A visit to Zoo Negara

Destination:

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While I was listening to the radio on My-FM this morning, I heard the DJs were discussing about the Zoo after they have read a post regarding the zoo on the local news paper. The news was reporting about the old/broken facilities, empty cages and very few animals being kept in the zoo. These are resulting in very low visitor's rate and forcing the zoo's management to run on a very limited fund. With the situation getting worsen, the management was asking for government funding to renew some of the facilities as well as bringing in more animals.

As I remember just recently Elaine and I visited the Zoo, so let me talk a little bit bout the zoo, sharing some of the photos we had taken during our visit and hope to draw some attentions from friends around about the zoo. It can really be a great weekend getaway place for family outing or even couple's dating. But please don't be surprise to find that the entrance fee alone is causing RM15/pax. I remember during our last visit which was about 4/5 years backed, the entrance fee was only RM10/pax. So much of a hike, 50%! Anyway, let's check out the photos.

The entrance - Zoo Negara:





The Safari walk... So you will see some animals from africa over here like giraffes, rhino and lions (those you have seen in Lion King cartoon).











The mother and baby hippos. The baby was born just 2 months ago with body weighting around 45kg! What a huge baby =.=! The zoo keepers keep the two out from the herd as mother hippo is very protective of it's child and will get very aggresive whenever someone is approaching. So, it is better to keep both out in another smaller cage/pond.



Our most precious and closest animal relative - Orang Utan. These animals are so endangered in the wild that a lot of sanctuaries were setup just to help them breeding so to keep them away from extinction. So next time if you do hunting in Malaysian jungle, please do not shoot one if you are so lucky to have seen one.



The zoo runs 2 animal's shows a day, one before and the other after noon. So you will see trainers giving commands to the animals and making them performing some tricks/stunts. Remember to go early before the show starts to get a place to sit as the seats are very limited.



Guess who was this "handsome"?







Try to spot the croc if you have a pair of sharp eyes.



Overall, the condition in the zoo was acceptable. Although some of the facilities were really old/broken. But I did see some of the new facilities were being built. So if we as KL residents would like to have a zoo for our children in the future to learn about the wild life, please contribute some of your time to visit the zoo and help generating incomes for the management. So with the revenue, I believe they are able to give us a better environment and more animals for our children to enjoy studying about wildlife.

Just in case if you do not know how to get there - please visit Zoo.

Bumbu Bali - Puchong

I have been to this restaurant once 2 months ago when my boss brought us there for our team lunch (on his treat). I did not really have the appetite to taste the food during that visit as I was just backed to the team after a week off from the office due to sickness (Chikun-gunya). I did not really enjoy the food during my last visit. So last sunday, me and Elaine decided to re-visit the restaurant and to really taste their food.

The mock tail that Elaine ordered - some kind of a mix of passion fruit drink with cucumber and mint leaves. I was so surprise to see that they actually put a red chili in the drink as decoration. They even cut the chili open but I was not able to show it in the picture. I came to surprise me so much that the cut chili made the drink taste a little bit spicy if you are sucking the drink near the chili.


The other drink that I ordered was one of their house drinks - barley lime. Taste a bit sweet and sour if your smash the lime slices in the drink.





1 jug of barley lime drink costs Rm 15 - almost 4 1/2 cups of drinks.



This was actually Elaine's main course - the beef pasta. Pasta was served with beef tender loin steak. I was not able to describe how the pasta's sauce tasted like. It was not bad as a meal if rice dish is not what you wanted to eat.



The Nasi Campur Bumbu Bali set that I took. It was like a mixed platter with all types of grilled meats like squid, prawns, fish fillet, chickhen and vege which was served together with rice. Trust me, it was a really big portion meal and even my oz's stomach found it hard to finish up everything on the plate.



The side order that we taken, Sate Lilit - which was like our Malaysian style otak-otak. Tasted a bit salty and spicy which makes it a perfect side dish when drinking beer.



Overall we were satisfied with the taste of the food and the services provided by the staff. They were so responsive everytime I asked for something, they will come to me even when I was streching my body (looks as if I was raising my hand to call them up). The overall setting of the restaurant made the atmosphere so good that you might think that yourself just might be in Bali. This would be a good meeting point for friends to hang out and chit chat while enjoying their Balinese grilled meals.

Preview >> Cambodia - Vietnam @ August 2009

Siem Reap -> Phnom Penh -> Ho Chi Minh (Saigon)



I started to plan for this trip somewhere in late May. I could not remember exactly when was it that I told Elaine I wanna travel to three different countries for 2009. As I just backed home from oz for a year, things were not really settling down well in last year as needed to spend lots of time to adjust and adapting back to malaysian lifestyle. So it ended up that we did not really do any travel for last year. So right after our April's Bangkok visit, I started to plan for my coming trip to Indo-china countries as well - Cambodia and Vietnam.

For this trip, I could not let Elaine to join me as she just came backed from her Korea trip early May. I don't really want her to finish all her annual leaves in the mid of the year. So she was omitted from this plan. I started to asked around for travel partner and after some considerable hunting time, I got my colleague Tang as my partner to indo-china. After some discussions with Tang, we concluded that we will be spending 9 days in total for this trip. Our first stop would be Siem Reap city, Cambodia. And from Siem Reap we will be heading south east towards Phnom Penh - Capital of Cambodia and finally crossing border to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh), Vietnam.


I planned to spend like 3 days at Siem Reap, just to focus on visiting the great Angkor temples (Angkor wat & Angkor Thom). As from what I read from other's travelogues, most of them were suggesting to spend one entire week just to visit bit by bit at Siem Reap as the whole ancient city is just too big. But due to limited holidays, I left with no choice but to cut the time short for Siem Reap. Mostly to focus on the great ancient city Angkor and night markets around the city.



To travel from Siem Reap to capital Phnom Penh, I am going for the water way - express boat operating between the two cities through the mother lake of Cambodia - Tonle Sap. As from my research, the ticket itself is costing USD 22 and it is doubled the price for land transport - bus is costing USD 12 only. The reason behind that I chose to travel through the lake is that I do not want to miss the great sight of the lake, where we can see the real life style of the Cambodians living by the lake. And I heard that the sun set by the lake side is such an amazing one but no luck for us as our travel time would be in the early morning. So sun rise maybe.



At Phnom Penh, I planned to spend 2 days only as nothing special about here. I only planned to visit places like the Royal Palace, Russian Market and their famous Killing Field which has thousands of innocent souls resting in peace over there.




To travel from Phnom Penh to Saigon (Crossing Cambodia-Vietnam border), I will go for a border crossing bus which is operated by Mekong Express Transportation co. It will take approximately 6 hours for the journey, and breakfast is provided too on board :p . Not bad the service considering that the fare is only USD 10.




The remaining days of my trip will be spent in Saigon on several places like Mekong Delta, Cu chi tunnel as well as some city sight seeing. Nothing has been planned concretely as I will take it more like a free and easy tour - go according to my mood on particular day. But one thing I will definitely go for it when I am in Saigon - Beef Noodle. I missed the Vietnamese beef noodle that I used to take every week when I was at Melbourne. It could easily be the best noodle soup on earth :p.

Finally as for budget wise, I will try to keep the spending as low as possible. I am targetting to keep it under RM1.3k. Mean while, stay tuned dear readers for the beautiful and lovely photos that I am gonna bring home from this coming Indo-china trip.

Michael's Birthday '09

Time flies... It was like yesterday night that only I realized my birthday will come in matter of hours. Well, maybe I made it too routine for my life, repeating the same things everyday. For as many years as I can remember, my birthday used to be a holiday for myself. It was either self-declared holidays or playing truant to stay away from school. Cause I needed this day to be a free day for myself, just to spend a day to think over what have I done for the past year and so to plan for the coming year (ideally). This year is a special one as I did not skip my work to stay home and have a self-declared holiday. Instead, I attended to work and tried to be as focus as I could to finish one of the tasks which was assigned to me just the other day. Strange? Yup, I do think so... maybe that was affected by the eclipse power?

People used to have birthday present from family or friends on his/hers birthday. As for myself, I got a series of birthday gifts too, from my siblings, Elaine and myself. My birthday present from Elaine came the earliest, somewhere in June I think. She got me air ticket to Cambodia and return ticket from Vietnam for my August trip. Thanks to her a lot for fulfilling my dream to visit 3 countries in 2009. Together with the Bangkok trip we visited together during April, the coming Cambodia- Vietnam trip would make my destinations of the year to 3. I feel really exciting ;) .










As from my siblings, I got a birthday cake from them. Really thanks a lot for the cake as I did not buy them anything for their birthday too (I am going to add in the birthday cake picture soon...). My last birthday gift was from myself. Here I am leaving it open for you guys to make a wild guess what could it be. Tips? I like traveling and FOOD. My hobby is soccer and pool. I like reading non-fiction books too.

da~dang! All wrong! haha ... my birthday gift from myself was a full body check and a Hepatitis A + B vaccination. Lets check the photos out :p ...












There are reasons behind for me to do all these. The main point is that I would like to put more concern on my own health starts from now (though I know I am still overweight). But I will try to work hard to tackle this.

My birthday wishes:
1. May everyone around me with good health and be happy.
2. Do well on my job.
3. To earn plenty of money.

Thanks for lots of best wishes from:
1. Elaine
2. Family members
3. Old mate Wendy Teoh
4. My buddy Brian Hin
5. Experian's Colleagues
6. Kompakar's Ex-colleagues
7. Cousin sisters
8. Melbourne Ex-housemate Jing Yao
9. Secondary schoolmates

*And before I forgot, thank you so much to my colleagues for the BKT (Bah Kut Teh - traditional chinese herbal soup - cooked with pork ribs and lots of herbs and GARLIC) lunch at Equinne park. The YapBeng BKT tasted superb especially the dry one.

Company Trip - Ipoh/Cameron Highland

Destination:

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Yes, this is yet another Cameron trip for me when my last trip to the highland was just like yesterday (May 2008). Thinking back over the years, I have been visiting Cameron highland for many times - like 4/5 times? This is not that I like the place so much but my parents like to take us for a family day and ride to the peak for lunch at the Smoke house and then back home. My parents really like a family trip once in a while, though it was tiring but I guess everyone in the family was enjoying. Father did not have much time to spend with us since we were kids so we really try to enjoy each of the family trips that we had together.

Na~ na~ na~, guess I am getting off topic thou... Okay, lets come back to my company trip. The day before, our gang had a chat to discuss about the trip like where to meet up and stuff like that. We decided to drive early to reach Ipoh right on time for the - said "nice" dim sum. So we started our journey early morning at 6:45 am with empty stomach. Yea, you read my word - EMPTY. Along the highway to Ipoh, there was nothing much but more like palm estates. We arrived at Ipoh around 9:00 am and we headed straight to the dim sum restaurant after exit from the highway.



We arrived at the restaurant around 9:15 am and get a table for 7 of us. I guess everyone of us was really starving and look just like a hungry ghost who has not been eating for ages. We ordered lots of dim sums and filled our table full with food. So we then fill our empty stomach with the hot dim sums. The taste of the dim sum was so~(x-rated word) and not really as good as what we thought it would be.

After breakfast, we headed straight to Ipoh old town for it's famous while coffee. Together, we tried the famous pork balls too (check the photos below).





Some of the photos that I took along the walk at old town area.



It was only 10:45 am after our coffee break, it was still too early for lunch! So we decided to visit the Kek Lok cave near Simpang Pulai. While the others were having a walk around the cave and garder, I was sitting on a long bench taking rest after few hours drive north ward to Ipoh. I was sitting in front of the cave's exit and enjoying the chilling breeze. With water dipping out from the cave top and drop on the water pool built inside the cave, the sound was making me in a state of "zen". I snapped a few photos inside the cave.



Guess where is this place? You will be able to find it if you are paying enough attention on small items in your next visit to Kek Lok cave...



Picture that I thought could portrait a feeling of "zen"... from the way it looks like half black and half white - the tai chi sign!





So after an hour rest there in the cave, we headed back to the town for famous Yong Taufu @ "Big Tree Head" (near Anson's home at Pasir Pinji). Thank you Anson for your GPS device to guide us there else we would have gone to Pasir Panjang :p. We had a quick lunch here as most of us were still full with the morning heavy breakfast.

We drove to Cameron after lunch and blah blah blah ... I don't want to write much about the part we were at Cameron. Let's just check out the photo.



We ended our night with a not-so-tasty steamboat meal and drinking session backed in our apartment. The next morning, we packed up and left Cameron around 9:30 am. With most of us still blur with the alcohol effect, we headed straight to the market somewhere near to Equitorial Hotel (Tringkap maybe). Here we got our car loaded up with lots of veges, fruits and flowers. I do believe that Cameron highland - as the vege provider for west malaysia, is truely a heaven for all the vege lovers. But sad to say that not for our gang - the Carnivors.

I got myself some stuff like strawberries and sweet corns for Elaine. After the morning shopping spree, we rushed down to Bidor town through the winding roads of Cameron. One thing I really hate about this Cameron trip was that there were too many tourist during the weekend. A lot of buses and lorries on the road which made driving down hill so difficult (I can smell my break system was burning). But afterall, the journey downhill was a pretty smooth one after Kg. Raja.

We arrived at Bidor around 12:00pm in the afternoon. We headed straight to the Restaurant which is famous for it's Duck drumstick noodle in herbal soup. I can't really recall the name of that restaurant, guess it is called Bun Chan Restaurant? But anyway, it was not hard to spot though. Just drive slowly along the main street of Bidor town and you will see a corner shop-lot which was painted in yellow and has a lot of fruit stalls in front of it. Let's check the noodle, hehe ...





After our brunch, we left Bidor and drove back to KL with our stomach full with duck noodles. Conclusion, this was more like a food trip than Company/Team Building trip... It was so boring!

Preview >> Borderless Musical Beach Party July 2009

Borderless Musical Beach Party 2009 @ Redang Island:

I gotta know about
this event through Elaine, and it was her friend who told her about it. The event is all about providing a stage for music performers to Rock & Roll and share their passion about music together with music lovers from all over the country at Redang beach. I got so excited to think about the beautiful beach of Redang island and party with lots of bikini girls :p ... (=.= Opps, I can feel a knock on my head from Elaine). Guys tend to have lots of fantasy about beach party, at least for me. But anyway, I'm gonna celebrate my 2009 birthday there with the music party.

Basically, this event is going to start on 31/07-
02/08 for 3 days 2 nights at Redang Island. I believe the registration for this event is closed but no harm for you to contact the organizers if you are still interested in joining. Who knows if you can be the august lucky boy :). Below is the list of the participating performers:

Performer from Hong Kong:

  1. 捌伍起义
Local Performers:






  1. ManHand - 慢行
  2. NameWee - 黄明志
  3. DayDream
  4. JUNK
  5. FOD
  6. Chron
  7. May
  8. Vian
  9. Endless Eternal
  10. R.M.L
  11. Cosplay
Some photos taken from the organizer's blog to share with you guys how it would be ...



















For details about the itinerary of the event, you might want to visit this page -
http://xywj.pixnet.net/blog