A Unique Trip

by Nickelby Thane

Nickelby Thane Bio: Nickelby Thane is a Cisco Ninja in the making who is studying hard to earn his CCIE in R&S. He is enjoying trips around the world and in Malaysia with either his wife, family members or friends. Apart from that, he is just practicing his art of sleeping in 11 positions although 10 seem to be the max for him. He is usually found sleeping with his laptop switched and have both the SecureCRT and Wireshark programs shown on his desktop.

It’s often that one gets to go on a trip to a place whereby the main focus of that trip is to enjoy sampling the food of that place or see the beautiful girls on the beaches running in skimpy outfits. My article for the CCIE Flyer July edition covers an entirely different trip. A holy one if I say so myself. This is a purely non-technical, non-CCIE article so for those who expected me to finally come up with technical writings, I will have to disappoint you ;-). I suck in those, you can ask my wife! :-D.

Late last month, my ‘boss’ was in town and that ‘boss’ of mine was no other than my sweet mum. She was paying me a visit keen to know whether I have been studying as what I have always told her on the phone or just fooling around with no directions in my life. Fortunately for her (and for my wife!), I am still deeply committed into my studies (yes I will DEFINITELY hit the CCIE written at least this year :-)). Now apart from that, my mum had another major objective during her visit this time and that objective is to visit the Buddhist statues located in one of the states in Malaysia, Kelantan.

Kelantan is one of the few states that are currently administered by the opposition government and is also one of the few states in Malaysia to have a mix of modern law and Islamic law during administration of the state. For example, in supermarkets in Kelantan, you will notice that there is a separate queue for the male and another separate queue for the females. This is just one of the many examples where you will see that there is a visible line between the males and females. To some, this place is quite backwards but that’s just the culture here which makes it a unique place to visit.

Now the Buddhist statues that my mum intended to pay her respects to lies in the town called Tumpat. A small town which you can basically cover in a day, Tumpat houses the biggest ‘Sitting Buddha’ statue in the South East Asia region. It also houses the famous ‘Sleeping Buddha’, ‘Standing Buddha’, etc. Now believe it or not, not only Tumpat houses these significant and remarkable statues, Tumpat also has offer one the best traditional Malaysian food called ‘nasi kerabu’ or kerabu rice’. The best ‘nasi kerabu’ can be found near the ‘Sitting Buddha’. In fact, both the statue and the stall that sells the best ‘nasi kerabu’ are in the same area (30 seconds walk between them).

I have included some pictures here so that you guys/girls will have a picture of what I have said :-).

A picture of my mum with the ‘Sleeping Buddha’ statue which is the largest ‘sleeping’ form of Buddha in South East Asia. Entrance is free but the environment is quite poorly maintained whereby bird droppings can be seen on the floors. So if you visit here, please make sure to see where you are walking.

Yours truly with the ‘Laughing Buddha’ although this particular statue does not seem to reflect him laughing. I have a lot of people saying that I reassemble the laughing Buddha due to my stomach being as big as his. Guess I should take that as a compliment :-)

The ‘Sitting Buddha’ also the largest Buddha in the form of ‘sitting’ in South East Asia. This picture was taken on a sunny day hence it was quite difficult to get the right exposure and lighting for this picture. By the way, all the pictures here are shot using the Sony SR-11E camcorder and has been resized using Microsoft’s Image Resizer.

The ‘Standing Buddha’. My mum is around 170cm so that should give you a rough idea on how tall the statue is :-).

This is the oldest Buddhist statue in Tumpat. It was constructed more than 20 years ago. This particular statue is named Kuan Ying which means Goddess of Mercy. Pretty tall too … just look at how ‘short’ my mum and my wife are :-).

We left Tumpat after covering these places in a span of 4 hours. Overall, we were in Kelantan for 1 ½ day. Being someone who occasionally exercises, generally I was tired but overall I was very happy because I managed to achieve one of my mum’s longest dreams which is to visit these statues. Of course she has other dreams which I hope to help her achieve in the near future.

Thanks for reading this far. I hope you guys/girls enjoyed my article this time around. Let me know via e-mail if you dislike such articles and the reason behind it. If you have any constructive suggestions/criticism, please do not hesitate to e-mail me at ‘nickelby at hotmail dot com’ or you can add me via Skype at ‘nthane’ (please give a brief intro of yourself). You can also add me on Twitter (search for Nickelby).

Till we meet again in the August edition of the CCIE Flyer which I plan to incorporate it with something science-fiction! Ok … back to studying!

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