The first day to the unkown

The plan for our budget, photography and venture into the unknown trip is... to have none at all. Well, that is not totally true. We did do some planning. We did know where we are headed to. But what we did not know was what to expect along the way. In order words, we do not plan the itinerary along the way. What we know is what we have been hearing from our friends. None of us has been traveling using this specific route before. We sort of know there are some breathtaking sceneries along the way. We sort of know there are some astonishing waterfalls along the way. We sort of know there are some mystical caves along the way. We sort of know there are some mouth watering foods along the way. But how breathtaking? How astonishing? How mystical and how mouth watering? We have no idea. The expecting of the unexpected added some thrill to the trip I must say.

So the journey began on the early Tuesday morning 7am. First stop was to pick up two of the four heavenly kings at the office: the self proclaim Lord (who got himself a D50) and the publicly acclaimed Java guru. Then we went on to pick up the fourth heavenly king: the dark and a little (just a little ok) over sized heavenly king.

First, each of us took up RM200 and handed over to our treasurer, the self-proclaim the Lord. With a total of RM800. our first stop was to get some tit-bits. After breakfast at approximately 8:30am, we started our driving north journey.

We have planned to overnight at Gua Musang, which is our Day One stopover. We first passed by Bentong, Raub and Kuala Lipis. We stopped at Kuala Lipis for lunch. For you out there who does not know, Kuala Lipis is actually the kampung of our very own Malaysian song bird Siti Nor Nurhaliza. Our dark and a little (just a little ok) over sized heavenly king was pretty excited. He is a big fan of Siti. Well maybe not as crazy as before but still he is excited, especially when we passed by Siti old school.

After lingered about 2.5 hours at Kuala Lipis, we continued our journey up north to Gua Musang. We reached our final destination of the day at around 4:30pm. Gua Musang is not small town (if you compare it to my hometown Pekan) and yet it is not big either. It is divided into Bandar baru and Bandar lama. And yes, there is a cave in this place where the name of the town is named after. But according to the local people, the cave is no longer being visited by people for many years. This town is actually pretty amazing especially with the huge limestone hills as its backdrop.

Our first mission is to get a reasonable but cheap place to sleep. It was not difficult to our relief. We have been seeing the motel signboard, The Kesedar Inn along the way from Kuala Lipis and to get to the motel was also not difficult as the signboard is big and clear. Since we wanted to keep this trip cheap, we opted for a twin sharing bedroom with an additional bed for four of us. We kept nodding our head despite being asked few times whether the arrangement was comfortable or not by the hotel friendly staff as the room seemed to be overly crowded in her opinion. So, the room charge for that night was RM97, which was about RM24 per person. I thought it was a pretty good deal as the room come with a satellite TV (yaba-daba-dooooo!).

We couldn't do much after settling down in that motel room as it was raining outside. We went out for dinner that night and tried to explore the town a little. The dinner was average but rather expensive. We had satay, omelet malay style, veggie, tom yam, white rice and keropok as starter. The dinner cost us RM46, which is unexpectedly over budget.

The night life in Gua Musang is pretty much the same as the other small towns in Malaysia. Don't expect too much. After making few rounds around the town, we headed to our motel room and called it a day.

Not a particular interesting first day, especially with the gloomy weather. But we are lucky enough to have dry weather during the drive. The scenery along the way was pretty amazing though. We passed by numerous kampong. We passed by many rubber and palm plantations. We passed by many unique and extraordinary limestone structures. As such, we drive drive and stopped for photograph. Then, we drive drive again and stopped again for more snaps.