Malaysia!
I spent 3 days in Kuala Lampur (KL) which is the capital of Malaysia and the largest city with a population over 1.5 million. I visited the national museum and the national mosque (both not that exciting), went to see a cultural show, visited an 11 story shopping mall with an amusement park inside (see pics) and went to the dentist and got a cavity filled. A fellow student from the class I took to get my teaching certificate lives in KL and he recommended the dentist for me. I went a couple months ago in China and the dentist told me I needed 3 fillings replaced. I didn’t trust her diagnosis so I wanted to get another opinion and I heard the dental care here was good. Thanks Ken and nice to get together for beers! When Ken first saw me the first thing he said was “you’ve lost weight”. I have lost 14 pounds since I left America and am now down to a weight I haven’t seen in over 20 years. Maybe I’ll write a diet book and call it “The Chinese Food Diet”….lol. KL was much cheaper than Singapore. It cost me about $11 per night for a private room (community bathrooms) in a nice hostel. One nice feature was that they had washers and dryers to use. (It’s rare to be able to use a dryer in SE Asia.) It was so nice not to have to hand wash my clothes. I packed 6 clothes pins to bring along and they come in handy for drying clothes after hand washing.
After KL, I went to Tanah Rata which is in the Cameron Highlands. It is a mountainous area with cooler weather. The hostel there was quite basic (see pics) and it felt more like camping since it was just outside a small town (cost was about $9 per night). It has a nice community room with movies every evening. I played golf at a local course and it was the first time in over a year that I’ve played. The next day I went for a strenuous 5 hour hike in the jungle but the trails were not well defined or well marked so I never did make it to my intended destination. I am now in Penang, which is a fairly big island off the west coast in the northern part of the country. I have visited a few sites and seen a couple movies here while hanging out with a Taiwanese/American couple that I met on the ferry. Tomorrow (Friday), I will take a ferry for almost 3 hours to a resort island very near the Thailand border called Langkawi.
Malaysia has 23 million people of which about 70% are ethnic Malay with Chinese and Indians representing most of the rest. The Malays are Muslim so you normally hear the calls to prayers early in the mornings. Most of the Muslim ladies here wear simple head scarves. I have seen many ladies in burkas but I think most of them were tourists from other countries. There are many native ethnic groups included in the Malay population. In 1511 the Portuguese took control, followed by the Dutch in 1641. The British established a thriving port in Penang in 1786 and took over most of the rest of the country in 1795. Malaysia gained independence from Britain in 1957. Malay is the official language here but most people can speak some English and most of the non-Malay also speak the language of their ethnic group. I have found most of the people here to be friendly and honest except for the taxi drivers in KL. I didn’t need a visa for Malaysia or Singapore and the border crossing into Malaysia was the easiest I’ve had in the last 20 years.
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