Colmar Tropicale

Now that 90% of Malaysian adults have been vaccinated, the country has reopened interstate travel.  This week is also the girls' October break, so we felt like we really had to leave the state and try something new.  One of the places I had read about was an area called Berjaya Hills that has a resort called Colmar Tropicale modeled after the French town of Colmar.  It sounded fun, the pictures looked great, and it's less than an hour outside of KL, so I made us a reservation for one night, and we set off in the morning to have a full day.  The website lists several restaurants and various activities, so I figured there would be plenty to do.

The drive went smoothly, although we learned that Carla doesn't like hills, so we had to really push it on some parts, but we made it.  It was a lot of fun to see the castle and village rise out of the forest.  We eventually climbed the tower and took a picture looking out the other way, but this is what the "town" looks like from afar.

The upper parts of the buildings are all hotel rooms, and the lower parts are shops and restaurants.  We got there around 11, and since the underground parking area had an elevator that led directly to the hotel lobby, we figured we would go and see if, by any chance, our room was ready.  The lobby was quite something.  There was leather-like furniture, including two massage chairs with slots to put money in, and then there were suits of armor around.  Out the yellow trimmed windows, we saw the cobblestone square and the first of several brightly painted horse statues.

It turned out that our room was ready, which was a pleasant surprise, so we took our things up.  Unfortunately though, the room was a disappointment.  It was large, with two distinct bedrooms and a bathroom, but everything was dark, old, and worn down, and the bathroom was just dirty.  The tub and the sink had stains, and bathroom floor had hair and trash on it.  Jeff even found a hair in the provided water glass.  The armor in the lobby was a sign.  There was a good idea here, but it just wasn't executed quite right.  The other issue was that most of the things to do around the hotel weren't open.  The area is supposed to have a ropes course, a flying fox, paintball, and all kinds of other activities, but when I checked in, the lady in the lobby told me that none of those were open for the foreseeable future.  It also seemed like most of the restaurants had altered hours.

We decided to just drop our things in the room and focus on exploring the things that were open.  We had noticed that one of the buildings housed a Krispy Kreme, and so the girls were eager to go back outside.

They sat on the fountain in the "square" to enjoy their treat.

Optimistically, I went to check out the "Boulangerie".  The outside looked promising.

But the inside did not.  There was hardly any food, and definitely no baguettes or croissants.

It should have been a tip off that a bit further down there was a Starbucks with a line, but I couldn't bring myself to go there.  Instead, we decided to walk around and explore.  We had fun taking pictures of the pseudo-Frenchness.

Eventually, we made our way around to the bridge at the front.

There was a "moat" under the bridge with some birds and fish, so we went down to check it out.

From there, we got a good view up at the clock tower entrance.  It was impossible to get a clear picture across the bridge to the clock tower, because it was Instagram central up there.

As we were coming back up through the clock tower gate, there was a station with lots of birds where you could get professional photos taken.  Elena, being an animal person, admired all the birds, but we didn't want to do the staged photos.  One of the people kindly let Elena hold one of the birds.  I took this picture, before he very apologetically told me, no pictures, because the idea was we had to buy the package.  I thanked him, and I'm glad that Elena got a chance to feel what it was like to have a bird on her hand.  She liked it, but she said it hurt a little too.  Hopefully, that will be all the bird holding experience she needs while we're here.

Elena was already starting to fray a little at the edges.  We had found out the day before that she would be going back to in person school on November 1st, and she had been so excited that she couldn't fall asleep, and then she was up at 5:30 that morning, because she was excited about our trip.  The "I'm tired" whining was getting into full swing when we walked by this bizarre ride.  It was $1.50 for a few minutes of going in circles, but she really wanted to try it, and I really didn't want a full blown meltdown, so I said okay.  Jeff and Viv kept walking around, and I stayed with Elena while she had the ride all to herself.

The ride was playing a high pitched version of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat", which was creepy enough, but then Elena decided to see what the button did.  It made all kinds of firing noises: machine gun, laser, bomb.  It was a profoundly disturbing ride, but she seemed happy, so I counted it as a win.

When we were done with the ride, we spotted Jeff and Vivi at the top of the tower at the other end of the square.

The ride seemed to have revitalized Elena, who quickly climbed the steps to join them.  I followed behind her a bit less enthusiastically.  The view from the top was worth it though.  You could see the surrounding hills on one side,

and the entire "town square" on the other.

We were perplexed by the nets, since there were big gaps, so they couldn't be to keep anything out or in.  Jeff finally realized that they were most likely there to catch falling tiles, which, given the state of the place, made sense.

There were two restaurants on the square, one Italian, and one that seemed to be Malaysian/French.  The second one didn't look open at all, but the Italian one looked like they were setting up for lunch.

It was about 12:10 when we walked up and asked to be seated.  The hostess politely told us that they don't open until 12.  We pointed out the time, and she said, oh, 12:30, so we shrugged and went to see if there were any other parts we hadn't explored yet.  We walked across the bridge and found a nice water feature.

There was a circle at the end of the walkway, and across from that was a castle of some kind.  We went to take a peak.

There was a nice covered entrance area, but the doors were locked.

We pushed up against the windows and saw an ornate event space.  Whoever designed this place really had a thing for French opulence.

This is the best picture we could get with the clock tower and without other people.

By that point, it was 12:25, so we found a seat with a view to hang out at for the next few minutes.

Finally, it was lunch time, so we headed back to the restaurant.  When we got there, the lady said she could seat us, and we could order drinks, but there wasn't any food yet.  Elena was now tired and hungry, and the warning bells were sounding, so we got her settled and presented her iPad.  Then, we tried to order her a mango juice, which was on the menu.  Turns out, no juice and only some of the sodas.  There was a big sign that said no outside food, but we asked our waitress if we could just walk over to 7-11 and buy Elena a mango juice, and she said sure, so Jeff went and got her one.

After about 10 minutes, the waitress came back with the other drinks we ordered and told us we could order pizza but not pasta.  We shrugged and said okay.  Then Jeff asked about wings.  The waitress said no, but then another employee walked by and said yes, they had wings, so Jeff ordered those and we got a couple pizzas.

Despite the slightly chaotic process, the food met with everyone's approval.  Once we had eaten our fill, we had a family conversation about what we wanted to do about our stay.  There was only one other thing open in the area that we wanted to see, the only other restaurant wasn't going to open until 7pm (which we estimated meant no dinner before at least 8), and the room was not appealing.  We came to the unanimous decision, that we should go see the Japanese garden, and then go home for the night rather than staying at the hotel.

After lunch, we went and got our things from the room, returned the key, and got in the car.  Then we drove what we thought would be the short distance to the Japanese garden.  It wasn't a long drive, but it was practically vertical, and Carla barely made it.  We found a parking spot, but then realized we weren't done yet.  There were many more stairs and a hill to climb.

Finally we made it to a scenic garden spot.  We took a couple pictures, but by then we were all DONE, not just Elena.

We started the walk back down, and it's a good thing we gave up when we did, because it started raining.  We made it back to the car before it got too bad.  We decided that it was a sign that we had made the right decision and headed home.  The drive home was smooth, and when we got there, the first thing Elena did was collapse on the couch.  She slept really well that night.

While it was a bit of a disappointing vacation attempt, we did enjoy taking pictures and having lunch, so we decided that we were glad we went, but we were also glad that we came home.