Desaru!

Ok now that I've survived the ordeal, it's time to prance around and upload the desaru/kota tinggi pix. Well since we had to visit relatives, we decided to take an extra 2 days off to go sightseeing. Arrived at Desaru at 3pm on Monday.

Her playing around on the beach.
(2 & 3 is her trying to retrace steps)

A pretty gull!

My cam is good eh? ^_^
Or is that my skill at work *totally lacking modesty*

Well last time I was there, I was there with jon n wanz i think. I still vaguely remember this pic we took with my Lomo cam, of Jon kicking the sand or sthg. it's lying somewhere in my cupboard.

Anyways previously we explored to the left extreme, this time I trieed to reach the extreme right of the beach. Pretty cool cos we sorta found an abandoned village, before we got cut off from getting any further by a stream.

One of the attap houses in the abandoned village.

More views of the abandoned village.

The view from our resort room on the 2nd floor. Jolly good.

And that's what we saw when we woke up at 8pm.

Yup, nothing much happened at night, as we tried to have dinner at some "high class" restaurant. Bad choice of al fresco due to being afraid of the indoor air-con being too cold. Bad choice, cos we spent most of our meal shooing flies. As we were both pretty sick, there wasn't much to do and we slept early.

After checking out the next morning (tuesday), we went to the nearby Desaru Fruit Farm, famous for honey-oranges, which fills half their plantation. We paid 15rm for a short guided tour, which was kinda worth it cos we had quite a bit of fun (despite me being pretty sick).

That's a cousin of the Rambutan. It's got a smaller fruit, sweeter juice, and an edible seed which tastes a little like almond. pretty nice.

The Passion Pavillion

Rather than construct an intrusive wooden or concrete shelter, they set up racks where Passion Fruit plants grew all over, forming a pavillion. Really fun, as you could walk along, and pluck a passion fruit along the way. But passion fruits are really sour, not many will like it - e.g. Clarisse cringed upon the first taste of it.

Pineapple by the side. These plants only flower once, and never again. However, if you chop off the shoot at the tip of the fruit and replant it, you get a new pineapple plant. That's how they propagate.

Well there were actually a lot more fruits but we were too busy tasting to take pix. We were introduced to 3 different species of Jambu (water apple), 3 different species of water apples, chili, mangosteen, durian, etc.etc.

We came to the end of the fruit trail to a Koi Pond, and the really nice tour guide gave us a pack of fish food for free. Nice guy.

Them rushing for food.

Threw the feed into a far end of the pond, and watch them all rush over.
It's a sad world in there where the slow ones simply don't get any food.
Wait that sounds exactly like the world we live in. -_-|||

A nice photogenic pic of the white koi emerging.

So bad was the rush that some were pushed above the water surface for like a minute or so.

That's us by the pond.

For someone half dead, I looked pretty good.
Pls ignore the photographer's thumb on the top left. -___-

A stray durian which rolled quite a few meters from it's parent tree.

Clarisse with a bunch of Ornamental Bananas.

As you can see, the bunch is pretty darn tall. No, these are not for eating, they're friggin small and fleshless. Nevertheless, I don't see why anyone would want it as an "ornament". Quite ugly leh.

Then we went on to the mini-zoo in there, which was really small, like the size of 3 x 4-room flats. But well, it was still pretty fun cos we got up close to many farm and domestic animals.

Our favourite zone: Kambing!!!

A cute lamb and her pretty mum (an ewe. sounds vaguely like *eew*...haha) . really comfy-looking wool makes you wanna grab them and hug for no good reason whatsoever.





Don't you just feel like grabbing one of them and go "Baa-aaa-aa!!!!" along with them? I mean at least I felt like doing that... ^____^|||

Mountain Goats. These are the kids (that's what you call a young goat, but it's still weird cos that's what we call our young too) who are small enough to squeeze thru the fence and get a bite at the hay ahead of mum and dad.

Dad and friends waiting longingly behind the fence for their turn to chew.

A table of cute young animals. They're all pretty young and staggery and huggable.

But well. The cute shit also shit a lot. Please look at the many spots, some of which belong to the hamsters, some to rabbits and some to the funky chicken. oh wait funky chicken is also the name of a dance. lol.

Lazy proud peacock on the right and totally bored mate on the left.

That's she.

That's he.

In the animal world, most he's gotta look better to attract the she's. It's like some law of nature.

We humans, freaks from the animal kingdom, have somehow managed to turn it all upside down and inside out, where females doll up to attract males, and sometimes to attract other females, and some males doll up to attract other males.

A pretty lonesome ostrich.

Fret not! I saw many ostrich eggs in an incubator, your mates are coming soon! But of course you're gonna have to wait till they grow up and get all randy and stuff, ya know.

A pair of hawks / kites. I honestly can't tell, and it seems the zookeepers don't have a clue either (other than their malay names).

After the small trip, we were headed on to a nearby seafood paradise for lunch. It's the legendary place where you get really cheap and really good seafood.

Along the way, within the kampungs, we spotted a rose among the thorns:

Like totally check that out.

compare and contrast with the house on the right, as well as on the left in the background. It's really nice architecture and looks well-designed - it's gonna be my role model for my future home. I want something as good, but not necessarily a photocopy.

Fantastic front view. It probably looks even nicer inside, but we were too embarassed to ask the owners for a tour... Now thinking back, I kinda regret not asking... *damn*

And among the seafood eateries, we chose the most expensive shop because it had the best variety, and they don't try to attempt to give knockout prices just cos we're from sg. The few other "recommended" shops gave prices not very far off from this shop, and in some cases were more expensive - we were probably seen as 菜头 to the locals.

But oh well, we were really happy with our meal. Only one pic tho:

A steamed lobster. Half lobster per person, at 150rm per lobster. Considering it costs approx 140sgd per lobster in sg, it's quite a steal. And not to mention, it tasted great.

The rest were great too, but we were too busy eating to take pix. Huge crab and some mantis prawns (癞尿虾) to make up a great seafood meal, which cost less than 50sgd per pax. Given the quality of the seafood, CHEAP CHEAP!

After a great seafood lunch, it was off to Kota Tinggi!! The really funny thing is... I think the last time I was there was with wanz' family.. like at the age of 9 or sthg. Donkey years ago.

As expected, the place is very different. Charging 4rm per entry. And with water slides and all that. Not to mention, the deep falls where we used to swim in, has been cordoned off, probably due to some accident in the past 15-ish years I haven't been there. Was still nice tho, as we were there for sight-seeing and not swimming.

The lower falls.

A cool mafia-boss-ish pidgeon which strolled casually past us while looking for food.

Along the stairs up to the deeper falls.

The out-of-bounds deeper falls.

It was fun to swim in there the last time, among the fishies, but now after seeing a rotting gigantic log (2.5 times the length of an sbs bus) lying within, I'm pretty glad nothing bad happened when we were last there.

Clarisse and the peak falls.

The funny thing is...after seeing so many places in the world e.g. europe, NY, Beijing, 'twas the first time she saw a waterfall.

Making our way downhill.

And after that was Jusco (Tebrau City) before heading to sg... And upon seeing this I really couldn't resist taking a pic:

Sho pwetty!! I so wanna take a pic with the two of us in the pumpkin carriage but it was out of bounds. But still a very nice model of Cinderella. Won't mind if I could like have that on display at home or sthg...mwahahaa...

And... I'm getting kinda weird lately... while trying to sing LeeHom's 在梅边, I've fallen in love with traditional chinese opera (昆曲).... I mean... like really enjoy and appreciate it, spending hours on end watching youtube videos... with some single words sung over 5 seconds, it's pretty time consuming. But still enjoyable to me...

Damn I'm turning into an antique. Help.