with short, slicked back hair; grandma playing online slots on a tablet in the corner; granddad slumped in a chair at the entrance watching the world go by, then getting slowly up to show us to a table; and, an effusive, energetic, skinny woman, presumably the owner, who came over and offered us free fruit – watermelon or pineapple. We would be doing her favour by eating it, she said, as it was just going to go off otherwise. She returned with a plate piled high with fresh pineapple, which the girls set upon with relish. We then chatted to her for a while and she mentioned that the night market that we were planning to visit for dinner would be diminished tonight. Instead, she pointed us in the other direction to a 'food court', which we set off for when we had finished our beer, chips and pineapple. 

It proved to be a sort of street food lite – a large central eating area surrounded by small stalls selling all manner of culinary delights (fish head curry anyone?). You simply choose your dishes from a variety of vendors, place you order, giving them your table number, and they bring it over to you (and then you pay, which seems a bit strange). We ordered some sushi for the girls and some noodles, veges, satay sticks and roast duck for us and sat down to wait for it to arrive – ordering some drinks from a passing woman in the meantime. The food, when it came, was all good – the girls went back a few times for more sushi – but the place lacked atmosphere and we won't be back.