Life is Beautiful: An Unusual Vacation, but Pleasant After All

21 December & 22 December 2007 at Bagan Lalang, Sepang

We first planned to coincide with each other's holiday as we were expecting some sort of vacation. A trip, and our initial plan was to go up to Cameron Highlands. After all the research and headaches deciding for a place to stay, it was rather unfortunate that the trip remained as a plan due to the rainy season - roads up may be blocked, it could be a bit risky as land collisions may happen... and we thought it's not worth dying together, so we moved on to somewhere safer.

I spent a couple of hours on the Internet and found this place called Bagan Lalang in Sepang. Pretty awesome - it's near, away from flood and new. There are some good and bad comments about this place on the Internet - some said it's dirty and "kampung", some said one of the best places to watch sunset. What'ever. Bottom line, we got free accommodation - Cyrus managed to get hold of his relative, who owns a house there.

The trip was rather unusual, in a sense that the decision (including accommodation, which always takes up a huge amount of everyone's reserved budget, considering it's nearing Christmas and year-end) was made in less than 48-hours. Now let me describe the typical situation - once everyone agrees with the location, there will be a few options for accommodation. Then we will take like a few weeks to discuss, argue, rest, realign budget, before it's confirmed. Thereafter, traveling mode - behold the divas on and on and on...

Anyways, back to the trip. Yes, everything was impromptu! Our journey got delayed because we decided to cook our dinner, so we headed to Tesco Puchong to do some marketing. Ideas of the dishes came in like snap, "Tonight, we're cooking this..." and the shopping cart moves.
We reached the house at about 5pm. I was like, wah lao eh, it was a single-unit, almost bungalow house, in a gated community! Such a perfect place to stay. At this point, there was no sight of the beach throughout our journey or near where we were. Some of us had not even rest our feet, and straight away started preparing for dinner. Obviously, it was quite an incident back there, but to cut the story short, the result of the Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver wannabes was not that bad, except for:
1. My experimental Tom Yam that tasted like some sort of cleaning detergent
2. Herma's Salt-baked Crab, quite delicious actually but she forgot to remove those stomach sacs and the gills. Those are not edible
3. Adeline's Sambal Prawn cooked with instant Brahmin chilli mixture... very salty and guys, please don't buy any of Brahmin's products. They're terrible.

Other than that, we had some good stuff too:
1. Of course, my Curry Chicken that I learned from another friend of mine
2. Daniel's Stir-fried Long Beans with Sun-dried Shrimps
3. Herma's Sauteed Mushrooms that is just nice
3. Adeline's Luncheon Meat with Fried Eggs
4. My Fried Eggs with Shrimps - too salty, but they walloped it :D
5. Dessert - Glutinous Rice Ball in Spicy Ginger Syrup

Altogether, NINE dishes. Not kidding. Nevertheless, I enjoyed playing Chef Wan and everyone enjoyed the dinner - they'd better be!

We spent most of our time in the house actually. Well, we drove out to the beach after dinner and hoped to find a 7-11. Unfortunately, we figured the nearest one should be in KLIA, so let's not go there. The place is really, really "kampung". The beach was wet and muddy when we were there at night, just about time as the tide is getting higher. Mat Rempits were also speeding around the area, how I'm not surprised.

After the beach, we headed back to the house and started drinking Tequila in a small hut built at the backyard of the house. Quite cool! No one was extremely drunk, everything was fine, the TV remained where it was.

The slut before we leave the house

The next afternoon was simply annoying - garbage flies were all over the house, buzzing around us like we're some dead corpses. We woke up, cleaned the house, had breakfast (Herma's fried rice with tap-water-washed-yesterday's- sambal-prawn). We left the house and went to a small Chinese shop-house for lunch, where apparently they sell very delicious curry noodle. Nothing exciting, except flies again. According to the shop owner, wherever there's a huge durian farm nearby, there will be flies buzzing around.

Final stop - at last, the beach. It was an entirely different experience as compared to the previous night. To be honest, the beach is clean and *beautiful*. The view is excellent, some huge pine trees are planted along the side of the beach. The sand is soft. Don't expect blue sea water like you can get in Langkawi, but the water is definitely cleaner than Port Dickson the way I see it. We had a great moment there, took some photos, filmed a Christmas video, briefly watched the sunset, smoked and threw the butts at the shores... fantastic!

Overall a unique vacation, awesome, one of the most peaceful, less painful holidays for me. No drama, nothing went wrong, just getting everyone together and spend some special moments for the nostalgia. As for Bagan Lalang, I wouldn't mind going back. It's away from town, panoramic, absolutely perfect for family trip or even a short get away. Don't expect a lot of water activities and adventures, those masculine activities though. And finding alcohol at night is quite a challenge - so go there with a whole barrel of beer!!!

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