I had to wait for some rain to stop today, then I headed out on clean busy roads following my GPS’ instructions to the letter. Ipoh is full of one way streets and the morning peak hour isn’t the time to go off piste and not trust your GPS.
Pretty soon, I was on some quiet outer-suburban roads and loving it. That is, until the GPS recommended a track that was seriously a driveway to a house. No problem, I’ll go another way. Same issue. I ended up asking a local, but he couldn’t speak any english whatsoever. The poor guy tried hard to explain. I ended up backtracking which was frustrating, because it was meant to be a fairly long and warm day. I can do without extra kilometres and time. But my mantra is always – ‘there’s no wrong turns’, so I stayed happy and started to look for a breakfast place. That’s the other part of my mantra – ‘there’s no wrong turns, and it’s always meal time’.
Success ! and what a great place. The waiter wanted to know all about my trip and really looked after me. With a full tummy, anything is possible. Maybe I should add that to my mantra…
I booked the Cozytainer hotel in Taiping and arrived there in the early afternoon. I went there because I’d read about other cyclists stopping there. Unfortunately, their cafe / restaurant was shut, so after getting cleaned up and recovering, I walked into town for some food and to see the sights. Taiping is meant to be the wettest place in peninsula Malaysia, and I stood under an awning for half an hour while a massive amount of rain poured down. It all drained away in an instant.
Taiping is quite a nice place with a large lake and park just near the centre and plenty of food options. After that, I did the usual and got supplies for the morning (1st breakfast) and snacks and water for the ride the next day.
