We were picked up from our hotel at 10am by John from Ipoh Secrets and he drove us 1.5hrs south to the Bukit Merah Orang Utan Sanctuary. It was small but interesting. They have 16 orang utans at the moment and 2 are babies. They have bred 13 since the sanctuary started.
We then drove to Taiping which is the old capital of Malaysia. It was very old and dilapidated and poor. It would certainly be a good place for a ghost tour! We had lunch in a local food court, some of the food was good, some of it not so good 😉 After that we went to the botanic gardens and museum which we didn't really enjoy because it is hard for us to absorb history that goes so far back, and it was incredibly hot in there! We then went to an old coffee factory and tasted the local coffees, most of which were pretty sweet, and then we went to the josstick factory which is where they make these massive decorative incense sticks for festivals which was pretty cool, and then to the charcoal factory where they ship in mangrove wood on little old boats and make charcoal in these huge igloo looking things, that was pretty interesting too. By late afternoon we visited the fisherman's village which was really interesting but so dirty and poor. Its hard to believe how hard these people work for such little money and state of living. There was rubbish everywhere and even their toilet houses empty into the water. After that we had dinner at a local seafood restaurant and were pleased to find the food very tasty 😉 We had a feast of seafood and beer for $50 AUD. Even the kids ate little fried crabs!
We were supposed to do a firefly cruise but the weather turned bad so we drove 1.5hrs to our hotel in Ipoh, The Haven Resort and arrived at 9.30pm.
