Arab Season

Is what the locals call it. July and August, being the hottest time in the mideast, are not coincidentally the time of year when the well off Arabs flee for other climes, one of which is frequently here in KL, ostensibly because its a Muslim country but really because it isn't. Though it should be noted that its a center of the Islamic financial universe due to its well developed Sukuk industry (look it up) As a consequence ME food and shisha pipes abound as do their clientele, which are of course Arabs. Also en vogue is the full length Burqa, a questionable development for the equatorial region. Aside from the more revolting sexist aspects of this particular convention, most striking is the fact that males escorting the burqas wear shorts and a t shirt. A fairer shake would be for them to wear three piece suits I think.
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Of medieval mace like fruits

At long last I have sucessfully consumed a portion of Durian - the peninsulas most well known and most maligned fruit. The smell is simply inhumane, leading to its rightful banishment from respectable establishments. The taste is not that awful, with a texture vaguely reminiscent of avocado. Hard to eat and inhale though.
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Downriver

Writing on a handheld device doesn't really allow for narrative flow but I've got two hours on the longboat so I may as well. I just spent two nights at kuala tahan at the entrance to Taman Negara rainforest. The town itself is a depressing collection of filthy shacks and concrete built into muddy riverbank. Its also overcrowded by both locals and tourists. If you're contemplating a rainforest trip in Malaysia I'd advise you to skip the peninsula and head to Borneo, which in retrospect I should have done.

The highlight was a 6 hour jungle hike yesterday that I forced myself into doing. I set off solo without a guide. I've done jungles before and figured this was one I can handle since its fairly touristed. Occasions like this are when its good to travel alone as one is left alone to question one's sanity after several hours of hot humid, muddy, leech infested traumatization rather than to face recriminations from other parties.

The jungle itself was surprisingly decent. Just a K or two outside the park entrance and you're pretty alone with the bird calls and the monkey howls and the heavy distort cicada solos. I saw a few small animals bolt away from me on the trail, probably small deer, and some elephant tracks as well as a few monitor lizards but the predominant organism, aside from the battalions of ants of all shapes and sizes (2 inches some) was the legion of leeches.

I've dealt with these guys before but man, they really still do suck in every sense of the term. I can't think of a creature more apt to induce revulsion, making their brief partnership with 18th c medicine all the more unlikely. The first one I saw yesterday reminded me how much I hated them ~ it was clinging to the edge of a leaf on the trail, totally vertical with its fat little mouth aiming skywards and waving around. It sort of reminds you of an annoying kid in class desperately raising his hand to get the teachers attention.

If successful it will then vault onto your shoe and then somersault its way up to your ankle and start to feed and get fat and nasty. Getting them off is no joy either. I had my Swiss army knife with me so I used the blade to pick them off. It was overkill of course and tweezers would have been ideal but I take great pleasure in bringing a knife into the jungle and using it to really knife things, as its normal use is to open beer bottles. Of course this backfired when I sliced my ankle open which turned my planned 18 k round trip into a 10k hike, which was fine insofar as I was running out of water in any event. Ok battery is dying so I have to end here.
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On a longboat in the Tembeling river

The coverage of wireless communications is amazing these days.
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Steak ahoy!

A trend which I must note- now that I've recognized it as a trend- is a peculiarity of Malaysian steakhouses. I'm uncertain if they got this from some other locale (Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong frequently borrow each others habits though won't admit it) or this is something they invented.

Anyway I first saw this in Penang and seen it repeated here in KL: a Malaysian steakhouse apparently must be nautically themed. Such as the exterior always looks like the bow of an 18th century sailing ship and the staff is outfitted in full Jolly Rogers style regalia. The incongruity of this is obvious - nothing says fresh prime beef like the dried beef and moldy biscuit diet of Her Majesty's Fleet!

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Penang (not the restaurants in manhattan, the island in the straits)

So I ended up spending two days in Penang - Malaysia's second city. And it showed! No, I'm kidding, sort of, lovely old chinese two-story shophouses and some nice Kongsi houses and good Peranakan/Nonya architecture (you'll have to look up old posts if you want to remember what that means) but not really much to report otherwise.  Good food though, I would recommend you shy away from the Rojak unless tropical fruit drowned in syrup and fish paste is one's idea of a good time. People seemed to take a genuine interest in the fact that I was there to sample their Hokkien Mee (a seafood/noodle soup with tamarind or something sweet in it that's damned good, one of my favorite noodle soups I'd have to say) and Char Kway Teoh ( a noodle dish that is the essence of awesomeness) so I guess that's something. But anyway it's your standard old colonial town, the first British settlement in Malaya but bypassed on the way to greatness by Singapore in the 19th C, which is good and bad, leaving it behind but free of overdevelopment and Japanese bomb damage. Old British Colonial outposts, of which I reckon I have now seen a hell of a lot of in my days, all have the aura of ghostly poetic metaphorism, which really goes wild if you traipse around the old Colonial cemetary (which I often due, I've done it like twice). So you see the old graves with their Victorian encomiums to the various victims of deaths at sea, tropical disease, childbirth etc and they're overgrown amid the banyan trees and the capital R Romanticism of the moment kind of makes you want to vomit, where you're ashamed of even thinking of waxing anything about it.

 

A few random thoughts for the record, on arrival in Malaysia one is still greeted with the homey and welcoming "home of the deadly death penalty for drug traffickers" rannouncement, and according to recent signage, piranha imports are also expressly labeled as uncool here, so keep that one in mind.  I should also say I'm fortunate to be here during yet another "Visit Malaysia Year" - just like 2007, according to unchanged signs, and just like the last time I was here in 2005. 

back sort of

so yeah I wrote this two days ago then realized that I was e-mailing the post to the wrong address so it got returned, it's two days later now so obviously we aren't real time.  The grand experiment fails.  Out of practice though man, that's what happens

 

Ok I hope this works.  This is my first post via handheld ever- so I'm writing in real time from a smelly bus between the gleaming ultramodern Kuala Lumpur Int  Apt and the rundown old airport where one catches the cheap local flights.  The only notable thing thus far was the incredible nordic stoicism of the two older Swedes sitting next to me, who did the whole 12 plus hours of the Stockholm to KL leg without getting up ONCE.  They literally just sat there like runes.  I was flabbergasted frankly, I am not one to lightly bestow the gast of flabber. In Sweden I understand the same feeling is referred to as "flabbjerkastjenorg"

Just noting as we pull in that Malaysia is one of the few places where you'll see a policelady with a headscarf and a submachine gun.