Malaysia at last
Trip Start
Jul 15, 2007
1
138
195
Trip End
Jul 16, 2008
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Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia
Saturday, March 15, 2008
We are here in Malaysia at Jack's insistence, since he studied the country for his Southeast Asia section in 3rd grade. Despite his desire to see Malaysia, Jack got serious cold feet in the week before we flew in. Last week Malaysia had a major election, and against expectations the coalition of opposition parties did enormously better than expected, winning control of some of the largest states in the country, as well as almost half of the parliamentary seats. Pictures of protesters being dispersed by water cannons were on CNN.
We asked a friend at Homeland Security, a nice guy we met flying into Amman, Jordan, for his advice. He said go for it, so we have.
So far we really like Malaysia. It is very clean, very efficient. The Kuala Lumpur airport is rated by some as the best in the world. Immigration was super-fast and efficient. Luggage had all been delivered by the time we cleared immigration. We traveled into the city on a smoothly paved limited-access highway, well-signed and without a tuk-tuk or camel cart in sight.
Kuala Lumpur is very modern. We are staying in the Hilton, one of the nicest hotels in KL (as everyone calls the Malaysian capital). We arrived this afternoon to find a problem with our reservations. At first they could find only one room. When I booted up the computer and found our two confirm numbers, it turns out that only one was on points. The other was for (very expensive) cash.
Thanks again to the American Express Membership Rewards web-site, which is essentially useless. Perhaps 20 hours of attempts to book rooms over three months has yielded three usable reservations. On one of the many times the web-site crashed, I made our second room reservation on the Hilton web-site, intending to move more Amex points over to Hilton later. Of course, the Membership Rewards site never worked, and I soon forgot about it. So we had an unexpected expense for the overnight, plus another for the very nice dinner, since we did not have time to go out and find a hawker stand in KL.
Tonight we ate at the Hilton's Asian-fusion restaurant. Our meal was a combination of the best appetizer buffet I've ever seen in my life, followed by a good main course and a similarly expansive dessert buffet. An absolutely delicious meal, but expensive even by First World standards. I suspect most of the Hilton's guests are either on expense accounts or on a once-a-year splurge vacation, not (as we are) staggering around the world watching our nickels and trying not to spend all the equity in our home. As we do so often, we wax nostalgic for the days of the strong dollar.
Our waitress at breakfast was incredibly nice to the kids, bringing them refills on juice, a toy fire truck for Alec, special training chopsticks. Amy chatted with her. She was from a large family and had mostly raised her younger brothers and sisters while both parents worked. She was curious about our family.
"You are from where?" The United States.
"London, yes?" No, London is not in the United States. Washington, New York, Chicago? None of these were familiar to the waitress.
"Your country is very big, I think. Man is here from Swiss, I tell him yes, New Zealand. But I learn is different country."
Yes, in fact a whole different continent. Which simply means that the New Yorker cover principle applies around the world. Just as none of us (except maybe Jack) could prior to our trip have drawn even a semi-accurate map of the geographical relationship of the various nations of Southeast Asia to each other, so in Southeast Asia the various Western countries (including ones full of transplanted Westerners, like Australia and New Zealand) seem largely interchangeable.
Next we are off to the Taman Negara rain forest, the oldest intact rain forest on the planet at 135 million years old. Getting there requires a three-hour bus trip followed by a three-hour boat trip. There are no bathroom facilities on either conveyance. We plan to buy a drink bottle at the midpoint stop, and keep the empty bottle and cap available for emergencies (for Alec in particular).
