Strangers in Paradise: The Innocent Bliss of a Malaysian Vacation
by James Fallows
M ALAYSIA IS OFF the track for most Americans, and few end Up there except when heading someplace else in Southeast Asia. Last summer my wife and I were at a resort, along with 600 other vacationers, on the Malaysian east coast. Before the evening variety-show entertainment the emcee worked up the crowd with a standard routine: Let’s hear it for the people from . . . AUSTRALIA!!! (Huge cheer.) Is anyone here from . . . JAPAN!!! (Louder still.) He went on to Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and New Zealand, and didn’t even mention the United States.
Envious of Thailand’s success in attracting some three million visitors, including a good many tourists from the United States, during Visit Thailand Year, three years ago, Malaysia has declared 1990 to be Visit Malaysia Year. It will be an uphill struggle to match Thailand. Thailand is larger, more populous, culturally richer, and simply more romantic than Malaysia. Although the Visit Thailand Year organizers didn’t stress this in their ads, Bangkok’s well-deserved reputation as the city where nothing is taboo adds buoyancy to the Thai tourist trade. (If it were possible for U.S. conventioneers to get to Bangkok easily. Las Vegas wouldn’t have a chance.)
The tender, slightly innocent nature of Malaysia’s charms makes me feel protective of the country, and hopeful that enough outsiders will discover it to make Visit Malaysia Year a success. Having lived in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, very happily for two years, I feel like the parent of a plain but good-hearted child, hoping others will pay attention long enough to appreciate the wonderful qualities inside. Since there are so many things to see in the vicinity, it would probably not make sense to come all the way across the Pacific to Malaysia without also seeing Singapore, Indonesia, or the inevitable Thailand. But it would be a shame to make the trip without devoting a week or two to Malaysia itself.
What would you do there? If you’re a naturalist or a trekker, you might head into the wild rain forests of Sabah and Sarawak, the remote Malaysian states on the island of Borneo. I have never been to those states and don’t know much about them. But by plane, car, train, and boat my family explored most of the states of peninsular Malaysia, between Thailand to the north and Singapore to the south, and we ran out of time before we ran out of destinations.
Travel in Malaysia is about as free of annoyances as it can be in an exotic country. The hotels are usually clean, the people are pleasant, and the food is a combination of Malay, Indian, and Chinese cuisines that made me look forward to mealtimes more avidly than I ever have except once when sailing on the Queen Elizabeth II. Everything is cheap. English is spoken widely in all the cities. (Like the English of West Africa or the Caribbean, the “Straits English" generally spoken in Malaysia and Singapore takes a while for American-English speakers to understand. Coping with it is a first step toward learning Chinese, because it has the rhythm and tone pattern of southern Chinese dialects, with English words stuck in.) Except in the hill-station resorts in the country’s central highlands, the weather is invariably humid and hot. In the big cities it rains torrentially late most afternoons and is sunny the rest of the day. The beach resorts on the east coast are deserted during the monsoon season, from November through February.
Before you go, you should read Anthony Burgess’s The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy and Somerset Maugham’s story “The Letter,”which is based on a murder in Kuala Lumpur. Noel Barber’s The War of the Running Dogs describes the 1950s guerrilla campaign known as the Malayan Emergency, and Mary McMinnies’s novel The Flying Fox is set at the same time. While you’re in Malaysia, you should be sure to buy all the books you can find by the brilliant satirical cartoonist known as Lat. Some of his newspaper cartoons rely on inside jokes about local politics, but the books KampungBoy and Town Boy, which describe his boyhood in the countryside and his bittersweet departure for the city, have universal appeal.(They are the Malaysian counterparts to Russell Baker’s Growing Up.)
NOW YOUR travel plan. On the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, looking out toward Sumatra across the Straits of Malacca, are two delightful cities, Malacca and Penang. Say what you will about the evils of imperialism, it did leave Asia dotted with a number of gracefully designed cities that combine European architecture with Asian flair. The great enemy of these cities architecturally is economic progress, which is why stagnant Hanoi has retained so much more of its colonial architecture than the boomtown of Singapore has. Malacca is sleepy enough to have preserved not only the centuries-old forts of the Dutch, Portuguese, and British conquerors but also a large undisturbed tract of classic “shophousc" architecture. This is the standard urban structure throughout Southeast Asia—row upon row of two-story whitewashed buildings with red-tiled roofs, open fronts, and apartments for the owners in the rear. When I strolled past the antique stores or the Chinese-medicine displays in Malacca’s shophouses, or sat with my family in a shophouse café watching cooks fry up char key teow a kind of paella with noodles, in big black woks, I felt as if Joseph Conrad, or perhaps Lord Jim himself, must soon turn up. Many of the old Chinese Malaysians who work in the shops do their part to sustain the tintype atmosphere by wearing shapeless Bermuda shorts and billowy basketball-style undershirts. Malacca is about an hour’s drive (or bus ride) south of Kuala Lumpur on a relatively modern and safe highway.
Penang is at the northern end of the Malaysian west coast. You can fly there from Kuala Lumpur for about $30, or get a first-class scat for the six-hour train ride for about the same price. In principle you could ride all the way from Singapore to Bangkok in about thirty hours on the same train, but unless you’re a zealot for either trains or views of rubber plantations, the Singapore-K.L. or K.L.-Penang leg will be enough. Penang is more bustling and therefore less nostalgic than Malacca, but it is full of imposing colonial structures, including the Malaysian hotel you are least likely to forget. On the waterfront, in the district called Georgetown, sits the Eastern & Oriental, or E&O, Hotel, which was the height of elegance at about the time the Titanic was and is now slightly better preserved. Naturally it has a Somerset Maugham Suite, where we stayed, plus ballrooms with sky-high ceilings and a hundred other reminders of what the gracious life was like long ago. Across the eight-mile-long bridge to Penang Island are the modern expressions of the gracious life, fancy (yet inexpensive, $60-$80 per night) beach resorts such as the Golden Sands and the Mutari Hotel. The water is flat and surfless, but warm and soothing to the soul. A tip: don’t listen to the paraglide operators on Penang’s beaches, who for $15 will strap you into a parachute harness and tow you behind their speedboats. I nearly died from fear the time I tried it, and the next day a woman from Hong Kong nearly died from loss of blood. The tow rope somehow got wrapped around her leg, and it neatly stripped off the calf muscle when the boat sped up and pulled the rope taut.
On the eastern coast of Malaysia there are no cities to speak of, and no para-gliders that I have seen. The coast is a seemingly endless band of smooth white beach, facing warm blue water and lined with palm trees. When you walk along these beaches you understand why thinkers like Marx and Einstein came from countries with bad weather. It’s hard to work up a sweeping theory of the world when your mind keeps interrupting to say, “Look! This is paradise!”
The state of Trengganu, on the northern part of the east coast, is famous within Malaysia as the stronghold of fundamentalist Muslims. On a drive through the kampungs, or villages, with their distinctive wooden houses on stilts, virtually every woman you see is wearing an ankle-length skirt and a long head cloth.
The most sublimely restful resort in Trengganu is Tanjong Jara Beach Hotel, done in traditional Malay-style architecture and situated on a cove of the South China Sea. The rooms are paneled with rich, burnished teak so beautiful that despite the sand and sea outside, I was tempted to spend the whole time in the room. (Teak and its related jungle hardwoods are often on one’s mind in Malaysia, and not always in so pleasant a form. Huge logging trucks, barreling recklessly down the roads of Trengganu and the neighboring state of Pahang, often made us wonder which would die first—the rain forest at the hands of the loggers, or us in a crash. I don’t mean to make light of the logging question, but for the moment my point is simply that you should fly to your east-coast destinations, on Malaysian Airlines System’s inexpensive and comfortable flights. You’ll be sorry if you rent a car and try to drive.)
A few’ miles north of Tanjong Jara is one of the world’s three nesting sites for leatherback turtles, at Rantau Abang. Up and down the coasts are landing sites for refugee boats from Vietnam. I have not been to see it, but one resort in Trengganu has converted an old refugee boat into a beach bar. Blanche d’Alpuget’s novel Turtle Beach, which seems impossible to buy in Malaysia, centers on the landing of refugees and reptiles in Trengganu. Two hundred miles down the coast, in the freer and easier state of Johor, is the small port town of Mersing. This is one of those places, like Independence, Missouri, in the old days or Chiang Mai, Thailand, now, that exists mainly as a jumping-off point. Its docks are jammed with trawlers heading for the dozen islands that lie offshore. The best-known and most extensively developed is Pulau Tioman ( pulau means “island”), with modern resorts and a small airport. But, while our children were at a Robinson Crusoe-style summer camp on Pulau Babi Besar, my wife and I had the good luck to find Pulau Rawa, a small kidney-beanshaped island an hour’s boat ride from Mersing. Rawa is just developed enough to have its own generator to provide lights in the evening, and a big open-air restaurant where curries, noodles, and fish are served. There are a dozen wooden bungalows right on the beach, the restaurant and bathhouse, and almost nothing else. Immediately offshore is a coral reef full of improbably colored fish. While diving off Rawa, I saw something I had dreamed of since my early days as a Sea Hunt viewer: a giant clam, its shell looking about six feet in diameter, its mantle oozing with an evil green pearlescence from the gap between its rippled halves. Daringly I brushed my hand past the jaws (as I thought of them), to see if they’d snap shut the way they do in undersea-disaster shows. Nothing happened. I assumed that by the time clams get this big, their shells are so heavy and arthritic that they’re practically welded in place.
Staying on Rawa costs about $30 a night, including the price of meals. The resort is owned and operated by a branch of the royal family in the state of Johor. The family’s local representative is the Tengku (Princess) Maria, who drifts around Rawa in her muumuu, feeding her pet goats and civet cats and urging guests to be careful not to damage the coral.
WHEN YOU’RE ready to leave Malaysia, you’ll go back to Kuala Lumpur for your flight home. Like Kansas City, perhaps, or Osaka, K.L. grows on you, and is a nicer city to live in than to visit. But even two or three days there will have their rewards. You should dine one night at the Colosseum Cafe, a Maugham-era dive where ageless Chinese waiters dressed in white bustle around with trays of meat. (Order the “Sizzling Steak Special.” You’ll see why when it arrives.) The next night you should go to the Coq d’Or, a quasi-French restaurant in a tin baron’s mansion, with another set of age-defying waiters. All your other meals you can eat at the ubiquitous outdoor stalls, which sell Indian roti canai (a kind of exquisitely oily fried bread) and Malay nasi goreng (fried rice) for less money than you’d spend in the United States for a Coke.
The mosque known as Masjid Jame, at the junction of two rivers near the center of the town, is a cool-looking lattice of pink sandstone, with gushing fountains in which men bathe themselves before prayers. The prevailing good taste of the local architecture is so powerful that even the American embassy looks nice. It is a handsome building with a red-tiled roof, a big brother to the local shophouses. On a narrow street less than a mile from the embassy is the strangest building in town: the residence of a prominent politician, the Tengku (Prince) Razaleigh, who has built for himself a home modeled on the Washington White House.
If you should visit Kuala Lumpur late this month, near the time of the Hindu ceremony of Thaipusam, your trip will be anything but tame. The ceremony takes place at Batu Caves, a thousand-foot-high limestone outcropping five miles north of town. The Batu Caves formation is inherently spooky, like Australia’s Ayers Rock; it might be named Devil’s Pedestal if it were in the American West. The caverns are used year-round as Hindu shrines and always smell of incense and the sanpangita flow’ers presented as offerings. Through the outside gardens roam grotesque sacred animals, such as a six-legged Brahma cow (the extra two come out of the hump).
In the month before Thaipusam hundreds of young Hindu males fast through the daylight hours, sitting cross-legged on temple floors. On the evening before the ceremony they disrobe, dress in white loincloths, and start chewing the betel nuts that will later make their saliva look like blood oozing from their mouths. They gather the friends and relatives who will offer support during the Thaipusam ordeal, and begin walking to the caves.
Around midnight the Thaipusam penitents gather along the sluggish brown Styx-like river that snakes around the base of Batu Caves. Oil lamps flicker at ground level, making it hard to see what is happening more than three or four feet away. The penitents bring out their equipment. Gleaming metal spears, six feet long and an inch thick. Big steel grappling hooks, attached to long reins. Supersized silver needles twelve inches long. The penitents begin dancing, often with their heads held back and their eyes rolling. Their supporters chant vel! vel! vel! (victory!) in a faster and faster rhythm, building to a frenzy or trance. A dancer grasps a spear and waves it over his head as he dances. He hears vel! vel! vel! vel! vel!
If I told you the rest, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d better go see for yourself.
