‘Don’t step on the moss’ is Ahmed’s only advice as we slip and slide up a steep, muddy bank, away from the road that runs from the base to the summit of Gunung Brinchang Mountain and towards the 200,000 year old Mossy Forest. Avoiding stepping on the spongey, khaki-coloured floor of the mossy forest is…
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Ahmed only stops talking to take a breath and he seems to breathe considerably less than I thought was normal. Driving in the same erratic, I’m a cat, I’ve got nine lives style I had become accustomed to in South East Asia he drives us up winding mountain roads to the Boh Tea Plantation in…
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2015 happened and like every year before it I look back on it now and see only a blur. All of the joy and excitement and pleasure of one of the best years of my life (so far) has dissipated into the ether. It’s over and the only proof I’ve got that it happened at…
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For my first attempt at a ‘Day in the Life of’ blog post I chose a day spent travelling between one place and another, Pangkor Island and Taiping City in Malaysia. If I had written this the day before there would have been very little to report as I spent so many hours reading a…
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It’s early, maybe 9am so it’s not too hot yet and there’s a nice breeze coming down from the ceiling fan in the terracotta-tiled café where I’m eating a breakfast of noodles and Muslim-friendly beef bacon. I’m in Taman Negara in Malaysia, the world’s oldest rainforest and yesterday I turned thirty years old. I…
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I sound so sure of myself with that title, don’t I? My A/W 2015 travel plans. It sound just like the glossy fashion mags with their A/W 2015 wardrobe essentials. Already decided upon, organised, solid. In all honestly I’m not totally sure what I’m going to do for the next few months or why. Perhaps the…
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Officially, The Blue Mansion in Penang was owned by Cheong Fatt Tze, one of the most important Chinese businessmen and politicians of the 20th century. Unofficially, and more accurately, The Blue Mansion and all who resided within her walls, belonged to his seventh, and favourite, wife. One of those places that just gets more fascinating…
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George Town is a place with ghosts. For our four-day stay that turned into a week we rented a room in a hundred year old shophouse in the heritage district. Once providing shelter for, reputedly, over seventy immigrant workers at once, the shophouse now provided shelter for the two of us and our Chinese-Malay-Brunei AirBnB…
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