Malaysia Travelogue

January 18, 2003 - 2:00 pm - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - 33 C and Mostly Cloudy

(Tony) We came to Kuala Lumpur 3 days ago in a speedy and comfortable bus. It was a shame to leave the comforts of Singapore, as being there is similar to being back in Canada, only cleaner and safer. That said, Malaysia (or specifically, Kuala Lumpur) is a lot more modernized than I had thought. This city is not as clean as Singapore (not many places are), and Malaysia is still very clean. There are also numerous multi-story buildings, a monorail, a light rail transit system, and even public buses with air conditioning! The downtown area was redone and now the KLCC encompasses many new high rises (both residential and commercial), a large green space complete with many fountains and the Petronas Towers (more on them later). This green space is a great place to spend an afternoon relaxing, people watching and resting weary feet. That's not even mentioning the view of the Towers from there!

Our first morning here consisted of breakfast at McDonald's, where Krista tried the "Burbur Ayam," which is a rice porridge with green onions, sesame oil and some shredded chicken on top. It's always interesting to see the various local specialties that McDonald's has in various countries (not that I am a big fan of McDonald's generally - except for the washrooms). After that, we headed to the Petronas Towers. Since we have stayed in the downtown area, we walked to the Towers. This gave us a great view of the Towers as we made our way closer and closer. The buildings around the Petronas Towers are just over half as tall, the Towers seem even larger than they are because of this. The shape of the Towers is also adds to the immpressiveness of the structure. Each tower is in the shape of two overlapping squares to make an 8 pointed star, and at the inner points of the star, a semi-circle reaches out to make more floor space. Both the eight sided star and the circle are common elements in Islamic architecture. The stainless steel panelling covering the towers combines well with the shape to give the building a very futuristic appearance. The towers reach a total height of 452 m, and a bridge just under half way up connects the two towers. Free passes allowed us to get into the connecting bridge for a grand view of the city. Kuala Lumpur, as most others, sprawls as far as it can and hills all around barely contain it. In the distance, high rise buildings can be seen built on the lower sections of the hills, and limestone cliffs can be seen to the North of the city (more on those later). Even with all the high rises and urban sprawl there is a lot of greenery around the city, and it's great to see palm trees all over when walking around. Back to the Towers - they are also equipped with special double-decker lifts to make the trip up the 88 stories as fast as possible. Our trip to the 41st floor took about 40 seconds! Sadly, the lifts are not like the CN Tower where you can see out as you go up. All those from Toronto should not worry, as the CN Tower is still 554 m tall. However, there is a debate over whether the CN Tower should be in the same category of building as the Petronas Tower, as the Petronas Towers houses office space, numerous restaurants and a huge shopping mall. I'll leave the particulars of that discussion alone.

The day after visiting the Towers, we took a 13 km jaunt North of KL to the Batu Caves. These caves are in limestone cliffs and have been religiously important to Hindus for a long, long time. To reach the main cave, one must climb 272 steps (quite a workout in this heat!). As with all Hindu temples, there are brightly coloured and richly detailed religious statues everywhere. After passing by an entrance arch and a few temples, the steps lead us up to the main cave, which contains sculptures that incorporate the walls of the cave. All of these statues depict various stories and scenes from the religious poems such as the Ramayana. This means that there are statues of people with four arms, with an elephant head, with several heads, blue bodies, third eyes and many other colourful details from these poems. An audio guide helped immensely to explain the meanings. It was quite interesting and the scenery could not have been better (well, maybe if there was a beach...).

That about sums up the main sites that we visited here, but the most fun we've had is just touring around. Taking the monorail was a great experience, and was a very good way to see the city as the rail is elevated about 25 feet. This view allowed us to spot a temple and then get off at the next stop to check it out.

Malls are another thing that one can't avoid when walking around the city. They are everywhere! They also serve a three fold purpose - a great place to shop (it's so cheap here that I don't mind shopping), a great to cool off (they are usually air-conditioned) and a great place to go to a food court for awesome food for cheap. With all the great food and shopping, our daily expenditure is not as low as it should be so far in Malaysia (and our packs are a little heavier.

One anomaly that we have found here is the price of sushi - it is remarkably low! A sushi dinner where we ate all that we could was around 12 USD (I stopped counting the number of pieces I ate). That was definitely a nice surprise!

One final note that I have on KL is the script for the Malay language. It is different than Chinese, Thai or Hindi in that it uses the same script as english. Therefore, while something written in Thai looks completely foreign to me, something written in Malay has the same letters. It's very interesting to think of how the Malay script came about. We have figured out so far that "hour" in english is "jam" in Malay. Thus, the speed limit on the highway is 110 km/j.

January 19, 2003 - 7:30 pm - Georgetown, Malaysia - 31 C and Mostly Cloudy

(Tony) Today has been a long day so far. Last night, we took an overnight train from KL, and arrived in Butterworth at 6 am. We then hopped on a ferry to the island of Penang, and arrived in the capital of the Penang, Georgetown at around 7 am. The travelling would have worn us out even more, but we decided to travel in a 1st class sleeper. It was a great train ride in our own room (we even had our own sink!), and I slept as well as possible on a train. After arriving, we found a hotel and ate some breakfast. We then took a tour around the island that lasted until 5:30 pm. After having some dinner, that brings us to now - backing up Krista's photos on CD.

On our tour of the island today, we drove past some of the numerous beaches here. It was strange as there was almost noone there (the water looked very inviting with the 30+ temperatures we have been experiencing). Tomorrow we will find out if everyone knows something we don't as we plan on renting a scooter and heading out there. Besides the beaches, Penang has some remarkable scenery that is very reminiscent of Railay beach with lush, green mountains that seem to poke out of the ocean. I definitely look forward to exploring it some more!

January 24, 2003 - 6:30 pm - Chiang Mai, Thailand - 28 C and clear

I'm miffed - I just typed for 1/2 hour all about Malaysia, and our ridiculous web host lost it. Aaaargh. Time to start again.

Where was I...Oh yes - I LOVE Southeast Asia. You will likely hear (or see) me say that ad nauseum for the rest of my life, or at least during our time here. One of the things I love about it is the daylight. Being so close to the equator, Singapore, Malaysia and most areas of Thailand enjoy a good 12 hours of sunlight a day. What a shock to our systems after having been so far north in the northern hemisphere for so long! Now we had 4 more hours on our hands! At first we didn't know what to do with our time, but pretty soon we didn't have enough time to do what we wanted. I guess that's human nature eh?

Heat is another bonus about Southeast Asia. You'd be hard pressed to find a low of 23C pretty much all year round here. It is now their winter, and we are wandering around in shorts/capris and our sandals - the items we packed months ago and haven't seen the light of day until Singpore. That said, we are having some issues adjusting. First off, it is much too hot to be wandering around all day, so we are naturally migrating toward Malaysia's ubiquitous airconditioned shopping malls or food courts, or even resorting to taking the monorail or LRT to avoid the heat. Even so, we consider ourselves blessed to be here, rather than back home in the freezing cold. The other thing the blazing heat has done to us, is wiped all appetites away. We both put on major weight in gravy-heavy India, and are on the way to losing it with only one significant meal a day....Actually that may not be so, as the ton of freshly pressed sugar cane juice a day I consume more than makes up for lost calories.

Speaking of food, for all you sushi fans (Dad!), it is so cheap here. I think I ranted about the price of sushi in Singapore, but I should have held my tongue until we found this terrific sushi restaurant at the food of the Petronas Towers in KL. It is called Genki Sushi - a worldwide chain of sushi restaurants, where service focuses on the "sushi boat" idea (for those who don't know sushi boat is where the chef makes pieces of sushi, places it on a colour-coded plate and then on a conveyor that carries sushi around the dining area. The colour of the dish that you choose dictates the price. Your bill is totalled by adding the number of dishes you have taken). Here we both ate a major sushi dinner, salad and dessert all for $17 CAN total. Two pieces of sushi, or four rolls, or one handroll will run you between 50cents and $1; easily 1/8 of Canadian sushi prices. Unbelieveable.

Besides sushi, food is all around cheap here. A one-meal sized bowl of noodle soup, or plate of stir-fried something will run you $1.50CAN. It's really too bad neither of us had appetites, as we didn't have enough space to sample all the dishes we had hoped. Malaysian food is very healthy and mixes Thai, Indian and Chinese food into a divine menu of noodles, meats and veggies. Of the few dishes I actually sampled, my favourite was "Koay Teow" - a fried mix of 1" wide rice noodles, chicken, shrimp, calamari, pork and bean sprouts (can be yours for $1CAN). Besides noodles, Satay is HUGE here. Pretty much anywhere, on any street, you can pick up a skewer of some form of meat. Each satay hawker will have about 10 to 15 types of skewers (colour coded sticks based on price) that you pick out, and dump into a boiling pot of water sitting beside the stand. wait a few moments (longer if you picked a raw meat), and then pull it out, dress it with satay sauce, and eat up! Your choices are usually a number of types of sausages, some cut of a chicken or other animal (not the pig, as this heavily muslim country does not eat pork), something that looks like heart, liver or kidney, and a vast array of meat balls (chicken, squid, fish). My favourite was the squid ball. Tony had one bite of what looked like dark chicken meat, but turned out to be some unknown and very chewy meat. Likely some type of animal's inerds.

Malaysia is so multicultural! Here you will find muslims, hindus, christians and buddhists all living together in a surprising level of peace. From up top of the Chinese buddhist, Kek Lok Si Temple in Georgetown, Penang, I was able to spot a mosque, a hindu temple, a buddhist temple and an anglican church in only a few blocks! Mosques are so elegantly simple, with their vast prayer halls all facing towards Mecca. Most are white, and sided by a towering minaret (where the muezzin, or call-to-prayer, is announced from). Oddly enough, it seems Malaysian mosques are a place to sleep as well as pray; one mosque we visited was filled with men taking naps. We never entered one, but the Hindu temples' spires dominate the skyline decorated with their pastel-coloured 3D statues of gods. My personal favourite is the Chinese buddhist temples, with their awesome decorations, sculptures and symbolic paintings. The shiny gold buddha is also very calming and spritual.

Racially, the majority of Malaysians are Malay, and thus muslim. This darker-skinned race originated from the mix of muslim and chinese who settled here hundreds of years ago. Chinese is the next in line, then Indian. Add into the pot a large concentration of tribal races, and what a country! Most tribes live on the island of Borneo, in Sabah and Sarawak, and thus we never had any encounters. As I mentioned, the country seems to enjoy multicultural peace, but our guidebooks suggest otherwise. Being the countries earliest settlers, the Malays have political, economic and scholastic benefits, and thus "unfairly" dominate upper society. I don't know if this is true, but as I understand it, the Chinese have brought this loudly to the table in the past, thus destroying this peace. Apparently this has been suppressed for the time being, but could re-emerge at any time.

The Muslim dominance can be seen throughout the entire country; more obvious is the high number of headscarves on women, but subtly you can find hints of it in architecture and design. For example, brickwork on sidewalks is often patterned to the symbolic eight-sided star. Even the levels of the Petronas Towers were designed based on this auspicous symbol! I guess this is to be figured, considering Islam is an image-less religion, and thus to show their religion it is beneifical to build it into their edifices and layouts; as opposed to Hinduism, where pictures of Shiva, Ganesh and Krishna can be seen everywhere, from your corner store to the water storage tanks on the bank of the Ganges (see picture, on right hand side)!

January 24, 2003 - 6:30 pm - Chiang Mai, Thailand - 28 C and clear

(Tony) As you may already know, we are already in Chang Mai, having left Malaysia on the 21st. We did not have a chance to see everything we could have, but the Chinese New Year was fast approaching. With the Chinese New Year comes increased hotel rates, as well as the closing of almost everything for a few days. Based on this, we made the decision to head North to Thailand a little earlier than expected. On January 21st, a small minivan wisked us and 8 others into Thailands border town of Hat Yai (a very last minute decision).

Before leaving, we did manage to make a day trip to the "Kek Lok Si Temple," which is a sprawling Buddhist temple set into a hillside. It is an incredible complex, combining Buddhist, Chinese and Burmese architecture into its temples. The combination of Buddhist and Chinese architecture is an interesting mix, with dragons carved into rock columns on the outside of temple buildings, protecting the distinctly Chinese Buddhas inside.

The two largest attractions are a 7 tiered pagoda and a 175 ft tall statue of the Goddess of of Mercy, Kuan Yin. We were able to climb the stairs to the top of the pagoda, and a Buddha could be found at each level smiling peacefully. As the Kek Lok Si Temple is set into the side of a hill, the top of the pagoda gave us a view of the town below and numerous highrises on the mainland across the water. In order to visit the statue of Kuan Yin, we headed down from the pagoda and up to the highest portion of the temple. The bronze statue is massive, and shows the Goddess holding one palm forward and looking down over the rest of the temple complex. This statue was only recently completed (2003 I think), and the name of the engineering firm that completed the cast is stamped in huge font on the far side of the statues base. Interesting advertising to say the least.

The Kek Lok Si Temple has numerous decorations in the form of a bent cross, or swastika. I think that either Krista or myself has rambled on about this before, but this is not the Nazi symbol that most westerns associate it with. It is a Hindu symbol representing the wheel of time. It's amazing to think of how deep the roots of Hinduism actually are.

Since the Chinese new year was approaching, the whole temple was also plastered with another decoration - red and yellow round paper laterns. There were far too many to count, and the effect was terrific - it was as if the whole temple had a red and yellow ceiling, even the outdoor sections! With the mix of architecture styles and the new years decorations, Kek Lok Si gave me a new look at temples.

One other thing that I did not mention in an earlier update was a place we visited on the tour of Penang island - the Snake Temple. This is Chinese temple, similar to ones we have seen before (fearsome lions at the entrance, ornately carved roof and walls...). However, there is one big difference - there are a number of pit vipers living within there! They range in size from 1 foot long to too big to bother measuring. The story goes that the incense smoke keeps them sleepy, but some are kept in a small tree in one temple room where no incense is burned. They were pretty docile, and I don't think that they would allow tourists so close to venomous snakes (key word is "think" - maybe that should be hope)...

The tour also brought us to a smallish produce stand where some of the local goods were on display, and our guide took us through them, along with a some products made from them. The unofficially named "King of Malaysian fruit" - the Durian was there, along with pineapple, longans, and a host of others. Local nutmeg was also on hand, with its associated oil (very potent stuff - it's supposed to be good for sore muscles).

That covers most of the specifics of Malaysia, and Krista is covering some general thoughts in her update. It would have been nice to spend some more time in Malaysia (particularly Penangs beaches), but I am very glad to now be in Thailand. Keep an eye out for a Thailand update!

January 24, 2003 - 9:10 pm - Chiang Mai, Thailand - a very pleasant 23 C and clear with little red things high in the sky (looks like UFOs)

(Krista) Being a predominantly Malay country, naturally the primary language is Malay, although English is widely understood. Chinese, Hindi and Tamil are also widely seen in advertisements or shown in movie theatres with malay subtitles. Until this point, I had no idea what Malay sounded or looked like. Upon arrival into the country, I started seeing signs posted with words like "restoran", "klinik" or "komputer" and thought they were the very common distorted misinterpretations of the english language. However, I soon realized that this was Malay (as words following these usually looked like "makanan" or "duduk" - words that bear absolutely no resemblence to anything english). Seeing a language so foreign to our latin or germanic cousins written in Roman script really had me baffled, especially since the Malays are a mix Chinese and Indian - two nationalities with highly symbolic or calligraphic languages! My research has concluded that Malay, like Indonesian and Vietmanese, were romanized during their years of European Dominance (British, Dutch and French respectively).

Well, as Tony mentioned earlier, we left Malaysia for Thailand quite prematurely the other day. While hanging out on the island of Penang, we soon realized that our time travelling was drawing near to a close (it is confirmed: Tony is returning to Duke Energy in Chetwynd), and decided it would be best if we spent the bulk of our remaining time further north. Thus, we had to make some very hasty decisions - where we were going to go, and how we were going to get there. Thailand is a huge country north to south, and we really wanted to get up to Chiang Mai. Overland this would have taken us at least two days on a bus, and likely a night in Bangkok. Because of our dwindling time, we did not want to "waste" on exhausting buses or wandering around Bangkok looking for a place to stay during Chinese New Years (Gong Xi Fai Chai!) In a spur of the moment decision, we hit the Thai Airways office in Georgetown, and booked a relatively cheap ticket from Hat Yai north of the Malaysia/Thailand border through Bangkok to Chiang Mai. An excellent decision really, as this gave us a night in Hat Yai and an opportunity to cross the famous Penang bridge to mainland Malaysia (with a wicked cable stay section in the middle) in an AC bus. Furthermore, we got to see more of Malaysian countryside - the green, lush and thick forests lining the beautifully manicured, and very efficient highways.