Grand Tour of Peninsular Malaysia–Part 2

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I shall be resuming my Grand Tour and embarking on the northern loop of Peninsular Malaysia.

If all goes according to plan I shall be quite busy. My first stop is  Kuala Kangsar, the Royal capital of Perak, then on to Taiping and the quiet hill station of Maxwell Hill.

Then it is Port Weld, a mangrove swamp, Bukit Mertajam and a beer in the Hong Kong bar in Penang.

In Kedah it is the Sungei Petani club, a beach, scale Kedah Peak, a waterfall, an archaeological site, a fort, a white elephant, another small mountain and a walking tour of Alor Setar.

In the micro-state of Perlis I plan to visit a minor peak, a national park, a snake and reptile farm, waterfalls, a herb garden, a cave, the Thai border, a couple of lakes and the towns of Kangar and Arau.

Then it will be a long drive over mountains, past lakes and through forests over to the east coast.

In Kelantan there are temples and a mountain on my to-do list before visiting half a dozen beaches.

In Terengganu I plan to drive down the coast stopping off at a dozen beaches (and maybe an island or two) and spending time in the state capital Kuala Terengganu.

Then it is Pahang for another 6 beaches before turning inland to visit a temple cave, a tin museum , sunrise on a hill top and drive back across the peninsula towards home.

I have booked a few crumby hotels, some of which claim to have Wi-Fi, so I shall post updates when I can.

The Grand Tour of Peninsular Malaysia

During March I am planning to go on what I am calling my Grand Tour of Peninsular Malaysia.

My small but esteemed group of regular subscribers might know that, in addition to this blog, I am also writing a website, Malaysia Traveller.com.

The website is a year old now and I am reasonably pleased with its progress. I have written 123 pages so far and during the past 3 months alone the website received nearly 53,000 unique visitors from 96 countries.  Since I started putting Google adverts on the website last July, there have been 2578 clicks on those adverts (I find that quite amazing as I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on any adverts on websites). In case you are curious or are thinking of quitting your day job in order to write websites, I can reveal that this translates into an income of USD410 since July.  Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick but really quite pathetic considering the amount of work that has gone into it. Fortunately I don’t regard it as work but in order to make a living from websites you would either have to find other ways of monetizing your site or write about something which is more popular than travelling in Malaysia.

Anyway to attract more hits to my website I need to broaden my horizons. Most of the 123 pages I have written so far have been on places which are within a day’s journey from Kuala Lumpur. To research places further afield requires an extended trip, hence the Grand Tour (and I only write about places I have personally visited, unlike many travel websites which just copy stuff from Wikipedia).

Starting tomorrow I am embarking on the southern loop of my Tour, concentrating mainly on the top attractions in Johor and southern Pahang. Then I will return home for a while before starting the northern loop covering Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan, Terengganu and northern Pahang.  I hope to post regular updates of my progress on this blog, though the cheap hotels I’ll be staying in may not have Wi-Fi.

This is the sort of trip where I should really take my family along but unfortunately it is school term time and, to be honest, my daughter would far sooner stay at home making videos and being creative on her laptop. Her Littlest Pet Shop YouTube channel by the way http://www.youtube.com/user/LOUISEtvLPS gets way more traffic than my website so I should probably spend my time monetizing her work instead!

Wish me luck!