Yuni Travel Blog – 7
The sail to Terengganu Marina started with some rocky sea for the first 2 and half hours. Lucky I did not have breakfast, so I got through it rather calmly. After that, the waves settled down and the ride became smooth. Of cause, 3 whole weeks of no breakdown on a boat would have been too good to be true…the starboard side engine over heated soon after we left the bay and caused quite a stir with alarms and hot steam shooting out of the hatch. Good thing was we have a 2nd engine, so we could continue with 4.5/5 knots which was not too bad. The berthing in Terengganu went super well. After the last few months of fixing the boat, Felix’s confidence was on the rise. While I spent the next 2 days with the boys on school stuff, Felix took the engine apart testing this and that (with the regular phone calls to the engineer of course) until he finally found the culprit. 5 whole hours and hurray, he fixed the engine all by himself! Well done.
This was to be the Malaysian National Day weekend. For a normally quiet town, it was cool to see a busy marina with all sorts of children sailing boats, optimists and ethnic barges of celebration. On the beach they played loud music while we had our own festive dinners with a couple of neighbouring boats. By the way, what is “fighting like cats and dogs”? We were totally amazed to see the cat and the dog on board of 2 different boats getting along wonderfully with each other.
Friday morning, we got up nice and early and drove to the airport. Felix needs to fly to Beijing with the Swiss government delegation for an economic forum. The boys and I headed to Kuala Lumpur for the week…a nice interlude from the sailing. I took the opportunity to get hold of Martin’s favourite tennis coach Chin Bee (a former Malaysian tennis champion) and organised 7 days of tennis training every day for the both of us. It felt a bit strange to wear sport shoes and hold a racquet again after 2 months at sea. She is a great coach and we had so much fun practising and chatting. Martin finally converted his double backhand to a beautiful single backhand as he wished. Helped also by his recent spur on height, he really is turning into a wonderful casual tennis player. I can only be envious of his energy level and the ease of learning. How nice it is to be young!
Since we are playing tennis everyday with soaking sweat, we gave in without guilt to sin on way too much food!!! The Renaissance KL is newly renovated and has nice restaurants and a new Executive Lounge. We stuffed ourselves everyday with a full breakfast…so full that none of us would be hungry by lunch. Still, at 2.30pm we all willingly went back to the lounge where they serve such nice mini sandwiches, croissant and fresh scones (with cream and jam, yum)! Ah well, why fight against it when the whole point of this 6 months sabbatical is all about enjoying life! However, I did find myself rather resigned from shopping which is rather unusual for me. Maybe the lack of need for cloth on the boat really sank in my head. I had hardly any interest to walk into the shops despite I am right in the middle of KL’s large and modern shopping centres. Instead, I opted for facials, hair treatment and massages.
Can you believe 2 of 6 months of our family sailing trip is already gone??? Time passes so fast. We are living the dream and we try hard to seize the moment. Tomorrow morning, we all fly out back to boat again. Then we will have some long passages of sailing to Kuantan, Tioman and then Singapore, our next leisure destination before going to the west coast of Malaysia. We are all really looking forward to catching up with good friends in Singapore and the visit of my sister and the 2 nieces from Australia.
Sign off 10th September
Yuni..... 