Saturday, July 25, 2009

Whole Day on the Road

15 June 2008 @ Chiang Mai, Thailand

Supposingly, we booked a place with our guesthouse to bring us to Chiang Rai. Unfortunately, we were told in the morning that the bus was fully booked. We had no choice but to travel on our own.

[9.30am] After packing everything, we paid the guesthouse's owner's husband to drive us to the Chiang Mai's bus station. We quickly bought the tickets to Chiang Rai.


While waiting for the bus to depart, we walked to a nearby 7-11 shop for breakfast. MinBee bought a hotdog, LeongKee bought a burger while Kuan and I bought cup noodles for breakfast.


[11.00am] We boarded the bus after that and finally gets moving at 11am. It's a rather long journey to Chiang Rai - 3 hours. We listen to mp3 and took a rest.

Sleepyboy caught on camera again!

After a while, the bus conductor started to distribute biscuits and a bottle of water to each passenger on board. Wow, never expect that coming.


Then, wet towels were given too! All with their company label - GreenBus.


[2.15pm] Finally reached Chiang Rai. We quickly look for counters that sell tickets to Chiang Kong. After we bought the tickets, we realized we don't have time to eat lunch. So we bought some snacks to eat on the bus.


[3.00pm] The bus depart from Chiang Rai heading towards Chiang Kong. The condition of the bus was much worse than the one we took before. No air-cond, no biscuits, no water, no wet towel, lots of boxes that the locals are transporting on the bus.

Kuan, MinBee, LeongKee and Me - on the way to Chiang Kong

While we have nothing to do. We ate our snacks bought earlier - custard cakes, and we took photos.





We bought the same type of food for our trekking back in Chiang Mai, because we kinda like the cake.

[6.00pm] After a another grueling 3-hour ride on the bus, our butts almost gone flat. We reached Chiang Kong town and took a tuk-tuk to bring us to somewhere where we can look for a guesthouse to stay.


The sky was getting dark and we finally decided to stay at Boom House after surveying the prices around. There were not many rooms available, so we took 1 good room and 1 bad room.

What is bad room? No air-cond, no attached bathroom and the bed is super-duper hard. And I mean it. I look under the bed sheet and I saw a mattress below it. But when I hit on the mattress, it was like hitting on a piece of board. *THUP* Me no kidding!


[6.30pm] We cleaned up and walked around town, bought some snacks and water for the long day tomorrow and went to withdraw some money. It was like a ghost town, nothing much to see around and most shops were closed.


[7.00pm] At last we found hope to cure our hunger. We found a shop that sells noodles - soup and dry. We quickly ordered and wait for our food anxiously. We have not eat a proper meal the whole day, everyone is extremely hungry.


[8.30pm] Very satisfied with the cheap and delicious soup noodles, we then walked around to look for travel packages that can bring us across to Laos. We found that the prices were almost the same, so we took the one near our guesthouse - Easy Bar. That guy looks friendly too.

You'll need these if you're going to Laos

We paid for the border-crossing package and head back to rest as we need to wake up pretty early for the next day.

For your information, crossing the border from Chiang Kong, Thailand to Luang Prabhang, Laos is no easy task. Takes two whole days to get to civilization. I shall talk more on my coming posts. Billy, out.

Previous post: Kalare Night Bazaar
Next post: 48 hours on Mekong

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

A Good Deed for a Tough Hunt

16 May 2009 @ Petaling Jaya - Malacca

After a fun and exciting TM Amazing Race about 6 months back, here we go again challenging a tougher treasure hunt - Lions Club Charity Motor Hunt 2009.

WoonLee sticking the sponsor's sticker on the car

This event was organized by Lions Club PJ and the hunt was created by Michael Pang.


Introducing the members of Team W4 - Cheryl Wan, WoonLee, William & Wilson. WoonLee was the driver while I was the navigator. Three of them were actually in the Amazing Race last year, except Wilson.

We are team no. 12 - W4 (prounce as W power 4 *ahem*)

Registration booth

We reached before sunrise to check in, change into the hunt tees and listen to a short briefing before flag off.

Look at the number of teams taking part

That is Michael Pang talking

We were given 2 goodie bags filled with stuff inside - pens, notebooks, buns, namecard holder, etc etc... and a red cap for each of us. Without any hesitation, we wore them and SS-ed.


We got the first question correct quite easily, with Cheryl's extremely wide knowledge's help of course. So we were fired up to hunt for the next 44 questions. All the answers can be found on sign boards along the way from Petaling Jaya to Malacca.


Well, things don't really go well as we were totally clueless about the questions and millions of possible answers on the road. Basically, we shooted (tembak) from question 2 onwards.


We even entertain ourselves by getting down the car and went to the middle of a road in Malacca to take photo. Oh, we also stopped for some fruits to quench the thirst.

SS again - I switched place with Cheryl so she can see the signboards better.

We got kinda fed up and frustrated for the fact that we couldn't interpret what the clues mean. So, very quickly, we filled in all the answers we guessed and head towards the finsihing line - the Grand Continental Hotel in Malacca.


The answers will be revealed in an hour and the winners will be announced. Well, we did pretty badly... Only got 4 answers correcly, out of 45 questions, and 2 of the correct ones are tembak one.


There's nothing much to talk about the race. Only one word - Super duper TOUGH!! We learnt our lesson and don't think we'll ever challenge any open hunt again until we are really ready for it.


As a consolation, we got ourselves a lucky draw bag. Well at least we didn't go back empty handed. Oh and we did a good deed too, by donating few hundreds (our registration fees) to the charity.

Since the 4 of us were in Malacca already, we asked others to join us for Jalan-jalan Kota Bersejarah. More to come. Billy, out.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Happy Burstday Joo Li!

7 May 2009 @ TGIF, Section 14 PJ

Mille crepe - a cake made of many layers. There aren't a lot of shops in Malaysia that sells this kind of cake. We bought three slices for JooLi's birthday.


Surprisingly, we didn't take any photos of food and presents. So let's just skip to the group photos.


We actually bought her a lot of little stuffs, ranges from cute paper clips to enema; Tiger biscuits to Rocky chocolate sticks.


For the food, we ordered a lot of stuff to be shared among the nine of us. Salad, steak, sandwiches... couldn't really remember them.



8 May 2009 @ Chef and Brew, Bukit Damansara

The next day, we went for lunch, movie and Chef and Brew for dinner. We ordered...

Fried calamaries *yumz*

William Lambchop

JooLi Salmon


Great food, great day. Everything was perfect. Billy, out.

Monday, July 06, 2009

My Collection in My Office

I know, I know... Many has been grunting me for not updating my blog. I am sorry but my little external hard disk that contains all my photos was sent back to the factory at Singapore, all because of my clumsiness of dropping it.

Well, my second reason would be plain laziness. Haha... So, here's something to cheer your day up - chocolates!


These photos of chocolates are taken at my office just moments before I wrote this post. Yes I am feeling a little guilty for not updating for so long already.



Some little fun facts to share with you about dark chocolates
- It lowers blood pressure
- It lowers bad cholesterol
- It turns women on more than a passionate kiss
- It contains a natural mood-boosting anti-depressant
- It stimulates pleasure-inducing endorphin production



I wonder you readers can reduce stress by looking at my chocolates...

Anyway, Roger Federer beat Andy Roddick 5-7, 7-6 (8-6), 7-6 (7-5), 3-6, 16-14 in more than 4 hours. It was a very exciting game as both players are equally good and on form yesterday.

Cheers for Roddick for trying his very best to beat Federer. The tennis ace did a good job claiming back the throphy after losing it to the hard-fought Nadal last year. He also created history by winning his 15th Grand Slam, and more to come.

Oh, if my chocolates ain't helping on your Monday Blues, try to have SEX!

Don't get me wrong. I meant Sleep more, Eat more (chocolates) and eXercise
more. Cheers. Billy, out.

Reference:
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