The weekend trip to Pontian was short and sweet. My sister and I did not do much, which also meant that we did not eat much.
There’s not much formal travel information on Pontian (zero at the time of writing on Wikitravel) so we did a lot of Google searching about food and things to do.
Pontian Wanton Noodles
Pontian Wanton Noodles
Since Pontian Wanton Noodles is famous in Singapore, I decided that we must eat wanton noodles in Pontian.
Unlike its name suggest, the wanton noodles is not promiscuous or cruel. Instead, it is a noodle dish served with little dumplings (wanton) which are fried or boiled.
We headed to Kedai Mee Heng Heng, a 15-minute walk away from the hotel. I was so hungry that I brought us into the coffeeshop next door.
I was rather puzzled why there was no wanton noodle. We were told that the dish was served next door. We thanked the people and sheepishly left the place.
Our noodles came really really slowly. We found out later that serving food at a slow pace is typical of Pontian town.
We ordered the black sauce noodles (instead of the sweet red sauce–ketchup–which feels urgh). The noodles were alright and the wantons too but nothing to shout about.
Football Field Restaurant seafood
Football Field Restaurant seafood
Another highly-raved about place was the Football Field Restaurant which seemed like a long distance from our hotel on Google Maps. In reality, the route was quite quick.
We didn’t order crabs because they were priced at a crazy RM70 per kilo. I could have RM18/kg crabs in Sabah so I refused to order crabs.
We did have grilled flounder which was amazing, as usual. The chilli paste that came along didn’t spoil the sweet taste of its flesh. (I sound like a cannibal.)
yucky noodles
Mediocre noodle at mediocre Pontian noodle stall
We wanted to try food at the Market. However, we found outthat the market only opens in the evening and at nights. In the end, we headed to a row of shophouses and tried our luck at one of the coffeeshops.
We stood in the shop waiting for tables to clear. No one was leaving and food was served at the usual snail pace.
We switched to a roadside eatery instead. The food was very bland.
Tropical fruits
Tropical fruits: Mangosteen and guava
Not counting the fish, this was probably the highlight of Glutton in Pontian.
Our taxi driver stopped at a roadside fruitstall where we bought a bag of mangosteens and two humongous guavas. I finished my guava only on the second day, biting through it like a beaver with my front teeth.
As for the mangosteens, they were sweet and delicious. I had fun making a video about how to peel a mangosteen, check it out if you haven’t seen it.
I haven’t talked much about my trip to Kudat with mom (except about food) so I’ll start with the hotel we stayed at during our 1 night in Kudat.
While we were planning the trip, mom said we could stay at Kudat Golf & Marina Resort since we’ve not stayed there the last time we were in Kudat. (Summary of the trip 10+ years ago: The whole family was in the north of Sabah to catch the eclipse. We stayed at a hall of a Taoist Temple because all hotels were full.)
I made the booking online and picked the Standard Garden Terrace (Twin-Sharing) room which was RM180.00 nett
While driving, the hotel is not the easiest to find as the sign only pops up once in a while. Our car drove past the golf area on the windy road before we reached the main building.
Kudat Golf & Marina Resort facade
I didn’t have much expectations for the hotel, even though it has “Resort” in its name.
Sure enough, it was a small resort with only 3 stories (4 floors of room if you count the ground floor).
Other half wing of Kudat Golf & Marina Resort
Standard Garden Terrace (Twin-Sharing)
Twin room of Kudat Golf & Marina Resort
Our room was located on the ground floor. The glass doors opened to a small pavement and a shrub which covered some of the view of the golf fields.
It wasn’t the most fantastic view but we were either sleeping or watching TV anyway.
Of course, there was no bathtub. (I adore bathtubs even if it uses too much water.)
Unfortunately, there wasn’t Wi-Fi in the room. I had to bring my laptop out to the lobby so I could surf the Net. (Why are you online when you are on vacation?!)
View from the lobby
View from lobby, overlooking swimming pool at Kudat Golf & Marina ResortView from lobby at Kudat Golf & Marina Resort (again)Lobby and veranda of Kudat Golf & Marina Resort
Luckily, the view from the lobby was quite gorgeous.
I even woke up at 5.30 am, hoping I could catch the sunrise.
Unfortunately, a bunch of trees faraway blocked my view of the sun. It was too cloudy for sunrise anyway.
You probably cannot tell from my stomach that I like to eat because many kind Samaritans have offered me their seats on the train, thinking my food baby is a real foetus.
I digress.
D’Conutt
Our room came with free breakfast at the D’Conutt Coffee House at the other end of our corridor.
I have not figured why many Malaysian establishments LOVE to add a “de” or “d'” to their restaurants. Is it to give it a French flair? Why would they need a French sounding–but obviously not French because “d'” comes before a vowel–name?
Anyway, the breakfast was so-so local food although I quite enjoyed the drinks–orange syrup with water and coffee.
Not so yummy breakfast
In a nut shell
Kudat Golf & Marina Resort is a nice pretty place with what you need for more than minimum comfort. You will need a vehicle to get in and out as the public transport to town is not developed.
There are other hotels right inside Kudat town if you wish something more central. (Shops all close really early so it’s not really that convenient anyway.)
It’s Tuesday and almost mid-week. This week, I will be sharing a post each on Tuesday and Wednesday because they are hotel reviews. I feel it’s kind of cheating when I post hotel reviews so I line two at a go. Enjoy!
Today’s post is about a charming hotel in Pontian, Johor.
If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you might not know that my sister and I had to cancel our plans to Gunung Ledang two weekends before. We missed the train to Sematan Segamat and took a bus to the long distance bus terminal but managed to missed the bus by 2 minutes! (TWO MINUTES!)
It felt like something in the universe was telling us not to go to Gunung Ledang so I cancelled our room reservation with the resort. (Yes, I’m superstitious) We sat in the busy bus terminal with our backpacks and googled the places nearby.
In the end, we decided to go to Pontian because it’s relatively near Johor Bahru. Also because I’ve actually heard of the place. (It’s food famous!)
Since we did not do any research about Pontian, we had to frantically read up links from Google.
While searching for a place to stay, I discovered Pontian Garden Hotel on Google Maps. I fell in love immediately because it looked like it overlooks the sea.
Pontian Garden Hotel on Google Maps
Pontian Garden Hotel’s strategic location
When we reached the bus terminal, I was delighted to find out from my Google Map app that the hotel is walking distance.
There’s even a Marrybrown under the hotel. I love fried chicken. Too bad we didn’t have any fried chicken during the trip. (Such a tragedy.)
Pointian Garden Hotel
When we checked in, the concierge told us that they only had standard rooms which were RM 118 per night. Good enough!
There was also FREE WI-FI! Password: jiayuanpg1001
Our room was on the second floor and there was no elevator. Thank goodness we have very light backpack.
Pontian Garden Hotel Standard Room
The room was very comfortable as the air-conditioning worked very well.
Coffee & Tea set at Pontian Garden Hotel
I also like the coffee and tea set. Free coffee and tea!
Pontian Garden Hotel shower
The only problem with the room is the shower: The water sprayed almost everywhere. Eeek.
Best about Pontian Garden Hotel
Good points about the hotel include the helpful concierge. They helped us call up a taxi to bring us to Tanjung Piai to see the southern tip of the continent of Asia.
But, the best thing about the hotel is not the room, the people or the breakfast (I love food!).
It was the view of the breakfast place. Look!
View of the sea from terrace of Pontian Garden Hotel
Imagine having breakfast while looking at the deep blue sea. (OK, it was gray the day I was there.) The sea breeze is great in helping with invigorating the appetite!
In a nut shell
Pontian Garden Hotel is a fantastic place to stay if you are in Pontian. The price, view, room, people are all fantastic.
I celebrated my blog’s 1 year birthday early this month. In terms of travel blogging, I’m practically an infant. But I hope to be able to share some of my experience with you.
Today, I will tell you which are my Top 5 favorite free tools for travel blogging. The tools can be adapted to other types of blogging as well.
Since I’m too miserly to buy software for blogging, I choose to use free (not pirated) software for all my work on YQ Travelling.
I’m blogging on the WordPress.com platform so some of the tools might not work for you (eg #5).
Here are the Top 5 free digital tools I use:
Windows Live Writer
Dropbox
Picasa
Evernote
WordPress.com
(Extra) LibreOffice writer
No. 1: Windows Live Writer
Working on a draft of this post in Windows Live Writer
It’s funny how Windows Live Writer is on the top of the list when I’ve only began using it in December. Windows Live Writer is a desktop blogging software which allows you to easily post directly from your desktop to your blog (at least for my WordPress.com blog).
Previously, I drafted my blog posts in LibreOffice Writer (open source equivalent of Microsoft Office) and even add links using handcoded HTML. (My work requires me to add HTML by hand so I’ve very familiar with it.)
Windows Live Writer makes it easier to add text formatting, photos, links and a lot more right from the comforts of the desktop.
What I don’t like about the software is that the Insert Picture function shrinks the photo to a tiny size so I have to manually upload it on WordPress.
The second on my list is Dropbox. I usually blog on three computers: home PC, office laptop and a netbook when travelling. It’s hard to get everything synchronized without Dropbox.
I save only one copy of my file in Dropbox, but I can retrieve the most recently updated file through the system. Isn’t it like magic?
I’ve installed Dropbox on all three computers and my iPhone. I don’t use it just for travel blogging. I also upload my photos from my phone to it as backup but recently, I’ve began using Google+ as photo backup because of the almost unlimited space.
Photos are important as part of the narrative for travel blogging. (Although some take that to the extreme.)
I don’t have Photoshop as I don’t know how to use it (and too cheap to buy it). Instead, I have Picasa which I use to organize my photos as well as crop and resize for images I want to put on the site.
The best feature of this tool is the “Export”, which resizes photos to the pixel length you specify. I find that 1000 pixel makes a good image size.
My free WordPress.com account does not have unlimited storage for images so I am careful to resize photos before putting them up. Exporting the photos also cut down on the size.
By the way, Picasa is owned by Google so you can easily upload your photos to Google Drive from the software.
I use the software and its Chrome widget to “clip” interesting content on the Web. For example, when I was writing my first guest post about Kuching. I “clipped” a few relevant pages from the Internet for reference.
It’s also very useful for travel planning since you have all the pages gathered in an area.
I almost forgot about WordPress.com which is ironic because my blog would not exist without it.
The first post in this blog was written in Xanga because my friend was using it. The mass photo upload function knocked my socks off. Since then, I have cold feet for most activities.
Then I shifted the blog to Posterous because it’s a cute microblog site. Later I found out that the functionality is too limited so I ported it to WordPress.com.
Some people were telling me that I should have started the self-hosted version of WordPress instead. If you, like me, do not know what that means, you can just ignore that sentence.
Perhaps one day I might switch to WordPress.org, but that day is still not here yet.
Extra: LibreOffice Writer
LibreOffice Writer was in my original list of Top 5 but was kicked off the list when I discovered Windows Live Writer.
Instead of writing directly on my WordPress blog, I prefer having my draft on my computer because I can “Undo” more in here.
LibreOffice Writer looks a lot like Microsoft Word. It’s an open source word processing tool. You can write in it like Microsoft Word but you don’t need to pay Microsoft.
I started out using OpenOffice (LibreOffice’s past life) out of spite of Mircosoft. Then I got hooked to it. It feels a lot better than Word, although my boss would say that the Spellcheck is not working as well as Word.
I also use LibreOffice’s version of Excel for budgeting.
So, those are my favorite tools for travel blogging. What are your essential digital tools for travel blogging? Share it in the comments.
When I was in the first three years of university, I flew from Kota Kinabaluto Johor’s Senai Airport on AirAsia. From the airport, I usually take a private cab into Singapore for a princely sum.
Of course I had a choice of flying directly into Changi Airport but it was an expensive choice of SilkAir.
When AirAsia finally flew from KK to Singapore directly, I was ecstatic. I remember saying “goodbye” to Senai Airport, adding, “We’ll never see each other again.”
Unfortunately, I did see Senai again.
I took an AirAsia flight from JB back home to Sabah during the Christmas break. It was more than S$100 cheaper per trip compared with flying directly to or from Singapore. (RM284 [SG$115] vs ~S$250).
Compared to 4 years ago, AirAsia has made it convenient for passengers in Singapore to go to Senai. There’s a 2-hourly bus from JB’s CIQ to Senai. The bus journey is about 40 minutes and a pleasant ride.
AirAsia Sky Shuttle
When I was on the way to the airport, I asked the driver about the number of passengers who have taken the shuttle. He counted in his head and said, “13. And that’s a good number. It’s the weekend, you see.”
On the way to the airport, there were 3 passengers. On my way back to JB, there was only me. I have a feeling AirAsia might cancel the shuttle any time.
Since I had the chance to experience flying to Senai and to Changi, I will list down the pros and cons for you to decide.
Pros and cons of Senai and Changi
Cruel fate
Senai Airport
Pros:
Tickets are cheaper than flying directly into Singapore
Marry Brown fast food at airport
Less crowded at airport
Free transport to Senai and CIQ
Cons:
Extra travelling time to JB or Singapore (depending on traffic)
If you are still undecided, here are some factors to take into consideration when buying your JB/Singapore ticket:
Total price difference (Remember to count in transport fees from Senai into Singapore. It doesn’t make sense if your transport fees are similar to airtickets savings.)
Time to travel to airport (You will probably be travelling for an extra 2+ hours depending on your SIngapore location.)
Wait for SkyShuttle bus (Buses come 2-hourly)
Getting to location in Singapore (Do you have too much luggage? Do you really want to drag them from Malaysia to Singapore?)
Have you flown from JB airport instead of Singapore? How was your experience?
For my regular readers who do not know about Juno, you should check out Runaway Juno blog now! (OK, maybe after reading the rest this posts.)
A few of my favorite Runaway Juno posts are the one where she talked about how she took a giant leap and also discussed things that I would (cowardly) rather sweep under the rug.
I like Arab Street for its food and the pretty Sultan Mosque.
But whenever I am in the area, the sun is shining too brightly and I feel dehydrated from walking around. There is just too much noise and people–the tourists with their gigantic cameras, cars waiting for the green light and shops laying out their wares on the sidewalk.
It’s sometimes a little too much to handle.
One day, I had the chance to visit Arab Street early in the morning around 7am. It was a different Arab Street without the people and the cars.
It was a little surreal but I liked it. The sun wasn’t out yet and the people were still away.
Multi flag deco at Arab StreetEmpty North Bridge Road in the morningDeserted pedestrian street in Arab StreetSultan Mosque, Arab StreetAlley of Arab StreetAlley 2 of Arab StreetTeh tarik, Arab StreetOld facade
My favorite place for afternoon tea in Singapore is Fosters, an English Rose Café at Holland Village.
Tea set for two
Even though the scones are the leading characters in the set, the Devonshire cream steals the limelight EVERY SINGLE TIME! The rest of the spread is so so.
The white cream comes in a small tub, the top in a cute swirl. It doesn’t taste of cream but of coconut. Can you imagine? Coconut bread spread that doesn’t taste like fake coconut.
Choice of coffee or tea
My history with Fosters
Setting of Fosters, an English Rose Café. Menu opens like a paper
When I was in university, one of the bus I take always passed the restaurant. It looked posh. With my university allowance, I didn’t think that I could afford going there.
So, one of the first things I did when I got my first pay was to visit the restaurant.
I was curious about its Devonshire Cream Tea Set. Back then, the set had two scones, four finger sandwiches (2 cucumer–eek–and 2 ham), 2 fruit cakes.
Today, there is only 2 sandwiches and 1 dried store-bought fruitcake. At least, the one coffee or tea remains the same. The breadspread is the same: strawberry jam, butter and Devonshire cream.
It’s only available from 3 to 6pm which is a tricky timing since lunchtime passed not so long ago.
The restaurant is decorated quaintly and makes a good place to chat with friends. If there’s only two of you, you can sit at the two sofas near the door where a suit of armor guards. Yoko-chi is hungry!
Hello! It’s Jan. 8 and a special day here at YQtravelling. It’s the blog’s one-year birthday!
This marks one year since I’ve moved the blog from Posterous to WordPress.com. It will actually take me another 3 months to get serious about blogging but let’s just ignore that.
Thanks for following the blog throughout the year. If you’ve only joined in recently, welcome!
So what has happened during the year? A lot. :) I visit more places than I ever did in the past years. I’ve written about more places than I have in my life time.
Let’s checkout what were the top 5 posts during the year:
One of the posts which I share the most. Since the post was first published, AirAsia changed its booking system. I updated the page and put the older version in a separate post for those who are nostalgic about the old system.
I was surprised to find out that a post in September had managed to shoot up so high into the ranking. It turns out that many people are interested in the mysterious Kabuki-cho, or maybe the “red light district”.
I think the visitors who came from Google were disappointed to find out that I did not include recommendations of host or hostess clubs. The raciest photo I have is a faraway shot of Doraemon characters in a PG-13 pose.
Taking the overnight train is one way to save on accommodation when travelling. I like the sleepers on our Malaysian train. The booking system is not as straightforward as I like but it works.
At AirAsia’s blog, I share how my day in Osaka went. This was the guest post which I gained the most traffic from. I really need to start writing more there.
Things to come
So, what will happen to YQtravelling in the new year? A lot. :)
I can’t share too much at this period but the blog will follow me while I travel.
Once again, thank you for joining me on my travels.
Tell me what you would like to read more on the blog: tales, tips, blogging, food? Drop your thoughts in the comment.
I’m breaking my usual posting schedule to bring you a deal.
I found out about a Tune Hotel Ipoh promo. It’s a collaboration between Tune Hotel and the Malaysian railways to encourage people to take the ETS from KL to Ipoh. Even if you are not taking the train, it applies to you too!
Room rates are RM68 nett from Sunday to Thursday RM100 nett for Friday and Saturday.
Rates include 1 unit Cozy Package (24 hours air conditioning, 1 towel and toiletry set, 24 hours TV and WiFi.
Use promotion code KTMIPOH
Other terms and condition
Stay period: 2 Jan to 31 Mar 2013
Rates valid for 1 double room or 1 twin room (subject to availability) per night
Black-out dates for stays: 1 Jan, 24-27 Jan, 10-14 Feb
Promo only for Tune Hotel Ipoh
(I’ll bring the flyer to a scanner soon so you can read all the nitty gritty fine print.)
My thoughts on Tune Hotel Ipoh promo
I’ve stayed at Tune Hotel Ipoh before and liked it a lot. My promotion then was a lot cheaper than what they have now: RM61.14 for room, 12-hour air conditioning, rental towel and “free essentials toiletries kit”.
But the deal’s quite good for weekenders. I just did a fake booking and the fees turned out to be RM142 for all the benefits they are including.
The hotel is a little walk from the old town area where food is congregated. Exercising is good, my friends.
I also love Ipoh for its food and sights (they have a damn castle!). It’s a great weekend trip if you are in Peninsula Malaysia or Singapore.
YQtravelling 
