Cave Hopping

I went outstation (Penang slang for 'out of town') this past weekend to the East Coast (Kuala Terrengganu) with some surfer friends. I went with the possible hope of surfing for the first time, reading on the beach, and adventure. I brought with me: a headcold, some apparently ineffective sunblock, and a long-repressed fear of ocean. (A very valid fear of the ocean and its violent waves, as evidenced by 1) the tsunami, 2) the recent drowning of 4 tourists near Ko Samui after a Full Moon party, and 3) the prodigious amount of salt water that rammed itself up my nose and into my ears. It was literally an assault: before I could recover from getting slammed by one wave, the next had come and broken in my face.)

My face… which is currently peeling, as it has not done since my late childhood. I wore SPF 30, reapplied twice, and was only at the beach from 9am to 1pm. Granted, 3 of those 4 hours are prime sunburning hours, but I don’t think I deserve a burn of such a magnitude after having obediently listened to the telegraphed advice of all Western dermatologists worldwide. (Something I’ve noticed is that 1) Eastern peoples tend to wear more modest clothing (whether because their societies are more conservative or because their religions are strict), and 2) they don’t need to be TOLD to wear sunblock and avoid long periods of direct sunlight: they just do it.)

Needless to say, the sunburn and headcold (literally, my brains were dripping from my nose and trying to explode through my sinuses) contrived to make my stay on the East Coast less pleasant than otherwise. We stayed in a decent sort of “hotel” that was directly on the coast (which was stunning, even in the monsoon season), but whose rooms resembled caves and in which Emily and I (and our sunburn) hid, as did Raymond with his headcold. Another contribution to our boredom was the fact that Thursday and Friday are the usual weekend in the more Muslim East Coast States, and Friday was Hari Raya Haji, which extended the “weekend” to Saturday. However, Saturday was a national public holiday as well, so that Sunday was also engulfed in this exceedingly long “weekend.” (In Malaysia, when a religious holiday falls on a public holiday, the public holiday is pushed back to either the next day or, in the case of Saturday holidays, pushed to the next Saturday. FYI: In M’sia, the 1st and 3rd Saturday of every month is a public holiday; On the 2nd and 4th Saturdays, everyone is supposed to work.) Well, between the four day holiday (which is essentially the Muslim New Year) and the proclivity of Malaysians to congregate with family members on all holidays, the entire town of Kuala Terrengganu was camped out in private homes, meeting privately with friends and their families, and as a result, nowhere to be found. This means that no businesses were open, no taxi cabs were driving around, and no friendly citizens were hanging out in hawker centres until 4am. So, deprived of the joys of eating out, sightseeing, and people-watching, I was reduced to reading and sitting and contemplating the explosion of my head.

By Sunday evening, (Day 3.5 of doing absolutely nothing) Emily and I had had it with the ghost town of Kuala Terrengganu, so we connived our way onto a bus headed back to Penang so we could nurse our sunburns and headcolds (between myself and Raymond, Emily somehow caught a headcold) in the peace of our E-Park home. Actually, we made our first attempt at 8:30 am, when we trekked to the bus station to beg unsuccessfully for tickets to Cherating, or Kuala Lumpur, or Penang. However, with all the joys inherent in holiday traveling (anywhere), there were no tickets out of town. We did manage to connect with a fellow named Azman, who pulled some strings and (we’re sure) did some covert things and arranged for us to sit in the “bus driver’s” seats on an evening bus back to Penang for only RM5 more than the usual price. He picked us up earlier in the evening so we could confirm with the bus driver in a back alley at the bus station, out of sight of the bus company operators but not really out of tongue-wagging distance of anyone in town. It was my first back-alley deal though: how thrilling! I’m obviously headed for a career in politics.

At 9pm, we waited outside our bus, pleased with our success and anticipating our arrival at home (sweet home!!). At 9:30, we were finally allowed to board (after everyone else) with the instructions for now, we could sit in regular seats, but that at the ‘jetty,’ we were to move to the “back of the bus.” Well, that seemed reasonable enough, and about an hour later, when we arrived at what was ostensibly the jetty (about 20 people boarded the bus), we got up and sat in the seats at the very back of the bus… until the last two of the new passengers boarded and pointed at our seats. We turned around to really contemplate the meaning of “back of the bus” when we noticed that the curtains in the back of the bus didn’t cover a window but concealed a compartment. (Between the headcolds and sleep-fuzziness, we were a little bewildered.) So we poked our heads into the compartment and Emily reluctantly crawled in. However, after she’d settled, there really wasn’t any space for me, since the alternate bus driver was curled up in on the other side of the bench seat, taking up about 67% of the space. (The compartment was nearly the width of the bus and about 1.5 feet wide.) When I started to maneuver my way in, the driver roused himself enough to curl into the back wall of the bus, which gave me enough space to… stretch out next to him. I tried really hard to sit upright next to Emily, but there simply wasn’t space, so I ended up uncomfortably wedged between Emily’s legs and the driver’s torso, sharing the pillow that he eagerly offered. We traded in our hotel cave for our bus cave… we didn’t go roadtripping or traveling on the East Coast, we went cavehopping. And maybe we were stow-aways to boot. I strongly suspect our presence in that particular ‘cave’ was illegal.

As usual, the bus trip took longer than its proposed 6 hours, arriving in Penang about 9 hours later. (I write “proposed” because the bus companies seem to offer trip durations in the same way they bargain over commodities.) Both drivers swerved all over the road and seemed to assume that Formula One behavior was acceptable for poorly lit backroads in the middle of the night. (I wonder why Malaysia has the highest rate of automobile deaths in the world… is it possibly because every reckless driver on the road stupidly believes that he is the only reckless asshole on the road?)

I think the truest adage in the world is the one about the adventure of travel being in the journey itself. I really think that buses in SE Asia are a learning experience, and the source of endless mental stimulation. I’m considering taking Greyhound when I get back to the US. I met a crazy Swede in Cambodia who spent a couple of months taking Greyhound buses all over the Southern United States with a friend (they’d originally planned to snowshoe from Toronto to Vancouver or some absurd distance, until his friend got major frostbite). He claimed he met some really interesting people, some of whom invited him home for dinner, some of whom were ex-convicts, prostitutes, single mothers. All of them were poor. Almost none of them were white. In his four months wandering around the US, he saw more of its landscape and met more of its people than I did in 22 years. It’s odd in some ways that I’m in Southeast Asia, building bridges between the United States and Asia, when if you study the election results for different states, the Northeast and California appear to be a different country from the Southern and Midwestern states. I remember Morlie describing her tour of Mississippi on a Civil Rights bus (one of the Spring Breaks in college), and describing shanties in Mississippi that could probably be superimposed on Cambodian and Indonesian villages without much variation. How different are the citizens of different countries? The richer of the world’s population seem to be merging together (yay, globalization!) in the pursuit of money and the guilty acquisition of Hollywood movies and Western music. The poorer of the world’s population seem to be denied many of the same things: adequate food, shelter, medical care, education, etc. Part of the reason I’m in Asia right now is to experience “the world” and decide if I want to focus on international or domestic public health and human rights when I’m in graduate school. I don’t really feel like I’ve got any more solid of an answer now than I did before, just better reasoned arguments for both sides.

Just out of curiosity, is there a difference between civil rights and human rights? I would appreciate any and all answers to this questions.