Genting Highlands

Today we took a day trip to Genting Highlands. This is a huge resort built on top of a mountain, home to shopping complexes, the biggest hotel in the world, an indoor theme park and an outdoor theme park. It is also home to the only legal land-based casino in Malaysia, making it the "Las Vegas of Malaysia." Many of Malaysia's well-to-do middle aged people come to Genting quite frequently to gamble, because they have nothing better to do with their time and money.

To get to Genting, Eunice and I sat on the LRT for an hour, then on a bus for an hour, and then took a cable car up to the top. Eunice was terrified by the lift because she has heard horror stories of cable cars falling off. There are conspiracy theories that the Genting Group is so rich that it covered it up and didn't let the stories reach the papers. The cars seemed perfectly safe to me though.

Being on top of a mountain, it is very misty and cold in Genting Highlands. This lends an unreal quality to an already unreal place.

Eunice has been to Genting several times already, so I went to the outdoor theme park. The rides looked fun, but half of them were closed and the lines were long. The light rain was probably an issue with a lot of the rides, so they were closed for safety reasons. I only ended up going on three rides: a rollercoaster, "Dinosaur Island" (which had great ambiance thanks to the mist), and a train ride.

Eunice has a friend who works at a cell phone store in Genting, so he gave us a good deal on a new phone. I sold my old crappy Nokia phone and got a spiffy new one with MP3, video, camera, bluetooth, etc., for only about $130. I like my new gadget, it has a nice screen. I think I'll upgrade the memory card and make it my new MP3/video player.

After the theme park I met up with Eunice again, and she was much more cheerful than she's been the whole trip. She has been sick for the past 3 weeks, and still has a cough and headaches. I made her go to the doctor because she wasn't getting better. The medicine helped her cough but made her very sleepy and grumpy. Eunice doesn't trust "Western medicine" and hasn't taken it for many years, so I think there may have been a psychological component as well to her discomfort. Anyway, she stopped taking the medicine and has been much more cheerful. It was quite a relief to me to see her back to her usual cheerful self.

As a general rule I don't gamble, because I don't like losing. But we were at Genting and Eunice wanted to gamble, so I was convinced to use RM 50 (about $12) on a game of chance. In each turn, two dice are rolled. There are various bets you can place: whether the total roll is big or small (which is 50/50 and only pays 1:1), whether a specific number is rolled (which can pay up to 1:7), and whether various combinations will be rolled (which can pay pretty high). Eunice wanted me to pick, and I always have a conservative strategy mixed with a wild streak. So of course I lost all the money. :D Eunice felt bad so she treated me to dinner!