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Road trip saga |
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Monday, July 12 Re the last statement of yesterday’s diary – it was both right and wrong. Right: Yes, the East-West highway is an engineering masterpiece . Wrong: “Then,… it’s a drive down the centre of Malaysia to KL”. Talk about counting chickens!! First, the East-West highway: It was all I imagined it would be, and Dave was impressed. The degree of difficulty for its builders would have been 10/10. It clings to precipitous mountain sides, skims across a vast lake Tasik Temenggor, struggles over a mountain range that should have blocked the whole project, before sliding down the other side into the insular, isolated Islamic state of Kelantan. One has to flag the Islam angle whenever Kelantan is mentioned. It’s the only state where the opposition fundamentalist party, PAS, kept control of the state legislature during this year’s elections. Even to casual passing observers such as we were, the impact of the Muslim way of life is obvious. Although it was Sunday, school children were everywhere in uniform – unlike the rest of Malaysia, Sunday is a regular school and business day. (Friday is the holy day for Muslims, but in KL and places south, its observance there is limited to an extra one hour prayer session early in the afternoon). And nowhere on the street did I see any female, even young girls, without the obligatory head scarf. This is not to infer that Islam, as practised in this northern part of Malaysia, bears a close social resemblance to the more repressive regimes currently in power in parts of the mid East. Malays appear to have adapted a type of Islam that suits their traditional life-styles, although I’m told that in recent years, the influence of Arab nations is becoming a little more evident. But back to our saga… The first intimation that all was not going to go to as planned was our belated decision once we had reached Kelantan and turned south, that maybe we’d better refuel, in case the journey through the midland mountains was more draining on our fuel tank than we expected. By this stage, we had travelled a considerable distance away from any large town, and petrol stations were in short supply. But there was no shortage of vehicles on the roads. So where were they refuelling? A man in one village pointed Dave to a stall across the road. There was indeed a Petronas sign there, but no fuel pumps we could see. Shrugging his shoulders, Dave asked the stall holder about petrol. DB (pointing at our car): Petrol? Man: Ya, ya. DB: Where? Man: Di sini (here) DB (puzzled): Where? The man gestured to his stall counter. The penny dropped. Just behind the counter, propped up on top of a 44-gallon drum, was a small glass measuring cylinder full of a gold liquid, with a pump and little hose (garden variety) attached. This was the petrol pump, designed to measure out five litre lots to the local population for their motorbikes. DB wasn’t certain about putting this stuff into the Proton’s fuel tank. “You’re sure it’s petrol?” he asked the man whose command of English wasn’t too good (but better than our Malay). “Ya, ya, petrol”. “Not diesel?” A shake of the head from the little man. “Unleaded?” an anxious DB continued. That was being a bit optimistic, expecting the stall holder to grasp his meaning, but the man nodded “ya, ya”. “Oh well”, DB shrugged and told him to put the fuel in…
DB watches anxiously as fuel goes into the Proton via a rudimentary refuelling system. That was the good bit – we drove off and the car was fine. What wasn’t good were the maps I was using – they were out of date, and showed a major road as going where we wanted to go. It didn't. |
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Rather than investigate another road which might (or might not) have gone through, we took the East Coast highway, at a cost of about four hours. The East Coast highway, from Khota Baru in the north, down to Kuantan, and then across to KL, is a nightmare of a road. Once before I described it as being like the Pacific Highway of 20 years ago, but carrying today’s traffic load. Dave has corrected me on this – he says, quite sourly, it’s comparable to the Pacific Highway of 1950. To add to the strain on DB’s stamina, the weather came against him when, nearing midnight and many hours behind schedule, we reached the home straight of the motorway into KL for the final 70 kilometres. All the usual weather clichés of rain: bucketing down, torrential downpour, the heavens opening, raining cats and dogs etc, are understatements when describing what hit us last night. Just say it rained, as it can only in Malaysia. And the wipers on the Proton definitely weren’t up to scratch. Today, checking out what happened, we realised, with hindsight and extra information, that the other possible road from the north, the unknown quantity I was too reluctant to commit us to, is actually the only road south through central Malaysia these days. The road we tried is now blocked by landslides and is used only by logging trucks for access to the mountain forests. |
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Obviously, we survived it all. I am a little tired today, but Dave, who bore the brunt of the miscalculation, went to work as usual.
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The
road went from being a lovely tar road to a rough forestry track
within the space of a few kilometres. So with no fuel tank
guard on the rental car, and keeping in mind the number of petrol
tanks we’ve holed over the years exploring rough roads, we opted to
backtrack a long way.