Borneo Again

Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia

 

So the last few days I didn't have much to say, going from the barely controlled chaos of Bombay and India to the ultra clean, ultra modern Kuala Lumpur was a bit of culture shock, although the replacement of rickshaw wallahs with mercedes & monorails was a welcome change.   KL manages to be more Western than most places anywhere in the west with an inordinate concentration of Starbucks, Borders, etc as well as a shocking amount of largely Guinness fueled nightlife for a muslim country making it a popular party destination (the first night I hung out with an expat chiropractor from Vancouver and a former coal miner from Wellington NZ ).  Making life easy once again is that English, due to colonial heritage as well as the variety of ethnic groups (malays, straits chinese, indians, tribal people) is the lingua franca.  And even Malay is easy enough to read a lot of the time as it's written in Roman alpha (though it possesses a komical amount of "k"s which I guess is from the dutch influence "teksi, Komuter Tren" and such).  The people are friendly enough too;  Malaysia  has an inferiority complex (malaysian flags are everywhere) and is kind of desperate to get noticed,  (which is why they built the Petronas towers and the KL Tower) and boasts all sorts of obscure superlatives ("world's largest covered outdoor bird park!" "Asia's Largest Chinese Harvest Festival Zhang He Mooncake float!" ) - apparently there is even a government backed initiative to get Malaysians into the Guiness Book of World Records.

 

I arrived in Borneo after a flight across the sea today (the BMW dealership next door establishes that this is not your father's wildman's Borneo) and tomorrow set off early to start climbing up Mt. Kinabalu which should only take a day and a half. (at just over 4101m, an anthill compared to July's effort, which is good because I haven't exercised in eons save to dodge roving drum salesmen in India. (one of many banes of my existence there - in every tourist area, north south, whatever, somebody tries to sell you a goddamned drum. Who the hell is buying these drums? They don't pack easily, and they're really not that cool in any event).