Daily Archives: November 9, 2009

Johor, Malaysia, Puteri Harbour

Passage Info

Tomorrow early in the morning we’ll start off FROM PUTERI to Pinang, Besar, and Port Dixon on our way to Lumut, the next official rally stop. The first Lumut event is on November 17th.    We’ll anchor each night so this trip has no overnight passages.  We will spend 3 nights in Port Dixon where we will be at a marina.   Since we don’t have any night passages I’m actually looking forward to the trip.  And some of our anchorages might be good for snorkeling if we get there in time and the water is clean.  We haven’t gotten to do that for a while and we both miss it.  This isn’t necessarily unchangeable, but as of this minute it’s our plan.  Not sure about email along the way.  It just depends if there are cell tours where we anchor.  Our DIGI phone modem is working pretty well with the email here in Puteri though it’s slow loading  web pages.    Since the Sox are out of it, who cares and baseball trading really hasn’t started yet so I tend to just do email and then I’m off to read or paint.   I do still read the NYTimes Art and Book pages.  We’re flush with them now!  Thanks George and Eileen.  And last night after the Tuesday market I swapped some I’d finished reading with Julia Woolf.  We had some really good talking time with Julia and her husband Horst when they visited our boat after the night market trip and will see them again as we travel during the rally. 

So here it is.  Tonight we’ll get the boat all ready and be off tomorrow early.

Ru

DoraMac

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Malaysia, Port Dixon

Port Dixon

Admiral Marina  http://admiralmarina.com.my/

Port Dixon, Negeri Sembilan Darul Khusus, Malaysia

Hi Everyone,

  We’ll be here in Port Dixon for one or two more days and then make our way north to Lumut, the next official rally stop.  Many of the rally boats chose to stop in Melaka instead of Port Dixon so there are very few rally boats here with us.  We’ll stop in Melaka later in the year or early next year, after the rainy season ends.  We have decided to remain in SE Asia through 2010.  Originally we had planned to leave Asia and cross the Indian Ocean, go up the Red Sea and then into the Med.  That’s now our plan for 2011.  There just too much that we haven’t seen; too much that we rushed through and once we leave SE Asia we probably won’t be back.  It’s kind of “now or probably not ever.”  We want to do lots more snorkeling, revisit some of our favorite places, like Terrenganu, and also do some land travel.  Beijing, the Tibet railway and India are on my list though we might very well cruise in India.  Anyway, that’s what we’re thinking now.

  Today Randal and I went into Port Dixon.  We’d planned to take the bus but joined another cruising couple who were planning to flag down a taxi.   None of us was sure when the bus would actually come: if we had just missed it we’d have to wait at least 30 minutes or more for the next one.  Because it’s always fun to talk with other cruisers, in Port Dixon we all ate lunch together at one of the many Indian restaurants that line the streets.    We all thought it was very good and it seems as if you really can’t go too far wrong eating Indian unless you think being way too full is too far wrong.  I had yellow flavored rice, some kind of spinach, a cucumber salad and a few bites of what tasted like a very light small onion bagel that had been fried. It was good but I was too full and didn’t need bread with the small mountain of rice. Randal decided to try a chicken onion egg patty along with his meal of rice, chicken and cucumber salad.  It was very good and large enough that all 4 of us has as much of it as we wanted.  By the end, way too full. 

  We’d gone to town to shop for veggies, bread, milk, mail my letter to my cousin Naomi and get a desperately needed haircut for me and a shave for Randal.  At one point I think the barber thought Randal wanted his head shaved and when I asked Randal just now, he said, “No”, but that he had heard the word bald…  Not to worry, it worked out fine.  Except the photo I took of me multiplied by the shop mirrors totally disappeared from my computer photo file.  There’s just a blank space where the photo had been.  It wasn’t deleted, zoomed,  cropped, or erased with the brightness option.  I have no idea where it went.  RATS!

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It was only Randal’s beard that got shaved and not his head.  I did make sure my flash was turned off before I took the photo.  I didn’t want to blind the barber while he was using a straight razor on Randal. 

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The barber was Indian and the customers was Chinese which seems pretty typical of the population mix that we saw in town. 

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We finally bought another little clock so I don’t have to keep moving the only one we have from room to room. 

Originally we had 3, but for some reason really inexpensive little clocks just don’t seem to last forever. 

Of course my overpriced Red Sox watch fell apart even faster and rusted to rediculousness instantly. 

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We walked around town for a bit before we headed over to the one grocery store at the end of town.    I couldn’t resist the elephants.

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Not exactly Starbucks.  This crow had raided the trash and was flying around with a styrofoam cup.  I don’t know what he thought it was but he just wouldn’t let it go.

Our main chores were done and it looked like we were in for the afternoon downpour so we grabbed a taxi and just made it back into the boat in time.  We hooked up our water catcher and managed to collect about 100 gallons in less than an hour so you can imagine how hard it rained. 

Port Dixon is a beach resort area and also has two big petroleum facilities which seems not a good mix.  

So that’s what we’re up to.  Is it baseball season yet?

Ru

DoraMac