Cherating trip

10-10-10 (Sunday)

Planned to do something different on this particular day since I missed out on the McDonalds Olympic run and a few others. The plan was to launch phase 1 of a long over-due road trip. Okay not exactly that. Road trip is supposedly with my GF Sumi. This is supposed to be a relaxed break away from the city husle..

Decided to drive instead of take the bus and hassle around. Had an itinerary planned out. Looks something like this but didn't follow through much of it.
(for some unknown reasons i can't seem to upload the file after much effort of converting the pdf file to an image.)

Anyway, ended up doing the following:
Day 1:
4pm Arrived at Holiday Villa & checked in
Couldn't locate the Restoran Kamar and decided to try again the next day.
Popped by the beach to check out the area
Drove out to look for food. Unfortunately, out of the many list of places recommended online which i took down, not all were to be found. We ended up in a restaurant where the mosquitos and flies were more than the people there. (They arrived after we ordered our food.)

Definitely not recommeding this place to anyone. One commendable dish must be their grilled sting ray. The fish was undoubtedly nice, edible but not good enough to counter the part where the flies ended up crowding the place more than humans.

Wine session followed.

Day 2:
Supposed to be up in time for sunrise at Teluk Chempedak but arrived at around 8 something, just in time for breakfast at McDonalds :)
The McDs here has a nice view of the sea with seats outside. Although the place could use some face lift, the area was clean in general. Do expect the staff to be a little slower in responding to you though. I'm not sure if this is the effect of the sea giving it a holiday mood or the fact that it was too early in the morning.
Following breakfast, we walked up the ever famous hanging bridge to the other side of the beach. The view there was AWESOME! It's like a private beach where the water was clear, clean and plenty of shady areas to chill. We went crazy with photos!
Supposed to go hiking up the hill but since we weren't well equipped, we didn't even attempt it. We walked back to the other side and got ourselves ice-cream (actually I got myself an ice cream). There were some shops opposite the parking where there were souvenier stuff and clothes on sale. Shortly after, although we weren't hungry, we thought we would buy back some food for lunch since getting good food in the hotel vicinity was not possible.
We were craving for some good chinese food and curry mee in particular for me. Just a few shops up from there was this chinese restaurant where there were even Malays eating there! We were surprised as this is not a common view in KL.
We had a drink while waiting for out curry mee - to be ta pau-ed. Food came up to about RM7-smtg with loads of fish ball and chicken slices. (We ate this back in our room)
We left the restaurant (can't remember the name but they have 2 stalls at the front of the shop - selling chicked rice, wan tan mee and mee curry - dry and soup.
On our way back I noticed the Batik Village signboard on the other side of the road. We turned in here and walked around for about an hour or so. The Batik Village is a tourist attraction where one can see batik prints being made - the traditional boil & wax method. We captured a few girls in action. They must be used to visitors as they continued to work as usual despite us going around their work station and sniffing over their art work.
Some pictures to follow here.

There were a few other souvenier shops in the same compound but they mainly were stuff from other parts of the country like Sarawak and Sabah which has become a common sight in any part of the Peninsular. If you've been to Sabah or Sarawak, you'd understand why I wouldn't buy these stuff from over here and would rather get them from the place of origin.

We got really tired from walking around and decided to call it a day. We went back to the room, took a shower, ate our curry mee (it tasted really really good!)  and took a short nap.

When we got up, we got ready and drove to Kuantan Town which was about 30mins drive from where we were. The roads are actually very very narrow and some don't even have street lights. One has to be very careful in driving down these roads especially at night.

We arrived in town at about late 6pm. It was getting dark really fast in the past 2 nights we were there. Our first stop was the Berjaya Megamall. Looks pretty run down with mainly eateries in the ground floor and some IT gadget shops in the upper floors. There is also an IT hypermart at the back of this mall.

We left shortly after getting some famous amos cookies for the road. The next hard task was to find some chinese food. GPS wasn't much help. Eventually we came around to the East Coast Mall (EC) and spotted some stalls at a food garden a stone throw away from the EC mall. The way I like my food - a lot of options. We had tom yam soup with mee hoon, ais kacang and chinese style ried rice. Food was decent. Nothing to shout about though. Following dinner, we walked across to EC to look around. Ended up getting another bottle of wine for the night at the Carrefour and left after.
Another round of wine session and we were all totally zonked out after till the next morning.

Day 3:
Slept in till late. Woke up, packed and walked out to the beach since we haven't been there yet. We played by the shores for a bit, lied on the hammock, took more pictures and waved goodbye to the beach.
We checked out and left by about 12 (if I remember clearly). Upon reaching KL, we went for lunch at Stevens Corner, washed the car and then got home. Time well spent. I must admit this was one different holiday we will be trying again.
But for Kuantan, I'd want to try to trace my steps back to Club Med Cherating the same way we went the last time so that we can locate the famous and super nice beriyani restaurant we ate at the previous time.. Till then..