DadTalk

Where are we?

We are currently staying in Kuala Lipis. Do not bother looking it up, unless you have an atlas with a map marked “Malaysia in Extreme Detail”. The town has two streets and about as many tourist attractions. The locals, while friendly, are prone to saying “you still here?” So why are we here?

We basically wanted to visit somewhere relatively easy to get to, which was also interesting for just being a small Malaysian town. After an 11 hour train journey from Singapore it did not quite tick the first box, given that it is only about a 500km trip it would have been faster to po-go stick here. However it does have an odd mix of bustling and at the same time decaying charm; Chinese coffee shops, Indian barbers, Malay hardware stores, all interesting by being very different from home.

Today we headed out into the jungle and again my children have amazed me with their capacity to put up with the range of hardships we throw at them in the name of tourism. With our guide we covered about 10km thorough muddy jungle, visiting bat caves and seeing wild elephant poo. Except for a couple of hunters with worryingly large shotguns, we did not see another soul. But for the point where we were prizing six leeches off Ned’s foot at once, the kids did amazingly well (he lost it a little at this point, but soon recovered after a good lunch). Yes leeches, truly vile little animals that you can see standing up and doing a hungry wiggle dance once they’ve sniffed you out. We plucked off many of their blood bloated little bodies today. How we laughed!

No doubt you can get the small town Malay charm somewhere without the bum numbing train journey, but overall if you happen to find yourself in the area you could a lot worse. Tomorrow we are off to big town KL, where we will see if we can find some of those anti-leech socks we’ve heard about.