Drive to Kuala Perlis

Today we have the longest drive of our Malaysia trip, 6.5 hours for 260 miles.  We are traveling from the west coast to the east cosst of Malaysia with most of the trip on Malaysia Highway 4, AKA East-West Highway.  The highway passes through 2 major mountain ranges, the Bintang Range and the Titiwangsa Range.

The road turned out to be in pretty good condition.  It was pretty windy, but most of the road was smooth and well marked.  I did some reconnaissance on Google map the night before, so I had a few stops planned.  The first planned stop was a rest stop for lunch, but we arrived there too early, so we passed it by.  The next stop was a the East-West Highway Monument, which was pretty much a rock on the side of the road with a plaque.  The monument commemorates the three workers that died here during an August 1974 attack by the Malayan National Liberation Army (communist insurgents).

After a nice stretch of the legs we continued west.  We were starting to get hungry and I saw a rest stop sign that pointed left, so we turned and followed the road until we were stopped by a pack of monkeys.  They were all playing in the road with, what seemed like a male monkey, blocking the road to protected them.  We came to a stop, the monkeys crossed the road, and the monkey road guard crossed as well, letting us pass.  Pretty cool.

After the monkey's the road didn't seem to lead to a rest stop, so we turned around and headed back to the highway.  

The next planned stop, a viewpoint, was only 20 minutes, so we figured we could eat lunch there.  20 minutes later I pulled off the road to not a view.  However, there was an elephant crossing sign...what?  I guess there are elephants all along this highway as well as monkeys.

Back in the car, and I did manage to find a rest area about 10 minutes later.  We ate our hard-boiled eggs on tortillas with chili sauce along with some snacks before getting back on the road and finishing the drive.

As I drove, Peter got some good camera shots out the windows.

We made pretty good time and arrived in Kuala Perlis around 3 PM.  We checked into the hotel and relaxed a bit before heading out looking for dinner.  Ramadan ends today, so we thought the restaurants would be opened, so we walked to the waterfront where there are a bunch of seafood restaurants.  But first, some tourist photos:

We continued the walk and failed.  It seems everything is still closed, but we continued walking.  At least there was some nice street art to look at:

Down the street we found an opened KFC.  Tim, Susan, and Peter managed to find something on the menu while I continued walking down the road where there was another tourist sign to take a photo with.

After about 10 minutes of walking, I was lucky to find a Chinese food stall that made me fish with rice that I took back to the KFC to eat.

After dinner we walked back to the hotel and chilled in our rooms.  Total Recall was on the TV.  Although it was dubbed in Malaysian, we could follow it since we have seen it before.  I blogged some and called it a night.  Tomorrow we will explore this northwest part of Malaysia.  Until then...