Trip to PNG

PNG, as in Papua New Guinea... not Penang! Just coz' someone I know made that mistake. Lol.

I went to Papua New Guinea in December 09 for work. It was my first time in the country, and prior to leaving, I had no lack of friends warning me to be careful and watch out for cannibals. Well, I'm still alive and well, not being digested in some Papua New Guinean's stomach, and while I met and spoke to quite a number of the locals in the course of my work, there wasn't a cannibal anywhere. My client also reassured me that if there were cannibals before, the people had stopped that lifestyle ages ago. I didn't even get to see any tribes, and I closest I got were nice paintings and photos of tribal people at the airport, as well as a friendly looking statue at the hotel I stayed overnight at.


Nevertheless, even without cannibals, I was told the place still wasn't all that safe, as the locals are quite poor and are known to do untoward things to foreigners unfamiliar with the place. So I and my colleagues were advised not to go out on our own, ever, which was fine, coz' the clients put us up at a pretty nice hotel (the Crown Plaza) for one night at Port Moresby, before we took another flight the next day to the island where our work was to be carried out at some palm oil mills. It was at the Crown Plaza where I got my first taste of Melanesian food, which is the local food is Papua New Guinea (at least I think so. You can go google the history of it. Haha). And they were serving crocodile meat served in some yellow sauce, which for the most part sounded quite unappetizing to me and also made me feel very guilty about the thought of eating part of an endangered animal. But since I was having a buffet, it was one of the dishes and the crocodile was already dead, I took a teeny tiny bit to try it out, and the meat was, not un expectedly, very tough. With curiosity satisfied, I decided not to take another bite. Apparently though, crocodile meat isn't supposed to be so tough, according to my client, so the hotel folks probably didn't cook it right. Not that I would know the difference anyway. Unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of the crocodile meat, but with all the sauce covering it, it didn't really look much different from chicken meat in yellow sauce.

At the airport, it was also not uncommon to see large groups of people sitting outside the airport, especially the domestic terminal. I'm not sure if they are waiting for people to arrive or just making a nuisance of themselves. I wanted to take a photo of the people, but I was also a bit worried I might get into trouble with some of them for it. So the most I got was this lady making herself comfy in the airport itself.

Either way, I and my colleagues were again advised to just walk as quickly as possible to the check-in counter, check-in and then head straight for the waiting area, just to be safe. Unfortunately even that wasn't so smooth sailing, coz' when we got to the check-in counter, it turns out the plane (which we all had valid tickets for) was overbooked and already full! At first, they said they couldn't fit any of us on the plane, but our client's consultant who was with us, talked to them and after a while they miraculously somehow got 3 seats for us...which was enough coz' there were 4 of us. So the poor consultant had to stay behind for one night while the rest of us went on the plane. And this is apparently why the local airline, Air Niugini, is also known as Air Agony.

That aside, there is very little industry on the island where we flew too, so the greenery was rather untouched, and since the landscape was quite hilly, it made for beautiful scenery from the plane.

After landing and being picked up by our clients, we were driven throughs mile and miles of forest (on surprisingly good roads though) to our resort), where along the way, it was common to see people walking along the road with their baskets, and sometimes children not wearing any clothes, and at one point we passed by a group selling vegetables and other wares by the roadside. Their items were all placed on the ground, no tables. Even though it was raining quite heavily (as in cats and dogs heavy!) they didn't even move to get shelter. They all stayed under their stall umbrellas and continue their business! Food cleaniness must be a major issue among the locals....

For some reason, the locals also have a strange way of disposing of their old and worn out shoes... by chucking them onto telephone lines! Don't ask me why...

Even with all the problems and potential safety issues, there are also of course, good things about PNG. Of course, not all the people are up to no good. As part of my job is to interview the local stakeholders, including the villagers and locals working for the company, to see how the company's activities are affecting them, I had no choice but to go right into some of the villages and talk to the people. Not all of them speak English, but some did speak English quite well, and while I was there I was quite warmly welcomed by the locals. So much that while I was speaking to the members of one family outside their home, my presence attracted a swarm of other local, curious at one this unfamiliar Chinese girl was doing in their midst. After 5 minutes, I was practically surrounded by the locals, young and old alike, all watching me with curiosity while I continued to interview one of the local ladies. Of course, I just had to have some photos with the bunch of people.... And these don't even show all of them!

If you look closely, the second guy from the right on the pic above as a bloody red mouth. That isn't blood and he's not a vampire. It's actually due to a local habit of chewing something called bettlenut mixed with some other spices. The bettlenut itself is white, but red colour comes from the mixing with spices, and apparently it gives them a kick but causes mouth cancer and give them really bad teeth. Kinda like the local equivalent of smoking. All in all, it doesn't make them look very good.

After working for a good whole week, my colleagues and I got a day off to enjoy the place, and so we went off to another nearby resort to enjoy some really holidaying activities. I and the client's consultant went for the diving and snorkelling trip (actually I was the only snorkellor coz' I can't dive, and all the other 6 people on the boat were all divers. Makes me wanna do a diving course, like NOW), while my other two colleagues who can't swim (how sad) went for a village walk to meet some of the locals. Since I had already met some locals, I didn't see much point in going for that, especially since I heard the reefs in PNG are awesome. I did get some photos from my colleagues though, of them visiting a hot spring, and being slapped on with war paint from colours produced from a rock!

They also saw a lot of cute little piggies owned by the locals. Pig butts!

For me though, while on a while, the snorkelling itself turned out to be not really that great (the reefs we went to were pretty shallow and I saw mostly small fish, which I see a lot of in Malaysia as well. There weren't any really big animals at the reef, unlike in Malaysia where I can see moray eels, sting rays, and even huge monster like fishes hovering just a few meters below me). One of the interesting things I did see where apparently people with the ability to walk on water!

Ok lah, they weren't on the water's surface but halfway submerged in it, so it's pretty obvious they are standing on something. They're actually standing on the coral reefs, which as I mentioned are very shallow, and also very flat at the top so people could easily walk on it. All the corals have a steep edge, so basically the coral reef is shaped like a mountain with a shaved off top. The peopl are apparently gathering stuff from the corals, and in destroying them in the process. So sad, but hey they're the locals, so what can I say.

The thing that did make the snorkelling trip really all worth it (and most of my friends would have heard this from me already) was the rare chance to swim with dolphins! ~:O

Well, technically we weren't swimming with them. We were hanging onto the side of the boat watching the dolphins. The boat has something called a boon net, which people can hang onto at the side of the boat, and then with our snorkelling masks on, we can stick our heads underwater and watch the dolphins swim below us. So while the boat is moving, the dolphins will swim alongside the boat. That's me in the middle sticking my head above the water coz' water kept getting inside it, which was rather annoying.





I can safely say that this is probably the coolest thing I've ever done in my life! Sky diving in Australia comes a close second. The dolphins were so graceful and they were having so much fun jumping up and down in the water in front of us! And there were so many of them! There were 3 main groups, with probably at least 20 in each, based on what we saw breaking the water. Who knows how many more were underneath? I can't even describe it. It's just something you gotta experience for yourself, getting right in there next to dolphins in their natural habitat. AWESOME. Of course, suffering from a sunburn for a week or two after that wasn't so fun. I didn't know we could go snorkelling there, so I didn't being any sunblock. It was also kinda dark and cloudy that day, so I thought I wouldn't get sunburned. Turns out I was WRONG... but at least the burn wasn't too bad. Now I just have really weird looking tan line on me, which hopefully even out with the rest of my body in due time. Still, the dolphins made it all worth it. :)

So there you have it, my first experience in PNG, and it had its ups and downs, but nevertheless a fascinating place to be. Not a place I would wanna stay long term though, and even for holiday, it's so expensive that if accomodation weren't paid for by the client, it might make me bankcrupt. Still it's interesting to see the simple lifestyle of the people there, and to end it all of, here's a lovely serene pic, which I unfortunately can't take credit for coz' it was taken by my colleague... but it's a nice photo. :)

Trip to PNG

Tales of a snorkelling freak and her whacked out underwater photography methods...

I LOVE snorkelling. And I thank God that I am a good swimmer with a bit more confidence then I probably should have, because every time I go snorkelling, I hate wearing the life jacket... I feel so restrained in it and I don't need it coz' it's so easy to float in the ocean (sea water is very salty = good for floating. Basic science lesson #1). And being a snorkelling freak with a bit more confidence than I should have, if no one else is willing to head out to the water with me, I am prepared to go on my own. Even though it's dangerous... if anything were to happen to me out there and no one else is with me all sorts of things could happen. So I try not to be TOO far from people... but I go far enough that I still enjoy the freedom of being alone out in the big blue, admiring the beautiful corals below, with nothing on me but my swimsuit, snorkelling mask, and if I can get my feet in them, a pair of fins (these are much more useful than a life jacket, I say. Helps me to keep my head above water when I need to adjust my mask, and makes me go lots faster in the water). It's ranks up there as one of the most exhilarating experiences ever for me... feeling a mixture of awe at the beauty of creation, adventure at being out there alone, and fear of something popping out from behind a rock or coral and taking a snipe at one of my limbs... thankfully that's never happened before and sea animals in Malaysia, even the sharks, are generally quite friendly fellas.

And with that long-winded introduction, I now move on to the tale of my snorkelling trip at Redang. As is expected of a snorkelling freak, I went snorkelling every day that I was there, twice a day whenever I could... even right after we just arrived on the island. If you read my previous post, I had survived more than 30 hours without proper sleep coz' I was working whole day on Friday, drove overnight on Saturday morning and arrived on the island on Saturday afternoon. So the fact that I and the rest of my group still had energy to go out and snorkel or dive (most of my group are divers, but not me. Too expensive and snorkelling keeps me happy enough) was pretty dang good. Not much of a tale to tell though... the resort we stayed at organizes two boat trips out to different snorkelling sites each day... one to the famous Marine Park in the morning at 9.30am, and another one in the afternoon at around 3.00pm. When I didn't feel like following these trips, I would just snorkel at one of the beaches near the resort... which were quite nice as well.

In addition to being a snorkelling freak, I am also quite the avid photographer. But unfortunately when I bought my camera and I was trying to decide between a waterproof camera which looked pretty good and a non-waterproof camera which had a few more specs, I opted for the latter. And being underwater without being able to take photos kinda sucks. And I tried to buy a proper waterproof camera casing for my camera but couldn't find one. However me being the humbly ingenious person that I am, I came up with a fantastic idea to keep my camera safe from the water.... And it didn't cost me more than RM8.

Introducing... Carol's Waterproof Ziploc Bag Camera Protecter Contraption!

If you were drinking something, try to keep the liquid from squirting out your nose, ya.

So here's how it works:

Step 1: Buy some ziploc bags. They look like this. The ones I got were Glad bags with double zip mechanism, for extra protection. Extra protection is always good. Unless you want to have kids. ;-)

Step 2: Place camera in ziploc bag like so. And zip it up properly. Make sure you don't squeeze out all the air if your camera (like mine) has a protruding lens, or else it will be very difficult to come out later. Also don't leave in too much air, as the water pressure, even at slightly below surface depth, will cause the air to expand in the bag, and if there is too much, the bag might pop open and there goes goes your baby.

Step 3: Place camera in ziploc bag in ANOTHER ziploc bag. And zip er up! The second bag is for extra EXTRA protection, in case this bag leaks, the bag inside is still able to protect your camera. It makes the photos more blur, but it worked well for me coz' the outer bag did leak a couple of times, but my camera was still safe.

And technically now you are ready to roll and start snapping pics underwater! But the big problem here is, of course, holding onto this contraption while swimming. Not very convenient. And another problem for me was that I sometimes wanted to skinny dip, or dive underwater to get up close and personal to corals and try and catch some clownfish or something. And I couldn't push myself down with my camera contraption in hand, and didn't want to leave it bobbing on the water surface lest it might float away. Of course I came up with yet another solution... a plastic bag and a rafia string!

Step 4: Insert camera contraption into plastic bag like so. The arms of the plastic bag goes around your wrist, so you can swim more easily. Of course, the bag fills up with water and slows you down a bit, so what I did was cut small holes at the bottom of the bag, which allowed water to flow out and reduced the drag a wee bit. One arm of the plastic bag is tied to the rafia string, which leads me to....


Step 5: When needed, tie both arms of plastic bags together with rafia string. This only done in the water and is so when you go skinny dipping and leave your camera contraption floating at the surface, it doesn't come out of the bag. But be warned, only try this if you are a VERY good swimmer and can handle floating out in water while trying to tie a plastic bag up. Not easy, I tell you. Don't come crying to me if you drown while trying this.


Step 6: Tie other end of rafia string around your ankle, swimsuit or any preferred secure part of your body. This is of course to anchor the whole thing to you so it doesn't float away. The ankle makes it very difficult to swim though, I found, coz' the string tended to wrap around my legs, so eventually I tied it to my swimsuit and that worked fine.


And after all that trouble... here are my underwater photos!

This is the compulsory camwhore pic. And you thought camwhoring underwater couldn't be done. Heh.


Some fishy friends...


This is a rather large fish called a Triggerfish. It was lying on its side on the corals for some reason. I didn't complain coz' it made a great photo!


This one is a HUGE fish... though you can't tell from the pic. It was at least 6 m underwater from me and hiding under a big bunch of corals at Marine Park, watching all the crazy snorkellors above.

This is a moray eel sticking out from under a coral. It looked pretty mean. One of the local snorkeling guides was fooling round with by swimming right up to it and feeding it a feed from his hand!

Everyone's favourite clownfish! Made famous by the movie, Finding Nemo... and because of this even the guides call them 'Nemo', and I resist the urge to tell them "Nama bukan Nemo lah, mereka panggil 'clownfish' lah". Since they like to hang around anemones, trying to catch these will likely result in your hands getting stung by the anemones... which is what happened to me. Didn't hurt, but my thumb was a bit swollen and when I accidentally touched my lip, it got a bit reddish after that too. But they're so cute! Everytime they see people around, they come out and look at you and wriggle round a lot, as if trying to scare us away.


I caught this nice pic of an interesting rock structure just when a pretty parrotfish swam past. The parrotfish are all rainbow-coloured like fish. They look very pretty.


I saw big turtles and this is one of them! But it was swimming much too far down below me, so you can only see the silhoutte. Still pretty cool....


This is part of a very freaky looking shipwreck at Marine Park. First time I went there, I didn't dare go too close. All those images of scary shipwreck movies were playing in my mind. Second time I went though, there were people around, and so I was more daring and swam in. It was overgrown with corals, some very beautifully coloured ones too.


Here are some not-too-bad photos of corals I saw.






And last but not least, Christmas Tree worms! These little worms are in the shape of little Christmas Trees that stick on coral rocks... and come in all sorts of pretty colours! And when you touch them, they pop inside and look like a hole in the rock. Dunno why they do that, but it's cool. :)


Wish I could put more photos, but I think my blog would overload. :)

Next up... my interesting and slightly freaky experience with one of the local guides. Brrr...

Tales of a snorkelling freak and her whacked out underwater photography methods...

Road trip to Redang

I went on a lovely 5-day holiday at Redang Island with some colleagues during the Hari Raya holidays couple of weeks ago, and apart from the long 10 hour drive there (no thanks to the extremely bad traffic jam once we hit the highway to Kuantan, due to the Hari Raya 'balik kampung' rush) and a rather strange experience with one of the island's local guides, I had an absolutely fantastic time. The strange experience with the local guide is a whole blog post by itself, so I'll save that for later.

As mentioned above, getting to the island from KL itself wasn't much fun. My boss arranged for us to meet up early Saturday morning at 1.30am and we would drive overnight to the island from KL. He had invited some colleagues from overseas offices (Japan and Thailand) and some of them had just arrived from the airport. Unfortunately one of their flights was delayed, so we ended up meeting and leaving only around 2.30am in the morning. Mind you, I was working on Friday too, and being the gung ho person that I am, I went for cell group on Friday night as well, and attempted to sleep at my friend's house for a couple of hours before leaving to meet my colleagues for the long drive. 'Attempt' is the key word here... wasn't really all that successful since my buddies were all yakking away in the living room where I was trying to crash... not that I blame them since I wasn't supposed to be crashing there in the first place.

So I only sorta slept for about a couple of hours before I met up with the rest of my group in the wee hours of the morning, some of which I had never met before that day, and I ended up driving the car first with 3 German guys from my Japan office in the car, and my boss driving his car with 4 others in it. Everything was smooth sailing on the highway up until we hit Kuantan. Then began the massive crawl for at least a couple of hours... and it was so bad that when I had to stop for the loo at a petrol station, I found that the queue to the ladies room was so long (and only ONE freakin' toilet!), I decided to pass and hope the next one would be better. Well, the next one was only better in that there were more toilets so the equally long queue moved a bit faster, I think. Still had to line up for at least 15 to 20 minutes. Dang.

After driving for bout 4 hours at least and getting through the jam, one of the German guys, his name is Michael, took over. I was wondering of German driving licenses are valid in Malaysia... wasn't too sure so I just crossed my fingers and hoped the police were on Hari Raya holidays too. Thankfully, no cops were in sight, which is especially good coz' we were far behind me bosses' car and worried that we wouldn't make it on time for the ferry to the island, so the German guy really stepped on it. And I mean, he REALLY stepped on it! Like he was going at 170 km/hr at one point, averaging around 150 unless there was a slow poke driver going at the speed limit of 110 in front of him. So early on I very politely told him that the speed limit on the highway is 110. Michael kinda grunted some form of acknowledgement that he heard what I said and continued driving at 150 average. All this time my colleague in my boss's car was constantly calling or sms-ing me asking me how far behind we were and how fast we were driving. One of my smses to her went something like this "We going at 170 now, and I'm praying very hard that we do not fly off the road". By the way, we were driving a Proton Gen 2. A wonderful home made Malaysian car. Anyone ever see those videos where some dudes tested a Proton against other good car brands by smashing them against something, and the Proton always ends up the most smashed. Yeah, memories of those vids didn't really help me at the time.

Eventually I kinda relaxed and stop twiddling my thumbs in the back seat. And after a few more hours (the sun had come up by then) we had to go off the highway and onto the trunk roads, where Michael swapped places with another German guy, Markus, and he took us on the final leg of our long drive through the small town roads, and fortunately I printed out a map of how to get to the jetty (or else we would've been lost without the guidance of my boss!) so once we hit Kuala Terengganu, we were able to find our way to the jetty soon enough and were off on a boat to Redang Island, totally ready for a real holiday to shake off the ordeal of the insane traffic jam and long drive.

Hmm... I babbled on quite a bit about just the whole adventure of getting there (getting back was much less of an adventure. Another one of my colleagues drove and he was so gung ho, he drove 7-8 hours, with breaks in between, til we reached KL and fortunately there was no jam. This was during the daytime though, so not so bad lah). Me thinks I will save the rest of my Redang Adventure for the next post. There will be pictures! Of fishes! Underwater! And my camera isn't waterproof! OOoooOOoo....

Stay tuned....

Road trip to Redang

The Amazing Ipoh Trip - Part 3 (FOOD Glorious Food!)

Sorry for the delay on Part 3 of the amazing Ipoh trip. I just got back from an 8-day trip in Indonesia and Bangkok for work again, where as usual I suffer severe internet deprivation (I’m seriously wondering if I should invest in a Blackberry now…). Although I did get to spend the weekend in Bangkok and visit a couple of places, as well as come down with another bout of food poisoning where I threw up in somewhere in Chatuchak market. Hmmm, wonderful way to start a post about food, eh? But I’ll save that wonderful experience for another post.

So the one thing famous about Ipoh which every true blue Malaysian Chinese should know is the food. Not, to be discriminatory or anything, it’s just that the only thing my family ever does eat in Ipoh is the Chinese food and far as I know or care, there’s no other type of food in Ipoh. :P And the first place my parents also zeroes into once we reach Ipoh is this really old school place called Restaurant Tuck Kee, along Jalan Yau Tet Shin at New Town, Ipoh. Unfortunately if you were to ask me how to get there I wouldn't have a clue coz' my dad always does all the driving around in Ipoh and I just sit in the car, usually asleep or half asleep. So if you wanna try the place, have plenty of time on your hands and feeling adventurous, you could take a road trip and drive around Ipoh town til you find it. If it makes it easier, the restaurant looks like this:

However, be warned that there is another restaurant along the same road with the same name, apparently a spin-off of this one, but since it’s not the 'original shop', we never go there. Coz' you know... if it ain't original, it ain't good, or at least that's the general consensus. Just remember the original shop is on the left of the unoriginal shop, and you should be fine.

Once here, we only order the same dishes, which are Fried Kuey Teow, Fried Mee Hoon and ‘Wa Tan Hor’ (flat rice noodles in egg soup), and sometimes bean sprouts, but we skipped that this time round.

Hmmm… Just looking at the pics makes me start hankering for this stuff. And if you’re thinking it all looks really greasy and unhealthy, well, IT IS. It’s all fried in a very un-healthy and un-halal amount of pig’s lard to make it taste like no other fried noodles I’ve ever tasted. Yum! Plus the flat rice noodles (kuey teow) are really nice and smooth, which makes it better. Not something you eat on a regular basis unless you don’t mind looking like the State Puff Marshmallow Man. Nevertheless, taste-wise, I think no other fried noodles in KL, Malaysia or the whole world can compare to this. *Drool!* And of course, my whole family loves it, so much that my brother had to give his 'I'm-so-full-of-good-but-unhealthy-food' look.

Somehow or another that also looks like a 'I-really-need-to-use-the-bathroom' look. Ah well, he enjoyed the food, that's the main thing.

Another unavoidable stop on our ‘makan’ trip is Ipoh’s famous Chee Cheong Fun, which in English would be something like flat rice noodles topped with any kind of sauce, although common sauces used are chilli sauce, soy sauce, sweet sauce or mushroom sauce. Now there are several places in Ipoh that sell really good Chee Cheong Fun, one of which is from another old school shop, quite near to Restorant Tuck Kee, sold by this Chinese lady who recognizes my family even after all these years, coz’ we used to visit her stall often. Here she is, chopping up the Chee Cheong Fun, which initially is made as sheets of flat rice, to make the shape of flat noodles (any self-respecting Chinese would know this, of course, but just in case you’re not one. :) ).

My dad also took us to this other Chee Cheong Fun shop, which is actually the owner’s house, where her noodles sell so well, we has to take orders in advance and then the person ordering can only collect it 2 or 3 hours later. Just goes to show how crazy Ipoh people are about their Chee Cheong Fun! Unfortunately I didn’t get a pic of this other place, and even worse, I forgot to take a pic of the Chee Cheong Fun itself before wolfing it down. But Ipoh Chee Cheong Fun is so famous, that pretty much anywhere you find it, I’m sure it’ll be good.

The next place we visited this trip was one we don’t really consider compulsory but of course the food is still good – meatball and fishball noodles. We actually ate this right after we had our Chee Cheong Fun for breakfast (just so we could get a taste of everything!). So here’s the dingy looking shop where we ate:

Another important thing is Ipoh is... never doubt the dingy looking shops. They usually sell the best food. Perhaps not the cleanest, but the best. And here are the owners of the meatball noodle stall doing their thing.

We came a bit late, so the amount of meatballs and fishballs left wasn’t much, but thankfully there was still enough for us.

The meatballs and fishballs are all homemade, so they have a bit of a weird shape as opposed to processed ones, but of course they taste much better than processed ones.

Another place we went to, but again I committed the cardinal sin of forgetting to photograph the food, is this rather famous chicken rice shop called Lou Wong Beansprout and Chicken, which is also just down the street from Restaurant Tuck Kee (everything’s located so conveniently close to each other, you could have a whole day ‘makan trip’ right there in that small part of new Ipoh town. :) ). The shop not only serves chicken rice, but also pork balls, beansprouts and noodles (and God knows some other stuff we didn’t order). And as you would expect, everything there tastes awesome too. As with most chicken rice shops, you can choose between roasted chicken and white chicken… we went for the latter and the white chicken was juicy and tender. The pork balls came in a pretty generous helping, and since I’m totally in love with pork balls, I wasted no time in wolfing that down too. Man, I can’t believe I forgot to take photos!

So after enjoying enough of good Ipoh to last us… a while, my family decided on our last day there that we ought to give our tummies a break and eat something healthy for a change. So while hanging out at Jusco Ipoh, my dad bought some ‘jambu merah’ and ‘lo hong ka’ drinks. Unfortunately I don’t know what the English name for ‘jambu merah’, but the ones we bought tasted kinda like apples, but softer, and were juicy and sweet (even the fruits in Ipoh taste wonderful!)… and they looked like this.

‘Lo Hong Ka’ is a Chinese name for Aloe Vera drink (or at least, that’s my deduction coz’ that’s what it read on the bottle label). I don’t usually drink this kind of traditional stuff, but was pleasantly surprised to find the drink was naturally sweet and refreshing.

And with that, we ended our amazing Ipoh trip, enjoying some healthy food on the drive back home to Subang. I made myself go on a oil-free diet for a few days after that, but it was well worth it.
You 'Lo Hong Ka' makers owe me for free advertising!

The Amazing Ipoh Trip - Part 3 (FOOD Glorious Food!)