Care-a-Lot

Okay, so remember that kids cartoon The Care Bears? Well if you don't, they are a race of intelligent, huggable, and snuggable super bears that live up in the clouds in a place known as Care-a-Lot. Their sole purpose is to maintain true friendship love on earth and battle the evil NoHeart and his minions and ultimately triumph by spewing some sort of condensed super matter out of their mural-painted bellies, after a specified time countdown, onto their foes ending the half hour of enjoyment. So why the out-of-nowhere reference to this long forgotten cartoon? On December 31st, 2006, I was able to visit Care-a-Lot.








Care-a-Lot (which is known by its real name Genting Highlands) is a Disney type resort 3km up a gondola in the sky. You travel up through the cloudes and emerge looking at a small city on a mountain plateau. The plateau is such that all you see is cloud cover on the edge of the plateau. There are no other mountains or any higher elevations that can be seen. As seen in the above picture, it looks like some sort of floating island in the sky. There was an outdoor amusement park, an indoor amusement park, hotels, casinos and malls all packed together and floating in the sky. We went up in the early afternoon and had a chance to walk around in the malls, have a bite to eat and then take in a Vegas style Illusionist show.



While walking around the indoor amusement park/mall, there were a few interesting things that we saw. For one, my brother and I wanted to see what type of ADD games were available to play at the local arcade. For example, we saw a DDR type game that was a DJ game. It consisted of 5 buttons, a spinning wheel, and a foot pedal. Then, as we watched the demo, realized that this game was not for the feint of heart. You had to spin the disk back and forth at the correct frequency determined by the song, mash the five buttons as they ascend up the screen a la DDR, as well as throwing in a foot pedal here and there. Plus the game was two players. My brother and I stared, mesmorized by the twirling background of colours and the intense pace and concentration that it would take to even get the disk spinning at the right frequency back and forth, let alone tapping your foot and pushing multiple combinations of 5 buttons over and over agin for 3 minutes at a time. Too much at once to think about.


Also in the arcades, there is a giant section devoted to kareoke. Thats right, you can step into one of twenty soundproof booths with a bench to accomodate up to 4 people with two mics, and pay 60cents for each song you would like to sing. Kareoke is really huge over here, but it's unfortunate that I have not had the chance to do any of it as most of everything is in Chinese or Malay and not english in Care-a-Lot.



We went in the evening to a Vegas style show called Mysteria. It was a "story" in ancient Egypt about a run away slave girl and a "mystery man" who would perform some crazy illusions here and there in the story. In between illusions, there was either another act taking place (like Chinese acrobats or a crossbow shooter) or people prancing around in very little clothing. Now the Chinese acrobats and the crossbow lady were very good acts and I was very impressed, but I wasnt too impressed with the prancing and dancing. For one, many of the dancers were bare-chested men in skirts showing off their incredible 6/8 packs as they would twirl and spin and well dance to music to tell a story that made no sense at all. I mean this slave girl just wanted some water and fled the scene when she was about to have her hand cut off. Then she met a man who was able to turn her into a lion on two different occaisions, thrusted swords through her, and then the mystery man used what seemed to be Jedi mind force on some guards as he waved his hand in front of them and they let the two pass. It was a little messed up. The sets were very eaborate and all the stunts matched the scenery and sets, except when they bought out the jet turbine. The mystery man then proceeded to pass through the moving turbine as if the guards who were holding them captive, dared him to do it, thus freeing the two. I'm still a little cinfused as to what I saw, but most of it was good stuff.



One of the most priceless things I saw was a place called SnowLand. It was a giant freezer where locals could PAY to put on a jacket and mittens and enter a place where artificially made snow falls down and take in a little taste of my home town. They look like they are soooo happy inside of that place, if only they knew what it was like. No I did not pay to go in as I heard what goodness befell on our great city that morning.