The short trip we planned for a drive up North to Perlis and back to Kuala Lumpur on a recent weekend went smoothly on the way up but turned out to be rather sour for the return leg. Traffic on the North-South Highway was already filling up as we left Penang and by the time we passed Ipoh, it was already a bottleneck. Waze advised us to go a detour, which we did, but traffic along the alternative route was just as heavy, if not just as bad.
The detour took us right through the main street of Kampar, the main one within the Kinta Valley tin mining region, which was at its height during the industry boom of the late 1880s. Aside from the unending stretch of pass-through traffic, the town (on a Sunday) is otherwise a forlorn sight, with hardly anybody around along the whole stretch of the main road. Shophouses look derelict, some abandoned, while the five-foot ways are dirty and unkempt.
I used the 2013 vintage 16MP CCD Olympus VR-370, a low-cost buy on the auction market, for the shoot and some other shots during the trip. The camera has Dual Image Stabilization to compensate for the image blurring and camera shake, a 12.5X optical zoom lens with a 35mm equivalent of 24-300mm lens, and a 3.0-inch LCD with 460k-dot resolution, enough to keep me occupied and elated with not being the driver for the whole trip, and with images from the CCD sensor that speaks for itself.
