Wonderful Wonderful Malaysia

On February 5, I flew to KL (Kuala Lumpur). My friend Stefan (I met him in Istanbul) came to the airport to meet me. We spent the night catching up over cheap chinese food, and relatively cheap beer. The bar we found ended up being a karaoke bar. It wasn't packed with locals, but there were enough so that there were endless love songs in English and Chinese being sung until the wee hours of the morning.

Our first day in KL was spent site seeing. We went to the KL tower first and paid a whole 20 ringet (about $6) to go up to the observation tower and get a look around the city. KL is really a western city in the middle of south east asia. It's got high rises and banks everywhere. There are 3 metro systems and drivers actually obey the traffic signals. From there we walked to one of the many shopping malls for lunch and then over to the KL Twin Towers (they now boast them as the tallest "twin towers" in the world. There is a bridge connecting the two at the 20th floor. They are nice during the day, but are lite up at night. They are an amazing site. We then walked around Chinatown and it's major shopping street Petaling before crossing over to Little India for dinner. Exhausted from walking - the weather here is about 80 degrees and humid as hell - we opted for an early night.

Day 2 was spent exploring the colonial area of the city. We started off at Independence Square which is surrounding by both colonial (british) architecture and beautiful arabic inspired buildings. After a short stop at the National Mosque and a look at the old train station, we began an epic walk through the gardens and parks on the western side of the city. We walked past the bird park, orchid and hibiscus park, deer park, and swimming hole to reach the ASEAN sculpture garden and national monument honoring Malaysian soldiers who fought for nationhood nearly 50 years ago. A long walk back through Chinatown took us back to our hostel for a shower and a rest before dinner at another Indian restaurant and drinks at our favorite karaoke bar. They really wanted Stef to sing, but he declined graciously several times. During this visit to the bar, there were several female/male duets being sung. The female parts were sung by our bartender, a man with an incredibly high voice who seems very eager to be a part.

Day 3 in KL was spent trying to figure out what was next. Stef caught a bus to Singapore and I decided to meet up with Alicia (a potential IEP student) on the tropical island of Pulau Tioman off the eastern coast. I took a 6pm bus to Mersing (the port city), spent the night there in a questionable hotel (I got there at 12:30am, so I had to take the only thing that was open), and got on the ferry at 9:30am the following morning.

Pulau Tioman is actually the island in which they filmed the musical "South Pacific." It's a lush tropical paradise. There are only a couple of villages on the island and there is no road connecting the villages together so the only way to travel between them is by renting a speedboat. They may or may not be available during the season during low tide.

At anyrate. I met Alicia at a great little budget guesthouse where we had our own room with bathroom and air conditioning (YES!). We spent the next three days sunning ourselves, reading, talking with the locals, admiring the local animals. On the 11th, we decided to take a hike over to the eastern side of the island to the village of Juara. After 2 1/2 hours on a path, we made it to town. (I should mention that it is monsoon season here in Malaysia. Although there was little to no rain in KL during my stay, we did encounter a heavy downpour during our hike. Just another thing to add to the adventure!) Juara was deserted. There was only one guest staying there and the other 5 people milling around were from the other side of the island like us. The beach was magnificent. I couldn't keep myself out of the water. The South China Sea is green and warm and irresistible. Ahh, I would spend months there in a heartbeat!

The guidebook suggested that we head back before 4pm as the jungle tends to get dark much sooner. So we came back to Air Batang (ABC as it's known to the locals) and had showers, dinner and some internet time before heading to bed.

To be continued in a new post . . .