Sweet, sweet Laksa

Langkawi :: Malaysia

Why bicycles are for chumps.

Places: Penang & Langkawi.

Coolest thing I did: Slid down waterfalls on my bum, like they were waterslides.

(un)Coolest thing I didn´t know: Beer costs more money in most of Malaysia than it does in London. That's amazing in a country where you can get a bowl of noodles for about 1 quid.

I'll start with Penang, as it wasn't at all what I expected. I looked at the map and saw it was an island, so expected all the usual island stuff, like beaches and climbing mountains to look at beaches. What I found instead was a heaving multicultural city in Georgetown and very scary roads to ride down on a bicycle. You see, I had the crazy idea that because the British government have my drivers license that I should hire a push bike and ride up to the Ki Lok Si Temple, which is up the top of a fairly steep hill. The problem is that the roads are all set up for multiple lanes of traffic and the spaces on the edge are controlled mostly by mopeds who have a suspect grip on the road rules. It took at times 15 mins to cross a road if I wanted to go the other direction and quite often I was having to cross things that would have been considered freeways at home.

Still, the ride was worth it in the end, as the Ki Lok Si Temple is an amazing Buddhist shrine in what is pretty much an Islamic country, with all the types of Buddhas represented, one even as a gift from the King of Thailand. It's also a work in progress, with the rich Chinese of Penang contributing money to build a massive shrine to the goddess of mercy, Kuan Yin. I'm not sure where goddesses fit into the whole Buddhist thing, but it was an impressive statue none the less, even if there is scaffolding all around it to allow the building of the pagoda around her/it. I also liked the statues of all the animals in the Chinese horoscope, but my picture next to the snake (my year) didn't come out very well. Luckily I think all that stuff is a load of crap anyway.

I also rode up to the funicular that goes up Penang Hill only to find it closed for Ramadan. I've since found most times I've wanted to go up some ski field form of transport (chairlifts, cable cars, etc...) it's been closed for Ramadan. I've as yet not gone up any hills in Malaysia as a result.

The city of Georgetown itself was a happy revelation. It has thriving Chinese, Indian and Muslim Malay communities and as a result the food is awesome. I'd have rice for breakfast, Indian for lunch and maybe Malay for dinner. They do a fish Laksa based on a Tamarind paste that is sweet and very, very tasty. The food was probably the highlight of the place, but it's a very livable place to stay for a few days anyway. It only really takes a morning to walk around and look at all the colonial relics the Brits left and then you've got time to wander around Chinese market stall for regular snacking, past Bollywood video stalls that smell like incense and listen to the constant arguments of hungry Muslim money changers passing the time outside their shops. It's full of life and decaying old trading houses inter sped with temples from all the faiths.

It was important to the Brits, as it was their first toehold on the Malacca Straight, probably the most important natural sea lane in the world. It would take them 100 years to take control of Melaka itself and to found Singapore so for a long time Penang was top dog. The governors of the place were also some of the world's early free trade enthusiasts, putting into practice some of the ideas of some enlightened Scots and allowing people from all over Asia to come and do business. The result was the ethnic mix that now prevails and the mostly happy co-existence of various incompatible faiths all in one small island. Seeing as they were all there for commerce anyway, it pointed the way things were going, and helped choke off the Portuguese and Dutch influence in the area for good, both of whom were avowed monopolists.

I didn't actually realise it, but Georgetown was founded about the same time as Sydney, and Singapore came much later. I'd just assumed they were older than Australia. I'd just assume everywhere was older than Australia.

So I took a fairly pleasant ferry ride directly to Langkawi, which really is a beach island. People come here direct from Europe just to lie on the beach and where I'm staying, Patai Cenang is the most built up at all. Which isn't saying much, as it seem quiet, but I'm thinking that's the result of this being the low season and the tail end of Ramadan. On the plus side, it's a duty free zone, meaning beer costs the same as it did in Indonesia, which is rare in Malaysia. I've got a feeling that when I get to KL there won't be massive party nights out at these prices.

I again decided that the best way to see other parts of the island was to hire a bicycle. I rode to the much smaller beach of Patai Kok and then onto some waterfalls that double as waterslides up in the hills above it. Not only was it a nearly 40km round trip in the heat, but the hills were constant and steep once you got half way there. There was also the rather annoyingly long ride around the airport runway, usually with a plane screaming in overhead every couple of minutes. Still, it was nice to get a white sand beach to myself, as in the couple of hours I was there the only other people to show up were construction workers coming in to eat lunch watching the water.

I'm writing this instead of being out on a boat around the islands today because it's bucketing down with rain at the moment. I was all ready to go this morning when the heavens opened and they said we'd probably end up at the bottom of the ocean if we decided to go out in that. I've decided to cut across the peninsula to the Perhentian islands on the east coast (because I haven't blown enough money on diving yet apparently) on the night bus tomorrow night, so I may be able to do it in the morning if there's time.

Every which way but loose

Penang :: Malaysia

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Places: Jakarta, Medan, Bukit Lawang & Penang.

Coolest thing I did: Ate several meals under the gaze of hungry primates.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Orangutan means "people of the forest" in Indonesian/Malaysian.

In total I was in Jakarta for little over 24 hours, so I don't think I got a proper feel for the place. What I did see led me to believe that, like Surabaya it's an Asian 3rd world city with all the attendant inequality that goes with it, sucking up rural immigrants into the place in hope of the poverty of the surrounding countryside. It's big, loud and smells terrible most of the time. It's probably not as big or extreme as say Bangkok but it's a microcosm of what's going on in the world over in the poor world.

I didn't get a feel for the scale of the place until I was on my way out, and as the airport bus rolls onto the overhead freeway out of town you can see miles of shabby lean-tos and shanties punctuated by the occasional mosque leading high-rise office blocks and hotels in the distance. You see commuter trains from the nearby villages and suburbs so full that there's people clinging to the roof while ducking overhead power lines. The Dutch, being the Dutch, left canals everywhere but the murky, grey, garbage filled water can only truly be appreciated at ground level, where you get the olfactory hit of an open sewer. The remains of old Batavia, the Dutch East Indies trading capital is in ruins, only one square of immaculately kept buildings remains for the tourists and outside the ultra swanky Batavia Cafe all that remains is old colonial buildings turned into motor mechanics and rice wholesalers. It's a city that buried it's past under concrete and dirt a long time ago.

Having said that, it's got an energy that's just not present anywhere else in Indonesia. At night the streets bloom with food stalls, especially now that most of the population is having it's first meal at sunset. Trendy looking young kids are hanging out pretty much everywhere, lounging on traffic islands or blasting past you on their motor scooters. People aren't so interested in tourists here, you don't get the touts chasing you nearly as much as in Yogya, as it seems like everyone's got better things to do.

The starkest contrast can be seen as you move away from the water, towards the high rise hotels, office blocks and shopping centres to the south. Walking through these immaculate white marble shops with all the luxury brands of the world on display I felt a bit out of place, unshaven in my dirty clothes and thongs, as the sparse weekday crowds seem to be all dressed like they've shopped there already. I definitely caught shop attendants openly staring, wondering what the hell I was doing there. The doormen didn't hold the doors open for me like they did everyone else better dressed. I'd say had I not been white I'd not have even been admitted entry. It's amazing that in a city where you can get a bowl of noodles on the street for 50 cents (and I imagine I'm getting ripped off on those!) you can still buy a handbag for a thousand bucks.

So I flew out of Java into steamy Sumatra with one goal in mind, to see Orangutans in the wild. After a short flight, a taxi ride and then 4 hours on a bus along an 80km road that seems to resist all attempts to pave it (potholes the size of ponds, I swear) I arrived in the beautifully located Bukit Lawang. It's a tiny village on the elbow of a white water river with jungle encased hills surrounding it on all sides. It apparently used to be bigger but there was a flash flood in 2004 (unrelated to the Tsunami) that wiped out most of the town and they've only been able to rebuild as quickly as they earn tourist dollars. It's remoteness means that's been hard, and the ruins of old hotels and bungalows still line the flood plain below the town.

The Orangutans live in a national park just north of the town and are said to number in the low 500s at this moment. The primates range from completely tame to completely wild, depending on where they were born and how much human interaction they've had. There's a feeding platform that is used to dole out extra nutrition to pregnant or nursing Orangutans as the area in the national park isn't quite large enough to sustain a wild population as big as it has. This means there is a whole load of semi-wild creatures roaming the place who are quite used to handouts from human being that happen to pass by. Some people complain about this but I'd see it as a much better option that extinction, which was on the cards before they started trying to rehabilitate the population in the 1970s, due to shrinking habitats brought on by unrepentant logging.

I ended up taking a 2 day combination trek, camping and rafting trip out to see the Orangutans deeper into the national park, as the idea of seeing them at the feeding platform was a bit too zoo-like for my tastes. It wasn't exactly easy going, lots of climbing up muddy slopes holding onto vines or sliding down loose rock faces but it was loads of fun. The humidity was 100+ so it only takes you about 30 mins to end up drenched in your own sweat and you remain that way pretty much all day. The guide joked we'd all lose 5 kg but I reckon you could have probably wrung 3 of those out of my shirt by the end of the day.

In the morning we saw long-tailed macaques, or little grey monkeys, who also see quite taken by human handouts. They travel in packs with entire families and aren't too worried about people being 1 metre from them as they sit there fishing through each others heads for bugs to eat. They do all the climbing, jumping and somersaulting that monkeys are supposed to do, so they were very entertaining to watch. However, by lunchtime we hadn't seen any of the orange primates the place was famous for and the guides were starting to get a bit worried.

Then, we bumped into April. A female in her 30s, April was pretty keen to see us, a big ball of soft orange fir with gangly arms and legs crashing through the forest looking for something to eat. I'm amazed at how their feet have thumbs and they quite often hold a banana spare in one foot while the concentrate on eating another one with their hands. They're also quite sneaky, as one of the Dutch girls on our trip found out. She'd been having her picture taken in front while April was giving little sideways glances to her backpack. April sprung very quickly into action, grabbing a thong (flip-flop for you non-Aussies, not the other kind) with a mouth and two hands that was strapped to the pack. Some quick yelling from the guides managed to get her away, but the Dutch girl got some Orangutan teeth marks and saliva on a thong as a souvenir. They're not only quick, but strong too.

After that, it was Orangutans every time we stopped. We made two attempts at lunch because as soon as we opened up our rice parcels of nasi goering an Orangutan would come crashing down through the trees looking for a bit. We saw a nursing mother, a couple and another single female over our next two meals, one even coming to watch us eat breakfast at camp. After a while you forgot they were even there, the guides being on the guard while we ate, handing out bananas if the orange furballs got a little too close. Watching them, despite all the documentaries and zoos I've seen them in before, you can't help but be amazed by just how human some of the traits displayed are.

We rafted back to the village the next day on some inner tubes and then spent the next afternoon watching walls of water fall from the sky. This being the tropics the weather doesn't always follow the wet/dry seasons like it's supposed to and I was kind of glad we got all our walking done the day before. Climbing some of those muddy hills with gushing torrents of water coming the other way wouldn't be much fun.

So another 4 hour bus ride and taxi through Medan (which didn't look like all that much of a town) I bought myself a plane ticket and got myself into Penang in Malaysia 24 hours before my Indonesian tourist visa expired. First impressions of the place is the contrast couldn't be more stark to Indo, but then again I do know that Penang has a thriving high tech industry so perhaps it's not indicative of the rest of the country. Still, it's nice to be in a place where the buses work.