Return to Asia

Gryphon II
Chris and Lorraine Marchant
Wed 21 Nov 2012 13:56

 

Back in Pangkor.

We are now back afloat in our yachtie life.

 

Having made our goodbyes to family and friends we bid the Wirral farewell and ploughed down the motorway to London to spend a precious few days with Hattie, it was a great way to end our 10 months in UK. We ate out Columbian style and visited one of London’s treasures, the wonderful Horniman Museum and gardens. It has excellent ethnographic and natural history collections and a very good aquarium.  We were happy and exhausted at the end of the day and recommend anyone visiting London to spend a day there. We left England on 6th November just as the weather was starting to be more chilly than we would like, we had to scrape the ice from the windscreen that morning as we left for Heathrow.

 

After a good flight back with Saudi Airlines and a 4 hour taxi drive from KualaLumpur airport we arrived in Pangkor once more. We spent the first three nights in a local hotel, the air con was a relief as Malaysia has not got any cooler since we were last here. Our taxi driver suggested that the ubiquitous oil palms were in part responsible for the high humidity. He said the oil palms take all the moisture from the soil and send it into the air through their copious leaves but when rubber was the main crop the climate was cooler and less humid as the rubber tree puts much less water into the atmosphere...possibly.

 

We launched on 10th, it is extremely hot in the marina, we have 4 fans continually blasting away. We were very anxious as to what we would find after 10 months of the boat being ashore having various jobs done including having the bottom antifouled.  Now we are here for longer than expected as although the boat was in excellent order in nearly all respects, we do need a new sprayhood. We have been repairing it for the last 2,000 miles but the time has come, and fortuitously there is a local S African yachtie who is a sailmaker and canvas worker and who can make us a new one. The upshot is we are also having a new sail cover and a dinghy cover as well as the sprayhood! This has meant we have had time to get sorted with refitting our newly repaired sails and the masses of other jobs that need to be done before we head off for the high seas again, well at least Thailand for Christmas.

 

As in Indonesia the local guys are very creative with their delivery arrangements!

 

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The only bugbear has been that we decided to treat ourselves to an aircon unit for a few days. The marina had one for hire which some friends had previously used. Manoeuvre on to boat, plug in, switch on, and the fan starts...the compressor starts... the cold begins.... the compressor stops.... the warmth returns. So we have spent the last three days doing everything we can think of to make it work, all to no avail. So we have to continue with sweating well. peeing infrequently, damp pillows and in Lorraine’s case prickly heat. To cap it all I have had a sore throat and cough. Apparently it is going around the Tesco’s girls...yes we have a major branch of that favourite with a few Malayan twists...such as a Hallal counter which oddly is also where we have to buy the wine. Sadly the cheapest wine is about £7 a bottle so we stick to beer mostly. No problem, we will soon be in duty free Langkawi where wine is at UK prices and spirits are very cheap.
 
As we have very few pics yet here are some views of a perfect day we had out circumnavigating North wales by train a few weeks ago. Beautiful Wales.
 
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