In the morning, Sarah and I checked out of our hotel (Olive Spring on Lebuh Chulia) and walked to the bus station to get a ride to Taiping. Lonely Planet made it sound nice enough and the friendly lady at the hotel said it was “nice”, so we decided to make a stop there on our way south. The bus ride was only a couple hours so we arrived in the early afternoon at the bus station just outside of town. We got ourselves a taxi and started for Taiping, but the car ran out of gas after about 500 meters just as the driver was pulling into the gas station! We waited for a few minutes while he refueled it and tried to start it again unsuccessfully before he went about hailing us another cab…

The next challenge was finding a hotel room. The first place we tried wanted RM55 for a double room and wasn’t willing to bargain. I walked around, checking hotel after hotel to find every one either utterly disgusting or fully booked. I finally went to the tourist info center and called around to nearly every hotel in town and came up with one place left to check: the Nanyang Hotel who wasn’t answering their phone. I went over there to check out the room and they had a double with A/C and a bathroom for RM35… not so bad looking at first glance… so we checked in. Upon further inspection, we learned that the sheets hadn’t been changed in at least 3 years (there was graffiti on mine dated 2003)…

Walking around town didn’t provide much excitement, either. It was starting to look all bad when we found a great restaurant - an all vegetarian japanese restaurant with excellent food. We ate too much and then went back to the hotel, shot some weird photos in the dingy room and then went to sleep (on our own blankets!). We agreed to leave for the Cameron Highlands the next morning…