Across Malaysia

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After eating a delicious breakfast at White Coffee (somewhat of a ‘Malaysian Starbucks’) and touring the infamous Kelli’s Castle (built by a Scottsman who mysteriously died before construction finished), Chris and I boarded a bus from Ipoh to Kuala Lumpor, Malaysia’s bustling capitol city. Luckily we had arranged another couchsurfing home with a wonderful Indian-Malaysian girl, Ratna, whom I had been e-mailing for almost a year now. Her apartment is located at the edge of the city, but easily accessible via KL’s light rail system, and in between days of walking (and walking, and walking…) around town we got to enjoy the comforts of the enormous swimming pool in her center complex.

We spent the daylight hours on foot, exploring the amazing Islamic Arts Museum (which fully restored my declining pleasure for museums), Garden Lakes Park (a tropical jungle within a city?), the many beautiful Islamic-inspired buildings, Chinatown and Little India (we always end up here for lunch, and dinner if possible), and of course the brightly illuminated Petronas Towers . Chris was limping painfully on his swollen ankle, a reaction to the enormous pus-filled infection he contracted sometime as we left Thailand ( we later found out this is strep, or possibly a staph infection, likely picked up while camping on Ko Adang—nasty little sucker).

I think I stated before, Malaysia is awesome. I don’t feel as much of an outsider, or a tourist, as I did in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, or Vietnam. Prices are fixed, so I don’t feel bitter paying a higher “foreigner” fee, or that I need to prepare to barter as we get on busses, etc. Malaysians have more money, so they travel more (thus we blend in, somewhat), and they certainly have a higher standard of living. With that (or due to it?) comes more western influences, such as fast food chains (Pizza Hut and Burger King on every corner) , more cars/ less motorbikes, and blazing metropolises. I already feel like I’ve traveled 20 years into the future.

Chris and I took a trip 2 hours west to Kuala Selangor, a small town (‘small’ as in one street) where we could take a taxi to a boat that would sail us downriver. The river is lined by mangrove swamps, home to thousands of twinkling kelip-kelip, a.k.a. fireflies! Since it began raining a few minutes after our bus arrived in town we hesitated to even go out to the swamps, but decided to forge ahead with a French couple we’d met in a coffeeshop almost right away. Luckily the rain was only temporary, and together our group sailed slowly through the water, in total awe of the beautiful lights. These ‘lightning bugs’ (as Chris calls them) are different from the ones on the east of coast of the US—instead of slow, long flashes they rapidly blink in unison, so the effect is that of chaser Christmas lights. Way cool.

Once back in KL, Chris and I spent the morning at the Batu caves, north of the city. It’s an enormous cavern with an old Hindu temple built inside. To get there, one must walk up a flight of 272 stairs, which is swarming with clever monkeys looking for food. I watched one of the bigger monkeys approach a little boy his same height, who became frightened and started to cry. His mother distracted the monkey by tossing bananas some feet away, then grabbed the boy and fled down the stairs. Other than that, they mostly rummaged for plastic candy wrappers they could lick the chocolate off of…

The caves are also home of the annual Thaipusam festival (which occurred only a few weeks previous), whereby thousands of people gather to perform a penance or sacrifice in hopes of gaining merit with the gods. In addition to tourists, many local Indian families come here routinely to pray and give offerings to the gods, so there are many Pure Veg restaurants circling the plaza in the front. This is where we got breakfast—white balls of idly with tomato/onion and coconut chutneys for dippin’, yum. Chris had spent a few hours sketching the temple, cave, and a few of the monkeys. He was showing his book to some of the waiters and before I knew it there were around 15 Indian men hovering behind him, pointing and talking about the sketches in Hindi, head bob and all. Every few minutes their boss yelled something and they would scatter, only to slowly gravitate back to Chris’ art…. 😉

Eventually, we had to leave KL and move on to the next destination: Kuantan, on the east coast. We wanted to go here to learn batiking. Our next host, a Chinese-Malaysian man with two children, picked us up from the bus station in the pouring rain, then took us for the first of many meals we would eat in the next few days. Chin took us to sample numerous local delicacies: simmering pork soup served with bowls of white rice; ice kachang- a “dessert” of ice, beans, corn, jellies, condensed milk, and sweet syrup; mee goreng- a yellow noodle dish with sweet brown sauce; dim sum; fish noodle soup (for breakfast). There are others, but I can’t remember them all, just the feeling of a really bloated belly. I didn’t know that Chinese people (at least those in Kuantan) eat supper at 10 pm, after a 7 pm dinner. Five square meals per day! At least that is what Chin assured us….

So, in Kuantan we did actually get to spend an entire day at a batik shop—in the back where the young Malay girls wax and paint the stretched banners of cloth to sell. Chin pretty much just dropped us off in their hands, saying a string of Malay words, and the owners pretty much just pointed us to the supplies and left us to it. I’ve wanted to learn how to use the batik stamps (my best friend bought me one last Christmas), so I hovered around the wall where they hung, finally selecting a few and tried my best to get the wax on the cloth in the right places. It was harder than I expected! Chris, however, jumped right into drawing one of a character with a guitar and one of a mosque, using the chanting, which is a wooden stick with a copper bowl to hold the liquid wax, similar to a pen. Both of ours are definitely amateur, but we’re hoping to practice again in Albania…!

Our last stop of Malaysia was in the southwest town of Malacca, an historic port of the sea trade route in the 1600’s. Here we stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Yee, of Yee Tea, the downtown teashop. With them we drank and learned much about tea, sampling a few of the ‘love brews’ and other exotically named leaves. They get much of their tea from Laos, supporting a local group of women who climb up wild tea trees (I’d never heard of or seen this before) to gather the leaves in the baskets strapped to their backs. I wonder if we ever passed by these women or the wild tea trees while we were there… ?
Malacca was a cool town simply to walk through, imagining what the old Chinese shop houses (which are now art galleries) could have been like, touring the old forts and churches left behind by the Dutch and Portuguese, and of course getting completely lost while buying dragon fruit and mangos in the Malay and Indian neighborhoods. We wanted to stay longer, but alas our trip was shortly coming to an end and our calendar was no longer … flexible.  boo hoo.
Final stop: Singapore!!

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