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Published: April 12th 2008
Passageway to Little India
Leaving the serenity of a little Chinese temple to the streets of Little India, Penang.Penang takes the cake as my favorite place in Malaysia, especially the city of Georgetown. I could have wandered around that island for months and never of grown tired of it.
The city is a photographer’s playground. The old colorful buildings and the friendly local characters make every picture a charm. The first day I was there I got so carried away with taking pictures that I made the worst mistake in the book. I was posing to take a picture of an old man weaving a bamboo basket and all of a sudden I lost my footing. As I looked down and tried to reorient myself I saw that I was falling into a four-foot deep sewage drain. In panic I threw everything into the air, including my camera and wallet, as I feel into a soggy pile of running black and brown filth. I smacked my ribs pretty hard on a pipe on the way down but at least I was able to stick out a hand to semi-protect my fall into the sewage. Luckily I only came out with a couple of cuts and bruises but my camera had seen the end of its days. The free
The Guy in the Window
Every time I passed this guys house he was hanging out his window, shirt off, cigarette in hand. Rock star. He came to symbolize life in Georgetown for me. fall had smashed it up pretty bad and the running sewage had taken care of the rest and short-circuited the inner chips. Lame. As I gathered up my wreck of a camera and wallet, I pushed my way through the crowd of onlookers and headed to the only plausible place, the camera store.
I had been struggling for months trying to come up with a decent reason to shell out the large amount of cash needed to buy a decent DSLR camera and I guess my swan dive into the Georgetown sewers finally sealed the deal. After all, there is no way that I could have passed the next two weeks trekking through Malaysia and Singapore without a camera. So without a second thought in mind, I cracked open my savings account and after an intense two-hour bargaining session with the store manager I left the shop a bloody and smelly mess but proudly carrying a sick new camera under my arm.
The rest of the vacation I spent my time trying to figure out how to use it so unfortunately the pictures didn’t come out as good as they could have. However, I’m sure I will soon
Vibrant Colors
The architecture and the color of the buildings in Georgetown are amazing get used to it and I am pretty stoked to be touting around a pimp new Nikon. It’s a bit big and in your face but I like it.
Besides the camera there aren’t that many other stories to tell. I spent most of my mornings at a local dim sum restaurant filling my stomach with awesome food and washing it down with a bottomless pot of Chinese tea and the rest of the day I just lazed about. An old Chinese guy befriended me at the restaurant so we sat together every morning over dim sum and Chinese tea, while taking in a crazy array of Chinese, English and Japanese. It blew my mind a bit switching between all three languages but it was a good time. The guy was a maniac and he cracked me up. That restaurant was my favorite place in Georgetown and I looked forward to going back there every morning. It was the cheapest dim sum I have ever had and it was beyond good. You could eat a tower of those small plates and your bill still wouldn’t surpass $5. If you ever go to Georgetown make your way to the 100
Living Large
off to the mosque for prayer Cintra Street Hostel, head towards the big Rolex sign and the place will be on your right. It’s a little hole in the wall but it will be packed to the brim of old Chinese. It’s very very good. I highly recommend it and get there early.
Another good thing to do in Georgetown is take the cable car up to the top of the mountain that overlooks the city. I headed up there at dusk one evening and got an amazing roast dinner with scones and tea to top it off while watching the sun set over the island. Maybe it is because I haven’t eaten a proper western meal for a long time but that dinner made me very homesick. Roast lamb, cranberry sauce and grilled veg, ummmmmm. It’s strange to say but the taste made me realize that it is time to be heading home. It reminded me of Thanksgiving, family, friends… the works.
After dinner when I was wandering around the mosque at the mountains peak I ran into two international students, one from Iraq and the other from Jordan, who had come up with their wives and children for their evening prayers. He
Not a Care in the World
passing the time in downtown Geogetown was the first person I have ever met from Iraq and it was good talking with him. We sat together for a long time outside of the mosque chatting about Islam, Iraq, the war, his life in Penang, my life in Japan, I played with his young son and I held his baby daughter. It reminded me of how ridiculous the whole situation is between our two countries and I didn’t know how to apologize to him for it. He was a good guy and I really hope that we stay in touch.
I’m worried that I may have ruined it all through my bad habit of flashing the peace sign when we took a picture together. After his friend had taken the picture I had a strange feeling that it may carry a different connotation in their countries and sure enough the student from Jordon said, “yes, yes. It means, fight till the end”… @#?! All I could think was… Jesus, I’m a tool. I tried to explain to him that I’m so used to doing it from living in Japan that it’s almost second nature and that it symbolizes peace, etc. However, things ended up getting a
Blue
very blue little lost in translation, so to speak, and we parted ways kind of awkwardly. Shame. So take note and learn from my mistake. Don’t flash the peace sign in any pictures when you are in Jordon or with anyone from Jordon. Or don’t do it altogether. It’s become a bad habit now and I look like a fool in every picture.
After sweating it out on Penang for a couple of days I headed up to the Cameron Highlands in search of the perfect cuppa. As the name suggests the area is way up in the mountains. The weather is much cooler than the humid Malaysian lowlands and it’s a good escape from the heat. It used to be a huge expanse of rainforest, or I guess all of peninsular Malaysia used to be for that matter; however, it has been almost completely cut down for its new golden crop, the tealeaf. Tea plantations cover the slopes of this area of Malaysia and they call tourists from around the world. Plantations have set up tours and expensive sets of scones and tea and locals offer guide services to trek through the sliver of rainforest that still remains. I had
My Enemy, the Scooter
zooming past a wall of color mainly gone up there in search of the world’s largest flower, which was supposedly then in full bloom deep in the forest, the Rafflesia. Now I’m not that into botany but it is still something that I wanted to see. It is a monster of a flower, not that far from the likes of the beasts in the classic, “The Little Pet Shop of Horrors”. At it’s best, it is one meter in diameter and can weight in around 10 kilos. It also smells of rotting fresh. Sounds lovely, huh. Local tour agencies pay rainforest tribes to search them down and they get a decent cut when they lead groups of sunburned white tourists to the meaty beast. It has become one of the main sources of income for these tribes in the Cameron Highlands, which I guess could be seen as both a bad and good thing. At least it keeps the food on the table.
Unfortunately, I was never able to make it on one of the tours. My time was tight and it took a full day to trek to one of the areas that the Rafflesia’s had been spotted in. Instead, I decided to put
Nepalese Muscle
this guy had been working the fields in the Cameron Highlands for 4 years some money down on a decent mountain bike and check out some of the tea plantations. Now I wasn’t thinking to clearly before I set out, but jesus, the hills in the Cameron Highlands aren’t too far off from the intense Pyrenees mountain section in the Tour du France. I had set out planning on a nice easy 2-hour bike ride to the Boh Tea Plantation. Instead, I got caught in a monsoon-like rainstorm and struggling up hills that would have put tears in Lance Armstrong’s eyes. It was a wicked ride though and since I was traveling on bike and at my own pace I was able to stop and chill with some cool local farmers, laze about on different tea plantations with a good cuppa and take in the scenery in its entirety. It’s an amazing area to say the least and I will have to make sure to go back there again for the giant Rafflesia search, part deux.
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Jennie T
Jennie Terman
memories...
Ahhh....reminds me of my visit to Malaysia. I want to go back!