More floods and visas

Having escaped the Queensland floods just in time, we find that the weather here has been weird and crazy.

The monsoon finished and left ...

and then came back.

No longer ocean and island views from our window. The tourism business in the islands is suffering because normally this is their big time for crowds to come and pay to go snorkelling.

The people in the little villages all around are used to rain - but not this time of the year. The traditional little wooden houses are always built up on stumps. Even so, apparently this situation hasn't arisen for some 22 years, and some people have had to be evacuated.

The longest rain

It has been raining heavily - tropical storms with pounding rain that makes it hard to hold a conversation - off and on for several weeks. And then the other night it just didn't let up all night. In the morning we got into our little (rented) Proton Saga and headed off to work in the dark and the pouring rain. It was different from usual - there were no motorbikes. And the windscreen wipers at their pathetic fastest barely managed to make a clear spot to see through. Quite a few times on the way the road was under water, everyone ploughing through it and throwing up great spouts of water. Occasionally someone on the other side of the road would chuck a wave right over the car, creating a moment of total loss of vision.

We got to work safely.



And went to park where we usually do. Ok, so there was a bit of water over the road! We sat in the car wondering how to climb out without removing shoes etc ... Other cars were driving along the driveway behind us, and their waves started bumping up under our car. Slowly the car started to shift sideways ...

So we moved away and headed up to the other end of the campus looking for some higher ground - although then we would have to wade back to our office. At one point it felt like we drove over something crunchy, but impossible to tell under the water. But later when we went to get back into our car we found we had a flat tyre - the tyre had started to come right off the rim. We found a couple of local boys who were glad of a few ringgit ($) to change our wheel despite the rain, and took the broken wheel to a garage. When they removed the tyre from the rim, gallons of water splooshed out!

Visa hassles

Our work visas are being "worked on", but we are very close to the end of our 'social visa', and don't want to risk being in the country illegally. The solution is usually a 'border run'.

Back up to Kota Bharu and then to the Thai border, a walk across the bridge into Thailand, a stamp in the passport, and then back across. It's what many people do. We thought it might even make an interesting little adventure for us and Lloyd.

But then there is the rain.

We've been hearing about drownings and mudslides in southern Thailand, and the river that marks the border is in flood ...

We decided we would just have to try, and we took the day off from work especially. It rained again most of the night, and in the morning it was still drizzling and not looking hopeful.

But then ...

I remembered: there is a building that we drive past every day, and can see clearly from our building -

- the big one in the middle - which has a funny name: Wisma Persekutuan. Being a curious fellow I looked up the 'p' word and found that it means 'immigration'.

So we grabbed our umbrellas and marched over there, and applied for visa extensions. It cost us no more than the petrol to Thailand and back (the visa in Thailand is free), and it only took a couple of hours.

Why didn't we just do that in the first place? - no one told us you could.

Nonchalant - word of the day

We are on a NOT-BREAK. The Institute, and all the schools, are on holiday but we are not. We are "working from home" ...

Maybe foolishly we chose this time to go north (up near the Thai border) and see the larger city of Kota Bharu - which we heard has big SHOPPING CENTRES ... and stuff like that.

So we went, right after work on Thursday (that's the weekend, remember?) Not really a long way, but fairly slow going through the endless villages (cows, goats, ducks on the road, not to mention obviously un-licensed drivers!) taking about 3 hours. [Coming back we came down that 'big' number 3 road inland, and it really wasn't any different except that there was less chance of getting lost.]

So we did find a couple of actual Shopping Centres:

That might not seem very exciting, but we don't have anything like that here in Kuala Terengganu. We have a "Giant" store which is like a big supermarket and there are lots of sort of little stalls kind of in the foyer of it - not separate shops like in a shopping centre as we know it.

So ... mostly KB was just more of the same as in KT, only more so.

More congested, people-more-unfriendly footpaths with steep steps, smelly open drains, and usually no footpath at all. To cope with the tiny streets and heavy traffic they have developed a fairly haphazhard system of one-way streets. And as a long-term prospect they are building a system of huge flyovers but they are still in the mud-and-mess stage of roadworks.

There were quite a lot of buildings like this here in the city centre and also in the countryside. The windows have all been bricked up, and there are little pipes inserted into the bricks. As you walk past the building there is a huge racket of birds squawking - outside the air is full of swooping swallows. We can only presume they are inviting them in and collecting their guano. This is an older building, but some of them are very new looking, with the glass windows propped open and bricked up.

The weather turned wet, and wetter, and quite miserable (still hot though), and we decided to go for a drive to find the beach - we thought that KB was a place to go to the beach, unlike KT where people only go there to fly kites and they are basically scared of the water, apparently. We were puzzled by the heavy traffic on the way to the beach, and even more by the number of people who were there on a Friday evening.

It was almost impossible to get a parking spot, and the little tarpaulin-cover 'restaurants' were packed with people chowing down ...

What seemed even more weird was the people sitting watching the sea ... This is definitely not how people normally behave down in Terengganu.

But the next morning when we were handed a newspaper (in English) it began to make sense.

We didn't know about the tsunami - but they did, and they were looking for it! Of course, Malaysia was basically protected by the Philippines in this case.

We were puzzled therefore that the police on the other side of the country in Kuala Lumpur were warning people. So in Terengganu state the police were turning people away from the beaches - all the way up to Besut, south of where we were.

What seems really amusing is the little comment right in the middle of this news report:

"While most revellers heeded police warnings, some appeared nonchalant and needed to be chased away."

Well, that seems to sum these people up. Nonchalant. That's how they drive and everything. Kind of relaxing really. Gotta love 'em!