Today (28th July 2020), we planned to visit the main market in Kota Bharu and then drive across the top of Malaysia to spend the night at the Jerai Hill Resort in Kedah. The best time to visit local markets is early morning, so we saved Pasir Besar Siti Khadijah for today. We arrived at the market around 9 am and found a carpark opposite the main entrance, although clearly the local practise was to park anywhere they liked!
This market was huge and very colourful. We spent about an hour here but could easily have spent longer if we had visited all the various floors upstairs. Several people asked us where we were from and wished us a happy journey.
Sadly my camera didn’t care much for the low light conditions of the market, but Lawrence managed to capture the vibrancy of the place in his video, so do check that out. What was immediately noticeable were the different faces of the people here compared to those in the south where I live, especially for the men. There seemed to be two distinct looks: the guys with sharp features (and long wavy hair), and the guys with the softer rounder features (and short curly hair)
These are the lovely ladies who sold me some pickled garlic; I really must get around to trying it.
There were plenty of stalls selling keropok lekor (below left) and unrecognisable objects (below right).
The route we took had us headed straight for the unlucky chickens…
…followed by some very fresh looking fish which had been neatly arranged on display.
It was a very busy place and easy to see why it was so popular; you could get everything here.
On the upper floors you could buy plastics of all varieties, dried fish of all sizes, and of course clothes, etc.
Then we bought some fruit for our journey today, to go with the snacks we bought previously in the market at Kuala Terengganu. We weren’t sure if there would be many options to stop and eat on the route across country, and we were right!
As we drove west towards Route 4, we drove very close to the border with Thailand (on our right). We had wanted to stay and visit the Belum State Park but the main resort there was still closed. The weather was too poor to bother finding the viewing point on the Temenggor Lake, so we just kept driving.
Lawrence was driving at this point, and stopped at a police road block. The policeman looked very officious and asked for his driving licence. When he saw that Lawrence had a Malaysian driving licence, he positively gasped with surprise! And of course waved us through. As we climbed higher and higher into the mountains, we had the Royal Belum State Park (Kedah) on our right and the Gunung Stong State Park (Kelantan) on our left. The countryside was striking and green, with hills covered in lush and varied rainforest, but we only found one lay-by where it was safe to pull over to take photos. Then the rain came down and all the spectacular views disappeared. So here are a few sights along the way…
The Jerai Hill Resort is perched on top of Gunung Jerai, so should have a stunning view. But we arrived when it had just stopped raining so the views were obscured by cloud. Even so, Lawrence immediately put his drone up in the carpark to see the surroundings, but it was too windy to risk sending it too far away. If you look closely at the photo below, you can see the flat plains of Kedah covered in rice paddies and other crops, and the west coast of Malaysia on the left.
The temperature drop in the resort area was very pleasant, and we would have loved an extra day here to explore, but the resort was full as this was a holiday weekend. We walked around the site before dinner admiring the flowers, then Lawrence thought he heard a drone. We looked up and saw nothing. We looked down and this is what we saw; the largest, most colourful, flies I have ever seen having dinner on a dead rat.
And so ended Day 7 of our Malaysian Road Trip. It had been a long day on the road but we had been rewarded by some beautiful countryside.
Here is a slide show of the photos taken on Day 7:
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