Pics of my newest candidate for Favorite City: Kuala Lumpur

Normally a big building strikes me as just
ridiculous, in a Freudian way, but I
liked the Petronas Towers. Probably
the closest I'll ever come to liking
an oil company.

I stayed on Ko Phi Phi for two full days, three nights...and that island was dreadful.

Well, it would have been great when I was 18-23, then I would have fit in (a little bit) better with the hordes of youngsters trying to get drunk and laid, but now, at the ripe old age of older-than-that, it was booooring. A gorgeous island now utterly devoid of substance, conversation, or thought, as far as I could tell.

Basically it was paradise...before Tourism ate it. And crapped it back out again, in time for the drunken dung beetles to enjoy the nightly fire dancing (which in itself was fantastic). I would have been lost if I hadn't met Hector, a Nicaraguan lad of great stories, jolly cheer, and a reliable willingness to ride the mechanical bull. (Because they had one of those, oy vey.)

But that's how I like to travel, at least two full days in each spot, more if it's great (see: Budapest, Mindo, Pokhara) and less if it blows (see: oh I could never name names, but I might point out that I spent less than 24 hours in Singapore).

The street food stall where I finished my birthday, choosing
various beasts and watching them grill them up for me.
The duck was the best. Lordie that was tasty.

But all of a sudden, I find myself rushing. Only two nights in Kuala Lampur, one in Melaka, and one in Singapore. Last night was one in Bangkok, and in a few hours I fly to Hong Kong for just two full days. Because to my surprise, I am heading back to the US for a bit. Only a minimal idea for how long

I am looking forward to Hong Kong, but before I head there, I want to take a moment to pay a little homage to my newest candidate for Favorite City: Kuala Lampur.

Merdeka Square, the traditional heart of the city, where
Malaysian independence was declared in 1957. The
Petronas Towers in the distance. These guys were hilarious.

Kuala Lampur is absolutely beautiful. I went for a short stroll one night that stretched happily on and on until I wondered at the empty streets and got back to my room to find it was 1:00 AM.

Looking at the pictures on my tiny screen I was in love, seeing them now...not so much. But in their place, a warm Ramadan night in Malaysia, in the right mood, loving the vagabond flow, it was beauty in my eyes.

Is that a good start or a bad one? Jungle birthday Part 2.

I'll just come out and say it: I was wearing flip flops. Old ones. This may surprise you, given that I was hiking six hours each way to spend the night in the muddy equatorial rainforest of Taman Negara in Malaysia, but I had two reasons.

Warning sign as you leave the boardwalks of the
easy tourist area for the real jungle.

First, previous experience with leeches showed that flip flops allow the best access for removal of the little bloodsucking bastards.

Second, they were pretty much my only option after I retired my (somewhat notorious) oversized sandals after they became Grade A Disease Vectors in Myanmar (don't ask).

They worked well for the first 4 hours on Day One, then their age became apparent, as the anchoring thong in the front popped out with increasing frequency. I bought the things two years ago in Nepal, and they had served me well, but in hindsight, for perhaps too long.

I didn't mind sticking the little plastic plug back in, it was the fact that doing so meant stopping, which gave a much longer opportunity to the vampirous tube-beasts who were swarming around, doing their little head-waving leech aerobics as they smelled the approach of something tasty.

Have you ever seen them do this? It would be cute if it wasn't so sinister. They look like tiny hyperactive Ray Charles impersonators...who feed on your blood.

There was time to stop and admire the scenery on Day One

Since leeches don't spread any diseases or do any real harm, my plan had been to just let them do their thing and drop off when they were done. How very Buddhist of me.

Yeah, no. That plan lasted until I saw the first one squirming out from my ankle, where it had attached and bitten through the skin. But the leeches weren't the worst thing.

This was the world's oldest rainforest, where intense competition has driven evolution for 130 million years (the area is just slightly above the equator, so even the ice ages didn't disrupt things). What do you think rules this forest?

Elephants, monkeys, or tigers? Only on the postcards. All of these are reportedly found in the park, but to my eye it was clear who dominates this dense world where a single hectare holds 14,000 plant species, 200 mammals, and 240 types of trees.

One of the construction workers
alongside the normal workers

Ants rule this place. Mean ones.

I stopped to take a picture of the first river of tiny black bodies, but by the tenth I was just stepping over the glossy stream. It was when I got careless that I learned more about them. To my disappointment I have been unable to find exactly what the little buggers were (hell, maybe they were termites!) so I'm going to make some shit up that makes sense to me.

There were tiny workers in superhighways half a dozen lanes wide and stretching for unbelievably long distances, which I learned when they commandeered a guide rope left to help me climb a steep slope.

Don't grab that rope.

Don't grab that rope

Then there were the construction workers, unbelievably larger than the workers. At first I thought these were soldiers, and feared them mightily, but now I suspect their job is to clear fallen leaves and sticks that obstruct the path. They seemed to pace the edge of the stream, and they're not the soldiers because those, I definitely met.

The soldiers. Assholes! I took off my sandal the first night to find four or five ants stuck to its edges, legs waving furiously. Curious. They were much larger than the workers, but not nearly as big as the construction workers. It took me a minute to figure it out.

They'd bitten my sandal, and they weren't letting go. I flicked at them. Brushed at them. Still there. I flicked harder and the bodies fell away...but the head stayed put, anchored into my thin sole with insectile tenacity.

So when my sandals would come off anywhere near an ant stream? (And everywhere is near an ant stream.) It hurt. They're good at getting you right in the tender spot on the bottom of the arch too. You have to lift your foot and rip them off, sometimes coming back for the head.

I wasn't enjoying this process much as I started walking through the mud. Then I reached a nice clearing by the river. It was pretty...and I definitely hadn't passed it on the way out.

Crap.

I backtracked, took another path and came to a wide shallow river...that I also did not cross the first day.

My sandals had given up completely and the thong was coming out every couple steps in the sucking mud, so I had to just take them off and go barefoot. In the jungle. Where billions of members of two particular species were very ready to go right through my skin, and I didn't know what else.

Someone left these bloody footprints in the hide
after their own meeting with the leeches

I backtracked. Bled. Sweated, stepped, and slipped. And bled some more.

Getting lost in the jungle sucks. Especially during the daily Leech Feeding, which is 24 hours long.

The girls and the German were long gone, so I was very much on my own, and sound just doesn't travel in vegetation that thick anyway.

I tried another path and ended up at the stream again, mirrored by tiny red seeps from my feet. I considered walking out via the water, trusting it would lead to the main river, but if that didn't work then I'd have a hell of a time finding where to start looking for trails again.

I turned back again and started jogging to give the biters as little chance as possible. Left hand on my shoulder bag, bulky with camera, journal, long pants and raincape thing, my right held the quickly-decaying plastic bag that held the remnants of my food, and my elbow pressed the water bottle pressed against my side.

When I slipped down a slope it gave the leeches a chance to climb all over me, but I think I escaped unscathed. I kept running. I was pouring sweat, feeling incredibly stupid, and lost in the jungle on my birthday.

Is that a good omen or a bad one? Whatever it is, I decided “Screw this, I'm taking the boat.”

I finally found the right path, jogged down it, and half an hour later reached the river at Kuala Trenggan, but instead of a village I found abandoned houses with broken windows. Not stopping to think about what would happen if it was totally deserted and I had to start the six hour trek back, I headed to the water...

Where I found the girls. They were surprised to see me. Literally within a minute or two the boat showed up. If I hadn't jogged, had gotten lost once more or fallen a few more times, I would have missed it and there was no way to call for another. But I made it.

THAT, I'll take as a positive omen for the year ahead.

Just your average jungle birthday

I'm not sure when midnight snuck by in the near-perfect darkness to officially begin my birthday, but I'm guessing it had already started when I got up, back sore from the bare wood planks of my bunk, to chase the cute little rodent out of our food bag.

I listened to the multi-layered cacophony of insects outside the large wooden room, knowing we were surrounded by them in our hide, about 30 feet up into the canopy of Taman Negara in Malaysia, the world's oldest rainforest. A 130 million year old forest has a way of putting a human lifespan into perspective.

Knowing it was pointless, my eyes rolled over in the direction where I'd seen the massive spider before going to bed. As always in jungles, it was the size of my open hand, and hairy, but this one was interesting since three of its legs were skinnier and shinier.

Arne-the-German and I agreed that it had probably lost the legs somehow and was growing new ones. Amazing little undoubtedly venomous beastie. After a day spent hopping leeches and various skittering things, the backs of my eyelids were a montage of insectile legs, half-seen as they skittered about.

But since I was awake now anyway, I used Arne's bizarrely powerful flashlight to look for critters in the semi-open space in front of the hide. A few days ago some bird watchers saw a tapir at 3:00 AM.

But no eyes glittered back at me, just fireflies drooping around the thick foliage, like stars on listless vacation from their nightly performance, so I lay back down on the bird-poop-spotted boards. My head on the meagre pillow of my rolled up shirt, I could feel the gap in the boards against the back of my head.

It was silly of me to wait for the second rodent visit to move the food bag. This time Arne woke up, sitting half upright on his luxurious 1 cm mat, to look into the eyes of the little fella, about two feet away from him.

“Vas is das?” You only speak your mother tongue when you're that sleepy.

His question woke the two English girls on the other side of the small room. “What's going on?” The nervous one asked.

“Nothing. Just a little mouse. No worries.” I reassured them. “It's all good.”

Apparently I was soothing enough, because even the twitchy one went back to sleep until morning, when we shared the remnants of our backpacker buffet for breakfast. My peanuts were a big hit again, both roasted and spicy-something coated.

We avoided the crackers, given how thirsty they make you and the fact that they were drinking shallow-creek water, which was pretty murky even after purification and clarification tablets. I was more worried about purifying the healthy bacteria right out of my system, so stuck to the water I brought.

We decided the two styrofoam containers of noodles that the girls brought were no longer a safe bet at their ripe old age of 24 warmly humid hours.
We were each taking different routes back to civilization, so we fared each other well and set off.

Just a nice easy walk back to town now...

The kind of thing you tell everyone

As soon as the pale child approaching on the jungle path saw me he wanted to know “parlez vous francais?”

As I have since my mother taught me the phrase when I was 7, I answered, “Non, je ne parle pas francais,” and added the newer “je comprends un petit peu...” I want to say that I understand a bit because I speak Spanish, but I've never asked how to say the second part of that. My brain, trying to be helpful, falls back to Dutch, but I don't think “want ik sprek spaans” would help this kid much.

But he got the point. And he looked disappointed about it. But he had something to say, and wasn't going to be put off so easily.

“You 'ave 'ad ze...” he made a wriggling, creeping, crawling, inch worm sort of motion with his finger. I was pretty sure what he meant.

“Leeches?” I offered.

Triumph lit his face. “Oui! You 'ave 'ad ze leeches?”

I looked down at my feet, which had been bare for the past couple hours, past few miles. “Not yet.”

The triumph blossomed yet further as he pointed a small pale finger at his older sister. “She 'as!”

Leeches are like that. They're the sort of thing you immediately want to tell everyone about, unless maybe you're an adolescent and they were on you, then they (as everything on Earth) are a potential source of embarrassment.

I am not an adolescent (a fact for which I give thanks daily) so I will let you know in a couple days what I find. Because tomorrow morning I am taking the “jungle train” from Kota Bharu down through most of peninsular Malaysia to the world's oldest rainforest, at Taman Negara.

The rumors speak of deep dark rainforest, hides in the jungle where you sleep among the beasts, and, most of all, leeches. It seems to be a given that visitors will feed the little creepers, and the only question is whether your hide is one of the ones that gets overrun with them at night or not.

So that should be fun.

And if I do get them, there's always the response I gave to the little French boy and his sister. She was showing a perfect adolescent blend of irritation at her little brother and embarrassment at his revelation, until I replied “I think that means you get dessert tonight.”

Her face cleared with a shy smile, while her little brother's showed crestfallen shock. I hope she got her ice cream.

I know I will!

Tiger Temple...oh THAT's it.

I counted 211 steps down from the top of the kitschy Tiger Temple. With a spackling of bird crap about every other flight of stairs, 8 steps per flight, that's roughly 13 crap zones. Charming temple. Really.

But the golden pagodas peaking over the edge of the dramatic cliff far overhead promised something altogether more interesting waited up there.

The sign at the bottom said there were 1,237 stairs. Now you're talking.

It was not nearly as long as Adam'sPeak in Sri Lanka, but was surprisingly steep. I arrived at the top completely soaked in sweat, and much happier than I'd been at the first kitschy “temple.”

THIS was a view. The landscape of southern Thailand is incredible, with green jungle washing up and onto epic karst eruptions of pure geologic artistry. Mother Earth is a sculptor.

Add a clean fresh breeze blowing the sweat off your back, just enough raindrops to make it interesting, and a few gold Buddha statues abiding it all with perfect equanimity, and you've earned the price of the sŏrngtăaou.

I found two young English parents with a precocious little girl who appreciated my offer to take their picture. The parents appreciated it at least, the little one just wanted to run up and down the stairs to the altar that looked out over the green landscape.

“Mummy, I want to show you sumfing!”

Back at the bottom I found Wat Tam Seua, “Tiger Cave”, which gives the tiger name to the area due to a rock formation that looks like a tiger's claw, or, depending on which site you read, they used to keep a tiger in the cave at the back. Given the tiny size of the cave, I hope it was the rock formation.

There's no tiger in there now, but there is an unearthly emerald-green Buddha.

I was digging into a plate of sticky pad thai at a stall outside when the sŏrngtăaou driver back to Krabi appeared. “How much you pay?” I told him. He sort of walked away. Does that mean “no”?

Whatever. It was a swell day, so I strolled out to the road with a song on my lips and started stepping through the 8 km to Krabi. The clouds were threatening rain as usual, but humans are remarkably waterproof, my trusty Timbuktu bag is as well, and after growing up with cold California rain conceived in Alaska, the warmth of a monsoon shower feels more like a reward than a tribulation.

Motorbikes sped past with theatrical puttering, and the breeze was fresh. I felt good, and the songs just kept getting better. Feeling the flow.

A guy just climbing on the motorcycle in his front yard asked where I was going.

“Krabi” I told him. He nodded, pointed at the clouds and gestured at the back of his bike.

I'm developing a love of motorcycles, and I was already smiling when we approached the first red light. I was expecting to stop among the little flock of puttering moto's in front, but oh no, not us.

He gunned the engine and we were up on the sidewalk, over some debris, thump back onto the road and across four lanes of traffic, then cut the far corner of the intersection and along we went down the road, free as the birds that crap all over the kitschy temple.

At the next red we didn't even slow, just a casual head turn to look as we flew through it.

Now THIS was worth the price of admission! Cute kitsch temple, great hike, amazing view, now this ride? The day just kept getting better!

Thank you, random dude! I'm sorry I couldn't thank you more than “Kop kun kap! Thai people...very good!” but you seemed to understand.

Tiger Temple...is that it?

I felt like a jerk even as I asked the question.

“How do I get to 'Tiger Temple' and is it worth it?”

I didn't mean to sound like that guy. The one who is really saying “I've, like, traveled so much that, like, temples and stuff just don't impress me any more. I'm THAT worldly. It has to be really amazing to be worth my time.”

I meant “Is it something 'real' or an amusement-parky tourist trap for people like me whose day-tours are cancelled by bad weather and find themselves with a day to burn in Krabi, Thailand?”

That's barely better. But Thailand...has had a lot of tourism.

The grungy guesthouse owner (grungy guesthouse that is, the owner looked like he showers sometimes) replied that it was definitely worth it, so I took the shared pick-up taxi/truck (called a sŏrngtăaou in Thailand) to a large gold dome with a skeletal structure crouching above it in unfinished concrete that looked more like a municipal water tower than a temple. Or maybe the secondary entrance to a baseball park built in the early 1980s.

At the bottom were two large tiger statues that would fit in just fine outside a carnival ride, bubble gum stuck to the bottoms of their “menacing” claws, and rings on their backs from where people set down their slushies.

Oh dear. It's worse than I feared.

The tigers were guarding a room with a nun so bored she was basically sleeping, and at least a dozen donation boxes. Subtle.

Then the Russians arrived. That helped a bit. The last couple years have shown the Russians to be the Next Big Wave. The previous wave was bed bugs.

Russian tourists haven't yet learned that you don't have to take a picture with your head in the tiger's mouth. At a temple. (I admit the likely existence of hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures of Westerners doing the exact same thing. But come one....they're Russian. They're so much fun to give a hard time.)

I tried to flirt with one, just because how great would THAT be? But she could only giggle and say “I...English no.”

I climbed to the top past innumerable scatterings of bird shit and stagnant puddles gathering on the poorly-graded concrete steps.

Halfway there were some little bells. That was kinda pretty. (Sigh.)

I kept expecting to hear “The starting lineup for the visiting Cleveland Indians...” but there was only wind and the faint metal taps of the bells now below me. 

At the top was an altar in a dreary room of puddles, bat squeaks, and pigeon shit (which were actually interesting ambiance after so many brightly lit temples covered in gaudy gold). Stacks of rebar lay around, rusting away without ever being installed. There's something so tragic about that, no?

I wrote my little message in the dust. There was plenty of space beside the two Spaniards who quieren each other very much.

Time to go home I guess.

Then I noticed the peeking golden glints of a temple on top of the hill high overhead, and I could just see steep flights of stairs ascending the sheer cliffside. Ohhhhh. Now you're talking!

I headed that way...

My new old travel companions

**I still recommend you try the wordpress version of the blog...you can subscribe to email updates there and blogspot strikes me as inferior, lower ranked, and an asset of the Bealzebub Corporation, NLC (No Liability Corporation)**

I was insanely lucky that traveling with K was not only doable, but actually an upgrade. It's a rare thing to find a travel partner who doesn't drive you crazy. On this trip I've had a very different partner. I just don't understand him sometimes! At first he was so undemanding, taking whatever came along without any complaints. "It's so hot, I'm just going to relax, you choose what we do" he'd say.

We'd have breakfast, then exist in companionable silence all day until dinner. Through Turkey, Israel, and most of Sri Lanka, that was how we worked.

What changed? I don't know. But in Myanmar, suddenly two meals a day isn't enough, and he's grumbling for lunch despite the stifling heat.

Sometimes it's hard to travel with one's stomach.

The first day in Bagan, 250 degrees, and he wants lunch. Are you crazy? But he was petulantly persistent, so we got back on the bike we'd rented for the day and pedaled down to the market in search of street food.

Tarps shaded the narrow alleys where goods cluttered tables and hung on strings in air so still and hot it seemed ready to preserve our bodies for future generations. There were stalls for tourists and stalls for locals, but no customers of either type. Women slept in low sling chairs with their fans over their faces, squatted behind stacks of spices and chili peppers, or sat at old metal sewing machines, no mistakes nor pauses in the rhythmic pumping of their bare brown feet on the platform foot pedals.

Burmese people don't seem to eat lunch though, so there were no wood fires lit below the woks which had cooked so many meals for me. A helpful lady accepted that I didn't need another pair of shoes and pointed me towards the restaurant. Inside, the tables and chairs were pushed to the sides so the dozen bare-chested men in skirt-like longyi could play some sort of gambling game on the ground.

They were startled to see me. No food, sorry. Try next door.

Next door looked empty, but a woman in the back doorway gestured me forward into the covered kitchen area at the back. It felt like a long-term campsite, rays of sun coming through the high roof of rough boards onto the dirt floor far below, where half a dozen women were preparing for the night, shredding carrots, scrubbing pans, and cleaning out the fire pits. They were startled to see me too, but agreed to my "food?" gesture with nods and an inviting hand sweep to an empty table.
I sat. They looked at me. I looked back, smiled. They smiled. I kept sitting. They kept looking. We smiled some more.

The elderly matron snapped something in Burmese and the youngest girl dragged over a big stand fan and set it blowing straight at me. I was ready to propose marriage. Either one, I didn't care. I'll take the fan as a dowry.

A woman over by the sink started holding up produce, and my smile was largest for the tomato. Tomato salad it is.

But they weren't going to let me off that easy. The salad came, tasty with a tangy sauce and soft noodles. And a plate of rice. A bowl of cucumber pieces, then one of raw cabbage bites. They love their fish sauce in Myanmar, so next was a bowl of super-fishy soup. Then a super-fishy paste. Then another fishy sauce. Fish sauce dishes smell like the gutter outside the fish market at closing time, and taste worse. I tried a bit of the sauce on some cabbage and barely hid my gag. What now?

Smile at the cook. She smiles back. Set the fish sauces slightly aside. Hope they believe the explanation that it's too hot out to eat soup. Eat the salad, cucumber, and cabbage. As always, evaluate the meal in terms of what a certain vegetarian could eat.

The stomach was feeling appeased after the tomato salad, but apparently my thoughts are a bad influence, and he was complaining again at the end.

Apparently I'm traveling with a stomach and a brain. We all got along better before.