Kota Baru - bit of a disaster

Our next destination was the Malaysian Jungle but as the train left at 6am we had to spend some time in Kota Baru - the nearest town to the station.

It is not a tourist town and, in fact, is rather dull and concrete and has no ...life. There is little in the way of town centre - although we did spend a fun day in a mall getting kitted out for Australasian winters (we'll go from 35 degrees to about 10 in one day...eek!). Again, we found it hard to find good food anywhere (what do these people eat?????) and because it is a very Muslim area, there are no bars, or off-licences or any way to be sociable in the evening. Luckily our hotel did have HBO so we settled into a crap film.

And then at 11pm (no joke) some dudes started digging up the road outside our hotel. Actually the main noise was the generator but it sounded like a drill in your head, and went on until about 5am. Suffice it to say we got zero sleep (and El was still suffering from a nasty cold, and Kieran had sympathy pains) so although we had to get up at 5.30am to catch our train, we completely slept through the alarm and woke up half an hour after our train left. Bollocks. Although, in 8 months this is the first connection we had missed so not too bad but a real bummer for our plans.

After trudging around the town for a couple of hours looking for a bus (non-existent) or a place to change our train tickets (also non-existent) and finally a hotel (hard to find but we got one in the end - away from any noise) and basically spent the whole of the rest of the day in bed, drinking hot tea, eating aspirin and watching TV (AXN, HBO are Godsends sometimes!).

Basically don't bother going to Kota Baru! But we did get the train the next day (phew!!) and were off the the jungle!