sweating in the Malaysian rainforests

After five months of being in countries where you can’t read the local script and most people don’t speak English, arriving in Malaysia was a big relief. It’s a multi-cultural country, official Muslim, but with many Chinese and Indian immigrants. It’s beautiful to see these different ethnic and religious groups living together peacefully. Can we make this an example for the rest of the world!!
The first place I visited in Malaysia was Georgetown, on a big Island called Penang. Georgetown is a modern city with many Anglican influences as can be seen in the older buildings. The most impressing to me was ‘little India’, an area with mainly Indian people, shops, music and restaurants. I’ve always loved Indian food and it’s even better to eat in a real Indian restaurant with only Indian people around you. Biggest difference with the Indian restaurants in Europe; they don’t use cutlery here, because food tastes better eating with your hands! Especially your right hand; the left one shouldn’t be used for touching your food.
I was even luckier while walking around there, because it was the start of a 7 day Indian festival called Thaipussam. During the festival all people dress up in traditional clothes and queue in big lines to get free food offered and prepared by the local communities. During the festival they celebrate one god (or several, I got a bit confused when people explained it to me). They carry him around in a wagon pulled by oxen and people on the side of the street clean the path in front of the wagon from bad spirits and unhealthy influences by throwing coconuts on the street.
A few days later I was in Kuala Lumpur (better known as KL), where I stayed with a Hindu family that I met during a tour in Saigon and who invited me to celebrate Thaipussam with them. With them I went to a big cave north of the city which contains an altar for this Hindu god which can be reached by climbing about 50 meters up on a steep staircase. During the Thaipussam festival, thousands of people get together during the day and night celebrating and paying respect in several ways. Some carry a heavy ornament around presenting this god; others carry holy milk to the altar, some walk to the top with many objects hung on their skin by little hooks. It’s a bizarre but amazing experience to walk amongst all these Hindus.
My main goal when going to KL was to stand on top of the Petronas Twin Towers, one of the highest buildings in the world. Petronas is the national petrol company but although they have a lot of money, you still have to pay RM 80 (about 25 euro) to go to the bridge that connects both towers. Obviously I didn’t want to pay so much for this oil company, but luckily there’s another high building in KL, simply called the KL tower. It’s a pinnacle with a viewing platform and restaurants and shops almost at the top of it and although the building itself is lower than the Petronas towers, the viewing platform was 100m higher than the Petronas bridge. Apart from this, the entrance was only RM 50 and the views are better (you can SEE the Petronas towers instead of standing on them) , so the decision was easily made. From the top you can see the whole city (over 1,5 million inhabitants) and the hills around. KL is a real metropole with many skyscrapers and big avenues running through the city, making it pretty hard to explore the city by foot. Apart from the giant buildings and some big mosques, it’s not a very scenic centre so one day was enough to see the most important parts (especially when you can see it all from the top of the KL tower).
The last city I visited in Malaysia was Malacca. This is the oldest city of the country, used in the 16th and 17th century by English and Dutch traders as a main harbour for their trades around the world. There’s an old Dutch City Hall, built after the one in Hoorn (north of Amsterdam). On top of the hill in the middle of the city is an old church with several gravestones inscripted in old Dutch. The city had many old and beautiful wooden houses that reminded me of the ones in Hoi An, Vietnam.
Of course I didn't just visit cities in Malaysia. There are so very nice rainforests here. Unfortunately most of them are destroyed to plant enormous palmtree for the palm oil production. While driving through the country, this made me really sad all the times. So don't buy palmoil anymore guys!!
The first rainforest I went was on Penang. I rented a mountainbike from Georgetown and paddled along a floating mosque (built on poles right at the sea) to the entry of the national park. With 2 liters of water I started walking, going up- and down hill while sweating all the time (getting so close to the equator, the weather gets really hot and humid). Along the path I saw some monkeys, butterflies, many birds, beautiful flowers and got close to some giant lizards the size of Komodo dragons. Fortunately these ones are not poisonous and just look very funny and prehistoric.
After a week of being in all the hot places in this country, I went for two days to the Cameron Highlands to cool down. The whole area is full of tea plantations, making it look a bit like China (I think, never been there yet). Apart from tea, there's a lot of fruit and flower farms, making it look different from the rest of Malaysia and actually whole southeast Asia. I rented a scooter to go around, but that was the most crappy scooter I've even had. Lights didn't work and for changing gears, I had to kick the clutch very hard every time. One time my foot slipped, so I hit the road instead so I got my ankle twisted. Fortunately I was wearing high boots so the damage wasn't to big and after a few days I could walk normally again. On the way back to the main town, I met a local guide who apart from guiding through to nature started his own little business selling masala tea spices. I liked the flavour and his idea for making some money and promised to advertise his product. So check the photo below. I'll give you the email address later.
From the cool highlands I went to the big natural rainforest in the centre of the country, called Taman Negara (which means National Park). To get there I took a bus to a city about 100 km south of it, than another bus to a smaller place and there continue on a engine boat bringing us in 2 hours to the park entry. That evening I joined a night walking safari together with some other dutch and european people I met during the trip from Cameron Highland to here. The night safari was amazing. While entering the bush we saw a male Tapir browsing the grass next to a resort there. walking with just some headlights and torches we saw a snake, some scorpions, giant millipeds, birds, deer and thousands of termites. Unfortunately I didn't bring my camera as I thought it would be to dark to take pictures, so you have to believe I did see all these animals.
Next day we did a big hike on our own, again seeing some giant lizards, lots of butterflies and birds. We heard some monkeys very close but couldn't see them. I thought that I wouldn't be able to sweat more than I did during the hike on Penang, but I was wrong. We had to walk up a hill and this time I really lost 20 liters of water.
After all this nature I was ready for some real modern civilisation.