TravelStream™ news feed for member jeroen on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/jeroen en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Thu, 08 Feb 2007 21:51:45 -0500 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/asia_2004/1094748900/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/asia_2004/1094748900/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/asia_2004/1094748900/tpod.html Thu, 08 Feb 2007 21:51:45 -0500 Nine months of traipsing across Asia: India, Nepal, Tibet, China, Hong Kong, Macau and Vietnam.

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Kunming, Yunnan province, China

... in which the travelling talesman meets the famous Dr Ho, and fearlessly peers down a misnamed 3500m-deep gorge..."You ask me why I live here in the grey hills.I smile but do not answer, for my thoughts are elsewhere,Like peach petals carried by the stream, they have goneto other climates, to countries other than the world of men."(Li Po)LIJIANGIn a quiet valley near to the place where the Himalayas finally calm down to become merely high mountains, Lijiang has a pretty, touristy old town with a fast-growing modern town attached to it. The town centre is traffic-free and consists of narrow alleys lined with walled family compounds, each centred on a courtyard, and roofed with green tiles and little dragons to scare off demons. A small river runs through Lijiang, and at the top of town, next to a big waterwheel that has been erected for Chinese tourists to have their picture taken next to, the river splits into three, gurgling elegantly along the alleys from thereon. There's nothing spectacular to see (or it has to be the view of snow-capped Jade Dragon Mountain roaring up north of town) but after China's identikit big cities it's a delight to wander along something old and peaceful. Until the tourist groups arrive, anyway.Lijiang, in Yunnan province, is right at the edge of the worlds greatest ethnic laboratory. Nowhere else is there such a variety of ethnicities, languages, cultures and traditions as between here in Yunnan and eastern India. Isolated living, due to impermeable tropical forests or unscalable mountain passes, has led to this jigsaw of civilisations. Lijiang is home to the Naxi ('nashi') minority group, one of the few societies on the planet that is (or was until recently) matriachical. The women were firmly in charge here, responsible for all production, child-rearing and decisionmaking, leaving the men to do what they do best - work hard for a little while, occasionally procreate, and then play cards and smoke with their friends. Paradise. Nearly all women in Lijiang and surrounding villages wear traditional costume - a dark blue tunic with a unique cape (attached to two crossed white straps on the front) that has embroidery and fabrics to symbolise the sun, moon, stars and earth. Naxi women carry the universe on their backs all day long. And they're pretty good-humoured about it.Another cool thing about the Naxi is that their written language is one of the few (or the only one?) that uses pictograms instead of letters or characters. So the 'Tea Horse Guesthouse' (see below) is literally spelled: cup-of-tea-picture, horse-head-picture, house-picture. Wonderful; no dictionary needed. Even the makers of Esperanto never came up with this. It does make typing and jotting down a short message very complicated, but at least everyone knows what you mean.Relentlessly suppressed during Mao's glorious era like all minorities, the Naxi now have regained their self-conciousness and pride, and have started to cash in big time on tourism. A huge earthquake about ten years ago destroyed part of the town, but most of it has been restored in the old style - a first for post-Mao China, where restoration work is usually done with big yellow bulldozers. However some streets have been rebuilt in Han-Chinese style which is great for the Beijing tourists but a bit of an insult to the locals. The rest of the town has been done up recently too, and looks nearly too cute. It's somewhat banal during the afternoon when half a dozen tour guides with little flags stand around the tiny reconstructed main square using megaphones to blare their history stories and shopping tips to their assembled audiences. It's so orchestrated that we joked it was a sort of living Disneyland - confirmed by the fact that the garbage trucks that trundle along the streets collecting trash play "It's a small world after all", the Disney international anthem, to get the people to bring the trashbags out. In the evenings, when all restaurant terraces are crammed with merry diners, people buy goldfish or little lotus-shaped boats with candles to chuck in the river. So they can have their picture taken with it, of course. Furtehr downstream, the dazed fish and candle-floats are fished out of the river by the enterprising locals, and resold.Half a day would normally suffice for wandering around Lijiang, but I was knackered after the hot sticky weather and relished in the cool mountain air. It was also raining, I still had a cold from the Chengdu dorm airconditioning and it was time to do the washing, so I actually did nothing for a few days. In the local vegetarian restaurant I met Nini, an aspiring Danish opera singer. For some reason, veggie restaurants are always great places to meet nice solo-travelling girls. And this one (the restaurant) served excellent muesli breakfasts too. Nini and I spent a day cycling around the villages in the valley north of Lijiang on a quest for some rurality after so much urbanity. Just an hour's pedalling northwest from Lijiang, Dr Ho holds practice in the pleasant one-street Naxi village of Beisha. He's an acknowledged expert on Chinese natural healing, in the herbal sense. He spent years trudging through the mountains around Lijiang searching for specific plants, and has developed a range of teas and herbal-based remedies that surprisingly even work for sceptics. Dr Ho is a funny old chap who speaks wonderfully mangled English, and who went through hell during the cultural revolution when he and his family were the most obvious 'bourgeois counterrevolutionary elements' that needed to be denounced, ridiculed and punished in jail. Now he and his doctor son receive dozens of foreign visitors every day, and Dr Ho busily scurries around, handing out his famed 'healthy tea' in exchange for a donation, and proudly showing off newspaper cuttings about himself and thank-you letters from cured patients.I mentioned to Dr Ho that I was ill (the Chengdu hostel airconditioning syndrome) and he grabbed my arm to feel my pulse, peered at my tongue, made me say argh and then started scurrying around the dozens of colourful boxes of dried and ground herbs in the room, creating a special melange of anti-airco-flu tea for me. Unfortunately, I can't report on its effectiveness as mother nature had cured me that evening before I even had time to test Dr Ho's herbal tea.Dr Ho became famous when Bruce Chatwin (the first, possibly the best modern travel writer) visited the village in 1986 and dedicated a short story to Dr Ho in his book 'What am I doing here'. The story, 'Rock's World', actually focuses on Joseph F. Rock ('Lok' to the natives), a seclusive, angry Westerner who lived near Lijiang catalogueing the amazing local plantlife for more than two decades before he was kicked out by the Commies in 1949. Dr Ho was described as an old frail-looking in 1986 - and now eighteen years later in 2004 he was still around, frail, wispy-bearded but with beautiful twinkly eyes. He knows something we don't.About the Red Guards who destroyed Ho's house, practice and life, Chatwin recites the poet Lao-tze:"How did the great rivers and seas gain dominion over the hundred lesser streams?By being lower than they."HIKING THE TIGER LEAPING GORGEEnglish mistakes are as hilarious in China as they are in India, but of a completely different nature. While Indians have chosen to create a new language using English as a base material, the Chinese are liberally experimenting with word order (and with the letter order within words). So, one day a long time ago in this distant land, the three Chinese characters used to name this particular gorge two hours north of Lijiang were translated literally into English, without paying heed to the order once the spelling was double-checked. That's why the Leaping Tiger Gorge is strangely, irritatingly and persistently called Tiger Leaping Gorge. This particular gorge is one of the deepest in the world, and in some places it's so narrow that local legend has it that a tiger once leapt across it while being persuited (probably by a pack of hungry Chinese who wanted to see how it tasted shredded with noodles,peanuts and a light soy-chilli sauce). The phrase 'Tiger Leaping Gorge' of course insinuates that the gorge is called 'Tiger Leaping', or that the gorge is itself busy performing 'tiger leaps' just like it would frog leap. Oh well.The cool thing about TLG (that's better) is that it offers a relatively wild and unspoilt trekking opportunity along well-kept paths, and that foreigners can stay in nice village homestays, which surprisingly is very scarce in this huge country. Perhaps most importantly, the ever-present Chinese flag-tagging mass tourism is completely out of sight, being limited to the road far below the hiking path. The Chinese mass tourist (CMT) hates to leave the tour bus or souvenir shop out of sight for more than the time it takes to aim a camera at a family member blocking the view of something old or rebuilt. As a result, the hiking paths are void of them, and most trekkers are beautiful, young, healthy, nature-loving foreigners. Plus the odd Dutchman.You can do the whole walk along the TLG path in a day, but Nini and I were in a particularly lazy mood, and decided to take it as easy as possible. So, after two hours of easy hiking on the first stretch, we sagged down in the courtyard of the Naxi Family Guesthouse, ordered stacks of fabulous local food, and did nothing for the rest of the day. Shower - nap - read - eat - read - sleep. Fabulous. Here the gorge was already getting impressive. The Yangtze river travels southwards from its source in Tibet in a huge arch for hundreds of kilometres before doing a dramatic 180° turn just before the gorge. It changes from a placid 40m-wide river into a churning 10-15m wide rapid for most of the 30 kilometres of the gorge. The river is at a height of about 2000m here, while the jagged peaks of the Jade Dragon Mountain range that rears up right behind it only stop at 5500m, the 3500m difference making it one of the deepest gorges around. 'The deepest' say the Chinese, but they haven't been to the 4500m-deep Sutlej gorge in northern India, eh. The hiking path is narrow and easy going, and every few hours there's a tiny village or farmhouse with accommodation and food - some of the best nosh I've had on the trip I might add.In China, eating alone sucks even more than elsewhere. Dining together with people you meet along the way really pays off, as Chinese food is made to be eaten by (surprise surprise) groups. The more the merrier. You just order a whole array of different dishes, sometimes with seemingly clashing tastes, and share, ordering more of what you like as you go along. It's all made super-crunchy-fresh and fast. Surprisingly, the rice usually gets served at the end of the meal, as it's more of a filler for truly hungry people than something that you eat together with the meat or vegetable dishes. Chinese food here is different from the mix of regional cuisines we call Chinese back in Europe (and especially the Netherlands, where it gets an Indonesian twist). Along the TLG trail we'd usually get some kind of vegetable dish, of which I loved the versions with bitter melon (a weird kind of cucumber). The steamed cabbage dishes are very tasty too - I don't know what method they use to make this infamous vegetable taste so good (but someone please get the Chinese to tell the Eastern Europeans how). Then we'd add a few meat dishes: fried bits of pork or chicken or veal in soy sauce or covered with sesame. The local speciality was the salty, dried veal meat that went very well with the bitter melon. Man, this stuff is so good, I'm thinking of switching to being a full-time food critic.After we managed to tear ourselves away from the Naxi Family Guesthouse table the next day, we made it to the wonderfully named Tea Horse Guesthouse. The Chinese characters for house and horse are apparently very similar and are liberally mixed up. Lunch was so good that we were nearly enticed to stay the night there too. But on we went, together with two Greek hikers (the first Hellenes I met on this trip) to the aptly named Halfway Guesthouse for more good food. A late departure the next day brought us along the most dramatically steep parts of the gorge via Tina's Guesthouse to Sean's Guesthouse. The fourth day we made our way back to Lijiang via a short walk along the road to the end of the valley, a ride in a taxi, a puttering ferry across the Yangtze and a private bus through the undoubtedly beautiful but completely fogged-up Jade Dragon Nature reserve.DALII already told you about the ethnic mosaic in this region. Hop on the bus for the three-hour ride south along another good highway to Dali, and you'll see the local folk costumes change twice along the way.Dali, set at about 1800m, is a cool hill town, sandwiched between a large lake and a 5000m mountain with forest-clad slopes. It's reasonably popular among foreigners, as it's low key compared to Lijiang and more touristy destinations, with no astounding highlights, but with a nice relaxed atmosphere and plenty of travellers' cafes and shops. Quite a few foreigners work here, opening up small bars or teaching English. At Jim's Peace Cafe I met Andy, a young dreadlocked Englishman who was English-teaching himself across China, making enough money to support himself and stay in interesting places for a few weeks to months each time. It's a way of life for many foreigners here.Renting a bicycle, I pedalled past the huge medieval pagodas around the town. Freshly renovated and adorned with an absurd 50 yuan entrance fee, I think they're best viewed from outside the gates, from a distance. I visited the cattle market where women with amazing local headwear (a kind of white crown with tassles) dropped pigs into a large basket for transport to their village. I cycled down through the Chinese quarter of town, the streets lined with baskets and buckets of vegetables, meat, wiggling crabs and shrimps. Rolling on, down through the paddy fields, across the new highway and further on to the villages lining the shore of the lake. Here, some fishermen had a line-up of about ten large cormorants perched on the side of their wooden rowing boats. The birds would dive into the water, chasing after large fish. The cormorants would just love to eat them, but a cunning bit of string around their necks prevents them from swallowing; instead, they get a small fish from the fisherman as a reward. They're completely domesticated and don't flap off - food is guaranteed here. After the work is done, the birds are grabbed, squawking, by the necks and deposited on a horizontal stick to dry, wings spread out, in the sun. KUNMINGAnd it's off again, on the night train to Kunming, Yunnan's capital. The trainride confirmed my theories about Chinese group mentality. The train was the flashy new double-decker I mentioned before. Very high, with four-bed compartiments on each of the two floors. Unfortunately, there was loud soggy music (think: Chinese instrumental version of the Titanic warble), no knob to regulate the sound, no door to shut it out, no lightswitch, no individual reading lights, and no buttons to adjust the air conditioning. But it was spanking clean, and a bargain at 120 yuan. The lights went out at 22:30, to come on again together with some merry marching music at 06:00 in the morning.Kunming, like Chengdu, is a scarred city. While in Europe we can usually blame our messed-up cities on other countries, here in China the destruction is usually completely home-made. Once a very pleasant city marked by elegant old buildings, Kunming doesn't have much to show any more. Most of the worthwhile temples and monuments were so badly damaged during the madness of the cutural revolution that they were scrapped altogether in the years afterwards. More recently, in the last 20 years, many remaining old residential areas have been bulldozed to make place for commercial development and wider roads for wider traffic jams. A large horticultural exhibition in the 1990s was even a reason for the city government to speed up the removal of old, unprofitable areas. I wonder if the Chinese will ever look back and regret what has been lost in the name of progress. They're selling their cities to the real estate mob and property developers at an alarming rate, and nobody is stopping to see what's going on.Still, Kunming is a pleasant place compared to other cities. It used to be different - positioned at the edge of the 'barbarian' mountainous areas it was a place of exile for political offenders during Mao's enlightened years. Kunming improved its image vastly with many deportees preferring its relaxed pace to their crowded east-coast cities, refusing to return. In between rainshowers, I spent time in a large park with lakes full of blossoming lotuses, and hundreds of excercising citizens. Chinese like to move, and parks are always full of people of all ages (but mostly the elderly) doing elegant tai chi movements with a golden sword, swinging their arms, clapping, revolving silver balls in hand (magician-style), aerobics and ballroom-dancing. The dancing involves several pairs around a cassette player, all doing the same moves together - it's a group activity of course and you're not supposed to have fun. 'Social dancing' was even banned during Mao's days, as it was considered a deplorable bourgeous individualistic activity, probably from the West. Also here, the presence of a foreigner sometimes raises eyebrows, and children will be whispering 'laowai!' (foreigner) to their mothers when they spot this strange-looking guy with funny hair and a big nose.I spent an afternoon along a large lake south of Kunming, where a lush hill with several old Taoist temples rears up 300m from the lake shore. Walking up through clumps of bamboo and beautiful forest with shy squirrels, the walk was beautiful. Most Chinese Mass Tourists preferred to zip through the uneventful natural bits to get straight to the temple at the top. Even I succumbed to CMT temptations a few kilometres before the peak, taking the chair lift to the top. Great views, but I was deposited in the middle of a maze of stalls selling the worst tourist trash, and with purring golf carts carting in the groups. I made my way off this desecrated mountain as soon as I could.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX X Next up: Buddha-caving my way to Beijing.Currently reading: Wild Swans, still. Shocking. Incredible that China seems to have skipped a period of soul-searching (or lynching) after this terrible period, launching the country head-first into unabashed commercialism. Time will tell what effects this have.Stomach status: happily filled with bitter melon.Signs Of The Day: "Rubbish spot"; "Do not use while stabling" (train signs).
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1166266680/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1166266680/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1166266680/tpod.html Sat, 16 Dec 2006 11:30:56 -0500 Malaysia - our second home

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Pangkor, Malaysia

Malaysia's known for its nice islands and beaches. Many of the nicest ones are on the east coast of the Malaysian peninsula, which experiences its monsoon season from about September to February. Ferry routes and hotels are closed down in that period, and there's not much use going then. On the peninsula's west coast however there's a scattering of islands that have pretty much the same weather year-round. It's slightly wetter in monsoon season, but usually that means an hour of rain on otherwise perfect days.The nearest beaches to KL are at Port Dickson ('PD' for locals) but these suffer from dirty water - shipping and industry nearby mean the water and sand are yucky brown. As the locals don't use the water much at beaches they don't always care too much about that.The nearest island to KL is Pulau Pangkor and we like it so much that we've been twice for beach escape weekends. We get there by bus - on Friday at 15:00 we hop on a VIP Luxury bus, costs 19 ringgit for the trip [€1=RM 4,7], with three seats across instead of four, and four hours later we're in the harbour and town Lumut, where we hop on the ferry for the 30 minute sail (RM5) across to Pankor past Malaysia's main navy base with some impressive warships floaring around the bay. Then a RM10 pink taxi ride to Nipah Bay on the other side the island - all taxis here are pink minibuses and are unionised with standard rates for destinations.The island is small, perhaps 10x3km only, with most inhabitants on the east coast facing the mainland. Most of them are in fishing; dried fish is the island's speciality. The single round going round the island is narrow and goes up and down steep hills to reach the other side, where there are a few beaches, some villages and restorts and the airport strip. Nipah Bay is a beautiful beach fringed with trees and backed by a tourist village with cheap chalets and hotels. The village has two streets with perhaps 30 chalet complexes and hotels, a few food stalls and water sports rental stands, and that's it. No bars, discos or restaurants (other than thos eattached to accommodation that is). In the evening it's blissfully quiet. Behind the village is dense jungle, and the most spectacular and also noisiest inhabitants are the hornbills - large birds with huge colourful beaks that flap around from tree to tree in pairs, squawking all the time. There's a lot of them and every day it's common to hear and see them messing around in treetops.Our first trip to Pangkor was on a weekend during Ramadan (Muslim fasting month) in October, and the place was positively deserted. We counted perhaps 15 foreigners in Nipah Bay, plus a handful of locals. We practically had the whole beach to ourselves. We stayed at a nice chalet at the Nipah Bay Villa complex (RM60 for a 2-person chalet with a/c). The best restaurant in town in TJ's, a shack serving local and western food. Very good and cheap, but man it takes long to get the food. After writing down your order it may take up to an hour to get it - even if it's a sandwich. Still, worth it, especially for dinner when you can point at a fresh fish to be grilled.The water is nice and warm, though if you swim out a bit you get stung by something invisible, perhaps jellyfish tentacles, which is annoying but not more than that. It's clear enough for snorkelling though I didn't try. They say the coral here is not as good as the east coast islands so why bother when you're flopped on your towel. Tour boats go out to the small island in the bay where we see tourists splashing around - must be some coral there. White coral does wash up on the beach, together with all sorts of shells - Marta found some really cool spikey ones.On our second trip, in November, it was a different story, as it was quite busy and the chalets we stayed before were booked full so we had to settle for another complex which wasn't as good by far. The beach was busy with Malaysian groups, but walk a bit to the left or right and it's peaceful.More photos at the top of the page. We'll be back.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1164795480/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1164795480/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1164795480/tpod.html Sat, 16 Dec 2006 05:57:44 -0500 Malaysia - our second home

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Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Time to give you a quick look at the expat way of living in Malaysia. It ain't too bad and we're certainly not complaining.For the first three months Marta's company put us up in a small apartment in the centre of KL, in an area called Bukit Bintang or 'star hill', just a few minutes walk from her office. The Bukit Bintang district is quite lively - it's nothing historical (that's a 10 minute walk down the hill near the river) but it's the heart of the so-called Golden Triangle area, which has a concentration of malls, 5-star hotels, bars, and restaurants. Quite nice to have everything at walking distance. The first apartment, called the Bidara, was smaller than our Prague pad, but it had 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a balcony, plus a small pool downstairs. The two large cockroaches that had Marta clinging to the ceiling in the first week were effectively exterminated with these little black poison units, but unfortunately for her the rubbish that people chuck out on the surrounding streets feeds a healthy population of large rats that scurry along the streets at dusk. No good for the nerves of ratophobes.  My main problem with the place was the nearby Istana Cruz disco, that would belt out thumping music every day from 22:00 to about 03:00 and all day on Sunday (when all the Philipino maids in town have their day off and party hard) with little regard for residents. We slept in the guestroom to avoid much of the noise but to hear it daily was annoying as hell.In December we moved into our new place, just a five minute walk away. It took us a week to find - we walked around all the apartments in the area, spoke to the doormen, had a vew agents give us tours and finally settled on the Angsara Impian 2 complex. It's great. Large, airy, clean, and has a great pool, tennis and squash courts and a gym downstairs. The landlord is a nice Chinese Malaysian man with a travel agency and 5 apartments across town. I hear that 80% of the people living here are foreigners, though we actually don't see so many people at all - never more than a few people sitting round the pool anyway. The complex has two towers with 28 floors and 5 apartments on each floor. There's security at both entrances to check everyone coming in, . We're in one of the smaller units (about 120 square metres) on the 3rd floor, with 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a study, kitchen with washing room. That's the smallest they had! We're paying about the same here as for our 100sq.m. flat in Prague - and that was without a lift and all these facilities... the park view in Prague was better though. We're on the 3rd floor but actually we're high in the sky - perhaps 30 metres above ground level. That's because nearly all highrises in KL are built on top of car parks. So there are 3 levels of parking before they have the 'ground' level with the reception and pool. That's very unusual in Europe and an architect I spoke to said it had to do with restrictions on building height (which don't exist here) and the fact that it's much cheaper to build up than dig down. Unfortunately, that means that walking on street level you see many car parks - unlike in European cities where they are buried beneath these kind of buildings. Malaysians hate walking and worship cars so they don't care. We're still just a few minutes walk from Marta's office (she comes home for lunch as often as possible). Also in the direct area is a small row of so-called shophouses - traders houses that have been converted into restaurants and guesthouses, with Indian, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Thai and Nonya (Malay-Chinese) restaurants. A little further is Jalan Alor (Alor street) which is one of the larger open-air hawker streets - it's lined with dozens of cheap restaurants (mostly Chinese, many serving seafood) and stalls with all kinds of food. Just beyond is the commercial centre of Bukit Bintang, with the monorail station and a handful of large malls. There's Lot 10 which houses the excellent Japanese Isetan department store with a supermarket and bakery in the basement - these guys have great fresh sushi to take away for a fraction of the price in Europe. Across the street is the massive BB Plaza and Sungai Wang shopping complex. I was there today and got lost again - it's huge with many small shops and badly indicated exits. There are two department stores in there, plus the post office and shops selling pirated DVDs. Behind it the 5-floor Low yat Plaza, which is the nerd's mall, as it only has electronics. Some of the cheapest laptops, mobiles, PCs etc etc in the world plus an incredible amount of pirated software sold in the open.Ten minutes in the other direction and we arrive at Bukit Nanas hill, which is partly covered in rainforest with trains to walk along - quite nice if you come prepared for the mosquitos. On top of the hill stands the 5th highest communications tower in the world, the Menara KL (= KL Tower). Great views from up there. They make a big deal of the fact that when it was built, they moved the building site 50m to save a rare tree - buit ignore to mention that they had to bulldoze a large part of the protected rainforest park anyway to make place for the tower foundations. Oh well.Anyway, that's an idea of the place we live. Click above to see more photos and explanations of what you're looking at.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1164363300/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1164363300/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1164363300/tpod.html Sat, 02 Dec 2006 10:57:25 -0500 Malaysia - our second home

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Siem Reap, Cambodia

The temples at Angkor Wat are in the list of ultimate must-see things. So we hopped on the luxury tourist bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, the town just south of the temples. Arrival was truly Asian, the hotel pickup service had forgotten about us and the hordes of guesthouse touts who managed to piss off Marta within seconds. We hopped on a random tuktuk taxi and scooted for the hotel we had booked; we had a pleasant cabin with plenty of lush greenery around. As it was the end of the monsoon we were the only guests - low season for western tourists. The Chinese and Koreans were out in force but you hardly notice them in town as they stick to hotels and air-conditioned malls for dinner and karaoke and don't go to the centre for drinking or shopping. The good thing about the monsoon: everything is verdant green and the nearby lake and rivers are brimming with water. In Westerner high season, November to May, roads are dusty, the rice fields are brown and dry, the temperature is higher, and the lake surface is 10 metres lower.The temple complexes near Siem Reap are huge and quite far apart despite their concentration in this part of Cambodia. Three days is just enough to have a look at most of them, and the favoured way of getting around is in a mototrailer - a motorbike with a four-seated trailer (with roof) attached. $10-15 gets you one plus driver for a day.Built between the 9th and 13th century, there's a variety of temple types and styles, and to make things more complicated some are Hindu and some Buddhist temples. So we thought it would be a good idea to hire a guide for the first day to get more background about the whole thing. That turned out to be a bad idea - they guy wasn't really interested in talking and didn't tell us much that I hadn't read in the Siem Reap 'In Your Pocket'-style booklet (see www.canbypublications.com). Next time we'll just bring a good book and read from that.We saw the two main complexes on the first day, Ankor Thom and Ankor Wat. Both 12th century creations, Ankor Thom was the largest one, a huge city complex with walls running all round, once housing a million (!) inhabitants. Within the walls of Ankor Thom were several temples and palaces, nothing was left of the civilian's wooden homes. Bayon is the famous one with the huge Buddha faces on its towers. It's actually one of the more recent and less intricate temples (with rather rough carving), though still very impressive. Angkor Wat was next - another massive city-temple surrounded by huge walls and a lake-sized moat. The temple still works its magic - we were just walking in when we bumped into some friends from Prague - they were here on a Hash House Harriers Asia tour that they had mentioned months ago before we left. Small planet. We timed our visit here with lunchtime so we'd avoid the worst of the groups, and succeeded in finding peace and quiet in the temple. The walls of the galleries were decorated with massive, well preserved friezes hacked into the stones, depicting gods, demons and countless battles on land and sea (in particular against the annoying Cham people, who inhabited what is now south Vietnam). The is was up up up steep stone staircases to the top of the temple, for a cool breeze and views over the complex and the dense jungle beyond.Nest up was the Ta Prohm temple made famous in the shitty movie Tombraider, which had huge trees growing on top of the temple roof and galleries. All the temples in the area looked like this until fairly recently - completely overgrown and hidden in the jungle, though not completely forgotten, as there were some small villages dotted around the area. The temple also had half a million loud and annoying Koreans climbing on it and lining up for the perfect photo opportunity. Nevertheless, very beautiful, and livened up with the cackling of green parrots in the trees overhead.The next morning we were up very early for what some feel is the highlight of an Angkor visit - sunrise at the temple. This means setting the alarm clock at 04:30 and a dark and chilly tuktuk ride to Angkor Wat. It was still pitch dark when we arrived, and we made our way to the reflecting lake in front of the main sanctuary. We weren't alone - about 100 others were there, though most groups stayed at the viewpoint near the main entrance, far from us. Sunrise was magical - the silhouette of the towers slowly came into view, and rays of light shot up from behind the buildings before the sun finally popped up into view. After the crowds had dispersed, we had Angkor to ourselves for an hour before grabbing breakfast at a nearby restaurant. Then followed a whirlwind tour of temples. First Preah Khan (my favourite), a rambling set of buildings smothered in jungle. Then Neak Pean, a beautiful Hindu temple consisting of a small island shrine surrounded by square lakes. Then Pre Rup, a 9th century 'mountain temple', looking like a Maya temple. Then home for rest. The final temple day we scooted east to Roulous town, home to some of the oldest temples around - we saw two complexes, built around 890 AD, and in an amazingly good state of repair. Then by car up to Banteay Srey temple, an hour north, for the most delicately carved images of all the temples. All in all magnificent, and highly recommended. With one day left we planned a quick trip to the lake, Tonle Sap. We made the same mistake of thinking we could better leave the planning to others, and booked a travel agent tour which turned out to be a rip-off, with only 45 minutes spent in a boat. Ah well, a good reason to come back and do it our way next time. We visited the Chong Khneas floating village, which was a collection of stilt houses, stilt schools, stilt churches and stilt shops. People even kept pigs in stilt pigstys. It was quite lively, with small shop boats being paddled from house to house, water buses, school kids buying sweets from a floating supermarket, fish being hauled in and tourists being paddled around. Small children were bobbing around the lake in dodgy metal tubs, trying to get money out of the tourist boats. Incredibly, in dry season the whole lake is ten metres lower, and the houses remain marooned on 6-10 metre-high stilts; many people decamp to temporary houses on the new lake shore until the rains bring the level up again.Interestingly, the extreme fluctuation of the lake is a result of the swollen Mekong river forcing water up the Tonle river at the confluence near Phnom Penh - it effectively turns the flow of the Tonle river around, and starts filling the lake from the lower end, increasing its area massively. Although the local museums claim it's a unique phenomenon, a similar thing happens to Lake Shkodra in Albania every year (I wrote about it here www.inyourpocket.com/albania/shkodra/en/feature?id=55967).Apart from temples and lake adventures, we spent time shopping around Siem Reap's market, which had no end of attractive clothes and souvenirs on offer. We also went to visit the local children's hospital, whose Swiss doctor/director gave weekly cello concerts to raise money and ask for blood donations for the kids, and to raise awareness about the nasty state of healthcare where children die every day of diseases like Hepatitis that are relatively easy to prevent with the right medicines and education. And then there's the cynical, perhaps intentional inability of the western experts of the World Health Organisation to do nothing about it. His main gripe was the official notion that third world countries should not have too complicated, too expensive, 'too advanced' labs and machinery. The insistence of this doctor has lead to Cambodia's first blood bank and testing lab. Until recently HIV/Aids and other blood-related diseases was passed on to patients without check. 'Too advanced' for Cambodia, according to the WHO experts staying in the $400-per-night Le Meridien hotel. Read more about it here www.beat-richner.ch, and keep it in mind as a good place to donate some money at Christmas time, it's really well spent there.The bus brought us back to Phnom Penh the next day, where we headed to the airport after a sandwich lunch on a terrace overlooking Tonle river. A budget flight, bus ride and monorail trip later and we were home in KL.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1161335580/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1161335580/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1161335580/tpod.html Wed, 22 Nov 2006 06:04:04 -0500 Malaysia - our second home

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Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Hurrah for multi-culturalism! Because Malaysia is full of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, we get all their religious holidays plus the commercial Christian ones. The end of Ramadan and the Hindu light festival fell within one week so it was a good opportunity for Marta to take a few days off and scamper off to the true Asia with me. We flew AirAsia, the very successful local budget airline, out to Phnom Pehn (PP), Cambodia's capital and got a taxi to our hotel of the next few days. PP is not a major attraction, the temples near Seam Reap are, so it's a nice mix of locals going around doing their daily business, the occasional tourist plus quite a lot of horny expats. It was clear from the few bars we visited that the combination of an older foreign man and a young local girl was quite normal. There's some of that, and also a lot of prostitution going on. Scarily enough that sometimes involves small children, though there are now efforts to put an end to this, like the organisation of taxi drivers who promise to report any suspicious behaviour. Once in a restaurant we saw an older Western man dining with a young local girl, and the first thought to cross our minds was to assume he's messing around with her... which is in fact an embarrassing knee-jerk reaction, as many locally-married expats will have children or adopted kids, and which sane pedophile would go take a kid out to eat in a nice restaurant?There aren't many sights in town - there's a large temple on a hill, the royal palace with its own temple, two popular markets (the fantastic Art Deco central market and the ramshackle-but-oh-so-cheap Russian market) and the Killing Fields memorial out of town. The city reminded me a lot of Vietnam - the same French architectural and food (fresh baguettes!) influence, a grid pattern of roads, many more scooters than cars and hot, hot, hot. The tatty Cambodian currency (the riel) is only used for small payments and is nearly completely replaced by the US dollar, which is also the currency of choice rolling out of the ATMs.We spent plenty of time at the markets harvesting presents for you all, getting me gear (several trousers and shirts, and a North Face bag that broke the same day, all for a few dollars) and of course a krama, the red shawl popular with the Khmer Rouge and also very useful against dusty rickshaw rides and against the hot sun in your neck.We used a taxi to get out to the Killing Fields memorial - a very bumpy 30 minute ride along very dusty roads... glad we didn't take a rickshaw. This is the site of the prison and execution area used by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. They managed to kill up to one million people in the 5 years they were in power, and some 60,000 of those were brought here to die. Trucks would arrive, music would be switched on to drown the screaming, and the prisoners would be killed using axes, hammers, agricultural tools etc, no bullets were wasted on them. Some were just buried alive, with chemicals dumped on top to make sure they wouldn't survive. The memorial consists of a stupa (Buddhist tower) filled with hundreds of skulls and bones found at the site. Wandering around, there's not much left of the few buildings that stood here, but the area is dotted with craters where bodies have been removed. After 30 years, many bodies still lie buried at the swampy northern end of the area, and the tattered clothes of the prisoners still can be seen in the ground.The same day we visited the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, a former school that had been used as a prison for torture under Khmer Rouge rule. Of the thousands of people that were arrested and brought here, only 12 survived. The old classrooms were partitioned into small cells, and barbed wire nets prevented prisoners committing suicide by jumping from the balconies. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge were avid administrators and kept photos and files of most people passing through, and the hundreds of photos of men, women and young children were used to great effect.Most Cambodians around nowadays were born after the terror of the 1970s and there's not too much else to remind you of it - they seem have to have their sights set firmly on the future (despite living in one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world).In the evening, we took a rickshaw out to see a theatre performance with traditional Cambonian dance and music. The play was based on a story of the Buddhist version of the bible involving gods and demons, but basically a story of lost love, travel, war and victory like any soap story. The music, essentially religious temple music, is a strange pleasant stream of plonkity-plonk kind of sounds made with xylophones and metal instruments, with a male and female voice doing all the singing for the mute actors. The actors offered food and burnt joss sticks at the stage altar before starting the show. In very elegant costumes and with very precise hand and facial gestures, they performed a mix of dance, theatre, martial arts and shadow figures (like in Bali and Thailand) for little over an hour. As the theatre tries to get the community involved in these cultural expressions that were nearly wiped out in the Khmer Rouge period, they let in a dozen neighbourhood children who at first sat grinning and wide-eyed around us, but later all nodding off and falling asleep as the play progressed.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1159512480/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1159512480/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1159512480/tpod.html Wed, 22 Nov 2006 05:12:58 -0500 Malaysia - our second home

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Bangkok, Thailand

We're way too busy with our Asian adventures to be able to keep you all updated about our past adventures, but in a spurt of artistic inspiration and a lazy Sunday afternoon, here's an attempt to get up to date.Late September we hopped on an AirAsia flight to Bangkok. The new airport (in planning for 40 years) has the biggest terminal in the world and had just opened the day before we arrived. Funny to see airport staff needing maps to get around the place. Marta was less amused to hear that she needed a visa for Thailand, but Poland's one of the semi-favoured nations that can simply buy one on arrival. So after finding a photomat and paying €20 she got welcomed to Thailand by what must have been the least friendly customs people I've ever encountered (I've heard since a few times that Thailand's reputation of being an exceptionally friendly country doesn't stand up to comparison with its neighbours).We were lucky as we arrived on Friday evening and departed Sunday afternoon - the only two times that the whole larger Bangkok area is not gridlocked with terrible traffic jams. It took us just 45 minutes to get to the hotel - at other times it can take up to three hours. Staying at a pleasant budget hotel near the river we spent two days zipping around on river ferries, tuk-tuks, SkyTrains and taxis, visiting the Wat Po monastery complex (with the Golden lying Buddha statue), the adjacent Royal palace with the wonderful attached monastery, Chinatown and the massive weekend market in the north of the city. We were apparently eating in all the wrong places because we had not one good meal - we've had better Thai cooking next door to our flat in KL or in Prague. Perhaps Bangkok is suffering from the same disease that effects restaurants in central Prague - the fact they never need to worry about convincing people to return to their restaurant, leading to mediocre food and high prices.Although the traditional and old parts of Bangkok are small, we thought it a good destination for a weekend trip. There's plenty of concrete around and it in no way resembles other less successful Asian cities - too many cars, too much pollution, too many highrise offices and condos. Still, an interesting place with great shopping and worth a revisit.My former Prague flatmate Goran was in Thailand on business and we met him for a few beers in Bangkok too - excellent to see an old friend so far from what was recently home.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1158382440/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1158382440/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1158382440/tpod.html Sun, 12 Nov 2006 02:43:25 -0500 Malaysia - our second home

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Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Marta's first business trip recently took her to Singapore for a few days. Of course, it's a completely controlled society where the locals have exchanged a large chunk of democratic rights and press freedom for economic prosperity. The rulers allow opposition, but the one opposing party and its voters are continuously hassled. They don't even bother to have elections in the many districts where they do not have a candidate, and the chairman is currently bankrupt and being sued for defamation of the leaders - basically he said the things that every politician says during campaign, but in Singapore that amounts to treason as criticism is illegal. So nearly everybody has a job and can feed his belly full every evening, as long as you vote for the same people every few years... sounds a lot like pre-1989 Poland except for the free travel bit. But the Singaporeans have found a way to prevent rats (punish people who don't clean up their mess) so Marta loves the place :) Her photos are included here - a small city centre with skyscrapers and some colonial buildings, and suburbs stretching across the island. I'll be there next month when I join in on Marta's next trip so I'll see how it is then.One fine Saturday we went to see the National Mosque in KL. A huge concrete building from the 1960s with an ugly minaret but beautiful marble pavilions with slender pillars and a patterned wall allowing the wind through but keeping the sun out. As underdressed tourists we both were given a bulky blue dress to cover our legs and arms. At the entrance of the prayer hall there was an information desk where volunteers helped infidels like us understand what we're seeing. We had a really interesting talk with the main guide.And I must say, I'm impressed with Islam. It has gotten a lot of bad press ever since the Ottomans conquered much of Europe (Romanians and Serbs and others make a big point of saving Europe from Islam, but I think in many ways the Ottomans had a pretty good regime... but that's another discussion). If you take the time to understand what the religion is all about, it makes a lot of sense. The basic rules of Islam are very simple, and clear. There is only one God - and no clutter of thousands of holy Catholic saints, or tens of thousands of Hindu gods, no sons-sent-to-earth, no original sin, no relic-worshipping (though Islam Sufism has taken to worshipping old prophets like saints). No pictures of Allah either, because even trying to think of what he'd look like is a useless excersise. The religious rituals have much to do with what was necessary to survive in the desert back in 600 AD (circumcision, no pork, rules for washing carefully, etc). Many things that the Western world believes to be the problem with Islam is purely culturally determined and depends on the country or region. Womens' headscarves are not prescribed in any way - the way women in different Islamic countries dress is purely a matter of tradition, not law. My eternal personal problem with any religion - it can't make people better (though perhaps it can help some). The realisation that I alone am responsible for my own decisions is more help to me than the belief that someone somewhere is steering my fate. When Islam makes the dishonest Muslim taxi drivers in KL (and all the others too) stop ripping off passengers, I'll think about converting. It'd take a miracle.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1156229880/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1156229880/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1156229880/tpod.html Sat, 16 Sep 2006 01:08:08 -0400 Malaysia - our second home

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Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

We made it. Marta's off to her new office here in Kuala Lumpur (KL for friends) so I have some time to let you all know we're alive and well.After a hectic last week in Prague (with two days less packing time than planned due to me being stuck in London Heathrow's security scare the weekend before) we boarded the flight to Amsterdam on Saturday to visit my parent in their lovely new house. It was good to rest for two days and meet the family before embarking on our monster trip to Malaysia; on monday at 10:00 we got on the train to Schiphol, and 33 hours later, Wednesday morning at 01:00 local time (with 6 hours difference) we got to our KL apartment and collapsed.The trip went really smoothly, with an EasyJet flight to London Gatwick and three Emirates flights, from London to Dubai, Singapore and finally KL. International travcel may seem glam and sexy on the airline ads, but once you're in the seat with a 9-hour flight before you it's decidedly less wonderful... more like a long wait. Emirates was a good choice; decent food, ok service, nice entertainment system, and the internet pre-check-in facility meant we had good seats all the way. We lucked out with children too - all the wailers were far away. The stopover in Dubai was very interesting too - we only caught a glimpse of the city from the sky, but basically, it's a lot of sand and dust, blinding heat, big highways, and districts full of cubist houses with high perimeter walls around them. Dubai airport did not live up to the hype at all - the shopping mall was smaller than that at Gatwick, and I didn't check prices but the choice didn't seem that varied. They are building a huge extension (replacement?) to the airport so perhaps it's all yet to come. Then when it was time to go it turned out that the screens are to small to hold all the flight information - 15 minutes before final checkin they still did not have our gate number on the screens. Strange.More interesting were the people milling around the airport - Emiratis in white flowing robes, looking like oil millionaires (perhaps they were), women in full black chadors sheets from head to toe, with just the eyes showing. We wondered how they get through customs dressed like that - it turns out they go to a female customs officer and very briefly flash their face at them.After a brief stopover in Singapore it was another 45 minutes in the air to KL International Airport - which looked a damn sight more impressive than Dubai with gleaming glass, steel and marble everywhere and a cute little jungle in the middle of the terminal. A taxi driver courtesy Marta's company was there to whisk us the 70 kilometres into town, an hour's drive along a 3-lane highway. Along the road: endless rows of palm trees, neatly mown grass, huge billboards, special signs pointing to shelters for motorcyclists for them to hide during tropical downpours, signs pointing to mosques for pious travellers.Our apartment is on the seventh floor of a new building in central KL, minutes away from the Bukit Bintang ('star hill') monorail stop and several large malls. We have a small living room with TV, satellite, DVD player, a small kitchen, two bedrooms each with a bathroom (showers only) and thankfully airconditioning throughout. Downstairs there's a pool and a French restaurant that bakes bread daily. The immediate surroundings are a little seedy, but the main roads are near and bustling.On arrival we went out to find an ATM and have later dinner - south Indian rice and curry and freshly pressed juice at a streetside stall - lovely. The next day after a long comfortable sleep we went off to find breakfast and wandered around our area, just before dusk at 18:00. We were in a mall havig fresh bread with philadelphia when the skies burst open and we saw the first tropical storm, with buckets of rain coming down and people sheltering or running to the metro station. Good time to be inside. Later on we walked down to the city centre, visiting Chinatown, full of stalls with illegal DVDs, watches and Gucci bags. We had dinner at a Chinese open air restaurant - incredibly good, fresh food (I had beef with ginger and spring onions) that makes my mouth water even now I think of it. Great, healthy, fresh food is everywhere - I think we'll like it here.Sign of the day: "Be forewarned - death for drug traffickers under Malaysian law" (KL airport sign)Marta's creepy crawly corner (things that made her go eek today):1 cockroach, 1 small gecko lizard
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1158195000/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1158195000/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1158195000/tpod.html Wed, 13 Sep 2006 21:36:24 -0400 Malaysia - our second home

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Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The mundane routine of work-shop-eat-sleep has cought up with us here, and both Marta and I are busy with our new and old projects, catching up with time lost. Yes, we spend more time in our offices than at the pool, folks, and we haven't seen a single tropical beach yet.Marta's been on a business trip to Singapore this week (where she is delighted to note there are no rats and the streets are clean - though I maintain that their little over-controlled state is worse than communism). Now she has met all people dealing with her conference products and can get some new ideas to work - she's enjoying it. It's good we live close to her office - she gave her number to her team and asked them to tell her for any morning delays and now the sms-es that come in give us a pretty good idea of the traffic jams around town.I'm slaving away at the first editions of the new Skopje (Macedonia) and Pristina (Kosovo) city guides for In Your Pocket, which are coming along nicely, though there are always a million more details to think of just when you though you were getting there.Last weekend we visited a Philhamonic Orchestra concert in the new hall which is in the Petronas Twin Towers complex, a 10-minute walk from our flat. With tickets at about 12 euros and the full orchestra wacking out Shostakovitch it was a good deal. They played 'Fratres' by the Estonian Arvo Part which was beautiful, with one droning background note going through the whole piece - listen to it if you can. It's a very nice but small concert hall compared to the usual size in Europe which means that all seats are OK. They insist on people dressing up for the occasion and it's suits only - I didn't have a jacket of course so they gave me a nasty polyester one to wear for the event. A hall half full of frumpy polyester jackets didn't seem particularly posh to me though. Because it's Malaysia, you can also enter wearing a batik shirt, which is the silk national costume - but these really look awful as the designs seem to try to outdo one another in bad taste - black silk with a pattern of large red and orange triangles for instance, or Hawaii-style flowers... awful. Perhaps they're all members of the polyester jacket protest group.Though a KL website we've found a group of people meeting up at different bar every week and that's been fun to go to - otherwise we're often to knackered to stay up long beyond 22:00 or flop on the couch with a pirated DVD.The pirates here have a good little industry going. It's always the Chinese selling them (as opposed to the Malays and Indians living here), I guess because they have better contacts with the homeland factories, good business sense and no morals. The media in Malaysia is controlled to the absurd, with the government in control of most newspapers and all TV coming in (even the satellite channels - there's just the one state company and I hear it's forbidden to point your dish at any other satellite). And with them being politically over-correct that means everything on TV is shredded in order to cut out any swearing or scenes with flesh. Gruesome gory violence is fine, of course, but people kissing on screen is a threat to the local youth's morals (or perhaps the politician's votes). Some films like Brokeback Mountain are banned altogether. So this is where the Chinese shops come in handy. Stacks of DVDs, all uncensored, and for sale for 8 ringgit, under 2 euros, each. The selection is not too impressive with 80% Hollywood shit, but there are occasional gems, and once you make clear you may be a return customer, they will actually tell you which are the good copies and which were made in the cinema with a camcorder.Some time ago we visited KL's famous bird park - the biggest in the world they say - which is basically a lush valley with a net slung over it. Some birds flap free through the area, other such as the large Brahmin Kites (which can swallow an Asian in one gulp) are behind bars in sometimes very small cages. Malaysia's speciality is the hornbill - birds with huge and weird beaks that are evolved to crack open nuts and fruit and toss it into their throats. The biggest was perhaps 75cm high - and a stupid kid whose stupid dad let him stuck his fingers through the bars nearly lost some of them. We've added the pics to this posting. There's also a few pictures of the Bangsar pasar malam, or evening market. Bangsar is a middle-class residential suburb which is pleasant for expats as it has a good concentration of cafés, bars, bookshops and restaurants. It's not as exciting as it sounds though, but the Sunday evening street market is certainly fun - with lots of fresh food for sale of the point-and-eat variety; fish, Malaysian dishes, do-it-yourself street fondue (called steamboats for some reason), etcetera. Despite all the food there was little eating going on - most people seem to take it home in plastic bags.Selamat tinggal, everybody.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1157198160/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1157198160/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/jeroen/malaysia/1157198160/tpod.html Tue, 05 Sep 2006 10:55:11 -0400 Malaysia - our second home

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Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

It's been a week since we arrived in Malaysia - high time for an update. It's been quite nice till now.We moved into an apartment that felt strange at first but now has been transformed into home after rearranging the furniture, installing the PC and internet, and killing all the sweet harmless animals that freaked Marta out. Three times the required amount of cockroach traps certainly did the trick - but there may still be a little gecko reptile cowering in a corner somewhere.The location is brilliant - opposite Marta's office, and near a monorail station. The Estana restaurant and disco, 200m away along the main road, is a bit of a problem - the boomboom resonates all night long, very annoying. On Sundays when the Philipino maids all have their day off and go partying it's boomboom all damn day long. Another annoyance for Marta is the rats that inevitably thrive in the dirty streets and this warm climate. At night there's often one scurrying along the side of the alleys leading from the main road to our apartment - but always running away, I tell Marta.We're also 300m from a row of three massive air-conditioned shopping malls, all of which have supermarkets, food and an eye-boggling amount of shoes and bags, much to Marta's delight. We arrived during the last week of the summer 'mega-sales' and she scored two very nice original handbags for a lot less than you pay in Europe. I never spent so much time in malls. It's a way of life here.We've been by bus (ticket 90 sen) to the Central Market, a cute art-deco hall full of tourist shops, and Chinatown which is more rough-and-ready and fun. Lots of pirated stuff, heavy bargaining going on, and stallkeepers keeping track of the the police by walkie-talkie... when they approach, all the watches, DVDs, Nikes and Versace wallets dissapear in about 15 seconds. We had dinner at one of the Chinese places (we selected one with 100% locals - a good tactic) and had fabulous fresh and simple food.We made it to KLCC one afternoon, the area with the Petronas twin towers, a large park and of course a massive shopping mall. It's easy to get sucked into these traps. From there it's a short walk across the park and through an area with new skyscraper hotels and apartment buildings to our place.We've uploaded some photos from the first week here so you can get an idea of the place - happy viewing.xxxSign of the day: 'Do not feed the monkeys' (in the Lake Park)Exchange rate: €1 = 4,7 Malaysian Ringit
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