Savory memories from a Malaysian Ramadan

Another bustling day, doing this and that but leaving those these and the other them for tomorrow, and there’s another quick peanut butter & jelly sandwich on my proximal horizon. Wouldn’t it be nice to hop out for quick and delicious food that was interesting, healthy (or at least mostly natural), and cheap? Not fast food, cuz screw that garbage, but… And suddenly the these and those of my To-Do List will have to wait: I’m on mental vacation.

A bowl of spicy laksa soup in Penang, Malaysia

Back to Malaysia, the rampant epicureanism of Penang, with its sweet treats and savory curries, where I sat back with a satisfied sigh, then startled at an approaching obstacle: Ramadan. Eating while backpacking is haphazard at best, and even harder during Ramadan, when restaurants are either closed during the day or tacky to visit. But not in Malaysia, 60% Muslim and 100% food-lovers. Malaysian Ramadan comes with special food markets, for those who are not fasting, or are but want to be ready for iftar, the ceremonial fast-breaking evening meal, usually eaten communally.

In Georgetown I swam among bubbling pots of Mamak (Muslim Indian) food and Nyonya, which blends Malay and Chinese. I remember ayam percik, the marinated chicken grilling over coals in the humid air, chipped bowls of the spicy noodle soup laksa, and the ikan bakar heavily spiced fish I found down by one of the wharves.

In Tanah Rata I stumbled on a market bulging with spiced meat and baked treats, and gestured wordlessly at un-fried spring rolls, little pastry balls filled with sweet paste, and slabs of murtabak, a type of pancake normally stuffed with spiced meat, but I opted for a vegetarian version with potato, egg, and corn, if I remember correctly.

My vegetarian murtabak in Tanah Rata

Many hungry Muslims will buy this delicious food at the markets, but are not allowed to eat it until iftar, so it is pretty callous to dig in when they can’t. This wasn’t much of a problem in heavily touristed and multicultural Penang, and in the Cameron Highlands I could easily sneak off with my treats and find a place with a view of green growing things, but in workaday Kota Bharu I was tormented by the sights in my eyes, the hunger in my stomach, and the desire to not be a tourist a’hole in my brain.

I didn't get a photo of my Buddhist savior, but I did get his
neighbor's squid collection later that night.

Then I found the Buddhist. With smiling eyes over a laughing grin he beckoned me inside the spare restaurant behind his stall, pointed first at the Buddha statue, then at a chair, and finally showed me the little bowl of food that he’d been eating when I walked up. Decadent co-conspirators, we dug into our lunch of rendang daging, a spicy beef dish with ginger, garlic, chilies, and turmeric among the mystery curry mixture. He served it over rice, which he cooked in a woven lattice of palm leaves.

That’s the danger of education via travel: your adjusted perspective will sometimes remind you of how incredibly good you have it… And sometimes it will make a perfectly good PbJ look like a mouthful of blah. I’ll take that double edged sword, as often and as wholeheartedly as I can.

But I’ll meet you at the market.

How short (and long) a year can be.

It's hard to believe it was a year ago I was playing with pincers on my birthday. I'm curious to see what sort of day will start the next year...

Last year's beginning:
http://vagabondurges.com/2013/07/25/is-that-a-good-start-or-a-bad-one-jungle-birthday-part-2/

Care for a cup of snake-infested tea?

I have a cold. I am not a fan.

Congestion in my lungs, congestion in my head. I should not be asked to do anything today, nor tomorrow nor the next day. Okay, it’s a man cold, I’m whining, but still. I just want to read and drink tea.

Tea plantation near Ella, Sri Lanka

Tea...

My last trip wandered through two tea producing highlands, the first in Sri Lanka, the second in Malaysia. Both were cool in comparison to the boiling oxygen of the nearby lowlands, but were perfectly suited to a shorts-&-sandals kid from California. Both spanned curving hills with winding lines of tea shrubs like fingerprint whorls, endless vistas of fields, and simple worker housing below large white processing plants.

A single tea bush (apparently) produces 3,000 harvestable leaves annually, which is a lot of work to generate a single pound of tea. (Green and black tea comes from the same plant, just harvested at different stages and processed a little differently.)

Chirlden of a tea plantation in the Sri Lankan highlands

The tea fields of Sri Lanka stood silent and untended for miles, disturbed only by the rambunctious passage of my train, whose insatiable metal arhythmic dance would occasionally disturb or distract a small group of women and children out in the fields, working a job notorious for its poor wages.

The main difference in Malaysia was that I saw only men working the fields. I walked through a few miles of fields on my way to a processing facility, saw men carrying big bags of leaves on rounded shoulders, hooking other bags onto ziplines that carried them down to end in an explosion of leaves at the bottom, and sorting the verdant wreckage in tall piles on the pavement.

Near the zipline's end (background), Malaysia

Anyone who was in the Malaysian fields wore thick yellow rain boots, despite the clear blue skies and absence of mud, I suspect as protection again the venomous snakes who infest the fields.

I have no experience with a life like theirs.

My earliest memories include my British grandmother asking if I would like a cup of tea. I have had a few million cups of it in my life, but never spent a day in the life of a harvester. There’s something wrong there. Why is it only now that I’m back that I realize I should have done something about that?

I’ll have to fly back and change that. As soon as this damn cold goes away.

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!