The Last of Malaysia

I meant to post this right as I was leaving Penang, but I ended up on a beautiful Thai beach where I completely lost track of time.  I think it's been something like 5 days since I got here.  Oops.

Anyway, last time I posted I was in Penang (Malaysia) and had just spent a day walking in the wrong direction. The next day, I walked in the right direction.  This is what I found:

This is the Hainan Temple, which was really beautifully Chinese-like.  The special things about this temple were the ridiculous number of red lanterns, dragon statues, and beautiful stone carvings.  Inside, there was a hole in the roof and a pretty garden in the center.  This is my favorite temple so far.

Who's this guy?  I think he's Confucius.  That makes sense for a Chinese temple, I think.

These are some of the stone carvings.  Apparently, the temple was built in 1895, but they had Chinese workers come over and fix up the stone carvings in 1995.

These are all the red lanterns.  Really, there were a lot, and it definitely made the temple more fun-looking.

So, after seeing this temple, I ran into Ahmed again.  Ahmed was the Canadian/Iraqi guy who I met in Kuala Lumpur and who came with me to the Cameroon Highlands.  What are the chances of that happening?  Apparently, he decided last minute that he wanted to sit on the beach in Penang one last time before flying back to Canada.  So, naturally, I went with him to the beach.  We took a bus for about an hour north to the Penang National Park.  Here I am on a swing by the beach after we took a long and sweaty walk through the jungle.

We decided to reward ourselves for doing such an intense jungle trek by going out for dinner in Batu Ferringhi, which is the beach resort area where all the rich people stay.  It sort of looks like Vegas, right?

 Since we're by the sea, people here like seafood.  This is the Golden Thai restaurant, where you can walk along a path of fish and choose one for dinner.  Half the fish were already dead in their tanks, so we decided to go elsewhere.

This is a sea creature who is in a tank much too small for him.  His antenna things were touching the corners of the tank, and he had to just sit there like this... poor guy.

This is a restaurant shaped like a boat.  How cool.

The restaurants compete with eachother by putting up lots of lights.  Though this place had a camel, I don't think they actually serve camel.

This is where we went out for dinner.  It was a halal barbeque.

Here's Ahmed enjoying the barbeque on the beach.

...and me doing similarly.

The next day, I went on a walk to see more of Georgetown.  This is the WWII memorial.

This handsome young man is Captain Light at Fort Cornwallis.  Captain light was known for coming into Penang before it was yet discovered by other Europeans and establishing a port there.  As I understand it, he founded Georgetown.  A funny thing - there's a sign at one of the churches that says something like "British settlers and locals both loved him for his work."  Somehow, I don't believe that the locals would really have loved him that much for taking over their land...

This Georgetown's coast.  Only 300,000 people live there, but they have a lot of industry and hence a lot of skyscrapers.

This is the clock tower.  I guess it's kind of exciting.  I found it most useful to orient myself during the many times that I got lost.

This is just another example of the kind of colonial architecture that Georgetown is famous for.

This is St. George's church.  It's the oldest Anglican church in Southeast Asia.  It's kind of funny how I got here:  While walking down the street, I met a Dutch guy named Tom.  The day before, Tom had met a crazy old Malay guy who showed him a free bus that you can take around the city to all of the main historical sites.  Tom and I went to take this bus around, because it was way too hot for walking.  While we were on the bus, the crazy old Malay guy got on.  We all got off at the same stop (at this church) and sat around under a tree for a few hours while the old guy told us all about the history of everything.  Even though the old guy seemed crazy at first, he actually had all of his facts straight and knew a ridiculous amount of history about everywhere in the world.  He said he knew these things because he's psychic.

After sitting around at the church for half the day, Tom and I went to get some tea in little India.  This is a Hindu temple in little India.

















Since leaving Penang, I've started the "breathtaking-tropical-islands" part of the trip.  After leaving Penang, I took a boat to Langkawi, which is a beautiful island at the northernmost part of Malaysia.  After Langkawi, it was time to go to Thailand.  I took a boat to the Thai mainland (to a town called Satun) where I took a local bus to Trang (a town farther north on the Thai mainland), took a minivan to Krabi (a town still farther north), took a sorngtaaou (which is like a pickup truck) to Ao Nang (a town on the beach), and finally took a longtail boat to Ton Sai.  I'm actually really proud of myself for having figured all of this transportation out on my own.  When I was leaving Langkawi, a guy wanted to charge me something like $50 to get me to Ton Sai.  Instead, I just set off on  my own, and I made it there for under $10.  Go me!

So, now I'm living on Ton Sai beach.  It's the closest thing I've ever seen to heaven.  There are huge limestone cliffs with stalactites hanging off them and the sea coming right up to the base.  The town is tucked between the cliffs.  There are no cars and barely any people here, but there are watermelon shakes and palm trees.  I might call it paradise.

I've just taken a day to come into Krabi (which is the big town near Ton Sai), but I unfortunately forgot my camera at home, so no pictures for now.  Next post will be all pictures of paradise, I promise.

Butterflies, strawberries, and tea... Oh my!

Malaysia is hot.  Like, burning hot.  We sit around sweating all day and all night (unless, of course, we spend the day in an air conditioned mall...).  But Malaysia also has a secret (or not so secret...) place where the weather is perfectly cool and you can frolic through tea and strawberries with butterflies swirling around you.  This place is called the Cameroon Highlands.  It's a 4.5 hour drive north from Kuala Lumpur, and it's worth every minute in the car to get there.

By some great luck, I met a very nice couple who rented a car and invited me to tag along as they drove up to the Cameroon Highlands.  What would have been an exhausting bus journey all by myself turned into a relaxing drive through the hills with Sina (from Germany), her husband Javier (from Columbia), and a man I'd been hanging out with in KL for a few days named Ahmed (from Iraq/Canada).  We thought of ourselves as the world's most bizarre "family".

The town in the Cameroon Highlands that we stayed in is called Tanah Rata, and the first thing we did when we got there was eat a steamboat.  This is a Chinese-type meal where you get a pot of boiling water and raw meats, fish, vegetables, and noodles.  You put things into the boiling water (in some special order, unless you're too hungry to care) and then eat the soup.  It was delicious.







The next day, we took a tour of the Cameroon Higlands.  This was a very efficient way to see all the sights, because there really are a lot of sights to see!  The first place we went was the Boh tea plantation.  It was amazing to see table-high tea bushes carpeting such a huge area of land.  We also saw workers in the field harvesting the tea.  Nowadays, Malaysian people can't be bothered to pick their own tea, so most of the workers come from places like Nepal, India, and Indonesia.  The workers we saw used big shears to cut the green tops of the tea bushes and then threw the leaves over their heads into a big basket on their backs.  The guide said that other workers also use cutting machine things that they carry around to cut the tea more quickly.

This is a cool panorama of the tea fields with Sina taking a picture of me and Javi in the foreground.

The next place we went was the called the Mossy Forest.  In school and in the media, you always hear about how rainforests are necessary to clean the air and water and how they're a home for strange plants and animals.  I always knew that rainforests are important, but now I fully understand that the rainforests are an extremely special thing.  Before we decided to do the tour, someone said to us that "you can go into the rainforest, and you will see something amazing and green.  However, if you go there with someone who knows the land, they will show you the real colors of the rainfoest."  They were so right.

This is me about the enter the Mossy Forest with our guide, Wasu.  Walking through the forest, I just saw moss.  Then, Wasu would point out crazy plants hidden in greenery and tell us all about the medicinal uses.  It was really more than amazing.

hanging orchids

lip flowers

giant fern

ginger

spider orchid

passive insect-eating plant

These are cool!  Under the umbrella-looking part of the plant, they secrete sweet stuff that insects like to eat, and poison stuff that gets the insects drunk.  So, insects come and start eating that stuff, then they get drunk and fall into the body of the plant.  There is digestive fluid inside the body, so the plant starts eating them.  The insects try to climb up the walls to get out, but the lips are really slimy and slippery, so the insects fall back inside and die.

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The next place we went was the butterfly garden.  I know, this doesn't look like a butterfly.  They trick you into coming here thinking that you'll see colorful butterflies fluttering about, and then they throw a big horned beetle in your face.  Just kidding - it's not that bad.  They had butterflies AND scary things.  Honestly, when I saw this thing, I thought I was going to die.  Apparently they don't really bite, though.  Instead, they snap their heads back and catch your fingers in the back of their neck.  That's still enough to cut your finger in half, but at least they don't bite.

 They also had a ridiculous amount of snakes.  I'm showing this picture because these are the friendliest looking of all the snakes.  Some of them were bigger than me, and I (again) thought I was going to die.

 Finally, they also had butterflies!  They were as pretty as you'd imagine, and the garden was sort of magical.  They were really used to people being there, so they'd even come land on you sometimes. 

On the way home we stopped for gas and ended up taking a survey that some kids were doing for school.  It was about the impact of tourism on Malaysia.  My survey was in Malay, so I'm not sure how many of the questions I got right.








The next day, I went on a hike to see the world's largest flower.  It was amazing and huge - like the kind of things you see in movies like Avatar and Jurassic Park.  Unfortunately, my camera died so I only have pictures of it on my iphone.  Even more unfortunately, I currently can't upload pictures onto this computer from my iphone.  I guess you'll just have to trust me that it was really cool.

This morning I took a bus from Tanah Rata to Penang, which is an island on the west coast of Malaysia.  This island is very famous because it's one of the oldest British colonies of the Asian islands, and it's now very commercially important because of it's location between Southeast Asia and India.  This results in a place with a lot of interesting cultural sights along with a lot of ugly commercial buildings.

I arrived in Georgetown (the main city of Penang) this morning at 11 am.  Once I got here, I decided to go out and see the town.  Unfortunately, I walked in the wrong direction and all I saw were banks, car rental companies, and other business-type things.  It was pretty boring, and I decided that Penang sucks.  However, I then took a look at the map and saw that there are tons of parks, forts, and temples in exactly the opposite side of town.  This is the life of a tourist: sometimes you make mistakes.  Tomorrow, my plan is to walk in the right direction.  I'll let you know how that goes.

Hello Malaysia!

It's been a week, and I'm still in Kuala Lumpur.  It's impossible to leave this place.  Every time I think about leaving, I realize that there are still a million things that I want to do here.  In Nepal, I got used to moving slowly through each day and generally being lazy about life.  There wasn't much to do in Nepal, aside from relaxing and watching the grass grow (which, let me just say, is a very important thing to do sometimes).  Malaysia is much more fast paced.  I'm in a CITY now.  There are lists of things to do and see, and the busy people on the street make you feel like you should also be in a rush to get somewhere.  Unfortunately, I don't do well at rushing.  In general, I like to move slowly.  I've realized that this is part of who I am, and I'm fine with that. 

This is Mac.  He works at the hostel that I'm staying at and has become a good friend of mine.  According to Mac, tourists usually stay in Kuala Lumpur for 2 or 3 days, and then they move on.  After I'd been at the hostel for 5 days, Mac was like "why are you still here?"  But, I swear, I am moving on very soon.  Tomorrow, I'll be on a bus northward, slowly making my way to Thailand.

This is Ben.  He's from England, but he's been living in Thailand for the past year teaching English.  He's on vacation from school and came to Kuala Lumpur for his holiday.  We've been hanging out for the past few days and going to the sights around the city.

Naturally, the first thing we did in Kuala Lumpur was go to one of the giant shopping malls.  Kuala Lumpur is half shopping malls and half jungle.  Of course, the first shopping mall we walked into was 11 stories high and had an amusement park inside.  The Lonely Planet travel guide describes this mall as "lacking the pizazz of KL's other shopping malls."  We went into the park, rode a few roller coasters, and hung out with Frankenstein.  I'm sort of embarrassed to say it, but we spent my whole first day in KL at the amusement park.

This is a flower that attacked me at the amusement park.

The next day, we went to Menara KL (or KL Tower).  Of course, you see jungle in the foreground of this picture.  KL is the biggest city in Malaysia with 421 meter towers and 1.6 million people, but there is still jungle everywhere you look.  What a crazy (and beautiful!) city.

This is the view of the city from the tower.  When you're up there, you get a tape player that explains what there is to do in the city and shows you where things are.  It was definitely a good thing to do on your first day in KL.

After visiting the KL tower, we walked through the jungle to get to the Petronas towers.  I think it's hilarious that you have to walk through the jungle to get anywhere in KL.  I thought that Nepal had jungle, but Malaysia's jungle is something much more serious.  The city is this crazy mix of concrete and thick plant life that ends up being a beautiful piece of high-tech chaos.

These are the Petronas Towers, which are linked by a sky bridge on the 42nd floor.  They are the highest twin towers in the world.  The Malaysians are very proud of these towers, and they are basically the symbol of KL.

The Petronas Towers are just one example of the amazing architecture found in Kuala Lumpur.  The city is an interesting mix of little old temples and new and impressive skyscrapers.  Just by walking through the city, you can see how Islamic architecture has developed over the years.

Next to the Petronas Towers, there is an aquarium.  I haven't been to an aquarium in ages, so I was super excited to check this one out.  I don't think I've ever seen so many silly looking fish in one place!  Even better, they had snakes and bugs and alligators and otters!  This is me in the otter pool (though the otters were too quick to catch on camera).

This is Ben in the big fish tunnel thing.  It was pretty cool - they had lots of huge sharks and turtles along with all of your regular fish.  They also had a moving walkway, so you could just hang out and watch the sharks swim around you. 

The other really good thing about the aquarium was that it's inside.  Right now, Malaysia is HOT.  I don't think I could survive if I couldn't cool down in an air conditioned at least once per day.  I really wonder how Malaysians manage to do exercise and such.

There was a "fish doctor" attached to the aquarium, which is where you stick your feet into a pool and fish come to eat the dead skin off your feet.  They're really little fish, so it doesn't hurt.  It does, however, tickle A LOT!  We sat around for a half hour laughing like mad.

This is Ben relaxing at the fish doctor.  They had a huge TV where they played a relaxing visualizer, and lying back to watch the visualizer helped to forget about how much the fish tickled your feet.

The next day, we went to the KL Bird Park, which is the biggest walk-in aviary in the world.  We spent the whole day there, and it was amazing.  I knew that these types of birds existed, but I never thought that I'd ever be so close to them.  Like you can see in this picture, we were just walking down the path when two peacocks started doing their whole mating routine about 5 feet away from us.

 We saw a lot of birds at the birdpark, but this was by far the coolest.  I would describe him as a mix between a peacock, turkey, and yak.  I forget what his actual name is supposed to be, though.

I'm adding this picture just because I feel like there is a lack of monkey photos on my blog.  Both Nepal and Malaysia have lots of monkeys everywhere, and I just want to recognize that they are not adequately represented in my blog.

 After leaving the bird park, we had to (again) walk through the jungle to get home.  This is the Lake Gardens park in the center of the city.  KL is pretty serious about their parks.

 In the Lake Gardens, there are many playgrounds for kids.  This is me in one of them.  I wish that I had such a playground when I was little.  It's like heaven!  It was so big that it was sectioned into different parts.  My favorites were Dinosaur Land and Fantasy Land.

 On the walk home, we passed through Merdeka Square.  There is a huge cricket field here, along with some nice fountains and such.  People like to hang out here, and I heard that they sometimes hold big events here (like on New Years Eve).

The next day, we went to a big flea market inside a shopping mall.  It was really funny to see people selling all these old antique things in stalls right outside of trendy clothes shops.

I also walked around town and learned about a lot of new fruit that I didn't know existed.  This is rambutan, which (I think) means "hair" in malay.  It looks funny from the outside, but it tastes wonderful on the inside.  When you open it up, it's squishy, white, and sweet.



And that's Kuala Lumpur!  If I had to pick a city to live in, KL would definitely make it high on the list.  I had a great time here, and it's hard to convince myself to move on.  Tomorrow, I'll be catching a bus to Ipoh, which is a smaller town about two hours north from here.  From Ipoh, I'll head up to the Cameroon Highlands, which are rumored to have strawberries, butterflies, and tea.  Get excited!