Hello everyone, here is my post from my entry into Malaysia and my first stop, on the island of Penang. I hope Malaysian readers will be amused rather than offended by any of my bizarre observations and inaccuracies.

There is something wonderful about being in a new country - everything different. My eyes rush to try and keep up with all the things I'm seeing.

The people are diffferent - many people's skins are darker, right to the almost-jet I mentally associate with Sri Lanka and southern India (quite possibly incorrectly....). But right now I'm eating in a Chinese noodle restaurant, and so most of the people around me are much lighter than was usual in Thailand. In fact, making generalisations about Malaysia seem like they are going to prove difficult. While the Malays may be the ethnic majority, there are large Indian and Chinese populations. While Islam is the country's official religion, there are huge Hindu festivals around the year, especially here in Penang; I'm sure the Chinese have brought their collection of Taoism, Confusianism and Buddhism; and from reading the blogs of Cayce and her friends in Sarawak, there's clearly a fair sized Christian community too. Complicated. And I'm sure I've missed out lots of groups and religions... Sometimes it feels like Malaysia is a mini-Asia in itself, a bite sized continent.

Malaysian people don't seem as extrovert and as bubbly as the Thais did, but don't seem any less friendly. Wheareas most people who passed me in Thailand would be smiling at me as I passed them, so far in Mayalsia people are looking at me in a, "Oh, who are you..?" expression, then notice me smiling at them - and immediately brighten.
The level of tourism development is world below Thailand's. My hotel pointed me at the main tourist street of Georgetown - my reaction on arriving was, "This is it"? The street had many, many shops with no English displayed in their windows - gasp. Post Thailand, everything seems far more pristine and undiscovered... So far, the level of English is the best I've ever experienced in Asia - street stall workers make jokes with me and describe their menu, hotel staff speak almost perfectly. Good Old British Empire I suppose..?

Perhaps it's the fewer fellow tourists, pehaps it's something else, but I do feel more relaxed here than in Thailand. Perhaps because that feeling of traveller peer pressure I couldn't but help feeling in Thailand is gone. And people don't seem in such a crazed rush to sell me things - twice today, people have told me to just go to the bus station / historical mansion to buy my ticket direct. "It'll be cheaper too!" said one, to my amazement. A pedal taxi pulled up to me as I tried to work out when to take the Cheong Fatt Tze mansion tour. "It's closed now, but there's another tour at three", he said with an Indian/British accent. "Would you like a tour of the city... good tour, see historic buildings, small villages"... Were this Thailand, our conversation would have consisted of "Tuk tuk, tuk tuk?" and "NO NO NO!!!" - here, I felt almost embarassed not to be taking the tour and very politely declined.

Near to my very polite and friendly guesthouse, there is an Indian community surrounded by the much larger Chinatown. The Chinese streets are quiet, lots of beautiful old buildings, arches and shutters. Many fantastically old Chinese people sit silently inside, as though their conversation cannot be run quicker than one comment a day.

The Indian quarter is loud, blaring, young, crazy. Multi coloured neon lights, cooking smells, lots of shops selling Bollywood DVDs (or VCDs?). From a speaker, a woman's voice rises alone like a charmed snake rising from a basket. Then, suddenly, the drumming polyrythmns kick in and her voice accelerates - the moment of peace smashes into fast pop.
As I pass a shop, a young man comes out with a round brown object in his hand, the top burning. It is, however, not a grenade, but a coconut. He smashes it on the ground with all his effort and goes back inside. I later discover in a restaurant that this is a Hindu offering - the white of the coconut is to show one's purity, the juice is to show one's heart is wet, not dry. "Bad to have a dry heart", says the man inside the restaurant. There is a Hindu conconut smashing festival in February here in Georgetown - in his thick Indian accent he smiles wistfully, "thousands of coconuts"...

The food I've eaten so far has been wonderful. The first night, I wandered back into the Indian quarter and had a masala dosai, largely on the prompting of the staff. A waiter placed in front of me a large square of banana leaf as my plate, and brought over the accompanying three curry sauces in a metal container. Then my dosai arrived, a thin folded pancake stuffed with vegetables. I poured some of the red curry sauce over part of it and began eating with the fingers of my right hand - it was gorgeous, far nicer than my brain had been anticipating. I then had a chapati with a vegetable white korma - eating was messy and great. I went over to the sink, threw my now sodden banana leaf in the rubbish pile and washed my hands. The cost was 2 ringgits, about 30p - I'm sure they undercharged me.

Not full, I continued, and came to that restaurant where I had my coconut discussion. They served me a set meal of chicken curry, biryani rice, and five vegetables, all spooned out in discreet piles on my leaf. "Spoon or hand?", one waiter asked. "Hand", I figured I needed to learn how...

Back in Kho Pha Ngan while chatting with Lucy and Poppy, Lucy had been talking about Indian thali set meals, and how you couldn't get a thali in England. I decided not to comment that lots of restaurants offered thalis now - Poppy however was more forthright and pointed this out. Lucy shook her head, "No, it's not the same, it was... just more Indian there".
Eating this meal, which may not even have been a thali, I understood what she meant immediately. For one, the flavours of each section were fantastic - they jumped out and assaulted my mouth whether I ate them with the rice or the popadom. But equally key was eating with one's hand. In England, one carefully spoons sauces on to different dishes, uses a fork to pick up meats. Here, the flavour mixed and changed as I poured the sauce bowls onto my rice then stirred in a lump of red chicken on the bone - mmm. It was great even though the chicken had clearly been cooked some time ago and was rather cold - surprisingly I have yet to feel ill.

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Tonight sitting once again in little India. Sipping a subversive, strangely delicious Lassi, loud female voice music playing in the next shop.

This afternoon I had asked the people in my dorm room, "Does anyone want to go on a tour of a Chinese mansion with me"? Jacky, from England agreed, and so we went to the absurdly opulent and auspicious palace of Cheong Fatt Tze.

This man arrived in Penang with nothing - he slowly acquired immense wealth, power, seven wives and quite a few concubines. This palace housed three of his wives, including his favourite, the seventh, and the house was meant to be both lavish and to be in perfect accordance with the principles of Feng Shui. Its front faced the sea, its back the mountain, and as a gentle slope is recommended by Feng Shui masters, Cheong Fatt Tze built the house on an artifical incline. The length to which he had gone to court prosperity and good luck: a wall of stone rings at the front, to blow in good fortune, a dark wood screen at the end of the entrance hall to catch the good fortune, stained glass windows from England depicting pineapples, wooden bats on the entrance walls, window shutters that when closed, resembled yin-yang circles - and as his belief was that water brought prosperity, the centre of the building opened into a courtyard to let rain in.
His master bedroom housed his favoured wife - the bedroom opposite housed his mistresses, and he alternated depending on his mood. He fathered an unknown but certainly substantial number of children, but chose to recognise only fourteen of these. His reputation and wealth became so significant that when he died in 1916 the British and Dutch authorities in Malaysia ran their flags at half mast.
It is possible to stay in the indigo blue mansion - bed and breakfast in one of the beautiful restored rooms costs between 30 and 50 pounds a night. Hopefully some of Cheong Fatt Tze's good Feng Shui will rub off on you.

I went to the Penang Museum, a glimpse into another world. The photos of 19th and 20th century life here in Penang was all the more amazing because how relatively recent all this was. Sepia faces of Indians and Chinese, Malays, Europeans and all kinds of other groups: Japanese, Armenians, Jews, Burmese... The faces and dress of the photographs just look other-than-modern, it seems incredible that someone could have got on a ship from 1940s England and visited this place. Someone from the world of Chamberlain and Churchill (which admittedly, would I'm sure be different from my own, but not, I think, to this extent) could have seen these faces and wedding ceremonies - one set of pictures showed a Malay man marrying a Chinese woman - the woman with a high forehead, seemingly the in thing back in those days. Opium was still being legally traded in Malaysia in 1940. Incredibly ornate doors and furniture from Chinese families, photos of street scenes and interviews with disappeared professions - bicycle hawkers who served food to people's houses.

Click here for a short movie, Faces of old Penang, I took in the museum (haven't worked out yet how to link these files directly). Scroll down to the files listed under TrekTV.

The other thing that fascinated me in the museum was glimpses of how Mayalsia (or at least the part of Mayalsia that designs and controls museums) sees itself. The emphasis was on Malaysia as a multi ethnic country, a blend, a kalidiscope. "...of many things and many people". Some of the groups had been, I was told, assimilated into Malay society (eg the Arabs, the Achenese), some had retained cultural differences (the Chinese, the Indians), some had lived in Mayalysia but later left. All however, saw Mayalsia as their home - various quotations from colonial figures suggest even British hearts could be melted.
I thought it would be very interesting to see how these self images would accord to reality. Already, there were signs that the alchemy was not entirely harmonious. One of the hostel staff proudly assures us Georgetown is a Chinese town, traditional Chinese buildings. I smiled, "You don't see buildings like these in China anymore" - he nodded that this might be so. He was Chinese and proud of it: "Malays are lazy... Chinese good at business, good at gambling, good at stealing" (so perhaps he wasn't being entirely serious). In a further complication, he didn't actually look that Chinese to my eyes, but then I didn't spend much time in south east China where most of the Cantonese and Hakkian Penang Chinese come from, so who knows?

I left Penang on a still dark Monday morning, still dark enough for the lady-bloke prostitutes to be tiredly standing by road corners. I was heading to Kuala Lumpur to meet my brother (I haven't set eyes on him in over ten months). I walked past two dogs savaging a kitten to death - they held either end of it and shook and bit. After the kitten stopped moving on the cold pavement, the dogs stood around looking slightly guilty. I noted it down in my mental log of "I've never seen that before", had a naan with dall sauce for breakfast in an Indian diner and caught the bus south.

Daniel, 7 June 2004, Georgetown