Not Really In Hollywood

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  Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia
Friday, February 10, 2012

Waking up this morning, we went down for our free breakfast at T-Hotel before lazing around for an hour or so. The breakfast included fried rice, fried noodles, toast with some kind of very sweet spread and coffee and juice.  Not bad, and certainly saved us some pennies.

During our lazing around time, we took a video of our bathroom.  It has the best tap ever.  Imagine the surprise Lizzie got when she was standing in front of it the first time she turned it on!

Around 11.30 we checked out and made our way to the bus station.  We were hoping to get all the way to Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands today, and we probably would have if we'd set out earlier, but as you can probably guess we didn’t make it!

Getting to the bus station, we said we wanted to go to Ipoh which was where we would get a connection to our final destination.  After being told that there wasn’t a bus until 15.00 we were advised to get the bus that was just about to leave that was going to a place called Alor Setar, from where there are more regular buses to Ipoh.  With hindsight, we should have investigated it a little more, especially as she just took our money without giving us a ticket.  She also said that it would take an hour to get to Alor Setar, whereas in fact it took nearly two hours.  Although it was the most palatial bus in the world, with fully reclining arm chairs.  Very comfy.

So arriving at Alor Setar around 13.30, we found that there was no bus to Ipoh until 15.00.  And finding this out was a chore.  There are so many different companies if you ask one, they will naturally only tell you when theirs is going, and most were at 16.30.  And because it was Muslim prayer time, many of the booths were closed so it took us a while to find the 15.00 bus.

But we got it and it took four hours to get to Ipoh.  Turns out Ipoh is not pronounced "I poo" after all.  But I don’t think we will be able to stop saying it like that now!  Anyway, it was 19.00 by the time we arrived at the long-distance bus station, 5km out of town.  We then had to wait for a local bus to take us to the city bus station from where we hoped we’d be able to get to the hotel we had selected.

Realising on the bus to Ipoh that we were going to miss the last connection to Tanah Rata, we knew that we would have to spend the night in Ipoh so we started researching hotels.  Embassy Hotel seemed the nicest and it was about a kilometre from the city bus station.  It was dark by the time we arrived there so we enquired about a taxi from the bus station, but every one of them was trying to rip us off so we were stubborn and decided to walk.  Trouble is, it took us a while to work out the direction to go in.  Stupid Lonely Planet maps strike again with incorrectly named roads and landmarks in the wrong place.

We eventually got the right direction, after walking around a roundabout a few times and firstly heading off for about 200m up the wrong road.  Then getting to Embassy, we were promptly told that they were full and they advised us to try Hollywood Hotel across the road.  We did.  And we took a room here even after taking a look at it.  That’s how much we couldn’t be bothered to explore any further to find a better place to stay.  Hollywood was the worst place we had stayed so far on our travels.  And it wasn’t even the cheapest.  It cost £2 more than our bungalow at Hin Wong on Koh Tao and it only cost £1 less than our bungalow at Tree Tops in Khao Sok National Park.  The video shows just how bad it is!  But at the end of the day it was a place to rest our heads.  Nevertheless, we weren’t looking forward to a night’s sleep at this place!

Having said that, the owner was the friendliest most helpful person you could imagine.  He told us about a decent Chinese restaurant next door (and it was very good and very cheap – a nice, much needed meal after a day’s travel); and he told us that we didn’t need to go back to the bus station in the morning to get the bus to Tanah Rata as it passed right outside so he told us where we could buy our tickets in the morning (another Chinese restaurant – we were staying in the Chinese Quarter).  He almost made up for the nightmare night ahead.  Almost, but not quite.

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