Day 22, Year 4: Slight Change in Plans
Date: Thursday, November 13, 2008
Weather: Overcast with Periods of Sprinkles
Location: Admiral Marina, Port Dickson, Malaysia
In last night’s log I said that I hoped we would be exploring inland Malaysia by this time tonight, but that didn’t happen. But by this time tomorrow night, we definitely will have visited the Kuala Gandah Elephant Centre and be back here on Windbird poised for a trip to Melaka the next morning. The change in plans happened totally by accident. After a frustrating morning dealing with the battery charger, we got ready to head to Kuala Lumpur. We thought that going to the “big city” and renting a car there to go to the elephant sanctuary was the way to go. So we got ready to go, packed all our gear and headed out. But on our way out, we remembered that we were supposed to stop in the marina office to let them swipe our credit card. We couldn’t do this yesterday as the woman in the office had the day off. Well, Veronica is a wealth of information and we were very sorry that we had not remembered to come to the office first thing in the morning to have her verify our credit. She explained to us that renting a small car is a much easier way of traveling about the country than taking the bus and taxis, and in the end, is almost as cheap. So we reserved a car for tomorrow morning, went back to Windbird, and regained our day.
Now I’ll go back a bit and talk about the battery charger problem. We bought the new battery charger in Singapore and hooked it up yesterday. It was working great, but then Mark unplugged it so he could run the extension cord a different way. Uh oh, he forgot to turn the charger off before unplugging it. And when he plugged it back in, there was a power surge and it blew the fuse in the plug-in and destroyed the controller in the charger. But he didn’t know when he went to bed last night that it was just the controller that was blown. He thought he had blown the entire charger. It was a mostly sleepless night for him as he was so upset over the problem. But his trials this morning proved successful. The charger works fine and controls itself. We just can’t read the information without his newly Singapore purchased ampmeter and his digital volt meter. These meters are showing totally acceptable limits that our new “very expensive” Singapore purchased batteries can accept. So all is well, but we had quite a scare thinking that we might have damaged the batteries. So by noon today, we had sorted this out and were ready to leave. That’s when we met Veronica in the office and changed our plans. I spent the afternoon doing laundry and Mark spent the afternoon fixing the attachment on one of our solar panels that broke when he tried adjusting the angle of the panel. There’s always something to keep you busy on a boat.
So tomorrow morning we will drive to Port Dickson to check-out of this port. You must leave within 24 hours, but we are going to stretch that considerably. We won’t leave until Monday morning, but if we don’t check out in the morning, we wouldn’t be able to leave until Tuesday. So “shhhh”-don’t tell anyone that we are checking out a little early. We will then drive about three hours north and west to the Kuala Gandah Elephant Centre. This is a sanctuary for elephants that have had to be removed from their “homelands” that have been taken over by palm oil plantations. It is totally against the law to kill an elephant here, so when the plantation owners find that all of the new trees they have planted had been destroyed overnight by angry elephants, they call the Centre to have the elephants transplanted. The elephants are brought to the sanctuary, and once they are calmed down, they are then transplanted to the national forest. The sanctuary is a great place to get to feed, ride, and actually bathe the elephants in the river. We’ll get a little wet in the process, but it sounds like great fun. Asian elephants are found in northern Borneo, Malaysia, Thailand, and then on north through Cambodia and Viet Nam. We hope to see them again in northern Thailand, but just in case plans change, we thought we should have the experience here. We will probably drive back to Admiral Marina tomorrow night and then travel on south to Melaka the next morning. Since we are now not taking a
bus to Kuala Lumpur, we will not get to see that city. But it is just that, a great big city. It does have the tallest twin towers left standing in the world, but there are lots of pictures of those, so I think we can live without experiencing that city for ourselves.
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| 081113 Day 22 Port Dickson, Malaysia–Admiral Marina and Port Dickson |
