Peace be upon you all. I've just returned from a week's trip to the East Coast with the wife. So some posting on the matter will be forthcoming. But before that let me get some pictures off my chest here... that of my latest trip to Pulau Besar, Melaka a fortnight ago, my first with my new wife (or any wife for that matter as I've never been there with my previous wife). Heck, after all, we only got married just about a month ago.
Oh, for the record, we also went to the north together and that happened the following week after we got married. It's just that the trip was also made with my friend @ photograher Shamsul Yunos for an upcoming coffee-table book on mosques in Malaysia, so I took the wife along. Whatever, that trip resulted in the last few articles here ending with the one titled New trip to the North - The Ubudiyah mosque and Perak royal mausoleum revisited... made on Christmas day at a cyber-cafe in Melaka!
Back to Pulau Besar... I've been there almost 20 times I think since I first went there sometime in 2002 or 2003. So let me just present these pictures ya. For previous pictures on the subject, please look for it yourselves using the blogspot's search engine.
Oh, for the record, we also went to the north together and that happened the following week after we got married. It's just that the trip was also made with my friend @ photograher Shamsul Yunos for an upcoming coffee-table book on mosques in Malaysia, so I took the wife along. Whatever, that trip resulted in the last few articles here ending with the one titled New trip to the North - The Ubudiyah mosque and Perak royal mausoleum revisited... made on Christmas day at a cyber-cafe in Melaka!
Back to Pulau Besar... I've been there almost 20 times I think since I first went there sometime in 2002 or 2003. So let me just present these pictures ya. For previous pictures on the subject, please look for it yourselves using the blogspot's search engine.
OK. We arrived at Pulau Besar at about 9pm, by the 8.30 ferry from Anjung Batu after a rather exhausting trip around Melaka. This is a picture inside the local surau (small praying hall)... or you can call it a mosque if you wish.
The surau is situated next to a complex housing a few tombs, especially that said to belong Sultanul Ariffin (king of the gnostics) Sheikh Ismail, a saint from the Middle East said to have arrived to the Malay archipelago at least 600 years ago.
The door to the complex is often locked and visitors who came by the drove expecting barakah or blessings from the aura of the saint's tomb normally could only look on and make their wish from outside. But I happened to come at the rare few times when the door is unlocked for visitors. So here is a good look at the tomb of Sheikh Ismail from inside...
Another look at it... from the head area that is.
Still, my favourite tomb in Pulau Besar (and there's at least 20 visible ones said to belong to saintly or magical personalities while more than 1,000 unmarked old tombs are believed to exist alongside) is this one just outside the main complex. Seen here are my travelling stuff. I often like to lie on that side of the tomb. Heck, sometimes I lie inside the box, above the tomb itself to the shock of some!
Here's the waters just outside the compound of the area containing the Sheikh Ismail tomb complex and the surau.
And the signboard just beside the compound's entrance, erected by the custodians of this place.
Actually I was just testing the zoom feature on my Olympus automatic camera. It has a magnification capability of 5x which coupled with the digital zoom (zooming by multiplying the pixels of the pictures shown, not actual physical zoom) gives and effective magnication of more than 22x. It's just that perhaps because of the internal software and hardware, the screen tends to show chunky pictures as the view is zoomed in past 5x and into the 20x region.But snap the view and picture would appear looking quite well on screen. That's how I got the previous two pictures although when I took it, I was actually standing on the same spot where I took the picture above...
Oh, as for the title "My latest trip to Pulau Besar... with the wife...", so where's the wife, you may ask? Well, if you look and study all my postings at any of my blogspots, I rarely show pictures of myself. And that's what I told the wife when she asked me to snap some pictures of us together... I took pictures mainly to share with others, not to show myself. So expect me to do the same regarding the wife.
Anyway, I might soon post some pictures with the wife as it is part of future story-telling, God willing. Besides, I'm also a family man at heart. What's the harm in showing some family pictures once in a while right? So see you guys another time. Cheers!
p/s: I hope it's not too late to wish Happy New Year to everyone and happy Ma'al Hijrah too (the Islamic new year which happened to fall on December 29th )