This week has been a bit of a struggle. No, not true. It's been a LOT of a struggle.

Sometimes your writing goes well. Sometimes it doesn't. Currently we have the latter situation.

Nevertheless, here are my highlights-despite-discouragement:

1. Continuing to be blessed -- not too strong a term -- by the wonderful amalgam of forest, shrines, and animals that brightens our every day here.























2. Continuing to ferret out new food. At Restoran Kakak you can get a nice chicken noodle soup, with a peppy sambal on the side. You can also order their speciality kakak peng. This is another of Taiping's combo drinks, this time consisting of ice, Nescafe, and barley water. Our local baker's, we discovered, does Portuguese egg tarts that are every bit as good as its kaya puffs. And we've been undertaking cendol comparisons. Truth to tell, there's not much to choose between Ansari Famous and Bismillah. Neither could offer the much-loved pulut (one day we were too late, the next too early). But they both serve up a damn fine cendol.



3. Celebrating Tynwald Day. During our walk in the forest, we constructed a three legs. And in the evening we drank the Island's health at the Flemington's Skybar. (Two days later we again walked the track where we'd laid out our legs. The component twigs and leaves were scattered. Was this the effect of a few four-wheel-drives passing that way? Or had someone decided this was a magic symbol and dismantled it? Who knows...?)





4. Checking out the Telegraph Museum. It's smaller than its Muzium Telekom equivalent in KL, but the building has been very nicely restored, and there are some interesting reminders of the communication breakthroughs of bygone eras.









5. Finding a way to watch our recorded movies on our hotel room's big TV screen. Very trivial, you're thinking, but this achievement -- which involved asking in every shop in Taiping for a certain kind of connector cable -- is actually very satisfying. Having re-watched the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel on Nigel's computer earlier in the week (we used to watch movies this way in Indonesia, but it's not recommendable), we were delighted to be able to re-watch the sequel, the Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in much more style.

They're silly movies, in many ways, but they contain quite profound thoughts about life, change, adaptation, and death. What ARE we waiting for to pursue our best chance of happiness? It's a good question...

Well before I saw the Marigolds, I thought Jaipur would be a nice place to spend more time. Who knows, maybe we'll do a bit of our own Marigolding one of these days...







I'd forgotten the second movie's reference to Tennyson's Ulysses, a splendid poem I first came across three years ago at an exhibition in KL.

It's electrifying:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees...
Much have I seen and known...
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move...

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas...
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die...