Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005
To: touring@phred.org
From: “Michael Ayers” <michael@terminalia.org>
Subject: Gondwana - Mildly Monsoonal in Malaysia
Selamat Phreds,
Another country is complete
as I’ve finished the ride along the length of peninsular Malaysia.
(Unfortunately a visit to the Malaysian states of Sabah
and Sarawak, on the northern coast of the island of Borneo was not practical,
though I would have loved to go there. Of course, none of the Malaysians I
asked had ever been there either, so I suppose I fit in, in that respect.) In
many ways Malaysia was not what I expected before I arrived, but that always
makes finding the reality of a place more appealing.
For the time being I have
left Gondwanaland though I will return sometime around the beginning of the
year. That’s a little fuzzy, since I’m not exactly sure where the official
plate boundary is. For now, I have been heading north through a wholly
different environment and society than what I last rode through in Western
Australia. For some reason I expected the county to be largely agricultural, at
least away from the mega-capital city of Kuala Lumpor,
with lots of rubber plantations, bananas and other tropical crops . However,
that was one of the things that turned out to be different than I expected.
The exact route I used
changed a few times since I first planned the Stage. Originally, when the tour
was going to start 6 months earlier than it actually did, I was going to travel
along the east coast from Singapore directly to the Thai border. However, this
time of year is the monsoon season in Malaysia (but further north in Thailand
and Cambodia it will be the dry season) and the east coast gets most of the
rain, something like 500-800mm a month. Yikes! Riding through Malaysia at this
time of year was one of the weather compromises that had to be made in the
grand scheme of the tour. The west coast is the more crowded and developed part
of the country, so I originally planned to ride right up the middle of the peninsula,
where it might be a little drier and quieter. That route changed a couple of
times before I was through, however.
For the most part, Malaysia
has been the easiest place I’ve been so far, in terms of practical matters. The
roads have all been in generally good condition, and fairly easy to navigate
except for one or two places where my map was rather out of date. There is also
enough English spoken here that I actually missed the fun of trying to
communicate in a different language.
Food has been pleasantly plentiful and tasty, with options ranging from
numerous local restaurants, fairly decent mini-marts, and, in the larger towns,
well-stocked supermarkets. The other pleasant surprise in post-Singapore Asia
has been the return of affordability of all the necessary items. Food,
accommodations, and net access are all considerably less
costly than what they had been for the last couple of months. If this keeps up,
which I suspect it will, I will be able to splurge a little every now and then,
and still recover the cost overruns from the end of Australia and Singapore.
The first change in my
route came right after I found my way through Singapore, and entered Malaysia
by crossing the Singapore-Johor Causeway. I thought it would be interesting to visit
the historic city of Melaka, which would mean going
along the west coast for a couple of days. In Johor Bahru, the second-largest city of Malaysia, adjacent to
Singapore, I realized straight away that my preconceptions of the country were
not exactly accurate. The city center was rather nice, and a little more attractive
than Singapore, but the route out of town was quite congested and surprisingly
familiar. The six-lane highway was lined with banks, glossy car dealers,
Mattress SuperCenters, and rows of townhouses with terra
cotta tile roofs. If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn I was in southern
California, not southern Malaysia. It wad about 30 km before things quieted
down a little, but even then it was very hectic. The highway was lined with
homes, and light industry, not the farms I was expecting, and the towns along
the way were more like cities than the dots on the map would have indicated.
Consequently, there was much more traffic than I expected. Malaysia has
apparently decided to join the ranks of the HighwayNations.
That was mostly ok, just a little surprising, and the only real challenge was
finding a good place to set up the tent in the evening. I eventually did of
course, though on the first night I learned that it’s a good idea to not set up
too close to the local mosque if you wished to sleep through the 5 AM call to
prayers.
Melaka was the first day off I took in Malaysia, and it was
an interesting place for a break. The city was the capital of the 14th-century
Melaka Sultanate, encompassing most of the Malay
Peninsula and a large part of Sumatra, and one of the most powerful nations of
its day. Later the city and its nation was occupied in turn by the Portuguese,
Dutch and British, and lost much of its status. Today it is a nice place, with
many good places to eat and several nice museums surrounding the ruins of the colonial-era
fortress. After the layoff of a couple of weeks I really appreciated the day
off after only a couple days of riding as well.
From there it was back to
my original route through the interior of the country. There, the rains began,
though it was usually only a brief period of actual rain with mist or just
clouds the rest of the time. After being so hot and dry in Australia, I
actually didn’t mind and did not make much of an effort to stay dry. It was
there as well that the agricultural areas I expected actually appeared. Large
rubber plantations were there, but palm oil was the most common crop. The edges
of the latter plantations made good places to sleep for the nights, but they
were not without peril. On one occasion
overnight rain woke me up and I felt too itchy to go back to sleep. It wasn’t
until morning that I realized that I had been infested by fleas. Yes, fleas. I
think that’s the only time I’ve been able to say that. And yes, they were all
singing “Food around the corner” (for those of you old enough to remember that
old cartoon with the singing flea.) On another occasion tiny ants actually
chewed through the floor of the tent and made for a similarly sleepless night.
The destination for that
section was Taman Negara National Park, which is said
to contain some of the oldest rainforest in the world. Here’s a tip for those
of you who may visit there on a tour someday. All of the Web sites and
guidebooks lead you to believe that you can only get to the park by a
riverboat. That’s not exactly correct. While the park, and
its upscale resort, are indeed only reachable by boat, it is on the
opposite bank from Kuala Tahan, the village which
services the park, and which is accessible by a good road. So, I could have
ridden all the way there, though I didn’t realize that until after I had taken
the 3 hour riverboat ride. That was ok, as I quite enjoyed the boat ride as the
Tahan River is undeveloped and lined with tall
forest. In fact, there is a surprising amount of uncut forest remaining in
Malaysia which was nice to see.
Kuala Tahan
was one of my favorite places visited so far. It is a small place, mostly just
a collection of guesthouses, hostels, a couple of hotels, floating restaurants
and Net access places which cater to the tourists, mostly European
budget-travel types, who have come to see the park. I stayed two nights instead
of one, since I needed a little extra rest at the time.
The park itself was very
nice, with a high-wire canopy walkway through the jungle. There is some large
wildlife in the park, such as elephants and tapirs, but I only managed to see a
few nice birds and lots of butterflies. One other nice event came as I was on
the way to see a bat-filled cave (I can say now that a guano-covered cave like
that one is not a really great place to be during a jungle cloudburst.) There,
along the trail came a small group of Orang
Asli people, the indigenous tribes of the Malay
Peninsula. I was hoping to meet folks from one of these gourps,
but there are very few left and as they still live a nomadic life, are not
always easily seen. I was curious whether the Orang Asli are descendants of the
original Africa-to-Australia migration that occurred tens of thousands of years
ago. If superficial appearances matter, which of course, they don’t, some of the
Orang Asli appear similar to the people I met in PNG, so there may
indeed be a connection there. Unfortunately, though I wanted to say hello and maybe
grab a photo, they were rather shy and quietly walked past without saying
anything. Incidentally, Orang means “people”
in Malay, and Asli is “first” so Orang Asli, not surprising;y, means First
people. Someone like me could be called Orang
Laru, or “people from other places”, though I can’t
say I ever heard that term used. Another word Utan
means “jungle”, so our red-haired ape cousins, the Orang-Utan
are “people of the jungle.”
From there I changed my
route again and cut over to the west coast again, thinking it might be a little
drier there, and because a new road which did not appear on my map made a more
direct route to the northwest corner of the country where I was headed. That
region of the country, and further to the north, posses some very interesting karstic landscape, caused by the erosion of uplifted
limestone seabed. So while this was not Gondwanaland, much of the country
exists due to uplift caused by the collision of Australia with southern Asia.
Whether or not that route diversion was actually drier is hard to say. It
rained a little each day, which was a little chilly during the one big climb
(topping out at just under 1500 meters) of the route in Malaysia. However,
during my last few days in the country I learned that the east coast was
experiencing extensive flooding, with several towns being evacuated. I probably
made a good choice there, in spite of the traffic found on the west coast
again. It was not too bad this time, as I found a route with occasional quiet
sections along the way to the most northwesterly border crossing into Thailand
at Kaki Bukit.
Thailand is where I am now,
and things are going ok, save for having to trash a tire already, which either
got a cut in its sidewall, or had some sort of defect. Blech.
Terima kasih,
Mike
--
The Tour
of Gondwana
May 02005
- Oct 02007
http://www.terminalia.org/tour