Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

The train was a bit more basic than the last one but I think I probably slept better this time, notwithstanding that I was traversing a bit of Thailand that DFAT thinks Australians shouldn't be going to (the British Foreign Office advice, which tends to be more specific, explicitly excludes the railway line - the actual trouble, in the form of a long-running and rather nasty separatist conflict, is further east towards the other end of the border). Woke up to a greener setting, mist and the odd rice paddy - definitely more equatorial than what I've been through. Crossed into Malaysia mid-morning, discovering in the process that, although quite a lot of countries these days make you give them fingerprints on the way in the Thais make you do it on the way out too (authoritarian regimes everywhere seem to be enthusiastic consumers of the latest in security technology), and continued on to Butterworth to get the ferry across to Penang in the afternoon.

Today's session was on the stationary bike in the hotel gym, not too exciting but allowed me to turn the legs over. I'll take to the streets (as a run) tomorrow, having already done a couple of bits of wandering through what looks like an interesting city. The food here also has a particularly good reputation (especially the various hawker markets) and so far I haven't been disappointed.

One familiar name which popped up en route in northern Malaysia was Alor Setar (previously known as Alor Star). A staple of mid-high school geography exams was a set of questions based around interpreting a topographic map - as you can imagine, I tended to do quite well on this section - and one year Alor Star was the map (not quite sure why - perhaps Australians mapped it because it's fairly close to the old RAAF base at Butterworth?). Presumably not there in the mid-1980s were the Malaysian McMansion equivalents on the northern edge of town, or the 165-metre high tower.