Le Tour De Langkawi - ooh race day!

We settled into our hotel we succumbed to the boys request for the deferred Western Food night (owing to the unavailability the previous night).  The big colonel on the side of the Tesco's building was calling them mighty loudly!  They had KFC at the big Tesco food hall and I mean big - it was massive - especially compared to all the other mini marts we had been in during the last week.  Myself and Kim couldn't bring ourselves to eat that shite so had rice - again, then Kimbo had to have a wander around the supermarket, because it was Tescos.  I dutifully followed!

The next day we weren't too sure where we were ending up, there seemed to be a shortage of big towns after about 40km and before 100km mark.  So we headed off towards Taipin, we stopped at a roadside stall for breakfast cum lunch after 17km.  You had to constantly stop flies landing on your food and keep the special fly lid firmly on your cup of tea.  Jake commented that we would need to make sure we had a good shower tonight to wash all the maggots out of our hair - Michael stopped eating at that point.  

We had been a bit excited to see earlier in the week that the Langkawi Cycle Tour - Malaysia's answer to the tour de France was heading our way.  We started passing alot of support vehicles (heading in the opposite direction) as we rode along.  The next town was called Pantai Remis and we noticed it was all set up for a stage sprint of the race, there were marshalls out and loads of Police about.  So we parked up and had a coke and the boys had some roti and settled down to wait for the bikes to appear.

It was ages before we saw any action - but we knew they were near.  Finally all the promotional cars turned up - this was called the Cavalcade, about 30 or 40 cars all lined the main street, some had hot chicks in them, others had daughters of sponsors (the ugly ones!) in them.  They all jumped out and started madly handing out flags, fans, drink bottles etc.  There was heaps of media there as well so that was pretty exciting as they were keen to take photos of the kiws - im pretty sure they thought we were the NZ cycling team, particularly as we got clapped as we rode into town - backwards.  Finally the cyclist came through - and as you might know cycling isn't the most exciting spectator sport it was blink and you miss it.  There were two leaders then the Pelathon probably 2minutes behind.  We then went off to find a hotel, as we couldn't be bothered riding any further that day, a measly 37km.  It was good to chill out for the rest of the day.

That night we went to a pretty much non english speaking hawker centre for dinner.  We had great fun explaining and pointing at other diner's food, combined with the the ingredients to get our food and drink order in.  It was another great feed.