is that enough photos for you?

Hello all, I've been mooching around Malaysia for the past 8 days in a most jolly fashion. And it hasn't been idle tourism either, although it has felt a bit like it and no mistake. I randomly got a new job on friday - as in I called up a company and they said "oh we're going off on a 10 day shoot tomorrow, do you feel like coming along?". So off I went.It's been loads of fun, helping to make a 15 minute tourism video for the state of Perak (which is just a couple of hours north of Kuala Lumpur, but very different indeed). The film is one about the fabulous locations in Perak for film companys to come and film there, a potted overall view of all the nice things in the state. Brilliant.So I spent 4 nights in a lovely hotel/ golf course called the Clearwater sanctuary, in a very nice room that overlooked a large pond/mini lake covered in lillies. The pond itself was a tin mine (there were several on the hotel site, as Perak was the tin mining capital of Malaysia for donkeys years). The pond now supports lots of wildlife, they're stuffed with fish, we saw herons, all sorts of birds and a big family of otters (about 11 or 12 of them swimming in a line going home after a days fishing). No doubt all sorts of other stuff too.

We went filming around Ipoh (the state capital) which has all sorts of old British colonial buildings, like the obligitary Cricket pitch in the town centre (complete with mock-tudor pavillion clubhouse buildings - just like in KL) loads of realy big and grand buildings around the old train station - see photos for details, namely the slightly dilapidated but still proper atmospherice Hotel Majestic which is like it was made specifically for a Humphrey Bogart movie.
We went to rubber plantations, run down chinese villages full of half collapsed pre-war shophouses and lots of rubber tappers lazing around in the afternoon (rubber trees are tapped at dawn and finish dripping around 11am so the workers get most of the day free). One town seemed to be totally centred around the local coffee shop, which had a karaoke machine blasting out rancid chinese music at 190 decibells with all the local old men wailing hideously out of tune. Was very funny, if a bit deafening.

The guys I've been working with are all Malay, except for Judy the producer who is chinese but converted to Islam in order to marry, and what with now being Ramadan they were all fasting during daylight hours. I wasn't expected to fast, but felt a little bit bad about chowing down on a hearty oily dinner whilst they all sat drooling and trying not to look. So inevitably I basically ended up fasting too - although I was able to drink (thank god, or I'd have died out in that heat) and occasionally sneak a quick bite to eat behind the back of the van. Needless to say I took almost as much pleasure in the 7pm breaking fast meal as they did, almost, but not quite of course as nothing had past their lips since 5am. I lost a few inches around the belly due to this and constant sweating my arse off.

We went to a cave temple - of which there are many in and around Ipoh - which was amazing, a vast limestone cavern with a massive golden buddah (about 50 feet tall or more, hard to tell) and loads of painting on the wall. I walked up the 450+ steps to the very top of the cliff which had a great view of the city. About 4pm a mad amount of moneys came swingin down the cliff and had a feeding frenzy (a few people turned up with bags of peanuts, presumably a regular ritual).Also next door were rows of stalls selling Limes the size of my head, a locally grown uniquery. Odd enough.

One town we visited was the royal town of Kuala Kangsar, which boasted an enormous golden domed mosque, 2 sultans palaces (one old and one new, the old one is the black and yellow place in the photo, which was built out of wood and woven rattan without using a single nail or screw amazingly), and the oldest rubber trees in the country - as the origional seedlings brought over from Kew Gardens were cultivated here and were are the grandparents of all the hundreds of thousands of rubber trees in the country. It's pretty nice there, I'd say cool but my skin got majorly blistered there. We also popped into the old train station and I managed to get a few snaps of the antiquated signal key system, long since abandoned in the UK but very much in use over here.

Another interesting place was Kellies castle - see pics - which was built about 90 years ago by a mega rich Scottish rubber plantation owner. He decide to build himself a castle all his own, in the moorish style favoured by the looney brits who governed here (also a few grand buildings of this style in KL and other cities). He got most of the way through the building, also building 3 hindu temples linked to the castle by tunnels - to appease the indian workers who were scared about an epidemic of something or other - then he popped home to sort out some business and never came back. Nobody seems to have found out exactly what happened to him, but it seems he went to Portugal (possibly to sort out some business in Papua New Guinea) and then snuffed it. The place never got finshed, so it was left abandoned, the jungle moved in and started to take the place to pieces. Then a couple of years ago the government cleared the jungle and rebuilt the place, but only to the point at which construction ceased back at the turn of the century, so there it stands, virtually as it was left when the Kellie family buggered off. Quite a place.

After lots of driving around and filming we went to the island of Pangkor (south of Penang) and spent a truely hideous 2 nights on a beach resort. Such a horrendous job you ever did see, being forced to lounge around by the pool, being pistol whipped into having a massage in a spa by the beach whilst the rest of my collegues filmed me, being dragged kicking and screaming around the old dutch fort, the weird miniature replica of the Great Wall of China, the fishing villages, the beaches and coves. Such an awful way to make a living. Oh and the hotel feeds the local hornbills twice a day, which is something to behold. These oddities truely are one of the most beautifully ugly things in all creation - second only to most sea creatures and the Welsh.

So there we go, enjoy the pictures, I'm going to go and eat some food. I'm back in KL now and hopefully they want me to edit this film for them, if not there are plenty of other job possibilitys opening up to me. It seems like the next project might be a self driven one, with 2 of the guys from the crew, we are talking about making a little expedition into the rainforest and shooting a documentary/short film there for our own reasons cos they're also a bit bored of working on crappy low quality Malaysian poo.Should be an interesting one I feel.
love to all and good luck

timbo