Monday, November 09, 2015

Steve Paine: Our last day in KK


Breakfast time is always amusing, this morning the star was to be the toaster. The toaster in question was the revolving type, you know the ones where you place your bread on a steel slide and it slowly travels along a rotating grill, finally falling to another slide placed underneath and to your plate. If the toast is not done well enough, you replace it for another lap, I'm sure you get the drift.

Now there are always people where there are controls and knobs involved, that can't resist having to twist and adjust them. This morning there was a problem where by the finished toast was not sliding down the ramp easily causing a backlog of finished toast.

Guests looked up the ramp from the front, down the ramp from the back and one even got on the floor to get a better angle. Whilst this build up gets increasingly serious, the more selfish guest is still trying to stuff bread in at the other end, tutting at the others, now with tongs and forks stuffed in the 'live' workings, trying to remove their toast.

I enjoyed this from my table, so interestingly did the staff who at a distance didn't make a move to attempt to solve the problem. Had I been part of this spectacle, I would have had to make a tactical withdrawal and pretended I had been no where near it. The main players however continued to interfere, with everyone fighting for their own particular piece of toast and giving no quarter to any kind of compromise.

Weary from the 'The Toasters Revenge' we retired to our room to plan our day. We can look forward tomorrow to 'The Return of the Toaster', hopefully a spectacular sequel to the original, we must get down early for a good seat.

A trip to the KK Bird Sanctuary looks like a nice morning out. Google maps says it easy enough to walk, in fact puts at 1.8 kilometres, a piece of cake for hardened jungle walkers. I wrote down a couple of roads to ensure we follow properly, what could be easier.

Off we set, keeping the clock tower to our left and picking up the Jalan Istana, this led up up quite steep hill, but we were quite cool in the shade of the huge trees that lined the road. The left hairpin bend corresponded exactly with our instructions, followed by our turn onto the Julan Bukt Bendera. When we met the Jalan Asrama it just all seemed too easy!

It should be just up on the right, after all we are now beginning to sweat a little and the 1.8k seems further than we thought. We now started to go down hill. This I didn't like, after all the reward in my opinion for travelling up hill in the heat was the return was all down hill! No sign of any Bird Sanctuary and the road had come to a more or less dead end. OK we must have taken a wrong turn.

Continue reading (Incl. Pics) at: Steve Paine: Our last day in KK
.
.