Monday, October 12, 2009

Merpati Adventures: Sekinchan


Merpati (Malay) = Pigeon (English)
In honour of the the pigeon post messengers during the war, we use the pigeon name as a symbol to bring stories from different parts of the country and the globe to share with everyone. Enjoy! 

With a free day on our hands, Leels, Molls and I decided to make a day trip to Sekinchan for some eats and sightseeing of the vast paddy fields we heard so much of...
As you can see from the map, Sekinchan is on the north-western coast of the Klang Valley. It took us about 2 1/2hrs to get there by car as it should have been only about 1 1/2hrs to 2hrs ride. Reason being that we got slightly lost due to Molly's fantastic self-GPRS navigation,  we now know that she is a better driver than a navigator ...

Anyways, after the long ride, we were absolutely famished, and we headed straight to the apparent local joint for breakfast/brunch @ Restoran Guan Hwat which is recognisable by its blue walls and hawk-like behaviour of customers waiting in line.



Thankfully, we didn't have to wait for long and we got our table almost immediately. The first thing that came to my mind was, "No way, I'm going to eat rice at 10am in the morning!" But after surveying the other tables, it was quite apparent that we were going to have rice for brunch...So we proceeded to order the restaurant specialties...
 

(Left to right from top) 
Fried Lala in chillies and tauchu (fermented bean paste)
Shark Meat fried in black soy sauce
 Mudskipper fish fried with tauchu (fermented bean paste) 
Shark Meat, Fishball and Preserved Vegetable Soup
Bitter Gourd fried with eggs and dried shrimps
Grand total for the meal (incl. of drinks) = RM55!


Overall, I felt that the meal was a bit too heavily laden with tauchu and was a bit on the dry side but it was nice to have the soup to neutralise the whole taste.  The mudskipper had too many bones for my liking but other than that it was a good meal that felt very home-cooked with love by Grandma. 

The challenge we had there was more of the locals (2 tables in fact) who took a fancy of watching us, 3 girls, trying to finish 5 dishes. For a good 30 minutes, they took the liberty to discuss and gave a "live" commentary on our progress of finishing our food. Honestly, it was pretty amusing as they thought we did not understand Hokkien, but we did! Finally, I think we impressed them by polishing our plates right up to the gravy. *take that, hah! don't look down on a girl's appetite!*


After that very eventful meal, we decided to head for some coffee to wake our full and lazy selves. We found an old school coffee shop which seem to have what we were craving for - local coffee and cham (coffee + tea)

 

As you can see from the look on our faces that this was our first coffee for the day and we are, lovingly, coffee addicts...oh happy, happy, joy, joy!

Satisfied and mildly buzzed from the coffee, we made our way to the paddy field to do a little exploration and trying not too act too much like a tourist who has never seen a paddy field. That was kinda hard, considering that only tourists would go and see the fields instead of going to work there! Having said that, the views at the fields were pretty awesome and somewhat invigorating.





Tucked away in the corners of the paddy fields, we found an orchard which bore fruit of the season - mangoes and papayas.


Unfortunately, I didn't get to take many pictures while we were there as my fellow roadtrippers forbade me to! Well, I guess they had a fair reason as when we walked into the orchard, all the (male) workers stopped working and started to talk to us by asking our names, where our boyfriends were and if they could have our phone numbers! Talk about being bold! Being at the fruit orchard was way creepier than being in a dodgy Chow Kit road night club! If you can spot the topless male in the pic above, he was the boldest and offered us free fruit for our numbers...errm...no thanks! We quickly paid for our mangoes (which were super tasty, I might add) and went on our merry way out of the orchard!

With all that, we had such a hilarious ride back home recounting our adventures for the day and our run-ins with the Sekinchan folks. Having said that, we know that they meant no harm and it was all in good faith, in other words, they were (super) friendly!

Merpati Adventures, Over & Out (for now)




9 comments:

Amy Chong said...

Hi Shuk Yin! Haha, you girls sure looked happy with your coffee.. GREAT PHOTOS! :)

justshuks said...

Hahah! Thanks, Amy! We hope to have more of these random adventures!

mei fong said...

to my defense, if its not my misguided routes, you wouldn't be eating the masuk angin Ro Ro.

Leels said...

Hahaha, yay to more random adventures! Shuk not going to blog about the word(s) of that day? ;)

justshuks said...

care to remind me what these fabulous words are? ;P

Shobha Nambiar said...

Love the photos. Road trips are the way to go! x

justshuks said...

Thanks, Shobha! Your travel pics are pretty awesome too! Hope you are well! x

kadler said...

What an awesome trip! Love your photos, too.

justshuks said...

Thanks for the visit, K! You are not very far from Malaysia, you should make a visit :)

It was an awesome, great company always helps :)