Malaysia - Formula One Bed and Breakfast

Explaining to Joslyn why Australian Quarantine has to be so 

strict on the bikes being clean before being allowed into Oz

Arriving late in the evening at a bed and breakfast which is situated close to the airport, close to the Sepang circuit and offers the best rates around, without booking ahead is not a smart thing to do. We aren't smart, so the above is exactly what we did. Josylan was very apologetic when he said he was fully booked. But instead of just leaving it at that, as quite a few others would have done, he offered to find us something else. While his help was very much appreciated, we just wanted to sleep and asked if we could put the tent up just for one night. A little reluctantly he agreed, but then his dad offered us his bed... saying he would sleep on the couch. For me this was a bit deja-vu... it turned out be just that!

More than 2 years ago we had arrived on a campground in La Paz, Baja, Mexico without any money and two blocked bank cards. My then wife had her card swallowed by the ATM machine and the bank in Australia had subsequently not blocked her but my card... Yet they let us in and they proved to be the most helpful people ever (and a very good campground for tents too!). Forward the clock a bit, again a campground in Mexico but much further south on the mainland, where we were told that yes they had a spot but weren't really setup for tents... again it proved to be a very good campground (by far the best we had in Mexico in fact). And now we found ourselves in Malaysia looking at two people who came originally from Tamil Nadu India and not only looked very friendly but offering us their own beds....!

We couldn't believe how well the bikes rubbed up after having been sandblasted for 120,000km all over the world. We usually don't care about shiny and clean, as we rather use them, but Australian Quarantine required them to be spotless!

Josylan's dad, a self employed taxi driver and a very nice man

Obviously we didn't want his dad sleeping on the couch and thus suggested to put up the tent for the night, if that would be ok. It was but I could see they weren't really happy with the situation. Dad and Josylan had a short discussion in Tamil (as that is where they've come from originally) upon which Josylan said he did have one room but we would have to use the downstairs toilet... we were that tired and so happy that we didn't have to ride anymore that we would have accepted anything. Having said that, the room was fine and so was the downstairs bathroom. The room we were offered had a shared bathroom, but the other room had 3 young girls in it. Apparently Josylan wasn't comfortable with us sharing a bathroom with 3 girls :-) or so we thought. As we found out later it was much more than that!

Last night at the Formula One, the bikes used to stand here but

are already in the air to Australia... weird being without them!

The bikes were parked double secure as the bed and breakfast is inside a gated community and has it's own secure fence as well. Breakfast is fully self service with plenty of choice and stocked up daily. As we were looking into shipping to both Australia we liked to stay a bit longer, but weren't sure how long. As Indonesia shipping turned out to be horribly expensive (which you can read in the previous post), we concentrated on Australia instead. 

Organising the shipping highlighted another plus point of the B&B we were staying at: super fast internet via an optical cable! Which apart from making the shipping easy to organise, as we could send scanned documents back and forth with ease, I could also make some Skype calls to Holland and Australia to sort out another issue we had. 

All in all we stayed quite a long time at the Formula One B&B, as both Josylan and his dad are wonderful people. They are so generous and just want to help with anything. We could use their pressure washer, use the washing machine to get the clothes, bags, straps and everything else washed and cleaned for Australian Quarantine. They even organised dinner for us a couple of times and in the end dad drove us to the airport as he is a taxi driver! (Can't get a more reliable taxi than that!) It really felt like our home away from home. During one of those dinners Josylan confessed why he was reluctant to take us in at first... he thought we looked like terrorists from IS or something... :-) I blame Mike's black helmet for that one!

Fully stocked kitchen at the Formula One guesthouse

Places like these are rare, people like this are rare too. For a motorcyclist who wants to ship his bike to Australia it's worth gold though. I hope that future motorcyclists who stay there will not abuse the generosity and keep this place available for other motorcyclists too. Do make a booking in advance though!

Coming back to the tent. I'm glad we didn't use that here. Malaysia is very green, and is so for a reason. Every evening/night it rained while we were there... The Formula One B&B is a good place to stay. As always it's the people that make it what it is and these two are lovely people. They go out of their way to make your stay as good as possible and want to help in any way they can. You can only book them through Booking.com and their rating at the time of writing is 9.6 which doesn't surprise me. The Formula One B&B can be found at N2.78933° E101.78536°