Sungai Lembing

Does this picture looks familiar to you?  Yes, it is from the current Mediacorp 7pm show, Kampong Ties.  Yes, this Sungai Lembing.  It is a tin mine town in Pahang, Malaysia.  Very nice kampong scenary.  The reason for showing is I am going to head there for a holiday in Decemeber.  Sungai Lembing, I am coming!

holiday

keith's mid-year school holiday started on the 31st May and last for 4 weeks. we been thinking and looking for a place for vacation. finally decided for a short trip to Malaysia Desaru for a 2D1N full board fruit farm tour.

we were to head to Desaru by Ferry and back by Ferry. the ferry journey 35mins from Changi Ferry Terminal. The only issue is the ferry left at 7:15am in the morning. Thus, by 6:30, we are to reach the ferry terminal. Anyway, we made it and enjoy our trip to desaru.

In summary, it was a very good trip with good food. We got to have unlimited durian for dinner, unlimited fruits during most of the meal. One of the lunch include lobsters (though it is a little small). I put on weight after the trip. Damn!!!

Other high light of the tour include the fruit farm, Ostrich farm firefly. Enough of saying but pictures for your viewing.

Mediacorp Veteran Artiste Huang Wenyong was leading the tour.
Dragon fruit (龙株果)
Durian, my family favarite
Ostrich Farm
Feeding ostrich with corn.
Free flow of tropical fruit
Fresh Jack Fruit (好大的波罗蜜)
Durian
Aftermath. We had dinner and at least 10 durians. Look at the mess...
Butter crab
Lobsters
Resort
Resort
Beach

Friends visit Part 2

the first 2 days of their visit, we took them around the suzhou area, visited 观前街, 金鸡湖, 重元寺, 太湖，木渎古镇，圆融时代广场 and 李公堤. nothing really great but they did enjoy the visit to those places. my friends are not really into buying so nothing bought at those places other than food to keep themselves filled.

to keep it short since many of these places I had already visited, so i will posted pictures for your viewing pleasure.

all these 3 friends are actually my ex-colleagues from WD. we had been working together for 6 years before the company started to shift the operation out of singapore. top left is Ah Wee, a coolman and very eager to go beijing to meet his china "female" friend. top centre, Ah Lim (aka handsome), funny guy, always create lot of joke but those cold joke "冷笑话" if you know what i meant. Top right, Sir Chua (aka Tungsten Chua)A great guy but eat a lot of meat. Sir Chua, you have to slow down your meat intake. Ofcourse, my wife, Selina, my son Keith and myself were in the pictures as well.

in the 重元寺, backgroud is the Goddess of Mercy pogoda.

closed up of the pogoda that has a height of 46m

a very peaceful statue of the Goddess of Mercy in the pogoda. this tallest in-door Goddess of Mercy in China has a height of 26m and it is made of 88 tons of bronze.

the day when we were there, it was the birthday of Goddess of Mercy, many devotees were there to pray.

a typical scene in china. throwing coins to some ponds or statue. actually, i saw this habit in western countries as well.

it was clear blue sky when we were at tai hu. lot of little make/shift stalls selling windmills of different shapes, sizes and colors.

weather was cold that day, Wee and Sir Chua bbqing their ice-cream to melt it. maybe it was the melamide.

wee trying out the pineapple while sir chua tried the stinky tofu at mudu town (木渎古镇). i have yet to try that in china. too stinky for me... haha

夕阳西下，小船流水。

长江三峡游 - The Yangtze Three Gorges Cruise

Make use of the China National Day holiday for a 4 nights Yangtze 3 Gorges cruise. 4 families from Delphi went to the cruise that was fun, bore and exciting, I will explain that later.

Day 1 (27th September 08, Saturday)

As we understand that the boat will not sail off till the next morning 8am so we decided that there isn't a need for us to reach the boat early like 6pm. We started off from our place at about 12:30pm, reaching airport by 2:30pm for checking. The airport was actually pretty quite since the National holiday had not really started. Checking went smooth and the flight took off with a slight delay. We reached Wuhan domestic airport by 6:30om. The local guide took us to a dinner place nearby the airport. Food suck and expensive.

After dinner, we are surprised that the journey from Wu Han (武汉) to Yi Chang (宜昌) will take us 5 hours of bus ride instead of the 3 hours that we were told of. So, now we would have reached the boat by 2am in the morning. If we knew about this, we would have took an early flight. So, by morning 1:30am, we reached the boat and tucked in for an early morning the same day. The room was excellence to my surprise. This is a standard twin hotel room with full facilities such as bathtub, TV, mini-fridge and big window for viewing. It is not the cabin with pot hole as in the cruises in Singapore. All rooms come standard with full length glass window.

Day 2 (28th September 08, Sunday)

The wake-up call music sounded off at 6:15am waking my wife and myself. We were tire as we sleep late early this morning. I was dragging my tire body to the bathroom for a shower, only start to feel the energy after warm water sprinkle on my body. Feel so good.

We had a sumptuous buffet breakfast with scramble egg, fried noodles, toasted bread, salad and many other pastries before leaving our boat for a visit to the dam at Xi Ling Gorge (西陵峡).

The dam was built with 3 purposes, first, flood control, second, power generation and lastly, navigational improvement. The annual power generation is 84.7 billion KWh.

After visiting the dam, we got back to the boat for our lunch and proceed to sail upstream through the ship lock. Boats have to pass through a 2 way 5 steps ship lock to get upstream or downstream. We took about 3 hours to get through the lock after lunch. It was exciting to follow through the operation of the lock initially but it was boring to look at it again and again.

The boat proceeded through Xi Ling Gorge and finally docked at Ba Dong (巴东). After a banquet dinner that were excellent. We proceeded to deck 5 for dance performance by the crews. The performance includes dance, act, taichi and saxophone. I was very very impressed with performers. During the day time, they could be a waitress serving food to us and by the night, they were performing right in front of us.









Day 3 (29th September 2008)

Day 3 was the best throughout the whole crew. We visited Shen Nong Xi (神农溪). There live the last generation of boatmen who make a living on premitive small wooden boat look like "Wang Duo Jiao" (碗豆角 - pea). Generally, each boat has 6 members from the same family and it is used as the only transportation along the river. During upstream when reaching shallow stream, the boatmen become tracker where they need to pull the boat from the shoreline. This is the exciting part of the trip.

In the afternoon, we proceeded to pass the Wu Gorge (巫峡) and the Qutang Gorge (瞿塘峡). Too bad that I slept through the afternoon so I miss the Qu Tang Gorge. Night activities are cultural performances by the crew members. The boat sail non-stop upstream through the night.

Day 4 (30th September 2008)

The boat were a little late today. It reached Feng Du by 8:30am instead of the original time of 8am or earlier. We headed to Feng Du ghost city at 9am. Not much fun for today day activities.

During the night, it was time for the passengers performed instead of the crew members. All four Delphi families' member participated the performance. Adithi sang a chinese song that impressed the whole crew members as well as the audience. Issac and Amada kick in synchronisation in with their Taekwando stunts. My wife and I sang a song 请跟我来 (please follow me).



Day 5 (1st October 2008)

In the morning, we checked out from the boat and headed to Chong Qing city (). Visited a couple of places such as People Theatre, ELing Park, Walking street. Since today is the China National day, the walking street was full of people. It is really (人山人海) People Mountain People Sea.

Overall, this was the most relaxing trip that my family had in China. Most of the morning, we will have offshore activities and back to the boat by lunch time. The afternoon were lazing around on the boat chatting, scenery viewing, card playing. All the meals were so good that my weight increase by 2kg after the trip. My wife and son enjoyed it very much as well.