The Hawaii of Malaysia
Trip Start
Feb 07, 2007
1
38
50
Trip End
May 15, 2007
I am sitting on the ferry from Langkawi to Penang. We each purchased a beverage to enjoy during the three hour ride on the yellow-green waters from northern Malaysia to our humble home in Penang. I really am tempted to pay off the captain to take make a pit stop in Thailand. It's only 150 miles east of us, and we all desperately want to go. Of course, that's not an option, but it's fun to think about. We spent the day today relaxing and enjoying some of the highlights of the island. Originally the plan was to wake up at 8am and hit the pool and beach outside of our hotel and then be on our way. Katie and Victor woke up and went to the pool but the rest of us slept until 9:30 and didn't leave the room until nearly 11am. I woke up after a terrible night's sleep, transferring to the floor inside from a futon out on our balcony. I'd really wanted to make it the whole night through outside, but it was just too hot. It wasn't as nice as sleeping out on the veranda on our Alaska cruise, because instead of a cool ocean breeze I was surrounded by tropical stickiness. The hotel provided us with some extra pillows and some seat cushions that I laid out on the futon, and I fell asleep covered in a kimono-cut robe to save myself from being eaten by mosquitoes, but I didn't last long like that. A couple hours in I was sweating and I didn't really care that the private beach and the ocean was right across the way. It was 2 in the morning so I couldn't see it, and the waves were too far away for me to hear. So, I gave in and went back inside with my pillows, and set up camp next to the coffee table. Lauren had the couch and Matt and Becca the bed. And she woke up when I came in and demanded I get in bed with her and Matt, but I was too hot to entertain the idea of getting under a down comforter, no matter how comfortable the bed was. So I tucked my arms around my pillow to hold in it in place at my head and fell asleep. I woke up next to the pillows this morning, as the floor was wood and the pillows had slipped around underneath me all night. We spent the next hour getting ready and lounging in bed talking, just enjoying not having to rush off and do anything. We finally left the room around 11 and went to have lunch in a cabana on the water. We sat on luxurious couches overlooking the water and took a dip in the ocean while we waited for our food to come out. I had the most delicious salmon and pineapple skewers flavored with BBQ sauce and a real salad. I mean, real lettuce, a nice vinaigrette and not the wilted brownness they call salad on the ship. It took us about an hour to eat, and when we were finished we checked out and hired a taxi to take us around the island of Langkawi. We spent most of our time at the Oriental Village, a small tourists' village with a cable car that takes you to the top of the mountain, lots of shops, deer and rabbit farms, and an elephant to ride. We took the cable car first, built like a ski lift. We stepped in one by one and the doors shut just before it shot us out into the open like the Superman ride at Six Flags. We spent the next five minutes ascending the mountain over the rain forest and looking out over the beaches and small villages. It dropped us off about three quarters of the way up, where a man was selling wax figurines of your hand. He asked me to stick my hand in hot wax so he could make a model of my hand, but Matt did it instead before we climbed the three flights of stairs and went to the lookout point. That high up, you could see 270 degrees around, with only the side of the mountain obstructing the full view of the Kelly green forests below, the turquoise lagoons and blue oceans beyond, and speckled of color of the fishing villages. We took pictures and took the cable car the rest of the way up to the bridge spanned between two peaks of the mountain, which you had to hike down to get to. When I say hike I really mean climb about ten flights of stone stairs. Getting to the bridge was downhill, but going back up was a little bit of a pain, as it was just so humid. I'm a Vegas girl. I can do dry heat at any temperature you want but if there's any sort of humidity I struggle a bit. However, the view was totally worth a little bit of sweat and a red face. The views from the bridge were even better, being even higher up than at our first lookout point. Katie and I spun around at the top and giggled as we watched the island continue to spin around us even when we stood still. It's so amazing to think that there we were, on top of the world we're making our way completely around. Miles high and thousands from home, the ends of the Earth is at my fingertips. After feeling so small after being in India, and so utterly helpless, it was nice to feel, even if only for a few moments, that I had some semblance of personal power. Looking out over the island and the ocean, it made me feel unstoppable. Like if I could go around it and climb to the top of it, I can do anything. At least until we made our way back to the flights of stairs we now had to go up. Hot and sticky, we climbed back into the cable car to take us down, which isn't really where you want to be, closed in in a little car with five other people just as hot as you are. The air conditioning in the souvenir shop at the bottom was a blessing, and we stood lined up by the fan for a few moments, just to cool off. I sold my ticket to the drug rehab center so I could ride an elephant at a reserve outside of Kuala Lumpur, and when it didn't work out yesterday I was incredibly bummed, but only for a little bit because I did get to walk around KL. And it all worked out perfectly, with a twenty-eight year old elephant named Lasah we could pay thirty ringits to ride right there in the village. Becca and Matt went first, followed by Katie and I. I was wearing a long dress so I sat behind Katie, and the entire time I thought I was going to fall right off the back of Lasah. I'm surprised that the little wooden basket was enough to hold us in, because that big guy isn't a smooth walker. But it was a dream come true, riding an elephant. I rode a camel when I was eight or so, at a zoo in Phoenix, but never an elephant. I loved it and appreciated it, but Lasah didn't. I reached around to pet him on the back, and he whipped his tail against my hand. I suppose I can understand, it probably felt like a fly tickling your arm, but he did like the fact that we fed him a couple dozen bananas when we were finished riding him. I loved it, holding my hand out in front of his trunk as he sucked the banana against his nostrils to hold it steady until he put it into his mouth. Of course, being a girl I thought he was cute, which probably isn't the word you'd use to describe an elephant, but I'm going to. His spotted ears and twine-like eyelashes and tufts of hair on his head, he was adorable. After feeding Lasah we shopped for a little bit and cooled off with some popsicles before getting back in the taxi and driving to the Black Sand beach. The island reminded me a lot of Maui in some ways, driving through the jungle along the coast. The driving was a little bit scarier, with the cab driver almost getting into several accidents trying to pass motorcycles and other cars on the road. We passed nice homes and shopping complexes, quite a few snack shops selling fruits and dried goods, and only a few shacks. It wasn't like Penang, where development was a lot more apparent. We arrived at the beach a half-hour later and spent some time swimming and bobbing in the murky water. It was about the temperature of bath water, not what we wanted after sweating all day, but it's hard to complain too awful much when you're swimming at a beach in Malaysia. We took pictures after writing our names and "SAS 07" in the sand (I also wrote SAS 07 in pen on one of the wooden beams at the observation deck of the bridge- we plan to have a reunion in Malaysia at some point and visit our signature). By this point it was 3:30 and we needed to hit an ATM to get cash for our taxi driver, so he took us to pretty much the only town on the island with an ATM before dropping us the jetty where we would catch our ferry. We discussed it, a little confused as to why Dean Mike told us that Malaysia was going to be the country whose culture was the most different from our own, but we came to the conclusion that he was kidding because after the shocks of India, Malaysia seemed like an island town picked up in its entirety and deposited on an island in Asia. We're back in a country that has Starbucks (I'm sorry, I'm a Starbucks junkie and I don't have a problem that they're found all over the world) and we ate at a KFC before boarding the ferry. Except for a few culture differences, like selling corn in a Styrofoam cup at the pier and the look of the people, it felt like America. Truly, the Hawaii of Malaysia. We ate our KFC and I went to get a coffee and a Kuala Lumpur mug before we ran to catch our ferry on time. I spent the next two hours writing my journals, and the last half-hour talking to the locals on the ferry. I knew we were being stared at, us six white kids in the last two rows of the ferry, but you get used to being stared at after going three-quarters of the way around the world. But the last half hour or so, they finally decided to come over and talk, rather than just stare. The next thing I knew (because I was sitting in an aisle seat) I had three guys sitting in the seats across the aisle from me, two crouched on the floor, and two or three others poking their heads around their seats a few rows up to listen the conversation I was trying to have with the man crouched next to me. It still surprises me how many people think that we're from Britain. Nine times out of ten people ask if we're from Britain because of the accent. I suppose I just assume that everyone knows the difference between a British accent and an American accent, and that's pretty much true in the West. But in the East, it makes sense to get them confused, just like I can't necessarily discern a Chinese accent from a Japanese one. But once we were on the same page about where I was from, I asked him about some good places in the area to go eat at, and he also gave me the names of a couple of clubs, without my even asking. Young Americans really are associated with partying and clubbing. We really are portrayed so well in American television. Not that my friends and I weren't interested, that's not the point. The point is, I asked for restaurants, and he offered names and locations of clubs without my even asking for something other than a good place to eat. I didn't ask because we were warned over and over again that the people in Malaysia aren't really big drinkers and thus we had to be extra careful and aware if we did decide to drink. Therefore, I didn't want to ask this guy I'd never met before who is a citizen of a country that doesn't look highly upon drinking. And yet, that was the second piece of information he gave me. I found it interesting on that level. But then again, perhaps I overanalyzed it too much because hey, why wouldn't they want to suggest a place to a group of foreigners, four of the six of them girls, in hopes that we show up and get to hang out with them? Well, we didn't make it back out after we got back to the boat around 9pm because we were just too exhausted after our whirlwind tour of Malaysia. I got back to my room, showered, and passed out for the night. I had an orphanage visit the next day, one of the only service visits I actually get to go on, so I needed to be rested!
