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Published: October 16th 2009
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(Day 555 on the road)I am back in Kuala Lumpur, and I love it just as much as on my previous few visits here. Of all the Southeast Asian countries, I definitely like Malaysia the most, with its mix of immensely friendly and tolerant people and its diverse natural beauty. If I ever chose to live in a country in this part of the world, it would almost certainly have to be Malaysia.
This time however I was only here for a one-day stopover on my way back to Indonesia. In the morning I met up with Ali, the guy who founded travelblog.org, in my opinion the best travel blog site out there. We had a great chat over some delicious food in Chinatown. Interestingly, Ali has moved to KL a while ago, and loves the country just as much as I do. Thank you Ali for this wonderful website!
In the afternoon I met up with my Jawads girlfriend Julia. Julia used to work for a UK newspaper in London, and confronted with the choice of continuing to work in an insecure sector or leaving with a large voluntary redundancy cheque, she chose the latter and has now
set off to explore the world. She is planning to travel for six month, but I can help but think that she will soon realise just how beautiful this part of the world is and extend her trip.
Julia and I spent the afternoon at the fabulous Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, the biggest free-flight aviary in the world. I have heard many good stories about this park but never went here because I shied away from the high entrance fee. But now I can say that it was well worth it - I have never seen to many beautiful and free-flying birds in one place. The whole huge park is covered by a gigantic net so the birds won fly away, but other than that they are free to roam around as they like. Plus most of them are so used to people and tame that you can get very very close to them. It was thoroughly enjoyable afternoon, and we ended our day with some good Chinese food in the lively Golden Triangle area.
And now as I am writing this KL blog entry some days later I am surprised to see just how controversial my last
blog entry about
prostitution in Angeles City in the Philippines is. Apart from over 500 views in just one day I have received many critical and some outright offensive comments (I took the liberty to delete the few calling me a stupid F*** or similar expressions).
It seems I have struck a nerve with many people with comments and messages ranging from calling me naive, being outright offended by my observations and opinions, saying that I support the industry myself by having a drink in a bar there, or criticising me for publishing the entry at all as that only promotes the place further. On the other hand there were also many positive comments from people that took my entry at face value, namely that it addresses an issue that is widely spread in the Philippines and that needs to be adressed. Hushing the whole thing up by not writing about it would certainly not be the way to go. It would have been interesting to follow up with the critics on this topic, but unfortunately not one of those commentators has left their email-addresses - I wonder why?
Next stop: Gili Trawangan (Lombok, Indonesia).
To view my photos, have a look at
pictures.beiske.com. And to read the full account of my journey, have a look at the complete
book about my trip at Amazon (and most other online book shops).
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Seth
non-member comment
The Truth is ...
SEX sells. Nobody really wants to read about cute little birdies (well except me). Readers, tourists, backpackers, travelers and the likes all want to read stuff that have sex written all over it, simply because people are drawn to sex ! SEX SEX SEX ! So bloggers like you go out of their way and spend they time and money going to Asias Red Light districts so they can blog about it. Why ? maybe to get the blog hits ? or try to prove to themselves and to the world that they are ot like those fat/old western men who use their wealth to prey on the under-privilege girls in third world countries ? The other truth is, you can write something offensive and disparaging about a country after only spending 3 weeks and not get a criticism about it. Just a thought ...