Cycling Through Malaysian Monsoons Singapore to Kenyir Lake World Bicycle Touring Episode 33

Jenny doesn't like the monkeys but I think they're fun. Right up until one bites me and gives me rabies. We've gotten to take a bunch of bike paths through Singapore so far. We've also seen more cyclists than we have total in Malaysia in just an hour in Singapore. We love huge elevators where we can fit both our bikes in. It's pretty rare. Usually we have to stand them up. We're headed out of Singapore pretty much taking the same way that we came into the city. Jenny's got new pedals and a new helmet. Both of them were kind of long-term things she'd been dealing with so we found a nice bike shop. Singapore is a tiny island with about five and a half million people on it but they've still really got a nice network of bike paths through forests and stuff. It's an effort to get an early start because we've got a pretty big day today. We're going to do about 58 miles. We somewhat succeeded in leaving early and it looks like we're going to get some rain today. So we'll see how it goes. It's a pretty good rain today in Malaysia that we've really had to ride for an extended time in the rain. At least it's not cold. It's pretty much been pouring the whole time that we've been riding and now there's crazy flash floods in the palm farms and in the road. It's pretty crazy. Luckily the roadside shelters are pretty common so we can take little breaks in the rain when we need to. It's one of our favorite breakfasts in Malaysia. It's like flaky bread with egg and a bunch of different dipping sauces. It's a rainy day and because all the hotels are sold out so we stopped for dinner. It's been a pretty interesting night. We thought we might try to camp but as you can see it's absolutely pouring rain so that idea did not work out. We started out in Mersing today. Riding on highway three pretty much all day. Started with some rolling hills and now it's flattened out quite a bit as we've gotten closer to the coast. Looks like we're maybe going to get some rain. Actually want to grab some Gatorade? It's like 52 miles today. Pretty overcast but still as always extremely hot and we're very sweaty. We're headed out of Pekan this morning. I don't really know how you're supposed to say it but I'm just going to call it Pekan or pecan depending on what part of the south you're from or whatever. We're going to hopefully take a beach road to get off of the highway three for the first time in a while. Let's go once my sandwich. There's more coming. What have we done? Overcast day so it just got a bit crazy. Riding along the beach kind of off the main highway but still a decent amount of traffic of course. It is the holiday today so understandable. Thai restaurant and I think this Tom Yum soup is just like destroying both of us. We're kind of crying and everybody's looking at us because it seems like we can't handle our heat which we kind of can. Really good food. Cashew chicken. Some other chicken. The offending soup. We're at Kwan Ton. We took a day off the bike in our really crappy hotel room. Jenny was feeling a little sick so we took a rest day. It's nice to be able to take a rest day here in Southeast Asia where we can afford to just kind of splurge on an extra $14 a night hotel and not blow our entire budget for two weeks. We try to ride these side roads as much as possible just to get off the highway. There are a lot of trucks and we're going past a mining operation today so it's just kind of crazy on the highway but the side road near the beach is really nice. There's like no cars on it. We're on highway 3 riding through Cherating and I just had a cop pull over and warned me that this area has robbers so that's kind of a first on our whole trip. I'm not really sure what he was talking about. He didn't really speak English so he didn't elaborate. It seems like an area just like any of the others we've cycled through. About 550 miles into our ride across Malaysia. Haven't had any crime related issues at all but yeah that's a little bit interesting. Andrew just crossed a four-lane highway to get us water from the filtering machine on the other side. Andrew found a cat friend at our lunch spot. It's a Saturday and we're right near the beach. Getting close to the town of Menang. Lots of beach traffic today. Huge amount of restaurants and food stalls right on the coast here. It's a pretty cool area. We're trying to beat this storm to our hotel. Today since we left Terengganu but finally it's let up a little bit. Starting to have some elevation gain and of course passing through palm oil plantations kind of as usual but we're excited to see what it's like in the more rural mountainous areas of Malaysia. We're at a small hotel on Kinnear Lake and there aren't really any restaurants or shops around so we're cooking dinner for the first time in a long time and we've got some filtered water going and we're also using gasoline for the first time on our stove so we'll see how that goes.