2. The Devils Day
Leaving our second home in Naarden we took a short cycle back to the hotel where we’d recently spent our anniversary at Amersfoort, successfully missing the thunderstorms until we could actually see the hotel across the road and getting drenched in the 300m before we could get to it. The rain now is tropical not just showers, great deluges for 15 minutes then gone. Who needs Thailand, but on the bright side we were offered a free glass of bubbly on arrival – should have been cocoa – and postponed that until we had got changed and dry and sat by the fire to enjoy it....
Read More1. A Catalogue of Catastrophes
It’s not often Ten Tonne Taffy gets a mentioned in dispatches these days, but lately she’s had a rough time, doing nothing but being our home. Firstly, I got up one night to go to the loo, one of the joys of getting older, and smelt that plasticky electric burning smell. I switched off the power and went back to bed after checking nothing was on fire and the next day took the fuse board cover off and found that the immersion wire had burned completely through and melted some other wires and fuses. A close call! A close call… It turns out that the screw for that wire...
Read MoreAnniversary Waltz – a mini tour.
We visit a lot of hotels so get to use all sorts of different showers, from buckets to multi jet rainfall showers. One thing most have in common is the lengths they go to to make it hard to read the shower controls by making the temperature and shower flow knobs chrome and the instructions for want of a better description ‘off chrome’ which make reading it, without your glasses in a steamy room almost impossible so with unbridled joy and with a deepening sense of ‘oh you’re really getting old now, getting excited about this sort of thing’ we found our first...
Read More23. A change of Direction
We left Taiping well before first light to try and beat the heat and headed towards the coast again. By 9am we had covered 50km (ok 49.8km but if it hadn’t been for that last few hundred meters of gravel….) and my shirt was so wet I could wring the sweat out of it. I wonder if our water filter can recycle that??? 🙈 We’d made really good time and wound our way through lots of little lanes on a pretty route. The last section however was on the main road, which wasn’t too busy but with our trusty flag sticking out we had no problems with traffic. Eventually we turned off...
Read More22. Muggy Malaysia
We’d had a lovely hotel suite in George Town, complete with a seperate lounge and had thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, but from about lunchtime onwards it was just too hot to go out and we ended up using our air conditioned lounge a lot! Much of the city slows down around the hottest part of the day, but even come the evening we preferred to sit inside an a/c restaurant than on the pavement as many tourists did. You just got a soaking t shirt if you stay outside and we have that enough cycling thank you very much! This had set us off on one of our many talk-ourselves-into/out of-something...
Read More21. The sun never sets on the (old) British Empire.
Always a picturesque start to the day We had a couple of nice days cycling through quiet lanes and tracks on our route south before emerging into Butterworth – a very odd name for a town in Malaysia. The ex RAF Butterworth is on the opposite side of the water to George Town, the old heart of the British Empire here and we cycled through the old RAF base, now with a RAAF contingent stationed here alongside the Malaysian Airforce, to catch the ferry to Penang Island. The ferry used to take cars and there’s a dual carriageway on ramps looping out over the water to get you to the...
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