You Can Have Your Apple Juice – And Eat It Too! – Travels in Malaysia

Your grass jelly as well

15.09.2006 – 25.09.2006

If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
– Vincent Van Gogh

Greetings fellow travelers! Nadine and I are currently here in Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands after a day of travel from the southern tip of Southeast Asia. What better way to end the day than updating our blog.

After our brief stint in Singapore, we quickly ventured over the border north to Malaysia. I didn’t know what to expect in Malaysia.

What is encouraging about Malaysia is it’s a country where THREE major religions (Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism) coexist peacefully all in close proximity. The three religions seem to respect each other and acknowledge the others right to exist. Just imagine having a Texan, a Californian, a Yankee, and New Mexican all living peacefully in a state the size of Montana. That could be a hard sale, but in the case of Malaysia, they make it work.

On top of that, I would never consider Malaysia a third world country. It is clean, efficient, orderly, people are very helpful and polite, and the economy appears to be humming along. I would rate it as a second world country at worst. The underlying fact is that I would recommend Malaysia to anyone, as long as you are ready for a little heat and humidity.

Our first stop from peninsular Malaysia was to the island of Pulau Tioman off of the southwestern coast. After a bumpy ferry ride across the choppy waters of the South China Sea, we set foot on ABC Beach. If reciting one’s ABCs were a requirement to visit this beach, New Mexicans may have a hard time.

Pulau Tioman gave us a chance to sit on a beach and watch the monkeys, monitor lizards, and bats play. We stayed 3 nights. At the break of dawn every morning, we would stick our sleepy heads out the creaky front door to find monkeys running around the grass surrounding our little bungalow. Beside them would be monitor lizards casually walking across the wet sod. At night, bats would perform flybys in closely to our heads snacking on irritating mosquitos.

Life had been all fun and games until that second afternoon. By that time, we had purchased a hodgepodge of fruit and by lunchtime all the bananas, oranges, and apples had found their way to our bellies. The lone survivor was an enormous, ripe mango. As we leisurely walked back from lunch to our bungalow, Nadine dreamed about her sweet mango dessert. Yet when we got there, all the items were just as we had left them, EXCEPT, the mango had miraculously sprouted legs and took off. It was missing from the plastic bag. Either another backpacker, or much more likely, a monkey came by and swiped our mango. If you find a monkey covered with mango chunks, kindly slap him upside the head for us.

In addition to pilfering monkeys, Pulau Tioman introduced us to a few new libations. While walking along the major thoroughfare that served scooters, trucks, and people alike, we encountered a stall with a long list of unfamiliar drinks. We consumed some warm soy milk (good). A refreshing 100 Plus (a type of Sprite). Yet the most unusual was a Grass Jelly soda. Grass Jelly Soda is just regular soda infused with small capsules of foul-tasting grass jelly. Whew it was nasty! Just the sensation of having several pieces of jelly sliding through your straw just didn’t jive for me. It was like eating dozens of jelly pellets at once. Don’t let me turn you off to it, give it a go. Once your done, move on to the apple juice infused with aloe bits. Now that tastes . . . a little better.

I also took the opportunity to expunge that darned grass jelly from my system. Running was the exercise of choice and maybe not the best one either. It was my first time to run since the Cook Islands. That combined with intense humidity and jelly capsules sloshing around my belly, it proved to be a challenging run.

Along the eastern coast in the town of Kuantan, a place we were staying just long enough to catch a bite to eat and the next bus. Jumping off the bus, we walked among metal stalls of hot food being served to the regular lunchtime crowd. This was authentic. No tourists, no backpackers, just locals and their lunch routine. We settled up to the table at one stall, fumbled through our guidebook looking for phrases indicating, “we want good food that won’t make us sick, and please, no chicken feet.” It worked beautifully. We had a great little lunch with a bunch of Malaysian ladies candidly staring and giggling at us.

We strolled to our Cherating bus departure stop. Along the way, we stumbled into some local kids. We tried to speak our limited Malay. They tried their limited English. Then we communicated in the universal language, laughter. Coincidentally, this transpired directly in the plot of grass situated right in front of the imposing huge blue Masjid Negri mosque.

My seat on the bus lacked a back cushion. I balanced on a metal skeleton of a seat that once was. Nadine sat on a fully cushioned seat chatting it up with a local girl on the bus, inquiring about the one most important Malay food we have to try, and about life in general. Kuantan was good to us.

Our goal along the eastern coast of Malaysia was to witness large female green turtles trudge up the sandy beach and lay eggs. We arrived towards the end of the nesting season, so odds weren’t against us observing them, but heck, nothing lost in giving it a try.

We enjoyed a great dinner with Jacques (last name not Strap), a French postal worker on vacation. A little white van from the conservatory carried us to a protected beach where green turtles are well-known to lay eggs. We sat there in the darkness of the night on the beach and played with recently hatched baby green turtles in a dirty styrofoam box. Their natural survival instinct instructed them to reach the ocean as soon as possible as they scrambled on top of each other to exit and to their future in the South China Sea.

Green baby turtles are born roughly the size of your hand, while their sex is decided by the temperature of the ground where they are laid. Closer to a tree, boy, closer to the ocean, girl.

Suddenly a notice came in over the guide’s walkie-talkie, there had been a momma turtle spotted up the beach. Like a bunch of ducklings, we followed our guide up the beach in the pitch black night. You can only imagine him saying, “Guys, I was just joking, there is no stinking turtles out tonight, now find your way back to the van.” We knew we hit the spot when we spotted huge turtle tracks the width of a monster truck streaking across the sand.

The transformation and juxtaposition of those one-pound wee turtles from the styrofoam box into imposing 700 pound adults was stunning to witness in person.

Another message informed us that another turtle up the beach was in the end stages of packing down the sand around her hundred plus eggs and making the cumbersome journey back to sea. We appeared just in time to witness the female green turtle dragging its heavy keister across 50 yards of sand.

We bounced back to the original momma turtle who was in the process of laying a total of 120 eggs! The guide counted it. We each tried predicting how many total eggs she was going to lay, when she hit egg number 80. By the time she finished her laborious endeavor, we were all a little like that turtle, exhausted. It was 2 a.m. Malay time (1 in the afternoon back in Odessa). We started at 10, and four hours later, we were back on the road again back to our bungalow.

Our track led north to the Perhentians Islands. We split five days between the smaller island of Kecil for three nights, and the larger and quieter one of Besar for two nights. We relaxed, read, hiked, swam, and a spattering of snorkelling. By the end, we had nearly perfected the art of relaxing.

Pulau Perhentian Kecil presented us cross island hiking among monitor lizards and mosquitoes while Pulau Perhentian Besar allowed us to snorkel among reefs and vibrant fish. Considering the amount of snorkeling we have done, we should have bought a mask long ago. On Besar, we did just that.

We have left the beaches and now sit in the cool, damp hills of Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands, home to tea plantations that export tea around the world. This region is a welcome respite from the heat and humidity of the eastern Malaysian coast. Now can complete a few travel errands and more importantly, wash our funky clothes in a washing machine!!! You can only wash your clothes so many times by hand before they need a good ol’ fashioned machine wash to eliminate the stank of three countries. They’re sloshing around downstairs right now as I type.

As many of you may have heard, there was a coup d’état in Thailand several days ago. This has created an interesting dilemma for us, head directly to Thailand or find an alternative route. Here is our conclusion. Other travellers and websites have mentioned that it is fine to travel Thailand, but maybe avoid the capital for a time. Thailand has coup d’états as often as Texans yell “This ain’t my first rodeo”. So they will probably name an interim Prime Minister in a week. Soooo, we are going to head south down the eastern coast until Melaka, home of the once thriving world spice trade, head over into Indonesia and see some orangutans, cross back over to Malaysia and then go to Thailand.

Enjoying our travels in Malaysia, yet it’s hard to believe that yes, we are already a third of the way through. Time, she is a flying.

Some of you may notice that in every entry I write, I always take the chance to take a shot at New Mexico at least once. I do this at the request of my 10 fingered friend Pepper (His twin brother only has nine, thus the clarification). Honestly, what opportunity would I have to tell a Dutch couple about the education system, green chiles, or those crazy arroyos.

JW: “Yeah Hans, at least the education of this town is much better than that of New Mexico! You wouldn’t want any child educated in that state’s educational system.”

Hans: “What do you have against Mexico?”

JW: “No Hans, it’s a state to the west of the great state of Texas.”

Hans: “I didn’t know there was a state called New Mexico.”

JW: “No one really does Hans. No one.”

Life is good. We are healthy. We still love each other.

Question #1 – What Malay number for 5 also doubles as the capital of this South American country? First person to get it correct will get their name in the title of the next blog entry or a postcard.

If all my friends were to jump off a bridge, I wouldn’t jump with them, I’d be at the bottom to catch them. Everyone hears what you say. Friends listen to what you say. Best friends listen to what you don’t say. We all take different paths in life, but no matter where we go, we take a little of each other everywhere.
– Tim McGraw

Peace from Malaysia

JW