GENTING HIGHLANDS
The routine for the rest of the tour was roughly
the same, head out between 8:00-8:30am after
breakfast in the hotel, get some kms under our
bums before a morning tea break. Then some
more kilometres, a lengthier stop for lunch and
then an afternoon run with another short snack
break somewhere in the mix. Our guides would
always pull us up between breaks if there was
something interesting on the route, which would
help us learn a bit more about their country or
would make a good photo opportunity. As a
daily routine, it was well planned and provided
an excellent balance between riding, sightseeing
and breaks.
Day 2 took us back north to the Genting
Highlands, a relatively short day of just 250km
in the saddle. Before hitting the open road,
Zahed and Feizal took us to the remains of the
Portugese fort overlooking both the city and the
Melaka Straits. Commanding a valuable strategic
position on ocean trade routes, the city had a
few interludes of colonial occupation with the
Chinese, Dutch, Portugese and English all having
38 KIWI RIDER
had their days in the sun. Melaka would be well
worth a longer stay but, this time around, the
focus was riding and not sightseeing, so we only
had a brief opportunity to take in the richness of
this history before mounting up again.
The roads north from Melaka were once again
very bike friendly and it was easy to settle into a
decent rhythm without any need to haul on the
brakes or throttle too much. These are the kind of
roads where a flat torque curve is a lot more use
than whole bunch of revs and horses you can’t
use. And this was the stretch where Zahed’s rear
facing GoPro got a lovely shot of me overtaking
a police car over double unbroken lines whilst
exceeding the speed limit. Well, he went first so I
figured it was OK and given that no blue lights or
chase scene ensued, I guess he was right.
Out on the open road, we did occasionally come
across roughly patched bits of road but they were
rarely more than 50 metres long and the patches
were more often than not a different colour to
the rest of the tarmac so avoiding them wasn’t
too hard.