Southward Bound: the Malay Peninsula

Saturday, December 30, 2006

I checked in, in the hopes that I could play innocent and get them to waive the overweight baggage fee, which they did. I'm sure it helped that our carry-ons now weight a thousands pounds. Finally arriving in Phuket, we took a taxi to Dive-Den, couldn't find a proprietor, and finally found the Thai woman half of the couple who own the hostel (the male half is British). We witnessed an all-out brawl between a young Canadian couple and the Thai proprietor. Apparently, they had been promised a room for New Year's when Dive-Den was expecting a cancellation but it seemed that they actually had no room, and the Canadians were saying that they had searched all day and couldn't find another hotel and this was ruining their vacation. I ran after the couple after their stormed off and said they could stay in our room (which had twin beds), if worse came to worse, and Steve listened to the proprietor, crying because she'd been cursed out. All this took awhile, and we finally settled into our hotel and got ready to hit the beach.

After seeking Thai food but only finding steak places and fast-food chains, we ate a kind of overpriced meal at The Port (the crispy noodles were good, though), across the boardwalk/road from Patong Beach. This incredibly tacky and painfully garish area where we stayed reminded me of Atlantic City meets the bad side of Las Vegas meets Newark, N.J. meets 42nd Street. Yuck.

I then directed us north up the coast to Lam Singh beach, where we walked down a steep staircase to a less overrun beach surrounded by rocky outcroppings and cliffs (though there were still a lot of tourists, mostly European, sunbathing [often topless] and drinking beers and smoking). We relaxed, read, napped, went in the water a bit, and both got hour-long full-body massages with lovely oils. Then we headed back to Patong, grabbed a quick bit at LG-recommended Restaurant No. 6 where I had excellent pad thai, and headed to bed.

Sunday, December 31, 2006

The day started off when the tour we had booked to Ko Phi Phi (a less-inhabited island with no cars allowed, etc.) didn't show up after we had been told it would be there at 8 a.m. We had to wake up Alan, our male proprietor, who didn't want to wake up his wife, who had taken a sleeping pill, and she is the one who talks to the tour company. Anyway, after a loooong string of phone calls and reorganizations, we get rebooked on a half-day trip to Koh Kai, a small island where we could lie on the beach and snorkel. We were only refunded a little bit, though. Bummer. When we got to the dock, I noticed that people had different colored stickers on their tickets, and I asked a British family that was living in Spain on a vineyard (go figure) what their stickers meant. Sure enough, they were on a half-day trip to Ko Phi Phi, so I conferred with Steve, who gave his approval, and I frantically talked us onto their tour for some extra baht.

It was worth it. It really was one of the best days I've had at the beach and a highlight of the trip. The boat stopped first at Koh Kai, which was out in the middle of the sea and looked very picturesque, with lots of colorful beach umbrellas and aquamarine crystal clear water, but we were happy to continue on to various stops both on Phi Phi Don, the bigger island with the hotels and such (though we went to a quiet part of it), and Phi Phi Le, a littler uninhabited island. We went snorkeling in a spot called Monkey Bay (a guy from Los Angeles that we befriended snorkeled up the beach and almost got bitten, because the monkeys are so acclimated to humans that they expect food, and when you don't have it, they sort of attack you...) and again in a small GORGEOUS cove off Phi Phi Le, right near where parts of The Beach (which I had just finished reading!) were filmed. It was amazing. I had never really snorkeled before except in Nha Trang a little, and it was just so fabulous. I couldn't get enough. As our white speedboat roared around the islands, we passed a cave-like place where bird's nests for the Chinese soup delicacy are harvested. We ended the day at Maya Bay, which was also used in The Beach, and I swear I could have stayed there for life. A perfectly arced strip of sand (granted, it was cluttered with tourists, but for the most part everyone was calm and quiet and enjoying the scenery), surrounded by cliffs topped with greenery. We sat on the beach with Kevin and his brother, observing that in front of us was a group of tow-headed Scandinavians drinking and laughing and singing along to a guy strumming a guitar. They saw us looking and invited us to join them, pouring us shots of tequila and offering us beers and pineapples. There were three tan Norwegian girls who said they were medical students who somehow got a three-month break from school and decided to come here. They were camped out on Phi Phi Don indefinitely ("We went to Malaysia for one day, hated it, and came back here," one of them said to me, grinning. "It's paradise." I had to agree). We sang some Wonderwall and some Greenday before our boat called us back on to take us, sadly, back to Phuket.

Right near Dive-Den, there was a week-old mall called Jungceylon where I had bought sunglasses the day before. The hotel owners had recommended we go there at night for their fountain light show, which we did. We were extremely amused by it. Through very cool video projections onto shooting streams of water in front of a pirate ship, we learned, in summary, that Jungceylon was an old name for Phuket, and the mall's crass commercialism was really all right because it totally jibes with Phuket's storied history as a center for trade with all parts of the world. We wandered over the France's version of Target, Carrefour, and bought some food for the next day's travel to Malaysia and some bad, cheap champagne. Steve got the last two bottles. Score. I tried a lychee-flavored breezer, which was yummy. After some pregaming on Dive-Den's rooftop deck, we attempted to eat at No. 6 again, but it was closed so we went next door, where I inadvertently popped a champagne cork. Everyone looked at me, Steve laughed really hard, and I blushed really hard.

Gleefully tipsy, we then ambled down Patong Beach boardwalk and tried to meet Kevin and his brother at Banana Discotheque. But we were late, they weren't there, so we wound up watching a Thai Elvis impersonator (absolutely hilarious), before walking over to the beach, where we saw what remains one of my most vivid mental images from the trip.

People were sending off these giant lanterns into the night sky -- this involved lighting a candle in a holder at the bottom of the lantern and heaving it off into the air, crossing their fingers that the hot air would make the lantern rise fast enough so as to miss the row of trees along the beach and get airborne. The navy sky was filled with flecks of golden light, and it was just beautiful. We got a little nervous that they would get stuck in the trees (some did) but they just casually burned out up there, posing no serious threat. As the clock sped towards midnight, we returned to Patong's main drag, which runs perpendicular to the beach, and found a small bar where we each had a drink and toasted the New Year. Everyone's watches seemed to say something different, but one loud guy started a countdown, everyone crowded the pedestrian-only street and counted and cheered and whistled and confetti filled the air. It was really joyous -- and then fireworks started going off in the street -- where people were STANDING. People would drag a string of fireworks behind them on the ground as they careened through the crowd. This kind scared me and Steve so we stuck close to the sidewalk and headed back to Dive-Den.

Monday, January 1, 2007

We allowed ourselves to sleep in a little, got picked up at Dive-Den by a minibus, and then headed to the airport. I checked in again, managing to strike a deal with the Air Asia checkin lady that we should only pay for 4 kg overweight when really our luggage was 8 kg overweight. We wrote postcards until our flight (which was delayed an hour plus), and we slept the whole way to KL. Groggily getting our luggage, we assessed the options to get into town, which is about 75 km outside of the city. In the end, we decided to take a bus from the new low cost terminal to KL Sentral, the main train station, and then catch the LRT (light-rail, and aboveground rail like the Skytrain in Bangkok) from there to Masjid Jamek and then walk to east to our hotel near the Puduraya bus station. This plan wound up working remarkably well, and we were impressed with the efficiency and speed of the LRT system.

We dropped our luggage at Anuja Backpackers Hostel, and inspected the room (not so nice, but at least no bedbugs like some of the reviews we'd read) and the bathrooms (so not nice that I bought rubber flipflops to use in the shower), before heading out to grab dinner. (This was also when we learned, from the TV in the hostel, that bombs had exploded in a few parts of Bangkok that morning, leaving three dead. Yikes. We had been there on the night of the 29th!) LG had recommended a place kind of near by, so we looked for it using about the map our hostel had given us as well as the maps in LG and LP. We got kind of turned around and wandered around the area just north of Chinatown, and finally we gave up looking for the restaurant and walked down the night market on Petaling Street, where tons of stalls sold fake designer watches, fake designer purses, fake designer sunglasses, and fake designer casual athletic shoes like Pumas. We searched for an ATM that worked and I found one that rejected Steve's card, so we walked around some more and then got dinner at one of the streetside restaurants with little plastic furniture (which was actually in front of the working ATM). I had noodles and sautéed vegetables.

Tuesday, January 2, 2007

We had a surprising amount of difficulty finding bus tickets to and from Melacca at the times we wanted (apparently the second of January is a holiday and lots of people travel), but we wound up getting a bus out at 9:30 and one left for KL at 3:30. It was less time in Melacca than we would have liked, but we were glad it worked out. We ate at the café next to our hostel, and Steve had very sweet tea and an egg roti and I had a plain roti that I smothered with a little packet of Nutella I had bought at Carrefour in Phuket. After observing with a sigh of relief that the roads in Malaysia are far smoother and the driving less crazed than those in Vietnam or Cambodia, we disembarked in Melacca just shy of noon.

Melacca was a port town, first frequented mainly by Chinese traders who dominated trade in the Far East until Europeans got there, after which it changed hands from the Portugese to the Dutch to the British. We wandered around some church ruins, the Stadthuys complex (which used to be the government offices for the Dutch imperialists), and the town's central square that had a fountain featuring Queen Victoria (I think. It may have been Elizabeth. Whoops). One of the cutest things was that the tuk-tuks in Melacca were decked out with yards of plastic flowers, Christmas lights, and adorable little hanging trinkets. We didn't ride in one, but I took a lot of pictures because I found them adorable.

After a walk through Melacca's Chinatown, which has traditional buildings, we stopped for nyonya laksa at Donald and Lily's which was recommended by a NY Times article I had clipped that ran in November. Laksa is a soup with noodles, fish, curry, and coconut, and the other ingredients depend on the location you're eating it in. There is a whole cuisine based on the Chinese-Malay fusion of cuisines that occurred as a result of intermarriage when the traders wedded local Malays. The Chinese were called babas, the Malays, nyonyas, and their descendents were Peranakans. Hence, "baba nyonya" cuisine. At Donald and Lily's, we also had cendol, a dessert with crushed ice, coconut milk, sweet green noodles, and sweet red beans.

At the restaurant, I asked a couple next to us what they were eating. It turned out to be rojak, which was bean curd and pineapple and other good stuff. But the couple invited us not only to taste the rojak, but to take a tour of Melacca with them in their car and drive us to the bus station. Andrew and Ai Li live in Singapore, but Ai Li is a native of Melacca (Andrew is from Singapore and they met in school there, and he works in some sort of finance and she works at a cancer research lab) and she is actually a baba-nyonya descendant! A real live Peranakan! It was like the guidebook came to life. Very exciting. We exchanged contact info and said we'd try to meet up in Singapore. They saw us off on the bus and we raved to each other about how nice they had been.

In Kuala Lumpur, Steve leaves the hostel to go store his bag for when he returns to KL en route to Mumbai. We agree to meet up at Passage Thru India, a restaurant recommended by Dive-Den owner Alan, and I chill at the hostel and read for a bit, then attempt to go shopping for gifts (bangle bracelets and pashminas!) at LP-recommended Mydin Wholesale Emporium only to have the store close in my face when I find out they won't take credit cards and won't let me run out to an ATM because they were closing that minute.

I tried to talk from the hostel, and got pretty far in the hour that I was walking and then realized the street that I was looking for wasn't even on the map that I was carrying (it was on the map Steve had). But I knew I had gone in the right direction, so finally, as a last resort after wandering for a bit and asking some people in a Starbucks, I asked the INCREDIBLY NICE concierge at the Mariott on Bintang Road (a fancy shopping street), and they put me in a cab that had me there in five minutes. I was about 45 minutes late, and I was so worried that Steve would be worried that I had been kidnapped or something, but it turned out that Steve was 55 minutes late, so we both gave giant sighs of relief and started grinning and talking a mile a minute about our adventures getting to the restaurant. We shared beer and a banana lassi (fruit shake), and both had delicious meals served on big leaves. Needless to say, we highly recommend the restaurant -- just take a cab there! We caught a cab back to the hostel.

Wednesday, January 3, 2007

Steve arose early so that he could go to the American embassy to get more passport pages. He also attempted to go to the Indian embassy to extend his visa (which right now expires not long after he gets to Mumbai when he still has another 2.5 months living there), but that wound up not working since they gave him number 118 when he walked in and they were serving number 20 or something of the like. We had worked out that he would try to call my international cell phone to try to meet when he was done with his errands, and my phone did ring, but when I answered, no one was there. Our backup was to meet at the hostel at 3 p.m. before our 3:30 p.m. bus to the Cameron Highlands, and that was what we wound up doing.

In the meantime, I saw the sights I wanted to see and catapulted into a shopping frenzy. I first had another roti smothered in Nutella and the sweet tea Steve had had the day before, then wandered down a main road toward the town center. I walked through Little India and would up buying like 12 scarves at 5 RM each (or $1.25), three jewelry-and-earring sets, a long white tunic top to wear as a beach coverup, and a hilarious-looking DVD of top Indian dance hits that I plan to share with Rosie and Kate, my roommates who danced in Ghungroo.

I stopped at the mosque (Masjid Jamek) in that area, and had to put on a robe and head scarf, which was the first time I had ever done anything like that. I took some entertaining photos and admired the white curves of the mosque as well as the arches that surrounded the two rectangular praying areas (one for men and one for women). I had accidentally forgot to take off my flipflops before walking through the arches into the prayer area, and someone reprimanded me, but I quickly left even though others nearby assured me that it was all right.

I then walked down to Merdeka Square, a large open area with a nice fountain and some flower beds and the tallest flagpole in the world, where Malaysia's independence was declared in 1957. Posted nearby were a series of very strict rules, like no chewing gum and no loitering and no animals and no bare feet and no smoking. I kept walking south and saw the National Mosque (which is made of white marble and has a 12-peaked blue tile roof), but I couldn't go in because it was closed between 12 and 3 p.m. for prayer. I walked by the Islamic-style domes of the old train station, stopping for a lunch of chicken rice at an overpass there. I crossed the river and walked back through Chinatown again and stopped to try my luck again at the Mydin Wholesale Emporium. I went nuts there, buying tons of Indian bangle bracelets to give as presents, earrings, two tiaras, three pillowcases, some ridiculously cheap bobby pins (30 cents for 100 of them!), and some bindhis. Loaded down with packages and glowing with sweat and the pride in a good day of shopping, I met up with Steve and we caught our bus.

The four-hour ride to the Cameron Highlands was uneventful, and Fathers Guest House picked us up at the bus station. The man who greeted us at the station was super friendly, and the guest house, which is on this little hill overlooking Tanah Rata and is surrounded by gardens, has a good ambience about it. Lots of people were sitting out at the café drinking beer and coffee and talking, and people filled up the lounge watching DVDs on a big screen and checking e-mail. The room was small and there were only common bathrooms, but it was a sweet place. We chose to walk down into town to eat at this Indian restaurant that both LG and LP had recommended. Steve had a tandoori chicken platter and I had chicken kurma (with coconut sauce) and rice and some unidentifiable vegetables and dipping sauces.

Thursday, January 4, 2007

We arose early, and after a quick breakfast at Father's Guest House (surprisingly good scrambled eggs with cheese for me, some fruit and yogurt and cornflakes for Steve), we got ready to hit the trail after booking our bus tickets to Penang for that evening. But first, we befriended a tall blond guy from the Netherlands who was traveling alone and asked to join us for our trek up Trail 10. We said, "Sure," and Alex (who is a financial manager at the government service for land and water management...an agricultural economist) went to put on his sneakers. We headed off, armed with water and granola bars and raingear -- and I put a compass and a headlamp in the communal backpack. Just in case.

So first we got a little turned around finding the trailhead and wound up in an apartment complex. We found the trailhead after backtracking around the main road leading into Tanah Rata, and then proceeded through some overgrown but colorful gardens. After some missteps -- trails in the Cameron Highlands are NOT marked as well as, say, the AT; in fact, they are not really marked at all -- we made our way to the top of Mount Perdah, a whopping 1551 m above sea level. We won't dwell on the fact that Tanah Rata itself is quite a ways above sea level.

The view was glorious, though. The misty skies of the previous evening and that morning had cleared, and we gazed at these beautiful rolling lush green hills, sprinkled with patches of overgrown jungle where agriculture or development hadn't yet take hold. We could see farms and quaint houses, and mountains rose all around us, the nearest ones a deep green and the farther ones a deep blue. We could look north to Mount Brinchang, the highest peak in the area.

Then came the interesting part. We had been told that around the power line at the top of the peak we were on there was a another trail (#12) that we could take to another peak before descending down to the road near Brinchang, the next town north of Tanah Rata. We tooled around the summit for awhile, and tried out a bunch of possibilities that all resulted in dead ends. Finally we found a trail that branched off near where Trail 10 had left off, and it was heading in about the right cardinal direction (north-northeast). We took it, noting that sand (not roots) were underfoot and that the trail was noticeably wider and more impacted than the one we'd taken to the summit. When we started to see some paving and more litter and signs of tire tracks, we figured we were on some kind of access road to the power lines at the top of the peak and that we would eventually hit a road at the bottom. Instead, after about half an hour of downhill skidding/hiking, we came to what looked a large power plant, fenced in with barb wire. We could see a road and hear cars and see a house or two, so we knew we were getting close to civilization.

But we could not seem to find a way around this power plant. On one side, the ground next to the fence sloped down at such a steep angle and was so overgrown with plants that we could not hope to get down. We looked for a trail nearby and found two promising openings, but the trails were overgrown and too steep once we got a dozen feet in. We went to check out what the other side of the power plant, and we were going to try to scramble on some small plateaus we saw on an otherwise sloping bit of land down to that side of the fence. Then I called the guys over and pointed out that directly next to the fence (which had barbed wire on the top, by the way) there was a narrow space that was just big enough to walk through. So we did. To our right was the fence, and to our left was a steep grassy slope. Feeling like fugitives, we squeezed through the opening and slogged through some mud in order to get to the road on the other side. After taking a triumphant photo, we noticed a sign pointing up the grassy slope that directed hikers to Trail 12. We must have just missed where it picked up at the peak, and instead took this not-so-legit access road for the power plant. Oops. In any case, we walked for about half an hour and found ourselves in Brinchang, where we stopped to eat.

For lunch, I had a claypot mixture of tofu, prawns, chicken, and vegetables over rice and we shared some sautéed bean sprouts, which the menu called a Cameron Highlands specialty. The sprouts were delicious. Steve had chicken with chilies, and Alex had an omelet. We all had strawberry juice, strawberries being another one of the Cameron Highlands specialties. Tea is another. So are roses, apparently. At lunch, I guess Alex was 28 and Steve guessed he was 27, and we learned that he was 35.

After lunch, we bid farewell to Alex and caught a cab up to the Sungai Palas Boh Tea Plantation, which is nestled on the side of Mt. Brinchang, the highest peak in the area. Our cab driver showed us a part of the factory, and we learned that the steps of making tea are planting, harvesting, withering the tea leaves, shredding them, fermenting them, drying them, sorting them by size, and packaging them. It was pretty cool. The workers at the plantation live in one-story houses onsite, and I was wondering about their treatment was a little too nervous to ask. Boh was founded in the early part of the twentieth century by the son of a British colonist in Malaysia who saw great potential in the arable land of the Cameron Highlands, and from a self-serving exhibit it seemed that the company's governance has been largely in the hands of that well-off British family. But I was comforted to see that in recent years, Malays have also held some higher-up positions.

Steve had the Boh Gold Coast blend, while I tried one flavored with lychee and rose. His was better, but we enjoyed the tea looking out over one part of the plantation, which seemed massive, driving through it. All the agricultural fields I've seen (and even the ones in Dalat!) have been on flat ground, even when the land is hilly. But the tea in the Cameron Highlands grows on the hills, and it's grown in ovalish patches with some space in between the patches for the workers to walk and squat and so forth. It just gives the impression that all these hills are covered with a 3D camoflauge print, and it is quite beautiful. We both bought Gold Coast tea from the gift shop to give as presents. So we drank our tea, played with a one-year-old Singaporean girl named Chloe at the next table over, and then met two Norwegian girls who hitches a ride back to Tanah Rata with us. On the way, we stopped so they could by flowers for their hosts in KL and I could buy an inflatable strawberry for 2 RM. It's for Melissa because it reminds me of one summer at camp at the University of Virginia where we somehow acquired a large inflatable strawberry and named it Cleatis and lugged it around with us.

We got back to Fathers Guest House, took a break for email and the like, and dragged our luggage down to Tanah Rata to get on our bus -- but not before I bought a waffle made fresh on the street and filled with peanut butter and chocolate sauce and Steve bought puri, yet ANOTHER kind of Indian bread (as if we hadn't eaten enough naan and roti over the last two days!) and dried strawberries

During our last long-distance bus ride together (sad!), Steve read up about Indonesia and read Prep (a tale of New England boarding school pretension and how it affects a girl from the Midwest there on scholarship -- which I had finished), and I read more of Complications (a book about what is hard and imperfect and so unscientific about being a doctor, by Atul Gawande) and worked on my blog and listened to pop music.

We arrived in Penang at a bus station quite a ways from Georgetown, the main area where pretty much everyone stays. The local buses had stopped running, so we were forced to take a cab at a cost of 25 RM. By 11:30 p.m., we were settled in 75 Travellers Lodge, which was incredibly spartan (read: concrete) but clean, thankfully. We walked to a nearby street and grabbed some dinner -- Steve had chicken (we think) thosai and I had char kway teow, noodles in a thick soy sauce with seafood and pork and maybe some other things mixed in. Steve opted for the cold shower in our room while I braved the common bathroom to have hot water. It was worth it.

Friday, January 5, 2007

We arose early, stored our bags, and set off for dim sum at a place in Georgetown Lonely Planet recommended. We tried all of the following: a sweet porridge, one doughy bun filled with pork, one doughy bun filled with egg and a sweet paste, one slippery doughy wrap with prawns inside in a yummy sauce, shrimp-and-pork dumplings, a shrimp, pork, and carrot spring roll, a chicken dumpling, sesame seed balls with a sweet paste inside, a crunchy fried object filled with yams, and two pastry-type things filled with sweet BBQ pork. And lots and lots of tea. This consumption occurred mostly before 10 a.m., and after we were satiated we headed to the central bus station to take a bus to Penang Hill, one of the highest points on the island.

On the bus we met this wacky American guy who told us, among other tidbits, that his dad had been in the CIA, that he had lived on a boat for 27 years, that he had been to 80-plus countries, that Lonely Planet was a ripoff and destroyed perfectly good off-the-beaten path travel destinations, that he didn't know Penang had an international airport, that India is the only worthwhile destination left in the entire world, that he was killing time in Penang before heading to Burma (Myanmar) for the fourth time, and that he doesn't talk to his sister but had just contacted her because she was in Bangkok during the New Year's bombings. It made the bus ride entertaining, that's for sure, and he walked with us from the bus stop to Penang Hill, planning to walk up but then ending up in our funicular car when he decided not to.

We took this slow, heaving funicular car up the side of Penang Hill (2700 ft.) -- walking up would have taken three hours and the heat was stifling that point -- glancing out at the island below and gazing at the jungle-like flora and fauna. The highlight for me was tied between laughing at the plastic deer and parrots that they had placed at the base of the hill and yelping with excitement that we saw several gray monkeys with white faces seating alongside the funicular tracks (desensitized to their presence, I suppose). On the way back down we saw one clutching (maybe suckling?) a baby monkey and the funicular car collectively awww-ed.

The top of Penang Hill was rather unexciting. We had a nice view of the city and of the straight between Penang and Butterworth, the port city on the mainland. Then fog started to roll in, which is de rigeuer in Penang, so the whole panorama was pretty hazy. I did notice that Penang is more mountainous and green than I would have expected from spending time in urban Georgetown.

Back down in Georgeton, we at lunch at the Joo Hooi Cafe, also recommended by the same NYT article about Chinese-Malay fusion food. We ate, according to Steve's blog, "laska asam (the Penang special laksa, a spicy soup with mackerel and other assorted items), hokkien prawn mee, and rice with prawns." We hadn't had a chance to see Georgetown yet, so we took a ride on a trishaw and tried to absorb a few hundred years worth of history while gazing at the colonial architecture and trying to read up in our guidebooks about the Chinese and Western influences in Penang (which virtually mirror Melacca's). We cut it really close by taking a local bus to the airport to catch our flight to Singapore, which makes me nervous because I'm usually early for flights. Steve said it doesn't even fall in the realm of his cutting-it-close airport adventures. We head to our hotel, the amazing and wonderful New 7th Storey Hotel, and putter around before bed.

Random observations in Malaysia: During our hike, Steve and Alex got into a long conversation about American foreign policy and disarmament, and I wished, as usual, that I could contribute productively to a discussion about topics like that (that is, more than saying, I think nuclear weapons are scary)...I remarked to today that even when you have a long conversation with people, and find out where they are traveling and what they liked best and what food they've eaten and even if they've had stomach problems or something, it's rare that you exchange names, so they become, those Norwegian girls on Maya Beach, or that family from England with the vineyard in Spain, or that British couple we met at Angkor Wat. At Halong Bay, we referred to people by their country of origin and sometimes descriptors -- the cute family of four from Singapore, the serious Swedish couple, the giggly French-Vietnamese family, the Dutch guy who biked around Vietnam. Referring to them in this way, they become characters in stories, in our blogs, not people...my head lamp and Steve's little flashlight have been RIDICULOUSLY useful, two blackouts, dark buses with no overhead lights, down the steps from Fathers to Tanah Rata at night...Books I've finished: Best American Travel Writing 2006, Catfish and Mandala (about a man whose family escaped from Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon who then returns to discover his homeland by bike), The Beach, Prep, Complications, Prep, Dante Club. Books Steve's finished: The Tipping Point, Seize the Day, Catfish and Mandala, Prep, and other more intellectual ones that I can't remember... Some Malaysian words that are very similar to English words (see if you can guess what they mean): teksi, kompleks, polis, restoran.