Next Stop: Malaysia

May 24, 2008

Long time, no blog! I haven’t had much time for blogging lately, but I’m going to try to get caught up.

I managed to schedule my departure from Thailand for the day of Thai New Year, called Songkran. It’s held during the hottest part of the year, and the festivities include throwing water at everyone. There were people with 30 gallon trash cans full of water alongside the road, with bowls to throw water at passersby. Big water guns were popular, and some of the tourists had punched holes in the caps of their water bottles to make a sprinkler. It would have been fun if I hadn’t been on my way to catch an overnight train, but the prospect of having to sleep in wet clothes wasn’t too appealing. The taxi driver dropped me off right at the pier, and I thought I was going to make it without getting wet. Unfortunately, it was the pier for a different ferry than the one I was booked on, and I was pretty wet by the time I made it to the right pier. I stood on the deck of the ferry most of the way to the mainland, which was a two and a half hour trip, so I was pretty dry by the time I got to the train station. And the train was an hour late, which gave me more drying time.

The train got to the Thailand/Malaysia border at about 8:00am, and we all got off the train at the station to go through Malaysia immigration and customs. It was a pretty easy border crossing. Then it was back on the train for another few hours to the town of Butterworth to catch the ferry to Georgetown on the island of Penang. The train station, bus station, and ferry station were all together, so it was just a short walk to catch the ferry to Penang. The ferry trip cost about a dollar, and took 10 minutes or so. I had a hotel already booked, so I got a taxi right to the hotel.

I splurged a bit and spent $22 a night to get a place that had wireless internet access. It even had an elevator! I thought the sign in the lobby was funny. Durian is a very popular fruit in this area, but it’s notorious for being very smelly. I intended to try it, but it seemed like every time I saw a vendor with it, I was on my way somewhere and didn’t have time to stop.

I was a bit tired after the overnight train trip, so I just wandered around a bit in the area near the hotel, and found an ATM so I could get some Malaysian money. I was having shoe problems, so I didn’t want to walk too far. I’d left my sandals outside an Internet cafe on Ko Tao, and when I came out, one of the ankle straps was broken. I bought a cheap pair of flip-flops to use, but I’m prone to foot problems if I don’t have good arch support in my shoes, so the flip-flips don’t work for long walks. I had to put on the hiking shoes I’d only put on for airplane flights for about the last 3 months, and they were giving me a blister. I think my left foot has expanded after three months in sandals. It’s also possible I was a bit crabby from not sleeping well on the train the night before. I found an Indian restaurant and had a nice dinner, then went back to my room and played computer games.

In its heyday, Penang was a center for international trade. The British had an outpost here until after World War II. Malaysia is a very mixed country ethnically. There are large Chinese and Indian communities there, as well as the native Malaysians. I visited a house that had been built by a Chinese businessman who was known as the Rockefeller of the East. After his death it had been turned into apartments because the family had lost most of their money, and they weren’t able to sell it until his last son died. When it was sold, the new owners restored it and opened it up for tours, and to be a high-end guesthouse. The house was very beautiful, and had been used as the location for the movie Indochine with Catherine Deneuve. Many of the mosaics on the walls were very detailed, and were made from broken dishes. In this particular case, they had broken the dished to make the mosaics rather than using dishes that broke naturally.

The town wasn’t that big, but since it was so hot and humid I hired a cycle rickshaw to take me around town to visit some of the temples and sights. With the ethnic mix of people, there was also a mix of temples, and I visited Buddhist and Hindu temples. The Hindu temple was very similar to the temples in India, but the Buddhist temples were different from the ones in Thailand.

After a couple of days, I finally worked up the nerve to go to one of the Chinese restaurants. They were generally full of locals and most of them didn’t have English menus, and since I wasn’t familiar with the food, I was a bit leary about going in. Of course, once I went in to one, they pulled an English menu out from behind the counter, so it wasn’t a problem after all. Many people here speak at least some English. I order chicken with a strawberry sauce, which sounded interesting. It was like lemon chicken, only with strawberry instead of lemon. It was a bit too sweet for me, though. Just after I ordered, servers started coming around with dim sum carts. I got some egg rolls, but nothing else since I had the chicken coming. If I’d known it was a dim sum place, I would have just done that rather than ordering from the menu. I think they wanted me to order from the menu so I would know what I was getting. Dim sum is small servings of steamed dumplings and other dishes brought around on carts. You just select the dishes you want, and the servers mark what you’ve taken on a card on your table for you to take to the cashier when you’re ready to pay. Some of the dishes are a bit strange if you’re not familiar with dim sum.

I was going to take the bus up Penang Hill, but I couldn’t find the bus stop. My bus phobia had kicked in, so I didn’t really look that hard, though the city buses looked very clean and nice (and air-conditioned) when I saw them going by. The heat and humidity was also sapping my spirit of adventure. I checked out the shopping center, and found a nice used bookstore, and just bummed around a bit before catching the next overnight train to Kuala Lumpur. The Esplanade along the seafront was a very nice place to people watch and catch a cool breeze.