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I went to a birding outing to Cranbourne Botanic Gardens. My first time there. It is quite an elaborate place.

There were plenty of birds around, including tons and tons of New Holland Honeyeaters, but again I didn’t get any fantastic pictures. Still feeling a bit rusty after not really using my camera much over the last winter.

I like the background and perch of that New Holland Honeyeater picture but why does he only have one eye??! And this galah picture really made me laugh… you want as much foreground as possible in a bird picture, yes? I submitted it to Crap Bird Photography on Facebook and got a pretty good response, hehe.

I do like this picture though.

After a pleasant morning of wandering around looking for birds I headed over to Ash’s house, who moved out to the boonies over a year ago and I hadn’t visited yet. After chatting for a few minutes I looked up how long it would take to get to my pickleball drills session and realised it started half an hour earlier than I thought it did and I only had ten more minutes to visit. OOPS. Well it was enough time for a tour and a cookie. My bad.

We played Critter Kitchen with Nick and Lara. Nick made chilli and Scott made lemon tart. We also played Wayfarers of the South Tigris which was a little bit confusing, and took us most of the game to figure out what was going on, but then was ok, but we’ll probably never play again because there are always new games to try, lol.

We watched the AFL Grand Final in Boronia with Vicky and Brett. It was a good game, extremely even until half time for excitement, and then Scott’s team (Brisbane) dominated the second half and won convincingly.

I got some new ear plugs made and spent the hour waiting time at Bonbeach. Was pleasant until it started pouring.

Post Pickleball Pizza Party. Our usual Friday night pickleball sessions at Ashburton have come to an end, so we had one last dinner out together. Fun group. Hoping they migrate over to the new session at the venue right around the corner from our house.

Good lunch, bad lunch. Diane brought me Kraft Dinner powder!! Happy Katrina. Another day I completely forgot I was cooking a gozleme on the stove until I smelled a lot of smoke… oops… Sad Katrina.

This is probably only interesting to me but whatever. My pickleball coach kept telling me that the handle of my pickleball paddle was too thick for me, but I also needed to put overgrip on it because I am so sweaty. So I took a risk and peeled off the factory grip that it came with, and added overgrip directly over the bare handle…. and it’s ok!! It took a session to get used to it again but now I feel One With My Paddle.

Finished budgie paint by numbers. I kinda want to add a little speech bubble… what should it say? Something short.

I started making a hat with the neon hand-dyed yarn I got at the Wool Show. I had to split the ball into two balls and learn how to do alternating skeins to avoid colour pooling.

Unpictured things:

  • We also had a games day with Michael and Gina but I guess I took no pictures! Scott made pulled pork for lunch and we played Crokinole and Empires End.
  • Scott came to pickleball drills sessions a couple times because they were in the evenings during school holidays.
  • We saw One Battle After Another at the theatre as a #SMAJ activity and I did not like it. Three hours of bad people and someone banging on the top keys of a piano… it gave me a headache.

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August was a busy month. Scott worked his first graduations days, and we went to Vietnam for a week, and in between we squeezed in lots of activities and some tasty meals.

We went hot air ballooning, and then went out for breakfast at Warung Coffee. We got a beef rendang toastie and a mie goreng toastie and they were ridiculous and salty and delicious. Yes that is a sandwich full of noodles.

I made Scott come with me to a birding photography outing to Muckleford and Newstead Cemetery. It was a cold but pleasant day. We saw a few new birds, but I didn’t get any particularly great pictures. At least now I know where to come back to try to see the rainbow bee-eaters this summer though.

Australian Pipit

We knew the steam train would be passing through around noon so everyone stopped birdwatching and changed their camera settings and got into position to best photograph the train… and then waited… and waited… and then finally fifteen minutes later it slooooooooooooooooooowly came around the corner. I think you could walk faster than this train haha.

Trivia. It was so loud. We didn’t do well.

Malaysian food all day every day. We went to Pappa Laksa again and had Pappa Special Laksa and Beef Rendang Nasi Lemak. Delicious.

RTE Pork Adobo and cucumber salad. Tasty, and affordable!

Trying out different methods of Brain Off time. Paint by numbers was pretty fun. Good ol’ Kmart.

Tiny bit of progress on the cable knit blanket.

Slow progress on Lauren’s hat. I only manage to get a couple rounds done at a time on my lunch breaks at work. And the pink thing was a project for Lara which I have now abandoned. Knitting it was going way too slowly, and crocheting was turning out way too heavy. I think a sleeve scarf would be a better project for someone with a knitting machine. (Can I buy a knitting machine??)

Unpictured stuff:

  • We took my whole work team to play pickleball at Pickle Play. Almost everyone came! We had to rent three courts! It was chaotic at first trying to teach them all how to play, but once they got the hang of it it was very fun. And no one hurt themselves. Success.
  • Scott took Beau to open day at UniMelb. They went to a bunch of science lectures and had KFC and had a good day together.
  • I’ve still been going to Bodypump pretty regularly. It is kind of stupid but at least it’s something.
  • And of course, still pickleballing. I usually do one drills session, and two social sessions per week. Still loving it.

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So after Malaysia, Rosemarie came back with me to Melbourne to hang out with us for a couple weeks while Scott was still not allowed to BLT (bend, lift, twist). She is a good sister/sister-in-law.

As usual we tried to cram a million things in so we had to have a group meeting about our goals, and a whiteboard, and a schedule. This is normal family behaviour, right? Rosemarie wanted to see an emu in the wild… unfortunately we didn’t find any of the four-legged variety for her.

We checked out Moomba. Saw some waterskiers and some jetpack people and some skateboarders. Got tacos and horchata from Dingo Ate My Taco.

Piccolina vegan pistachio ice cream. Yum.

We made Nagi’s beef rendang and tried three player Unfair a couple times. Still hate it. Scott sold it after that.

Rose and I drove across town so I could play free pickleball and she could have a swim. Then we went to Girls & Boys ice cream shop, the completely vegan ice cream shop I love. The lady scooping our ice cream told us about her explosive diarrhea. But the ice cream was amazing, as usual.

The next day I dragged Rosemarie to my usual pickleball session where we accidentally dressed the same and confused every single person there. They still have not recovered from this.

We went to the new St Kilda Pier to see penguins for free. They haven’t opened the penguin viewing platforms though so instead you have to cram together at the fence and hope a penguin decides to come out into the open. A few did, but I forgot to put the memory card in my camera so this fantastic phone picture is the only photographic evidence you’ll get.

Rosemarie really wanted to use our new mixer to make a pavlova. It turned out great! We brought it to family dinner at Jemma’s house.

My friend Steph told us about a free archery session we could do for International Ladies Day. It was fun to try a new thing and catch up with Steph (unpictured).

White-plumed Honeyeater
Magpie Goose
A lot of Magpie Geese
Emu

We went on an excursion to Serendip Sanctuary, near Geelong, to try and find Rosemarie an emu in the wild. It’s a lovely state park, with lots of different short walks and bird hides. The emu was technically in an unenclosed area, however I think it does get its food from the park, so not sure if that counts as wild or not. Most of the emus I’ve seen have been in campgrounds though, so I guess that’s just kind of how they get their food.

On the way back we stopped at Tofu Shoten, where we ordered one of everything. This was something like a strawberry mochi red bean deluxe dessert. It had a lot of elements. I liked some parts but not the others. Rose and Scott got things with matcha and coffee and I can’t remember what else. We also bought some biscuits that I really liked, and some savoury tofu for cooking later.

Cookin’ sisters.

Our final project was to make roti at home. The dough was easy enough to make in the mixer, and once we accepted the sheer quantity of Nuttelex we needed to stretch and form and shape and fry the roti, they turned out pretty good. We made plain roti and egg roti, served with a random curry pack we had in the freezer, and then a dessert course of Mars bar roti. Epic meal.

Unpictured stuff:

  • Between each of these activities, we played A LOT of board games. We played Everdell, Orleans, Kingdomino, Wingspan, Unfair, Qwixx, Empire’s End, Drop It, Welcome To, Deep Sea Adventure, Concordia and Crokinole.
  • We did NOT play Finspan because it arrived two hours after Rosemarie left. Womp womp.
  • We took Rose to the footy and we got drenched by ice rain and had to move undercover but still had a good time.
  • Rosemarie helped me fix up the backyard that desperately needed some attention. We did some major lemon tree prunage. Thanks sister.
  • We went to trivia in the boonies with Ash and Charlie and we won!
  • Rose did a bit of work, Scott did a couple job interviews.

All in all, it was an excellent visit and we were sad for her to leave. I wish we could spend time together all the time.

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Some might say that wolfing down a spicy som tam salad and a spicy nasi goreng immediately before going on a 5 hour bus ride to the Cameron Highlands was a risky move.. but thankfully we survived. Iron stomach. Our bus broke down on the way but they organised a replacement bus quite quickly and the new bus was better so all good.

Eventually we made it to Tanah Ratah where it was at least 10 degrees colder than Kuala Lumpur. Our hotel booking got upgraded to a two bedroom place so we had lots of room to spread out.

The area is known for tea and strawberry farming in particular, so I had strawberry juice several times. It looked like they grow all sorts of stuff in the area, there were really crazy looking vertical farms on the hillsides everywhere.

The next day we took a half day tour of the area. It was very foggy/cloudy/misty so we didn’t get to see that much of the view, but what we did see was still beautiful!

The first place we stopped was the Boh Tea Plantation. I think Boh is kind of like the Lipton of Malaysia, but the scenery was awesome and we really enjoyed the tour of the tea factory. We saw how they do the plucking, drying, rolling, fermenting and more drying. It’s a pretty quick process. We weren’t allowed to take pictures in there though.

So many colours of flowers.

After that we stopped at a couple other places to admire the views. :D

We went for a short walk on the side of the road on the way to the Mossy Forest where the guide pointed out a bunch of edible plants. It was so lush. The guide said “OK?” after literally every sentence he said and it really made Rosemarie and I giggle. OK?

The Mossy Forrest was indeed very mossy. And moistly. And cold. We were wearing every layer of clothes we brought and still had to keep moving to stay warm.

There were tons of these endangered carnivorous striped Malayan montane pitcher plants (thanks Wikipedia) in the Mossy Forest. Pretty neat.

Then we went to a tourist trap strawberry farm but it wasn’t really strawberry season so instead of buying anything I looked at birds.

Found some!

That was the end of the tour. We asked to get dropped off on the side of the highway so we could walk to a restaurant that was serving bamboo biryani. I didn’t know what bamboo biryani was but after seeing it on a billboard I had to try it. Turns out it’s rice cooked inside tubes of bamboo which they dramatically knock out of the tube onto a plate in front of you. I couldn’t really taste the bamboo but whatevs it was a fun gimmick.

Afternoon snack. Mangosteen are so good. It was only the very tail end of the season so they weren’t even at their prime but they were still amazing. Next time I go to Malaysia I’m going to make sure it’s mangosteen and durian season.

We went on a short hike to a garbage-filled waterfall and then warmed ourselves back up with a giant steamboat hot pot. This meal was a splurge meal for us… I think it was $20 hehehe.

In hindsight we should have booked a morning bus to Penang because we didn’t really have anything left to do in the Cameron Highlands at that point. Instead we slept in, had roti for breakfast again, went for another short hike along garbage-strewn streams, and attempted to find birds.

We had Indian food for lunch and epic mango smoothies before catching the bus to Penang, about another 5 hour trip.

Cameron Highlands is beautiful, and the cool temperature feels great after being so sweaty in KL, I would recommend going there, but you only really need one full day there and then you can continue on.

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In hindsight, it was not the best decision to book an international flight leaving at 6:15am when we live quite far away from the airport. Waking up at 3:30am is not fun. At least there was no traffic.

KUL airport is super far away from the Kuala Lumpur as well but the train was very straight forward. I got some cash and lunch in town and then headed towards DQ’s apartment where Zeph met me at the monorail station. DQ works at an international school and they have been living there for a few months. Their apartment is pretty amazing.

This was the view from DQ’s shower!!

That first evening we went out for nasi lemak and a little walk around the neighbourhood. Nasi lemak is like a super popular customizable meal where you get to pick all sorts of different bits to go with your rice, and then it comes with sambal, fried anchovies and peanuts. Delicious.

Because this was a carry on bag only trip, I only brought my 50mm lens, my 16mm lens, and my cheapy telephoto lens to try and reduce weight. Most of the time I only brought one lens on my camera out with me, which was a fun challenge. I greatly underestimated the size of the Petronas Towers the first time though, haha.

It was really nice spending time with Dan-Que again after so long. We have been friends since Grade 4!

The next morning Dan-Que and I went out for an epic roti breakfast. We ordered way too much haha. But each one was like $1-2! If I remember right we got plain, egg, egg + onion, and banana. It came with three different dipping daals/sambals.

After breakfast we went to the market to try and buy a variety of mangoes to do a taste test. There were lots of different types and they were so affordable (1 kg for $1.40 AUD!!) but they were a little pushy about buying many kilos at once, and there is only so much mango we could eat in time, especially when it’s already ripe. So we ended up with like 3 kg of mango but only two different types, heh. We did get to try slices of a few other varieties, and another dude let us try salak/snake fruit (not great imo).

Later we went for another walk to KLCC Park, alternating outdoor time with mall time for temperature regulation. That is a Oriental Magpie-robin. We also saw a Black-naped Oriole.

We stopped in a food court for a snack. Dan-Que ordered cendol and a sirap bandung on my behalf for us to try because I was completely paralyzed with indecision. The cendol is an icy coconut dessert with pandan jelly and beans. It is nice and refreshing and not too sweet. The sirap was ultra ultra sweet. We couldn’t pick the flavour at first but then eventually figured out it was rose flavoured.

We had Indian food for dinner and then had to try and meet up with Rosemarie at the subway station, 2000s style, because she had no internet. We had come up with a plan ahead of time, and then just had to be there and wait for her. Remember when we had to do that all the time?!! Our dinner ran a bit long, and we weren’t 100% sure which metro exit she would come out of, and what she would do if she beat us there, which was a little bit stressful, but we just used our sisterly intuition and it worked!!! Reunited.

The next morning we all went to Batu Caves. It is so colourful and cool! Unfortunately it was raining quite a bit. The rain cooled us down a lot, but it made it hard to take pictures on the fun rainbow stairs, and also we didn’t see any monkeys, which is unusual apparently.

It is a pretty neat place though.

After showers and wringing out our shoes we headed out again. We had regular bak kut teh, which is a very porky soup dish, and dry bak kut teh which is the same thing but caramelized, and doughnuts and kangkung belacan (water spinach with shrimp paste). I liked it, but I wouldn’t want to have it too often.

We walked around some more touristy areas.. Chinatown, some neat alleyways, some hipster shops, and this bookstore that I’m pretty sure I saw on an episode of Amazing Race.

Assume that every activity is separated by showers and/or swimming. I was having like 3 or 4 showers a day those first few days. Dan-Que’s apartment has a really great covered pool, which is epic. I am cry-laughing in this picture because someone turned on the jets on the lounge beds and my bathing suit kept filling up with air that I could not get out.

Night time photoshoot at the Petronas Towers. It was going so well until it started POURING. Even though they only live 10 minutes walk away, and we were prepared with umbrellas, we got fully drenched again. A moistly day!

After another roti breakfast the next day, Rosemarie and I met her friend Daph at the KL Bird Park.

I didn’t realise that hornbills were so huge! It was a pretty good bird park, and we saw monkeys too, but I was also having some kind of allergic reaction to something for the last day or so and my eye was getting hella hella swollen at that point so I was a little miserable.

Daph made some calls and organised to take me to a clinic, where I saw a doctor, got an antihistamine and steroid shot in my bum, and a prescription for the next few days, all for $30 AUD and done in like 45 minutes. Amazing. I am very grateful that she was able to help me out with that. My eye felt better almost immediately and by the evening it was back to normal size.

Daph took us to her favourite banana leaf restaurant for lunch. All the curries and pickles on the leaf are unlimited! And then she added on calamari and goat. You eat with your hands! It was really delicious and lots of fun. When you are finished you fold your leaf over a certain way and then they know you are done.

We went back to Daph’s house for a rest and to wait for the daily rain to pass. Weather apps do not work very well in Malaysia, but her dad said he thought it would stop raining at 7PM and he was pretty much spot on. Years of experience > computer modeling.

Daph took us to her local night market and explained what everything was and we all bought different things to bring back to her house for a feast. Her information was so interesting and helpful! We tried rojak (fruit and veg salad with a sauce), stinky tofu, a Chinese pulled sugar dessert thingy, corn in a crispy shell, salt baked chicken, carrot cake, a vegetable stir fry wrap thing, longan juice, and probably a bunch more things that I have forgotten.

Finally we caught a Grab back to Dan-Que’s place and the next day Rosemarie and I continued on to the Cameron Highlands!