Visiting the Cameron Highlands, I seemed to do more inside my head than outside it. I felt immensely peaceful, thinking lots - I was pretty much the lazy guy hanging around the guesthouse and not really exploring, the person I've made fun of in previous articles.

The rolling tea plantations hills of the Cameron Highlands were some of the most beautiful vistas I have ever seen. It seemed that the combination of being rather close to the equator and rather far from sea level resulted in every day resembling some perfect English summer afternoon. Not humid, not too cold, just bright, soothing sunshine. I went on a tour through cloud forests and a little zoo of very strange insects.

I watched simple films on DVD (The Punisher (comically bad), Starsky and Hutch, Finding Nemo (both rather good)) and read two great books, the horror classic I Am Legend and the fairly complex The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The latter is a really good book, full of musings on our human condition and mixing love stories with sometimes quite difficult philosophical theory. Aside from a few too authory touches, like Kundera repeatedly commenting, "As I have already said...", I felt reading the book helped bring into focus a lot of the thoughts that had been circling my head for a while now. I read and typed while sitting on a bench facing a little field, hills and the setting sun, and felt very happy.
I don't know how much interest you have in my metaphysical reflections, but I had a lot of thoughts sitting on that bench as the sun creeped lower each evening.
The feelings that I had seem to leap into cliche as soon as I put them into words - but: I didn't feel like I had discovered the meaning of life or the existence of a benevolent creator, but I felt like not knowing either way didn't matter. I felt like I was a very limited and finite human being - I felt liberated by this. I couldn't solve the unsolvable, all I could do was live a life that made me and others happy. It just seemed like the point of life was living, and the world seemed to offer so many options and possibilities, there were a million paths for me to explore. There didn't seem any rush - I was happy to envisage teaching English in China for a little while, going to work on a farm or office job in Australia, just seeing where the world took me. I felt very much at peace, and simply bringing air into my lungs and letting it out again brought me great pleasure. I felt like my life would be full of fresh books, films, friendships, conversations - and I was looking forward it.

Like I promised, not a very easy thing to convey. Perhaps this feeling of ease will be very transitory, but right now I move on to fresh destinations with a warm heart.

This photo shows what an Indian banana leaf lunch consists of, mmm... Plus, Malaysian restaurants have a fairly unique way of making tea. A sweet thick condensed milk is poured in at the bottom, and the cook then pours the tea through the air to make it lighter and cooler. See the movie "tea through the air" for a demonstration, slightly ruined by my subject self-consciously looking at the camera. You can hear the waitress telling him to calm down and get on with it...

And also on that page, there is a short movie file of when I came out of a forest in the Highlands, and heard a recital of the Koran, "As I walked in a forest".

(A rather long) PS:

There was something of a gap inbetween leaving for the Cameron Highlands and my return from Port Dickson - an exploration of the delights of KL.
Among white walls I walked all but alone through the beautiful Museum of Islamic Arts. The building houses fabrics, weapons, dress, and furniture from around the Islamic world, from Morocco to China. Plus models of the world's greatest mosques, a restored room from an Ottoman palace, and a continuous recorded recitation from the Koran (with simultaneous English translation). Two things struck me about the museum: 1. It was very much a museum of the rich - the artifacts were a caliphate's sword, a Morrocan prince's desert robe, a Mughar's locked box. I wondered what the art of the not aristocratic Muslim was like. 2. The geographical extent of Islam - this faith we perhaps think of as odd, intolerant, backward, is one that shapes the world view of an awful lot of people of our planet. Yet we, a mere 60 million British, somehow feel ourselves at the moral centre of the world. I imagine the entire population of the first world is less than the population of India... It is us that is the minority on this planet.
Yet how many of us know anything of Islam, even as a new clash of civilisations is proclaimed? Not that I have learnt much myself - I now know things like: to be a Muslim, one must believe in angels, destiny and the day of judgement; that men's forbidden parts are the waist down to the knees, while women's are everything except the face and palms (so only these can be displayed). I know other things from reading books like Among the Believers (by VS Naipaul), but essentially I am ignorant.

--

That night, I went to the Beach Nightclub, where far more than face and palms were on display. The rather beautiful Nicole (an 21 year old American who had just spent four months in India) invited my friend Alex and I to join a small group on a clubbing expedition.
Holding my rum and coke, included in the 23 ringgit entrance fee, I joined my friends in the not especially enthusiastically jumping place. In every direction, slight Chinese and Malay women in little black dresses stood by themselves, holding my eye evenly whenever I glanced at them. Crickey. We went up to the stage, predominantly Chinese girls in tiny skirts gyrated as a few local guys tried to impress them. I hoped Mohammed wasn't watching this, or if he was, the intervening centuries had mellowed his big thing about female sexuality.

PPS Here are two of my favourite buildings in KL

Daniel, 22 June 2004, the town of Ipoh, waiting for a bus