A tour of different Asian Habitats

S’Pore, Sabah, and KL

My apologies for being internet-absent for the past couple of weeks… I was on vacation =) …and then sick=( Prepare yourselves for the mother of all bllogs…

Btw, I’m writing this at a coffee shop called The Coffee Bean, drinking a shot of decaf espresso (sorry, I know it’s sacrilege!), and not even trying to listen to all the conversations going on around me… in Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese, and 1 Malay voice (screaming at the barrista, the little bastard). I have finally discovered the Saturday night hotspot… who thought it’d be a coffee shop? (Not to mention that there are four coffee shops in a row, all packed to full…) No wonder the bars are empty:-/

So we left on a Tuesday night for Singapore and took the overnight bus which is ridiculously cheap but definitely not the best night’s sleep that I’ve ever had (though not the worst)… I’ve raved to some of you about the buses in Malaysia, and I still think they’re divine (air-conditioned, giant reclining executive seats, luxury buses, super cheap) but not quite heavenly. Singapore was beautiful, wonderful, Westernized, and a little bit creepy… it was really strange to be in an Asian place that is so un-Asian, yet so organized and efficient in a truly Asian manner. I don’t really know how I feel about it as yet; I’m very impressed that I was able to find blueberries at a grocery store, and almond milk, and all sorts of goodies. And when I went shopping, I found cute clothes that actually FIT me (although they are size XL). However, the government’s paternalistic attitude was apparent everywhere… there were ‘advertisements’ in the subways that encouraged Singaporean children to give up seats for elderly and disabled passengers, and also some that urged residents to keep the city clean for ‘everyone’ (read: tourists). Even the hawker stalls were spotlessly clean; if you haven’t been to Malaysia or one of the dirtier SE Asian countries, you don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about giant food courts (imagine the mall food courts, with screaming babies and tons of people and plastic lawn-chair seating) but the bussers dump all the dishes in a big bucket and rinse them in a bucket of water before giving them back to the stalls who serve food, and occasionally you can spot rats in dark corners on top of piles of rotting vegetable/meat rubbish… now in Singapore, it looks more like they sweep and mop the streets before and after meals—do you see the difference (visually or figuratively)?? Ohhhh, but I had such a good meal in Chinatown there (on Smith Street): grilled stingray served on a banana leaf… I always thought that my single-meal-for-the-rest-of-my-life-choice would be rice with butter and seafood, but stingray is a very close second (it even displaced mangosteen!).

We then took a bus to Johor Behru… ahhh, back to Malaysia: 5 seconds at Singapore’s Customs, and 1 hour at Malaysia’s Customs (mostly waiting in the wrong line), then a ride on an un-air-conditioned bus crammed in with about a zillion people (The air-conditioned buses that I mentioned earlier are the long-distance buses; local buses are Hell-on-earth.) and then a flight to Kota Kinabalu in Malaysian Sabah (Borneo) where we stayed a night at the world’s worst hostel (none of us slept). One highlight of Kota Kinabalu was the traditional “wet” market (produce, meats, dried fish, knickknacks, etc.); I got some great photos of these men who were selling giant bags of pure spices (star anise, black pepper, white pepper, gosh, what else? Cumin, turmeric, and lots more) and saw new and unusual fruits and vegetables; I also pondered buying some Belaca (bu-la-cha (a pronounced as in ‘father’) which is this supposedly sinful paste used as a seafood seasoning… I think it’s made of prawn and some sort of oil and maybe some chilli. I’ll try cooking with it at some point and will report further then.

The next afternoon, we headed to Mount Kinabalu via taxi (ohh, how I adore bargaining for taxi fares: this is where I try to bargain them down from double or triple the usual fare) and stayed in a hostel at the base to acclimate to the altitude (already 2~3 km above sea level, where we’d been in the morning). We started out bright and early the next morning and shared a guide with these two guys from Hong Kong who were quite nice (Gary, who was a Chinese guy who worked at Immigration, and Reg, an expat Londoner working in China). Our guide (Fabian) was tiny and wiry, and he had these crazy blue eyes that I’ve seen in a lot of Malaysians—silvery, icy blue, and a little unclear (not in an unfocused way, just in a softer way than bright sky-blue eyes). A lot of times, I see the eyes in older Malaysians (both Malays and Chinese, not yet in an Indian person), but occasionally in younger people as well (like my friend Raymond).

Anyhow, the mountain was incredible; on the first day, I went nuts taking pictures of all the orchids (I’m serious—I don’t think I skipped a single one), so, when we reached the summit early in the AM of day 2, I only had 6 exposures left on my roll:-/ (Btw, we stopped and slept at the summit; we definitely didn’t climb through the night, though we did wake up at 2am to continue climbing so we could arrive before sunset at 6am.) However, I got some amazing pictures of the sunrise from the mountaintop and also the nearby mountains… sadly, there were a lot of clouds—I’ve heard that on extremely clear days, you can see all the way to the Phillipines. (Mt. Kinabalu is over 4 km high, which makes it the highest mountain in SE Asia.) Maybe Mr. Polio will post these photos for me??

After climbing the mountain, we went to this group of islands off the shore from Kota Kinabalu (and had a wonderful adventurous ride in a speedboat doing about 90mph in choppy waters) and landed on Pulau Mamutik (Pulau=Island) where we promptly set up our campsite and beached like whales…for about 3 ½ days (I shit you not). We’d picked up a good stash of books in Singapore and pretty much read and swam and sunbathed (well, John and Emily did; I got a major sunburn coming down the mountain—Thank you Chloroquine for making me a super-sun-sensitive lobster; I love looking like the SuperTourist who forgot sunblock), and ate from out meager little stash… we were the most unprepared little campers ever. No lighter, not enough food/water (PBJ and cans of tuna), no Swiss Army knife (or knife at all), a little plastic soup spoon was our only utensil… it’s a good thing that we didn’t have any major adventures planned—we probably would’ve fallen over:-/ The island itself was a tiny little gem… pretty white sand, clear turquoise water with lots of coral right offshore, and pretty green trees—all that’s really necessary for a tropical island. (Oh, and a nice campsite with clean bathrooms and some chill Malaysian caretakers who just hung out and slept all day.) We made friends with this 26-ish year old East German guy Sandro (Italian: Alessandro), and though I wanted (and hoped I’d get) details about the fall of the Berlin Wall, but apparently that was a bigger drama in my living room television that in East Germany? Well, at least not in his life: he was about 11 years old and he said he just went to school and went to home and not too much changed before and after the wall falling and East and West reuniting…

Ohhh, one last thing about the islands: we were supposed to go to this other island, Pulau Sapi, on the second day so we could camp and explore there as well. I was a bit reluctant since I’d heard rumours about mischievous monkeys and after the Penang Hill Race, I HATE monkeys (and btw, mischievous is a serious misnomer—they are some evil malicious food-stealing fuckers, and not cute at all). So we get there and the first bad sign is the plentitude of package tourists from Japan and Australia; I don’t have anything personal against tourists and definitely not against independent tourists, but I am perplexed by people who leave their own countries to explore other countries… from a nice safe bus in which they are surrounded by only people from their own country who speak their own language. I can’t understand what they get out of their experience, other than the new ability to truthfully say “Oh, I climbed Mt. Kinabalu… oh, I saw orangutans in Borneo… oh, I saw the coral in Borneo, and it’s nothing compared to the Barrier Reef…” Those tours are like lessons in professional chitchatting and social niceties (because it’s not like they really get to be friends on the tour—it’s like those playmates that your mum hooked you up with in kindergarten, not because you guys liked each other, but because you all lived in the same neighborhood or because your moms were friends.) Anyhow, we search the beach and one end smells like rotten food and the other smells like sewage, so we tramp off on a path in search of a nice, secluded campsite and some pretty white sand. Instead, we’re nearly attacked by a gang of nine marauding monkeys who want to relieve us of our bags of food (granted, 5 were babies but I DON’T CARE: they still weren’t cute.) I don’t know if I can handle going to Angkor Wat (Cambodia) if it is indeed infested with vicious macaque monkeys carrying Hepatitis B and various strains of simian viruses. I wonder how monkeys regard pepper spray? If it works on bears, think of the wonders it could do to a vicious monkey. I am normally all about animals having owned their habitats first, before us humans moved in, but when the animals are more viciously human than the humans I cease to feel pity for them.

I almost appreciate all of the frustration (ah, when Lonely Planet is wrong… that is truly the end of the world! It’s strange how those books get to be like a best friend and trusty guide. John and Emily lost the Malaysia book in Singapore, and I’d left the SE Asia in Penang, and we felt seriously abandoned for a couple of days… like toddlers left in the car: we couldn’t move because we didn’t know how to move nor how to get anywhere else… I know, it’s pathetic.) For example, we ended up paying an obscene amount to get to the islands because we were trying to go later in the day, and apparently rates are calculated for 8 passengers, so we had to charter a boat for 8 people to bring us to our sweet little island paradise (very much worth it) but it was nonetheless stressful (especially after having climbed a mountain peak without breakfast and on 4 hours sleep, getting sunburnt on the way down and then dealing with a two hour bus ride around curvy mountain lanes).

Kuala Lumpur:
We flew (As much as I like the buses, I love airplanes) on Saturday and spent the night at a hostel across from Pudu Raya bus station; very sleazy and scummy but the hostel was on the 4th, 5th, and 6th floors which at least kept the laziest and drunkest of the scummies away. (Imagine Times Square pre-yuppification.) Anyhow, We met up with Mohan (Surabhi’s friend who is from KL but studied at Western Michigan) who took us out to a bar to chill and meet up with my friend Raymond and his friends at another chill bar (I adore drinking outside… I think I’m going to need a have a porch to drink on when I get back to the States). Later we split up again and went back to Mohan’s bar and I had my first “that girl” sighting. (Btw, there are so many mullets in Asia that sometimes I wonder if the world quota has been unbalanced and West Virginians are getting haircuts by the truckful.) She was a fairly big girl who was pretty much being carried by THREE of her guy friends because she’d lost all motor control and kept thrashing from side to side and trying to drink more. I know I was quite the little puker in college, but I don’t think I was ever quite “that girl,” right? Just say yes, k? Love ya.

Ooh, and the next morning I went to a Hindu temple with Mohan and his girlfriend and then ate Thosai for breakfast (yumyum). The temple was dedicated to Ganesh, and featured a large golden statue of the god (in front of which a couple of priests were accepting prayer tickets. The prayer tickets seemed like an interesting concept: someone who wishes for Ganesh’s blessing (via the priest) lined up at a counter and bought a yellow ticket on which the individual inscribed their name and message for the god. Sort of like a prayer coupon instead of a food coupon. Anyhow, then the priest chanted your name and made your messages known to Ganesh, meanwhile draping the statue with wreaths of flowers. At the end, he took a hollowed out coconut shell and put in some flowers as a present for the individuals who’d bought tickets (like a present from the god). He then went around and distributed ash for people to put on their foreheads, and they kneeled and prayed for a few minutes longer. Then we walked around the temple three times touching certain significant statues, and then went outside to buy coconuts for another ritual that I must admit I wasn’t all that fond of… the vendor placed a square of ‘camphor’ on top of the coconut (which I was holding, in my hands) and then he lit it on fire. Okay, I can climb mountains and camp on random tropical islands, but a flaming coconut is absolutely out of the question, and a giant flaming coconut is exactly what I was holding in my hands… in an absolute panic, I searched with my eyes through the smoke for Mohan and directions that potentially involved getting this burning fruit out of my soon-to-be-charred hands and spotted him winding up and throwing his own flaming coconut into a giant metal bin where it shattered into multitudes of pieces. I was so terrified at this point, and imagined that giant flame lighting my hair on fire (there was a gentle breeze that was pushing the wispy front pieces of hair back and forth, teasing the flame in a tantalizing and dangerous way), so I lobbed that coconut in the bin like a grenade. Of course it didn’t even crack, so Mohan had to reach in and throw it again for me. Supposedly this ritual helps the coconut-thrower with their wishes (it helps them come true, yada yada yada bling) but I think I can make my own wishes come true in the future:-/

Back to Penang… and there were no cabs. I really think I hate the transportation system in Penang: the bus routes aren’t published, nor are they regular. No one knows where they go nor when they start and end, including the drivers sometimes, who put up a sign in the window saying they go to certain locations and then never go. I decided this last weekend that it was high time for me to explore Penang and it really didn’t take much time for me to remember why I never explore Penang—it’s a transportation nightmare. I was reading an article about life in Afghanistan post-“liberation” and how the pollution is so bad that experts who measured it equated it to the equivalent of second-hand smoke from 55 cigarettes (So, Thursday at Skeepers or Tuesday at Mitch’s). Walking along the side of the road in Penang is probably a good 30~40 cigarettes. (Kota Kinabalu, the city that we passed through several times, was probably 25~30 cigarettes with eau-de-garbage-rotting-in-the-streets mixed in with the original smog.) Complicating the air situation are the Indonesian fire hazes… apparently they still practice slash-and-burn agriculture in Indonesia (I think we’re close to Sumatra) and the smoke blows right from their sky-atmosphere into MY atmosphere=( (Btw, slash-and-burn agriculture is horrendous for the environment in every possible way. Shhh, no one tell GW Bush!!)

So I changed my plans from trying to find Little India (because the bus never passed my stop and took me way out into West Bumblefuck) in the spirit of flexibility and exploration. Then I walked an hour and a half in midday heat, before spending half an hour trying to hail cabs (when I finally got one, he majorly ripped me off, but my dripping-sweat, red-in-the-face self wasn’t in a position to complain or bargain) and he took me to a nearby Thai Buddhist temple that has the 3rd largest reclining Buddha in the world. I never made it to the temple though, as I was distracted by the Burmese Buddhist temple across the street (also exquisitely beautiful); when I stepped inside to explore, I met a woman named Shirleen who escorted me through the temple and then drove me to grocery stores and to my building. They’re having a mass Pali Chanting next Sunday in honor of National Day (~Independence Day, July 4th); I’m not really sure what a Pali chanting is, and 9:30am is sorta early to discover but I’m going to try anyways. I hope it isn’t anything like my grandfather’s funeral (3 ½ hours in a Buddhist temple listening to the monks chanting and it was over 90 degrees Fahrenheit… almost everyone in my family fell asleep because of the heat and exhaustion (we’d been awake guarding my grandfather’s body (packed in dry ice) for three nights while we waited for the Summer Festival to end and an auspicious day to arrive). We’ll see—more reports later.

Nationalism in Malaysia:
Apparently, there is a program (“National Service”) in Malaysia for young people, implemented in the last few years, that required a year or 18 months of military training, including classes on ‘what makes Malaysia wonderful—its food, peace, and diversity.’ The government adopted this program from Singapore, but since some draftees aren’t showing up for their Service, the government has begun tracking them down and prosecuting them as criminals. I read an article in the paper a few weeks ago that described the plights of several such draftees—one was a Chinese student who had plans to leave the country for his university studies and filed for a waiver about 6 months in advance and never heard back. Another was an 18-year-old woman who had to go to court to ask for special permission to breastfeed her child until it could be weaned. This is a bit scary (at least for me), but at the same time, I have to wonder if the paternalistic attitude of the government in this instance contributes to the general happiness and peace that I’ve discovered among Malaysians…? I also wonder this in relation to the gender/sexual relations that I see; the students seem more like 18- or 19-year-olds than 23- and 25-year-old adults and are very non-sexual. Granted, it’s against the law to commit public displays of affection (sort of nice to not have to watch couples going at it in public parks), so that definitely squelches any spring-fever-birds-and-bees-nonsense. I guess I wonder if the Western emphasis on sex (did I say emphasis? I meant obsession.) is something that contributes to the strength of the Prozac/Paxil population in our Nation? I must say that if you took the sexual component/stressors out of American television, it would probably collapse on its face (except maybe Seventh Heaven and Garfield and select kids’ shows)…. Sex and the City would never have made it to its fabulous sixth-season fate=0 (Thank God Carrie ended up with Big… it was about fucking time) I’m sorry, I think that imagining Sex-and-the-City as nonexistent might be considered blasphemous… Btw, I fully intend to buy every season of it on DVD/VCD while I’m here—any orders from the States?

I love you all much, but the mother of all blogs must come to her own fate (now, and not in 6 years/seasons) so I can go to bed and get up early for my 8am class. Grrrr—I hope I get a better schedule next semester; I like being up while it’s still dark and seeing the sunrise over Butterworth’s chemical plants every morning (pollution happens to create colours in the sky that Crayola only wishes they could re-create)… but sleep would be nice (at a normal hour too, not a granny bedtime!) <3 Mibs