Tag Archives: Asia

Travel log: Malaysia

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I used to live with a guy named Al. Al in many ways was a total freak. The stand out sign of his freakishness was giant bowls of Maypo with frozen blueberries stirred into the otherwise gruel-like meal. It was a meal that could occur at any of the 24 hours in a day and would often leave a blueish gray cast of spills and crusted tableware all over the apartment.

Al also called himself a writer. He would watch and look and examine and write in his imagined grotto. One day I came home to him transfixed by a can opener, which he was twirling to view at every angle and at every gradation of open and closed.

Caught in his study, he explained as a writer one must at all times carefully observe everything, even minutia to a minute detail. All was fodder for greatness.

I think his plan was to be as Melville was to whaling, but his passion would be kitchen utensils.

Al puzzled me.

His contention, his philosophy was that all writing is at its core was observation. He was a watcher. He existed in the square rooms of our apartment never venturing beyond the journeys he concocted between his temples and behind his forehead.

At the same time, I was studying journalism, writing that by its very nature stepped back to observe and report. Aloof from the messiness of human existence, we were taught to remain factual and by extension allowing the story to create its own structure remaining neutral in the telling. I suppose this training had me thinking Al was onto something.

But, my favorite journalists just might be Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. They, in the sense of Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey and The Electric KoolAid Acid Test, got ON the bus.

Many years later, I found my own tribe of writers and storytellers. Not quite out there in the wilderness of the 1960s and 70s, they did not ascribe to stories coming from afar, cool observation. Nope, stories came from going balls in and doing something.

Which, in all apologies, brings us to today. Holy fuckballs (as I like to say in countries where the locals are unlikely to be able to translate, I did take a long-winded path to today.

Today, I had round two sparring with the kung fu master who bloviated that he is one of 10 elite in the ‘hood called Malaysia who can tap out impurities and do something good to your chi or qi or chee (definitely not chia). My qi has positively been beaten into submission.

For a couple of bucks, I succumbed to a type of massage that literally involves a long series of backhand slaps to my areas of arthritic pain. By the way, I grew up hearing the word arthritis and thought of diseases and treatment. In these modern days, it’s medical shorthand for the fact of my cartilage deteriorating and my bones rubbing together, nothing more interesting.

In the spirit of travel, adventure, story telling, sucking the marrow from existence, I figured the investment was worthwhile on two scores.

First, I have back and leg pain and it sucks and I exercise and try to work out the kinks and strengthen my core and it persists and it sucks. Anything that could remove the suck would be fine indeed.

Second is just the awesomeness. I have a story to tell and pictures to show.

I have these:

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I also have this one of my knee. Grace and good sense preclude me from posting the worse bruising on my ass.

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Best of all, we get too bring home magical and mystical and therapeutical bottles of oily elixir of mystery.

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My back and leg are sore as I type this missive. But, if all goes well, in 2 days time I shall be healed. He promised me that soon I could do things with my legs I couldn’t before. I’m hoping that means ballet.

Of all of it, it’s a traveler’s dream of “authenticity.” The master’s rap was solid, peppered with references to the Chinese, qi, cultural superiority and my yin mixing with my yang. Westerners like me, we can’t take pain of treatment like the Chinese can.

The promises were wonderfully rich with self-promotion and mystery. He had skills and powers and training that few possess and to which he wouldn’t give a name.

I can’t decide which experience I like more–His burning my back, literally, with the heated ember of a block of incense, the visible bruising or the manifestations of health represented by the color and texture changes of my beaten flesh. Perhaps it’s the sum of it all.

So I wait, and I’ll report back if I can plie and jete like nobody’s business as the bruises subside and the oil seeps into my wounds.

Random thoughts at 40k

I’m more or less comfortably sitting in my sky chair, going from one side of the globe (California) to the other (Kuala Lumpur). As the crow flies it’s a fucking long ride. Different continent, different languages, different everything and far. That’s how I conceptualize travel.

I grew up packing snacks and loading up a station wagon to cross a state line. New Hampshire wasn’t even 100 miles a journey, I don’t think, but journey it was. A day could be set aside preparing and anticipating. However, if it weren’t for the signage, you really couldn’t tell you were somewhere different.

I yearned for travel as a kid. Plotted my escape from suburban torpor. Imagined exoticism, adventure. If asked at age 12 my retirement plans, I probably would have said a round-the-world ticket that never stops.

I’ve been places now past my wildest imagination. Safari in Africa, whitewater rafting the Nile, street food, temples, snake charmers and even a snake temple in Malaysia, shopping in Bangkok and Singapore, Edinburgh’s Fringe, punk bands in London, the tops of the Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building, the Golden Gate, and the Grand Canyon. Crunching snow underfoot in Yellowstone, and shooting guns in early summer outside of Yosemite.

It seems kind of fake to me, the one who couldn’t figure out the logistics from my bedroom daydreaming.

But, here’s the dark side of my experiencing some of my flightiest dreams. I am not a comfortable traveler. I ache with erratic sleep and temperature changes.

I never factored in dehydration and back pain while fantasizing.

Fortunately, I can eat pretty sturdily. I only have two gastrointestinal complaints in years of trekking. There was the incredibly tasty, succulent crab in Thailand that carried so much more. Nota bene: the public toilets in Bangkok are unparalleled in quantity and quality.

The less said of finding myself tangled in mosquito netting in a pitch black Ugandan night groping for the bathroom, the better.

But, where food is fine, sleep is elusive. It doesn’t arrive when it should, if ever. Even now, an almost 20 hour flight that took off at 1 a.m. to my body’s clock, sleep should have been a given. I dozed fitfully repositioning myself and never really getting to bliss for about 5 hours, and that unsatisfying stint was with the help of modern pharmacology.

Of course, a soupçon of the sleeplessness could be my hard-wired anxiety. We snagged the easy mobility and ample leg room of the emergency row. It’s a great perk — not only have I had room to do some stretches for my back, but we’re behind the galley and the bathroom. Plenty of water, and an extra snack and easy plotting for personal relief.

“But at what cost?” My brain says. Will I really be able to fulfill my promise to read and follow instructions and help evacuate the plan in the case of an actual emergency? Do I have the strength and dexterity to rip off the door and inflate the slides?

Who can sleep with that kind of pressure?

By the way, I’m wondering about the age of this flying vessel. There’s roughly a million built in ashtrays, on the bathroom doors inside and out, near the galley and around the sides. How the hell long has smoking been banned?

In hotels, sleep is much the same. I lay awake in the downiest of featherbed counting the hours until daybreak. (Back in the olden days when I might have occasion to visit strange beds, not sleeping was a great coping mechanism. I was up and out before the damage could be assessed, a ship sailing out of port and into the horizon before the dude knew what hit him.)

Maybe Morpheus will give me a little something something this trip.

Otherwise, if you ask me now to channel that 12-year-old’s view of retirement, travel dreams have gone to sleep. Now, retirement will be a cushy couch and a fluffy, warm blanket at home.

Dateline KL

We arrived in KL a while back, I think it was Monday, also known as yesterday, which is tomorrow if you are reading this from the other side of the international dateline. Something like that.

Since hitting Kuala Lumpur, M.’s aunt has done yeoman’s duty shuffling us around to the sites. Today was Melaka, where it all got started Malaysia-wise. Cool little town. Kind of like visiting Plymouth, MA give or take a few hundred years of human history and another hundred of colonializing nonsense from Europe.

What I really haven’t had time to describe in writing words or show in photographic splendor is the drive from Penang to Kuala Lumpur. We drove one car with two teenage/young adult cousins and a dog and followed the caravan lead of M.’s aunt and uncle (and owners of one said adolescent and dog).

The thing is, Penang is an island connected to the mainland by bridges. Consider holiday traffic at it’s peak in the U.S., since we were holidaying here, on a Sunday when everyone’s trying to get back from their family homes to their real life homes. Now, factor in an island. And, throw in the body count of Asia’s higher population numbers. Finally, stir in the fact that Penang drivers are the joke-butt crazies that back where I am from would equal Boston drivers.

When the radio traffic reports promised gridlock, we scuttled our after lunch departure plan. It became a waiting game to see if positive reports would reach our eager to leave ears. No such joy.

The plan then became an after dinner plan. But, where to eat? That question and its answering became another bit of a delay. So then we ate.

We said our goodbyes all over again and hit the road at about 9 p.m. We didn’t hit KL until about 3 or 3:30 a.m. Monday, hours after what is meant to be a four-hour ride.

Here’s what I want to show in pictures some day and find the words to describe — The truck stops along the route were mad crazy crowded. Traffic jam crowded. Like crowds you sometimes see maybe on the New Jersey Turnpike, or heading back from Cape Cod on an August Sunday. But, it was fucking 2 a.m.

Everyone was doing what one does, grabbing snacks, coffee, soda and the toilet, when one is on the road. But, it was fucking 2 a.m. and men, women and playing children were out in force.

And, it was all Asian and shit — meat on sticks and tropical fruits and Muslims ducking into the prayer room.

When I have more time, I will strive to write more and better. But, now, we prepare for healing soup that is only available at a certain vendor up around midnight.

35,000 and whining

Asia is very far away from the U.S.  About 9 hours in we still haven’t hit our layover in Japan.  Japan promises fun things like some kind of foot, toilets that are not in mid-air and electricity. From Tokyo, we’ll hit Singapore at about 12 midnight, there anyway.

It will be 19 or so hours from when we left the house, and one crossover the international dateline and yesterday is completely gone.  I’m sure I could come with some yearbook or poster worthy wise about minding the days as they slip through your hands. I hope I get to see monkeys.

More so, I hope I get to see monkeys in a wilderness kind of way.  Ones that don’t get peanuts from children, but instead live by their wits, as I’ll be doing. OK, that’s a lie.  I’ll be living more by my half-wits.  The wit that will need to go along with the crowd and smile profusely like the dim watt that I am unsure about language and all that.  Thank fucking god English is pretty prevalent among the M.’s folks.

If we get a SIM card to work in my old, unlocked cell phone I schlepped along, I’m going to have to beg M. to carry it.  His family from what I have seen seems addicted to the technology, using phones to text and talk like walkie talkies.  You don’t just meet somewhere, someone will call you. As what I like to call the “pseudo-wife,” seemingly there is a movement to put me pseudo in charge. So his aunt has my number on speed dial. It gives me sympathy to my sisters-in-law.  Seriously, what cosmic decree that apparently crosses cultures, puts the chicks in charge of telecommunications.  If I wanted that kind of role I would have tried to be a radioman in the army. 

Came, saw, hosted

I dabbled in comedy tonight. It was fun, in that way that comedy isn’t really capital F fun for the folks doing it.

I really like some of the stuff from W. Kamau Bell, and I wished it was the kind of place you could have had an actual conversation with the other performers. Same with Nato Green.

It wasn’t, though. More of a come in, do your time get on the road kind of show. (With my road about 2-3 miles away, I could have stayed.)

When I got there, the bartender thought he might have met me before at the Rose and Crown nearby, which used to have a comedy show. I did it twice, moments after moving here. To say I sucked would be to grossly underestimate what amounted to the Orick challenge.

A couple of people showed up from a job in the early 90s. A couple of other people showed up from my current employment. I shall see if they make eye contact come the morning, or advert their gaze in that awkward afterwards of a comedy show that’s rather like a bad morning after with an intimate stranger. Hopefully, all don’t hate me.

And, as I prepared to go on stage, I remembered Dot and I devising our hosting strategy. I tried to live it all, and I tried to do all of the things assigned to me — passing the tip bucket, eliciting tips, introducing and generally keeping the show moving. I believe I met expectations. (In a perfect world, people would have been howling for more of me. Alas.)

One last thing checked off my personal to-do list. I should try this comedy thing more often. Next on the list will be to go to Asia.

(Video to come, maybe I’ll ask people to vote on whether I should try this comedy thing more often.)