AWOL Geordie - Steve’s global adventure

Hi, I am currently in Penang, Northern Malaysia. I was watching TV one night when the cheesiest ever tourism advert accosted my senses. Malaysia is heavily promoting 2007 as the ‘Visit Malaysia Year’ and uses ‘Malaysia, Malaysia the essence of Asia’ as the main line in the tune that accompanies the advert. Wow, don’t you just want to line up these advertising tossers and sling bricks at them?

I never made it up the Rejang river, I got back to Kuching and indulged in some boozing with two great Aussie lads and a Cumbrian hotel worker. I did visit the Sarawak museum and the Islam museum as a token effort to do something not booze related. I went to an aquarium and saw a huge crocodile although I was too hungover to think anything of it.

I left some great friends behind at the weird Anglican church hostel where I was staying when I headed back to Kuala Lumpur to meet my lass Fen. We headed straight to the very nice Pangkor Island on the West coast of peninsular Malaysia. A week was spent here swimming, snorkeling, kayaking, sunbathing, jungle trekking, reading, motorbiking and eating. We stayed in ‘A-frame’ digs which consisted of a small wooden tent type thing on the jungle periphery. During the week we saw: Hornbill birds, Sea Eagles, Monkeys, Snakes, Lizards, BIG scary jellyfish and many leeches. After a short jaunt into the jungle I noticed my ankles were covered in blood! I had FIFTEEN leeches sucking the blood out of my body. They had penetrated my socks. I took my shoes and socks of and flicked them all away, but my feet were covered in blood. It looked worse than it felt but as this was my first encounter with the little critters, I was a little disconcerted. An Indian geezer offered assistance and explained that these leeches are totally harmless (although this is hard to believe when your feet are bleeding profusely - I lost pints man!). I am glad I never experienced this in Borneo, I still have the marks on my ankles now.

We also had a sort of standoff with a huge pack of Macaque monkeys. I hate these creatures, they reckon they are so hard. We had just found a great spot to watch the sunset when these annoying shitty little monkeys started harassing us. I frightened the alpha male away but he came back with rienforcements - the whole troop of about 20 monkeys. I tried to get rid of them again but they stood their ground growling and flashing their teeth (strength in numbers you see, the worry is if one manages to bite you, you don’t know what disease you might get). Then they started advancing on our position so we backed off and found a big stick. Now armed with my stick I went back to claim my sunset-viewing position, however, the monkeys had retreated to the trees and intimidated us from above. The fact is I couldn’t believe how afraid I became when there were so many of them. I thought monkeys were cute when I was at home but not now - not Macaques, I would cull the pests if I were local. The locals tell me that these monkeys can ’smell’ that you are a foreigner as they are afraid of the locals, I don’t know about that.

Georgetown (or Penang as it more informally known) is Malaysia’s number 2 city. It is a canny place situated on a large island in the North West of the country. There are a few English colonial buildings from when we kicked arse around these parts. There is an impressive fort built to defend the island and all manner of impresive Hindu/Muslim/Christian temples, mosques and churches. Tomorrow, we are hring a bike to tour the city and island and on Friday we head for Hat Yai in the South of Thailand for 1 month of beaches and islands - Life can be such a bitch sometimes!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 11:02 pm and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.