Breakfast the next day:
Double order of roti canai
Beef rendang. Below are some type of hash brown and to the left of them is some sort of fried starchy thing that didn't have much flavor, colored with pandan.
Plate of pineapple
Clear chicken soup with rice noodles, fish cake, fish ball, mushrooms and fried shallots
After breakfast, we went to the neighboring city of Ayer Itam to see the Buddhist temple Kek Lok Si which, I believe, is the largest Buddhist temple in Malaysia. I thought this temple was amazing because it had the most amount of manicured plants that I've ever seen in a temple. It was just so relaxing wandering around the grounds... I could have stayed there all day.
Some nice heliconia
Giant bronze statue of Guan Yin
After viewing the temple, we were walking around Ayer Itam and stumbled into this Laksa place for lunch. There seemed to be a good amount of locals in there (as well as some getting takeaway which is always a good sign) although quite a bit of tourists since it's not far from the entrance of the temple.
Cendol is a common SE Asian dessert - it's basically some pandan flavored jellied squiggles in coconut milk sweetened with palm sugar. Ais kacang is shaved ice with flavorings.
The laksa stall
The mise en place - squirt bottles are full of shrimp paste syrup, the pink shredded stuff is torch ginger flower, then chillies and mint.
Giant cauldron of broth
I thought this version was better than the one we had a few days before. Bigger flakes of mackerel and better broth flavor.
I saw a sign on the wall for this and was curious...
Quite interesting - kind of sweet/sour but very distinctive - didn't really taste like anything I've had before.
My wife needed a pick-me-up, so.....
After lunch we went to the botanical garden. They have a few houses of specific types of plants, but 3 out of the 4 were closed. This one was open:
The fern house
There were quite a few monkeys roaming around:
Contrary to what the sign says, the monkeys were not aggressive at all. This lady was feeding some (which you're not supposed to do) and they were being very patient with her as she doled stuff out:
They even have a nice trail through the rain forest:
Great example of a cannonball tree. I've seen them in the Singapore botanical garden when they were flowering, but I've never seen them with the mature fruit.
Then back to the hotel to relax a bit. By dinner time, my wife was pretty exhausted so we stayed in the hotel.
Indian style lamb curry with a dish of pickles and a the blandest pappdum ever.
This is the middle of the end. Soon after dinner I started feeling super exhausted, and then wound up having a fever with the chills and became ridiculously nauseous. Like debilitating nausea where you just want to curl up in a ball and pass out. Thankfully, a few years ago I got a prescription for an anti-nausea medication meant for cancer patients - it's really effective. In about 5 minutes, the nausea is mostly gone and by 20 minutes, you feel normal again. It didn't really help for the fever though.
