Kaeru's Online Journal

Bagan Lalang, is a small public beach about an hours drive from Kuala Lumpur. It's very easy to get there as it's on the same highway to get to KLIA and LCCT. You basically take the turnoff to the Sepang F1 and LCCT from the KLIA highway and then take the road to Kuarters KLIA. From the roundabout, keep going straight. After that just follow the signs to get to Hotel Sri Malaysia, Sepang and Sungei Pelek. You'll end up at the beach.

The beach is rather clean with white sands, though the water is muddy as a lot of the west coast of Malaysia consists of mudflats, and there are mangroves and a river nearby. So expect to dig up little crabs and clams when building your sand castles. At high tide, it doesn't get deep and is relatively calm so kids can play close to the shore.

There are shady trees all along the beach, so you can lay picnic mats and such and stay in the cool of the shade.

Along the narrow beach road, there are stalls that sell the usual snacks, toys and floats and t-shirts. If you're not into swimming, you may want try kite flying and all sorts of kites are available at reasonable prices.

Unfortunately there are no good public facilities, especially toilets, showers and changing facilities. There is only one small shack where you have to pay about 0.80sen for a shower with very low water pressure and only two shower stalls. It's not very clean. Simple public showers by the beach with changing rooms would have been much better.

Food, there are a few seafood restaurants. Unfortunately these seem to be poorly managed. There didn't seem to be enough places for the amount of people on the weekend, and the restaurants seem ill equipped to handle the weekend crowd. Since there are no table numbers, menus and apparently staff, you're going to have to chase people around and check whether what you've ordered is really coming and figure out the system. We had to wait over an hour for our food and drinks.

Overall this place has much promise, since it's very accessible now due to the KLIA airport. It's a shame though that there isn't better support from the local government. If the restaurant owners got some assistance in basic F&B management they could be doing much better. Similarly improving the public facilities, including the water-front shops would do wonders in getting more people to come back and improving business opportunities for the local folk. This is where the BN government has really failed in terms of "development". While a few folks probably got millions, from the highway development, the lives of the local folk could do so much better with a little bit of assistance and guidance.

For now unfortunately it's not worth a return trip. Without good facilities, it's hard to come with kids, and if it's faster to drive home to eat, might as well eat at a good restaurant in the city. Hopefully things could be improved to warrant a return trip in future. Lumut Jetty is a very good example of how things can be improved with a little bit of government support.

So there's an official blog now at Inigo for sharing information with others interested in experiences of bootstrapping and running a FOSS small business in Malaysia.

• Booting up on where we've been since FOSS.my and some of our upstream and community contributions.
• GnuCash: Salary, EPF and SOCSO - on setting up GNUCash accounts for Malaysian type payroll with EPF and SOCSO contributions.

Still on the lookout for a comfortable family weekend getaway around Malaysia within 2hrs drive. Previously we tried Thistle which according to Internet ratings, has quickly risen to be the No.1 resort in Port Dickson. At around RM500/night net, it's also rather on the expensive side for regular weekend trips.

This time, we gave Avilion Admiral Cove a try. It's quite new, and much cheaper than it's sister resort Avilion, Port Dickson. Net rates for weekends is only RM250 net (cheaper with promotions) and around RM280 for seaside view.

Rooms

The cheapest superior rooms are very spacious, new and clean. The only negative for some, is that the bathrooms do not have baths, just shower. More than enough space for a family of 4 with two small children. Also a nice sofa as in Thistle for you to lie down and read a book or afternoon nap. Even with the rooms without a view of the sea, you can still see it from your balcony. It's only a little bit more (RM20) for a better view, so I would recommend this upgrade. For a business trip or conference though, it would be even better. One of the few hotels, in which the desk actually is a proper working space with proper adjustable chair. It also has free unlimited Internet, which I didn't try out (hey.. it's a weekend getaway). It passed my moldy dust allergy test and I had a good nights sleep. TV with usual limited selection of Astro channels and all important Disney channel. Unlike other hotels, each room has it's own air-conditioner. Not sure how efficient this is, but it does allow you to control the temperature or even turn it off unlike most hotels in Malaysia which are freezing cold

The other room facilities are all there, electric kettle, fridge, hair dryer etc. The things missing that matter to me, was a lack of indoor slippers (apparently available upon request) and some sort of mechanism for hanging wet swimmers.

Facilities

I didn't get to try out all the facilities, there is gym, tennis and pool. Pool is the important one for the kids. It's not a huge pool, but it has two kid pools and the main pool isn't too deep. It also wasn't very crowded at all, so it seems the others were interested in doing other things, which is good for us. It would be good to have a water slide, but it was fun enough just to be in the pool for my daughter.

Beach is much better than Thistle. It's a 5 minute walk to a private beach, and it looks to be the same stretch of the main beach of Port Dickson. Clean with fine sand to make sand castles and such.

It's a marina too, so there are charter boats for fishing and cruises, if you don't have your luxury yacht berthed there.

Breakfast buffet is included. For the price, it was as expected and there is enough variety of local and continental dishes.