Part 3b: Malaysia
From Singapore we travelled through many fields on a bus to get to Melaka, a town on the coast. After just about working out the vagaries of the large bus terminal, we managed to get on the right bus and head townward. It went okay for a while, took about ten minutes to get into town, however the next twenty minutes were spent sitting in traffic as the bus moved forward at an agonisingly slow pace, moving only a few hundred metres in that time. As soon as we got our bearings on the map, we figured it would be quicker to walk, so off we hopped. Hotels were rather crummy and there weren't many free rooms, but we were only staying there for a night so we just took what was available, which was a rather plain room. The bathrooms were really sucky though.
After checking in we took a quick walk around the town which proved to be a curious mixture of about everything Malaysia has to offer. In one central square alone, the ruins of a Portugese fort/Christian church, the Islamic Museum of Culture, an upscale shopping centre, a reconstructed Sultunate Palace and the residence of the former Dutch Governer (now a museum) all converged. Not to mention that down on this square were many of the ricksaw/pedalbike contraptions that were a feature of the town, all colourfully decorated with flowers and blasting any number of out-of-date varieties of western music from the boomboxes perched at their rears, mid-90's dance music being a particular favourite. Pretty cool.
In the evening we headed out to the Chinese market, which proved to be quite delightful, many weird and wonderful knick-knacks on sale. I fleetingly entertained the idea of buying a t-shirt with sparkles and sequins on it, but Mo was sceptical, perhaps believing that it wasn't quite flamboyant enough for me to be the victim of a hate crime back home, so I left it. We had food at a little restaurant where an array of christmas hits and muzak renditions of christmas hits played in the background, totally at odds with the tropical surroundings, Boney M being particularly prominent. After more marketeering, we strolled back to the hotel, stopping off to buy some beer, which was somehat expensive as we were now in a predominantly Islamic country (sighted on the walk and worthy of mention - the Tourism Police Office which also doubled up as a bistro!) Also noteworthy is that for the first time I realised that if I didn't have a covering sheet, I could just pull the bedsheet off and wrap myself up in it. Hey! Only took me two weeks to work that one out; moron.
Next morning, more bickering on the ususal theme meant we picked our separate paths around the museum of culture. The museum itself proved to be not much cop, so I walked up to the ruins of the chapel on the hill and mooched about there. When it was time for us to collect our bags I returned bearing us a Cornetto each, which proved to be a pleasingly effective curtailment of further argument. I mean, if someone buys you a Cornetto, you know they're sorry, right? Right. We had lunch at a busy Indian restaurnat where we were the only whiteys there (again). Food was served on banana leaves rather than plates, as with one of the places we ate in Singapore. I have to say that I had some damn good Indian food in Singapore/Malaysia, and this place was no exception, delicious, plentiful and cheap to boot. Feeling pretty good we then proceeded to the bus stop, only to find out that it ran along some kind of weird circular one way loop deal, meaning that we would miss our bus to Kuala Lumpur. Deciding instead to hail ourselves a taxi, we stood around for twenty minutes, during which time not one single taxi appeared. Hoofing it up to the main drag we eventually flagged down a taxi whose driver told us that he might not be able to get us there on time, only for us to arrive at the terminal some half an hour early. Snacks purchased and bus loacated, we were soon off to our final destination.
The bus pulled up on a smelly street in Kuala Lumpur in the middle of heavy rainfall. After searching for an hour for a decent and decently priced hotel, we eventually found one that was acceptable, and checked in. KL proved to be a bit of a dissapointment to be honest, and I can't really be bothered to write about much of it. Here then is a fairly brief run through:
The first night we went out for pizza at, despite our better judgement, a reggae pizza bar. And no, that is not a euphemism along the lines of "happy" pizzas. We were served by a very tall transexual who mucked up our order something rotten by taking the pizzas to the wrong tables. Someone else nabbed our pizza and since Mo couldn't eat the meat-laden pizza we were brought, we ended up waiting over an hour while they baked us another one. Guh-reat.
Next day we went for a walk to try and find an arts and crafts centre mentioned in our guidebook. This went spectacularly wrong as we ended up getting so utterly lost that I'm still not sure whether we visited the Petronas towers by accident or not. These are a couple of absolutely huge towers that were once the tallest buildings in the world and are now the tallest twin towers in the world. My friend Rob informs me that they are built according to some kind of radical super-concrete design, due to the high price of importing steel. Wikipedia informs me that they appear in the Katamari games wherein they are the largest man-made objects it is possible to roll up. The Malaysians also love to put the towers on tourist t-shirts montaging the city/country, a move which, owing to their rather large height of 452 metres, puts all hope of accuracy right out of whack. Anyway we got lost, for reasons including but not limited to these: there were signs to the craft centre pointing in opposite directions, roads didn't correspond to our map, it was impossible to cross certain busy roads, it started raining heavily (turned out to be monsoon season, dontcha know.) I cursed the city's poor signage, I cursed the Lonely Planet, I cursed my ineptitude, but it didn't help. We couldn't find it so we gave up and tried to go back to the hotel. Except of course we couldn't. Because we couldn't find the right way. And then of course, drenched head to foot now and with me screaming hysterically into the void, we stumbled onto the right road and made it to the craft centre. And of course, it turned out to be a major dissapointment. Well, not exactly, since Mo managed to find a few nice things to buy as presents, but on the whole it was just one of those places where tourists with more money than us buy phoney authentic ethnic looking souveneirs. I didn't have the heart for it at this point, and as she squirreled out a few bits and pieces, I sat watching the torrential rain coming down in sheets. We didn't so much walk back as float, but hey, we did have a warm shower awaiting us this time, which I was absolutely delighted about, cushy pushover that I am.
The only other thing really was the markets. The big Chinatown market most prominently. This was a big throng of stalls all hupped together and mostly involved the stall jockeys yelling at us to buy their wares. Haggling was a given, one memorable instance being the fellow who tried to sell me a belt I didn't want for 70 ringgits, only to drop his price down to 15 ringgits step-by-step to try and get me to buy. This fellow was also quite physically aggressive, an anomaly I should stress, he put his hands on my chest to attempt to prevent me from leaving when I said I didn't want to buy. I was concerned for a bit but managed to get away alright. Purchase of the day for me was a bootlegged set of 17 Studio Ghibli films on 3 DVD's that cost about £8.
I'd also like to mention a guy named Jamil who worked in the 7/11 down the street from our hotel. A constant source of amusement whenever we went in there, he was either singing, knocking over stacks of food (while his chagrined manager looked on, shaking his head) or otherwise having a whale of a time at his mundane job, fair play to him. I went in to buy some 8.8% cans of beer and he gave me an approving nod: "Strong," and flashed me the arms aloft 'Steve Holt' fist pump. A prince among men.
Next morning we took a taxi to KL airport, where I finally got stopped for having larger than allowed containers of shower gel, toothpaste and deodorant in my bag, something that Heathrow, Narita, Fukuoka, Taipei, Ho Chi Minh City, Siem Reap, Singapore and Hong Kong airports all failed to pull me up on. However, after the customs lady informed that they were too big, she turned away from me, apparently content to let me dispose of them myself, so I just hupped them back in my bag and went along on my way. Nice to see the stringent anti-terrorism measures being enforced, eh? Although I recall that staff at one or two of the airports did manage to confiscate unopened water that we purchased in the airport. Good job lads, good job.
And then we fucked off home.