Bus stations, the grimier the better. There is a comfort attached to a wait in a bus station for a long-distance bus. You know you're in the right place, the sweet Muslim girl behind the glass assures you.

You aren't moving, so don't have to worry about your bags. Eat, buy a big bottle of water for the journey, read a book. The sparseness of a bus station is its appeal, just me and two other people waiting for the 10pm night bus to Kota Baruh. One is a fully robed (in light purple) Malay woman, three front teeth missing, who finds my every antic (brushing my teeth, cheering when the bus appears) hilarious. As I lean over the gutter to spit out my toothpaste, twenty odd cockroaches scutter around below on their cockroach errands. The very emptiness of the scene lends it safety - none of us are going anywhere (until the bus appears at least).

I had dilemma-ed over whether to stay longer in the Cameron Highlands. I felt ready to go, but had become I think friends with an English masters degree biology student, Alfie - doing a research project on pesticides used in this area. Tall, splindly and with confused red hair, he had got to know all kinds of odd characters here in the highlands - eccentric farmers, a corpulent crime boss, a principled plumber / environmentalist, inept local officials. My own age, Alfie had a probing way of just asking the question he wanted to ask - something I quite admired. He encouraged me to stay and accompany him on his explorations - to meet the oddballs and the Korean missionaries heading off into the rainforest hoping to convert villages of the Orang Asli (the original people of Malaysia). It was a strange feeling to be introduced by him to people as "a writer", see people measure me and think if there was some use they might have for such a person.
I decided not to stay with him - I just wanted to move on, and also didn't feel ready to become some kind of actual journalist, investigating a local situation and writing a perspective on it. Not that there wasn't a story here - there sounded to be masses of incompetence and corruption among the vegetable farms - but I wanted to move on from Cameron. It may have contributed to this feeling that on my last day I was exhausted from staying up to watch England play Croatia, but I got on buses in the afternoon and headed to the east coast of Malaysia.

--

Kota Bharu is hot, friendly, shy. I learn from a man in a street diner that there are no bars or discos in the town, and as we are only 35km from the Thai border... perhaps you can guess where lots of townpeople go on their Saturday nights. It is unquestionably the most Malay and Muslim of anywhere I've been in Malaysia, almost every woman has covered her head.

The food is spicy and good - distinctive from everything I've tried before. This Malay food doesn't seem to mute its spices with coconut milk or dall sauce, so the feeling is a bit like licking a scorpion's barb - though in a good way. Thick chunky pancakes with chopped peanuts (or maybe bean paste) inside, fish curries, oversized squid, fresh grilled chicken, blue tasty rice.

Malay people seem a bit harder to talk to than Indian or Chinese Malaysians. They don't have that chatty, curious surety that the Chinese do, nor the Indian forcefulness. Indian taxi drivers and waiters sometimes just shout, "YES!" when they see me.
People here are friendly and smiling, but haven't made much move to start conversations with me - I feel a fraction more of an outsider here than in the other Malaysian towns I've been to. I now realise I knew it would be like this before I arrived - and am wondering why I wasn't a bit proactive about it, maybe looking for a tour or something so that a local person could show me the town. Then again, there is a homestay option, apparently 240 ringgits for three days and two nights, or a walking tour of the town, 30 ringgits. Both seem too expensive. Both Thailand and Mayalsia's tourist orientated activities are rather pricy - in contrast to how cheap everything else seems in the countries. I am bemused to remember my furious haggling over paying five pounds a day for my all inclusive horse trek back in China...

This room is a restored bedroom of a sultan of the Kota Bahur state, early 20th century:

Here is the handicraft museum, built like a traditional Malay house.
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I went shopping to replace things mislaid. Kota Bharu has several supermarkets, every person I passed seemed so happy to see me sharing this everyday activity. I bought a towel to replace the one left forgotten in Cameron - a curious system of an attendant filling out a slip for me, carrying the towel to the till then me joining the queue to hand over my slip. In front of me, five Malay women, all in white headscarves, faces forwards, none taller than five foot six. I suddenly had an incredible urge to pull out my camera and shout "Cheese!", envisaging them all looking around and, West End musical style, all be perfectly in-line for the photo. But I resisted.

In the night, the three other travellers in the Cerana hostel and I got shown magic tricks by our very nice hostel manager Ewan. Ewan was a very short but strong looking Malay, and at 2am he drove us to some outdoor courtyard by a foodstall and television set, where maybe forty Malay guys were getting ready to watch England play Portugal. Most of them in their twenties and thirties, in jeans and cheap t-shirts (in Malaysia it's still shorts and t-shirt temperature at 2am). I think the different groups of friends had placed small bets on either side - and when anything happened, everyone went crazy. "Orh, Orh, ORRRRRRRRRH!", when Portugal took a shot at the England goal, missing. When England scored that early first goal, everyone around us was leaping, screaming, waving chairs above their heads, hugging, wagging superior fingers at the friends who had bet on Portugal. Those nearest us gave me high fives and cheered. "Owen, small, small!", a couple of them shouted at me inexplicably. The match went on, the intensity of their football madness didn't tire, even though everyone was only drinking fruit juices and water. Portugal won, they went crazy again, us four English watchers put our heads in our hands, aghast... Perhaps if Rooney hadn't gone off, perhaps if Beckham hadn't had his mind on other things - but.. at least now I can stop going to sleep at 5am every few nights. The Malays ran round ecstatic, ranting at each other, laughing, honking car horns as they got ready to leave. But every time they saw us, they came over and shook our hands to sympathise - "sorry, sorry".

The match didn't finish until after five I think, we went back to the hostel, then Ewan and I went for breakfast, so by the time I got bed it was around six thirty, and I was getting up about an hour later, to catch the morning boat to the Pherentian Islands.

Daniel, 26 June 2004, the island of Kecil