Malaysia

After our experiences in India, I’m not quite sure anyone really knew what to expect from Malaysia. We had heard it was a land of beautiful white-sand beaches, amazing cuisine, pristine temples, and of course the Petronas Twin Towers – the largest twin towers in the world.

But the culture shock we had all experienced three days earlier was enough to turn any expectations we had right on their heads. Needing desperately to find another picture for my Cambodian visa after my China debacle, I got off the ship and headed to the nearest mall with Flynn to find a camera store. My god it was one of the largest, most beautiful malls I had ever seen. It was eight floors high, with every single type of electronics store known to mankind. They also had a complete food court – McDonalds, Famous Amos – the whole deal. After getting my passport pictures taken, and getting lost numerous times, we grabbed Brad from a nearby bookstore and headed out to grab some Malay cuisine, the specialty of Penang state. Our taxi driver took us to a tiny local restaurant where there was not another tourist for miles. Confused about the whole process initially, we hand-signaled our way to getting a meal of rice, chicken and vegetables, which we soon realized we were meant to eat without silverware. Interesting. Malaysia is a country of diverse religious and cultural background, with a population comprised mostly of Muslims, but with large Buddhist and Hindu contingents as well. Many of the people are of Chinese and Indian descent; so naturally, Malay food has quite the interesting mix of everything. But it was really delicious, just like we had been told it would be. After lunch we grabbed a cab to Kek Lok Si Temple, a Buddhist temple that sits high up on Penang Hill, and one of the most famous religious sites in Penang.

The name, meaning “Temple of Supreme Bliss”, is really fitting since the temple sits high above Penang’s capital city of Georgetown nestled between blue sky and lush forests. It’s pretty hard to miss considering the lavish and bright red, gold, blue, and green external decoration. Inside the temple the walls were lined floor to ceiling with thousands of miniature golden Buddhas, and the smell of incense filled the air. There were large alters with candles, flowers, and giant golden Buddha statues, complete with even more ornate carving and gilding. Purty.

On the way from the Temple of Supreme Bliss to the Temple of the Thousand Faces of Buddha we ran into some Chinese women, who decided that I would be a really good prop for their pictures. Without asking, they grabbed me and threw me into the pictures while Brad and Laura Flynn just stood there and laughed – typical. This always happens to me! On the way down from the lighthouse at Cape Point some random room accosted me, took my sunglasses off my face and kept yelling “Jamie!” until she realized after about ten minutes that no, I actually was not Jamie. My awkward laugh got me through both interesting experiences, not to worry.

So in this next temple we find that Buddha has multiple personality disorder. There is literally a Buddha for every single mood. Happy Buddha, sad Buddha, angry Buddha, hungry Buddha, hungry-for-revenge Buddha; he’s moody. So the temples were all well and good and beautiful and I got to put my Asian art knowledge to use – score.

We left to ride back to Georgetown and catch the tender to the boat to change and get ready before dinner.
Oh yeah, tendering. I forgot to explain the most annoying and frustrating experience of boat life. Apparently in some ports, like Penang, our little floating campus is too big to actually pull up to the dock, and when we saw the actual wooden planks Malaysia calls “docks” we understood why. Anyway, we have to sit out in the harbor and use our lifeboats to shuttle people back and forth to shore. The ride across the water takes only about fifteen minutes, and so you ask why is that so annoying? The process, my dears, is not fun. You have to arrive at the gangway 15 minutes before the tender leaves, and they leave from the boat on the hour and from the shore on the half-hour, so if you miss one and you need to be somewhere at a certain time, you’re in a little bit of bind.

Then you wait for the tender, wait for everyone to unload, load everyone on, sit in the hot boat until it gets cleared, then cross, and unload, etc. We did learn that our lifeboats do work nicely though, in case of emergency, which I suppose is a good thing. Anywho the tenders don’t run all day every day, and coming back from shore they stop at 1:00am…so if you miss that one, you sleep at the marina. Not so fun. Luckily I have responsible friends who get me places on time; my perpetual late tendency doesn’t work out so well.
Okay so that’s tendering in case anyone asks. We got back to the boat, showered, changed, and got ready to go out for a girls’ night since I wasn’t going to be with any of my girl friends for the next five days – I’ll explain. So apparently every Wednesday everywhere in Malaysia is ladies’ night. That is neat. I’m quite sure that Semester at Sea took over Georgetown’s central bar area as people held dance competitions on stage for free prizes, us included. That was fun.
The next morning I woke up to enjoy the fabulous life of tendering over to my 8:30am FDP – Prime Commodities of Malaysia. The plan was to visit a palm oil factory, rice paddy museum, and rubber tree plantation, and be back by 3pm. Perfect really, because my bus for Kuala Lumpur left at 4:30pm. Since I was traveling with my 3 best guy friends, Brad, Josh, and Jesse, and they seem to think that I’m responsible, I was put in charge of holding on to the bus tickets (this part of the story comes into play later). So first we’re off to visit the palm oil plantation, the commodity that is Malaysia’s largest export.

Along with Indonesia, the two countries produce 90% of the world’s palm oil. Which is a lot. Oh, and if you like eating palm oil, I would stop. It’s 51% saturated fat, and perhaps one of the worst oils you could eat! Good thing the US soybean lobbyists prevent mass import of palm oil to protect the soybean industry, or we’d all be super fat. So palm oil smells foul and has no taste whatsoever, but its greatly redeeming quality is that it can be used for biodiesel, and so people are hoping that it will be able to help with our energy crisis…I guess we shall see.

So we left the palm oil factory, drove 2 hours to get lunch at hawker stalls, then another half hour to a rice paddy museum. Yes, you can reread that to make sure I said what I meant – a museum about rice paddies. Doesn’t it sound thrilling?
Well I was all super excited about the rice when I found out that our FDP wasn’t going to get back until 6pm. That was not okay. So our guide had to arrange for me to take a cab back from Kedah, two hours away from Georgetown, by myself, in order to make my bus. So he calls a cab, the guy speaks not a single word of English, he puts me inside, assures me that he has told him the right place to go, and sends me on my way.

In retrospect, probably not a great idea. So we’re riding along and the guys pulls up to the ferry port and points to the ferry to Langkawi, a island about 2 hours north of Penang. I frantically try to tell him that I need to go to Penang, to Georgetown, to the pier, but he does not understand. I commence freak out stage. I finally say Georgetown enough times that he says he understands, so I get back in the cab, at this point around 2:30pm, still thinking that I had enough time to meet my friends on the pier at 3:45pm. He assures me it will only take an hour – I think “one hour” and “thank you” were about the only English phrases he knew, and clearly my Malay wasn’t too hot either. So we get back in the cab and he is moving a snails pace, I try to tell him to go faster, he doesn’t understand. I try every hand motion I possibly can, sign language, anything I can think of, it’s not working. 4:00pm rolls around and I am still 15 minutes away from pier, our bus leaves at 4:30pm, I have all the tickets, the driver won’t go faster, I am hysterically sobbing in the back because I think my friends will have left for Kuala Lumpur without me, I’m by myself with no cell phone, all in all not a great situation. Finally I make him stop, sprint from the cab to the pier where people sitting under the tent tell me the boys have already left. The tears pour a little bit harder, but some nice girl tells me they went to the bus station and to meet them there. I careened out of the tent yelling frantically for a cab, luckily a driver who speaks English speeds his butt off to get me to the station. I get there, tears coming down my face, and race over to the bus were Brad and Jesse are waiting there with a new addition to our trip, Amanda. You know when you’re sick or something goes wrong and you pick up the phone to talk to your mom and you cry even harder? Well this was sort of like that. Just seeing them standing there with bewildered expressions on their faces (I looked like a hot mess that’s for sure), and Brad coming over to give me a hug, made me cry a little bit harder. I knew that some point along this journey I would run into some problems somewhere, needless to say I thought my lost credit card and messed up Chinese visa would be the big issues, so I guess it’s all well and good that I had 7 minor heart attacks in a cab in Malaysia.
So after I calm down, we meet up with Josh and Jeff, who added on to our trip at the last minute as well. We hop into our “Super VIP” ($6 a ticket) bus, and settle in for our fun five-hour bus ride.

Jeff and I had some epic games of hangman, let me just tell you that.
We get into Kuala Lumpur, grab our packs from beneath the bus, and start to look for something to eat, and then somewhere to stay. After a VERY spicy meal (Frank you would have enjoyed it), we started traipsing around town looking for a hostel or hotel with open rooms. We end up at the Swiss Garden Hotel, where we get a 6-person room for $25 a night. Nice. I take my usual 20 minutes to get ready, finishing before the boys, a new claim to fame I have perfected on Semester at Sea for those of you doubting that ability, and we headed out to explore KL’s nightlife.

The next morning we got up early to go to the needle, a fairly new addition to Kuala Lumpur’s skyline. We rode up the 270 meters to the 360 degree viewing veranda and got to see over all of beautiful Kuala Lumpur. And yes, the towers as well (they were even more awesome at night! The needle lights up like the Eiffel Tower, too. It’s pretty sweet).

We left the needle to make a quick stop at the actual Petronas Towers before we had to board our bus to Tanah Rata, in the Cameron Highlands. The towers are HUGE and awesome, and my friend Jesse, who is an architecture freak and civil engineer, was just in his element the entire time, which was fun to watch. I’ve never seen someone get so excited about buildings before in my life.
So after a quick stop there, we grabbed out bags, checked out of the hotel, and made our way to the Cameron Highlands, about a 5-hour drive from KL. That actually happened to be a fun bus ride with a little more competitive hangman, and a very competitive game of euchre. It’s a four-person card game that Josh, my friend who grew up in Indiana, and Brad, from Kansas City, say is a must-learn Midwestern tradition…five hours later we landed in the highlands, a breezy 15 degrees cooler than sweltering KL and Georgetown. So refreshing! We made our way to our hostel, Daniel’s Lodge, which ended up being a very interesting and fun experience within itself. 6 of us shared a 4-bed sardine can of a room, less than ½ the size of our ship cabins, and those are small.

We asked Box, the elderly Malaysian man who ran the lodge, where a good place to get Chinese food would be, and he took us to his favorite restaurant, the Mayflower (interesting), ordered us a Steamboat, and essentially commenced what would be the death of me for the next 3 days. A steamboat is made up of a huge pan with a divider – one side filled with spicy broth, the other with chicken broth. Then they brought out raw jellyfish, squid, chicken, beef, crab, egg noodles, rice noodles, oysters, eggs, and a couple other things I probably blocked out. It’s kind of like a Melting Pot type deal where you throw things in, let them cook, and then eat them…but then again you are eating jellyfish (bad consistency if you’re wondering). Since we really had no idea what we were doing, made clear by the fact that three of the boys thought it would be a good idea to eat chili peppers (it was not), it took us about 2 hours to eat dinner.

We then went in a mad search for ice cream to cool off the boys tongues before heading back to inviting bungalow bar and bonfire at Daniel’s Lodge.

Hostels are super fun because not only are they a unique experience (toilets = holes in the ground with a hose to wipe in Malaysia; showers = spickett over said toilet; all are communal), you get to meet so many cool people from all over the world. We met some American kids from Loyola who had been studying abroad in Bangkok, lots of Australians, and some British as well.
The next morning, after having spent the night crammed into a tiny twin bed with Brad (that was not comfy), I awoke feeling very sick to my stomach – a feeling that lasted until today. That was unfortunate considering what goes in, must come out, in either direction, and like I said, the toilets were holes in the ground. Fun. Not to mention, Malaysia, and apparently Southeast Asia in general, don’t believe in toilet paper, so I was glad that when we ventured out on our jungle trek at 8am the next morning, Jesse thought to pack some for me, lest I should need it in the woods. By the time we reached the jungle I actually felt a lot better, and was super excited for what we were about to do. We were starting our three-hour trek into the highland jungle to see the world’s largest flower, and swim in some waterfalls – no way was I letting myself be sick for that.

So we started out in these badass old school hummers, off-roaded for a bit, walked up some steep mud slides the hummer could handle with all of us inside, and finally arrived at the start of the trail. We crossed bamboo bridges, ducked under and hopped over giant fallen trees, fell in the mud, sweated a lot, but overall, I really enjoyed be out and active in nature.

(Side note: this picture is me drinking out of a bamboo cup that our guides made for us. The stalks are divided into sections with fresh rain water trapped inside and the cut down some of them so we could drink!) It was so calm and beautiful, with just the seemingly far-off sounds of rushing water behind you. When we got to the flower, I must admit I was a little disappointed – it was ugly. And I mean UG-LY. And since I know you all are dying to see what it looks like, and since the picture of me with the flower was even uglier than the flower itself, here’s one of Josh and the world’s ugliest, biggest flower (If you can’t tell from the picture it’s a burnt-orange-esque color with lots of weird tumor type things on it).

After trekking a little bit more we arrived at a beautiful, serene waterfall with built-in caves (almost the near-death of Jesse, but that’s another story). We got to swim and relax for a while in the cool water, a nice refreshing contrast to the sweaty heat of the hike. The boys found some caves, decided it would be a good idea to army-crawl up them, and wiggled their way onto the top of the waterfall.

Josh and Jeff jumped off into the rocky/water abyss below, miraculously surviving, but Brad and Jesse decided it would probably be a better idea to go back down through the cave. Ha. So Brad comes down, and all is fine, but when Jesse goes, he by accident knocks a small rock out of place, that in turn causes a giant boulder to fall on top of him, inside a tiny cave. Luckily he had the quick idea to try to go underneath the boulder and swim out before he got totally crushed. Since he didn’t come out for a while the boys got a little nervous, calling his name, but there was no response. Finally he emerged, scraped down his whole back, arms bleeding, but okay. I don’t think his heart stopped palpitating for a couple hours afterwards. Scary.
After Jesse’s near-death experience we hiked back down the mountain, got back into the hummers, and went to visit a nearby aborigine village. The village visit was really interesting, and we learned all about how the government and local NGO’s help provide them with education, healthcare, and housing. The coolest part though, was that we got to use the chief of the village’s blowgun to try to hit a faraway target (I did)! I lobby that we replace darts with blowguns, much more fun. We left the village, and stopped for lunch before visiting BOH tea plantation (short for best of the highlands). And it was beautiful!

Honestly the view of sprawling hills and valleys covered with lush fields of bright green tea leaves splashed here and there with the occasional house was just breath taking. The dark green hills reached up to the deep blue sky, and were settled over with a light blanket of fog; it looked surreal. We took a tour of the factory and got to see the entire process from tea leaves being picked right up until packaging. We went onto the veranda, and sat looking out over the hills while sipping mugs of hot, freshly brewed tea.

Then our guide Spencer took us all down to the fields themselves, talked a little bit about the plantation and the tea-producing industry in the Cameron Highlands, and let us wander around and explore for a bit before heading off once again. This time we drove to a butterfly farm some ways off the main road. It wasn’t really just a butterfly farm though. I got to see some GIANT bugs – giant leaf bugs, giant grasshoppers, giant rhinoceros beetles – weird stuff. I got to hold a gecko, a scorpion, a turtle, and some butterflies.

But that kind of stuff, especially the scorpion, gives me the heebie jeebies so I was itching to get out of there fast! We made our last stop of the day at a strawberry farm outside town at sunset. Unfortunately we couldn’t pick strawberries that late, but they had homemade strawberry ice cream we got to eat while watching the sunset, and it was really good! Being on Semester at Sea really has made me appreciate sunrise and sunset more and more. I have never been surrounded by such beautiful scenery all the time.

It truly is amazing, and I find myself thinking every day how lucky I am that I get to be living this on a day-to-day basis.
After an extremely long and full day of hiking, swimming, eating and sightseeing, we headed back to the lodge, grabbed dinner, enjoyed the bonfire for a little bit, and then went to bed. The next morning we woke up early for our drive back to Georgetown, and we prepared to leave Malaysia. It truly was a beautiful country with tons to offer. I enjoyed all the people, the places, the food (except the steamboat, which was the death of me), and the amazing scenery.
So we pull into Ho Chi Minh city tomorrow…how cool is that I can wake up and actually say “Gooooooooood morning Vietnam!”

Yeah, I’m that big of a dork.