Kuala Lumpur again

I'm sat in an internet cafe surrounded by kids playing World of Warcraft wasting time before my flight back to Japan. This is the end of the little trip which has been fun.

I went to Melaka which is the old capital of Malaysia which was filled with Dutch and Portuguese traders and then British colonialists long before KL was even a city. It also has Chinese and Indian influences as well which makes it full of history and culture with grand old European buildings serving package tours to bus loads of tourists. For some reason amongst all the history and grand old architecture somebody, somewhere decided that the best way to experience all of this would be on a trishaw (a bicycle with a side car for two) which are then coloured pink or yellow or red or every colour there is. And decorated with plastic flowers and lights and umbrellas. And music. Dance music. Loud Dance music. So, there you are walking amongst old Churches and colonial villas and independence memorials to be greeted by Boom Shake Shake The Room rattling your ears as three or four of these luminous bicycle taxis roll past with some tourists on them. It's all a bit incongruous. A bit like been shown around Stonehenge by a clown. Fortunately Melaka also has some fantastic night markets, amazing food, friendly people, a very laid back style and an outdoor, open-air, cheap-beer-serving, big screen Saturday night football venue.

I got a bus from Melaka to Singapore. Well, i thought i got a bus from Melaka to Singapore but i guess the driver was in a rush as he just left us at the Singapore side of the border after we'd cleared immigration. With no Singapore dollars and no idea i ventured out into the rain storm. Welcome to Singapore.

I'd heard mixed things about Singapore. Some say it's the best city in Asia. Some say it's dull and bland. It's neither. You can tell it's a planned city from the moment you start walking down the streets. In fact, at times it feels planned to the point to being stage managed. As if the taxis and pedestrians were meant to be in those places at those times, being directed there and following orders. It's not very organic. All shiny and new and engineered. There's the CBD area which could be anywhere in the world with global banks, global shops and global people all working and playing by the river at the quays. And there were lots of fat western people jogging around the quays as well for some reason. Then there's Little India which is a wonderful place to get lost in with its knots of streets and smells, sights and sounds making it almost authentically Indian. All that's missing is some cows ambling down the streets holding up traffic. Chinatown, with it's usual Chinatown shops and restaurants and coughing men and haggling women, seemed to complete the centre of Singapore. The West, China and India all in one city but all separate and engineered for your own personal flavour and preference. Outside of that is the rest of the place which seems to be filled with apartment blocks, shopping malls and people speaking a weird indecipherable language that is a mix of English, Chinese and who knows what else. If Singapore was a person it would probably have some kind of multiple personality disorder or at least be seeking therapy for an identity crisis.

I got back to Malaysia last night content at seeing a brief glimpse of an interesting little country. I've walked down streets here that have Hindu temples, Buddhist temples, Mosques and Churches. All on one street and everybody's fine about it. How do you do that, Malaysia? And why do you insist on outdoor karaoke at sights of extreme natural beauty or historical significance? Who designed the Melaka Independence Memorial and can you get you money back? Which idiot decided to completely privatise your bus network? Turning up at a bus station to be greeted by 10 different bus companies going to 25 different destinations at 4 different prices at various different times isn't better for anybody, is it? What makes your taxi drivers so happy and chatty? And how can we convince the rest of the world to use as much cucumber in their cooking as you do?

I'll be back in Tokyo tonight hopefully finding more unanswerable questions that nobody gives a toss about. Keep moving.

Melaka

I've got a weekish left in Malaysia and then i'm back in Japan.

I was in Khoto Bharu waiting for a Saturday night and a game of football at the city stadium but it turned out that the local team was playing in Borneo that day so i never got to sample the delights of top flight Malaysian professional football. The next day i went to an island just off the east coast called Pulau Perhentian. My guidebook, and almost everybody else i'd met who'd been there, told me that it was a tropical paradise so i hopped on a bus and then a boat and headed out to the island.

The boat was a small speed boat thing with a small roof driven by a large man with a big grin and just two other passengers. Speeding out of the harbour and over the sea we could see the island looming large on the horizon. Unfortunately there was a storm just behind it heading towards us and the horizon turned a dark grey colour, the wind picked up and the rain started lashing down so hard i could actually taste it. It looked like we were sailing into the apocalypse. Waves splattered into the boat and we all got completely sodden. We arrived at the jetty and i wandered down the beach in the rain and found a place to stay.

I set out at finding paradise. It was raining hard. I was wet. The guesthouse didn't have electric during the day. The two main beaches were packed with little guesthouses and restaurants that had bright plastic tables and chairs covering the upper part of the sand. Everybody else seemed to be a fat hairy European, a kid, a loud Chinese man, a JCB digger or a suntanned, long-haired, hippy-looking diving instructor. I sat on the beach between rainstorms drawing looks from complete strangers with my lobsters-for-arms fax-machine-paper-for-a-body t-shirt suntan. Paradise.

The guesthouse was owned by Muslims so they didn't serve beer. I watched Man United get a lucky win. Horrid karaoke drifted down the beach after sun set from one of the resorts as everybody sat on plastic chairs eating burnt bbq fish and getting attacked by mosquitoes. Yeah, paradise. But i did find some nicer parts to the place, went for a swim, read two books, did bugger all and managed sunburn other parts of my body other than my forearms so it could've been worse.

After the beach i went to the jungle. A train from Koto Bharu took me through the dense green of the north east which was occasionally peppered with the odd corrugated iron shack or colourful town. I stayed a couple of nights near Taman Nagara rain forest which is the oldest in the world at 1.3M years. I met a couple of people on their holidays and travels and went on a canopy walkway during the day and a night hike after dark within the jungle itself where we saw more weird insects than you could imagine, deer, a mouse deer (i'm still not sure what that was) and, amazingly, a wild elephant. Good fun.

As hiring a guide and hiking through more of the jungle was about the same price as a second hand car, i got a bus to Melaka yesterday instead. I wondered around this morning to see a China town and Indian restaurants and cheap bars and a market and pollution and beepbeeping taxis and all the other stuff that comes with humid, busy, south east Asian cities. Paradise.

Kota Bharu

I started this week in Kuala Lumpur which is home to quite a few night market hawkers selling fake everything, men sleeping on park benches and alley ways in the middle of the day and, surprisingly, a hell of a lot of trees. I escaped a few monsoon-like rain storms in the air conditioned Islamic Art Museum and the massive National Mosque and also spent a sweaty afternoon at the fantastically named Lake Titiwangsa (it's ok, go on, giggle, i did) where you can get a fine view of the KL skyline through the mist and pollution. Oh, and if you ever get the chance to visit the National Art Gallery don't go there around lunch time as the place is like a fucking creche, half-filled with little snot machines running around the place turning it into some kind of post modern parenting exhibition.

I got an 8 hour bus to the north west corner of the country to Kota Bharu a few days ago. Malaysia's default colour is green. Once you're out of a city all you can see is endless amounts of trees and jungle clambering over every peak and into every valley. Kota Bharu is a nice enough little city not far from the Thai border. It's an Islamic place with mosques scattered around between quiet shops and billboards advertising watches and mobile phones that me and you can't afford, let alone the woman waiting tables in the half empty cafes. The occasional rat scuttles about in the shadows, stalked by the stray cats and at sunset the birds go a bit mental for half an hour as a lightening storm usually rages on the horizon or, if you're really unlucky, over head. Nobody is in a rush and everybody seems perfectly happy and content with the languid pace of life and easy going days. Why wouldn't they be?

Yesterday was Friday so everything was shut apart from the mosques and the 7-11s so i rented a bicycle and headed off to a beach out of town to the north. Along the journey half the people i passed seemed to want to say hello. Kids waved, teenagers on scooters zipped past shouting greetings and giggling at my insufficient speed. As a consequence of being sucked into this happy-go-lucky sunshine atmosphere i neglected to recognise that i was wearing a short sleeved shirt and i'm now the proud owner of bright red forearms and pasty white body. Sexy. I've spent today at the War Musuem (don't ask), hiding my arms from sunlight and generally just killing time before the Kota Bharu football team plays a home game tonight. Apparently they're the champions of Malaysia and according to the guys who work in my hostel the standard of football is "a bit shit". Should be fun. Tomorrow i'm heading to an unpronounceable island with a beach for a few days to try and make the rest of my body the same colour as my arms. Then maybe a train or a jungle. Or both. Or something.

Thanks for reading. I'll try and write some more guff next week.

Kuala Lumpur

I'm in Malaysia. I have a month between jobs in Japan so April is free, the plane ticket was cheap and i'm currently sat in a dank internet cafe avoiding the sweaty afternoon downpour.

Kuala Lumpur is a former British colonial city with Chinese, Indians, Malays, Muslims, tourists and probably everybody else scurrying around it. There's noodles and naan, Chinatown and Little India, headscarves and miniskirts, baseball caps and suits, smelly markets and air conditioned malls, Buddhist monks and mosques. It's a fantastic cultural mess all wrapped up with the usual south east Asian blend of thick pollution, thick traffic and even thicker air.

I wandered around all of this yesterday and somehow ended up at the Petronas Towers, the twin sky scrapers that loom over the city from almost every angle meaning that you keep catching glimpses of them through gaps in buildings or through the monotony of construction sites or between metro tracks over head. It seems a little bit weird (or apt) that that the most photogenic and famous landmark here is a essentially an office block for an oil company. Still, it's worth seeing close up and has a massive shopping centre in it filled with stuff that i couldn't really afford and is mainly home to people walking around escaping the heat trying to figure out how to pronounce BVLGARI and why they charge so much for handbags.

Last night was spent on the rooftop bar of my hostel swigging beer and chatting to people telling stories about traveling around Asia as the smell of sizzling food and wet cement and belching buses and humid fug floated up from the city below, ably accompanied by the sounds of people laughing and scooters beeping and music blaring and kids running. This is, essentially, why i don't have a job and a mortgage in England. I tasted all this a few years ago, drank lots if it in but somehow never really slaked my thirst. I probably never will.