on Borneo

Malaysia

We have just arrived in East Malaysia. We took a flight to Kuching, the capital of the Sarawak province. It is extremely beautiful here. It is calm and peaceful, unlike anywhere else in Asia. The sky also looks different- the sunsets are beautiful and the weather is warm yet not oppressive. It is very tropical here, with most of the island being a jungle. We have spent the last day walking around the city and tomorrow we are going to an orang utan recovery center to visit our ginger-haired friends. In a few days, we will head over to the Indonesian side of the island.

Singapore Eats

Some of the culinary highlights of Singapore:

Singapore Eats

Short Stop in Singapore

Singapore

Yesterday we arrived in Singapore around 2PM and, after having a drink with a Texan ex-pat named Marlon at the bar beneath our hotel, we headed to Orchard Road, where conspicuous consumption is the name of the game. The 2-km walk is lined with 4-storey mall after 4-storey mall, with movie theaters, food courts, Louis Vuitton and any other name brand designer stores you could think of. The crazy thing was every single mall was packed with people. We were definitely bumping shoulders with the glitterati of Singapore. It was pretty overwhelming, given that we have been wearing the same 3 sets of clothes for the last 9 months, but the Singaporeans are enjoying their new found wealth and they are not afraid to show it in everything they wear.
Today, we walked through Chinatown, which is home to not only Buddhist temples but mosques, Hindu temples and churches. Some of the oldest religious sites in the city are located in this area. We had a wonderful Sichuanese lunch spiced up with plenty of chilies and peppercorns, which made our mouths turn numb. We walked through the business district and picked up some DVDs to watch in our cheap yet huge double room with a DVD player (don't know how we lucked out with that).
Singapore is a very modern and orderly city. While this is not the only police state that we have been to, it is the first one where people seem to follow the rules, being that the consequences are so high. You can get heavy fines for jaywalking, gun chewing, feeding the birds or forgetting to flush the toilet. You get caned for vandalism and the death penalty for trafficking drugs. As a result, Singapore has one of the lowest crime rates in the world and is impeccably clean. I have not yet seen any litter or graffiti and everyone stands on the corner until the little green man tells them they are allowed to walk (like Germany). The latter rule is a little hard getting used to but I don't want the maximum penalty of 3 months in jail. It is the cleanest city I have been to, without a doubt.
We have one more day in Singapore before we fly to Kuching, the capital of East Malaysia.

Malaysian Eats

Food highlights from Malaysia:

Malaysian Eats

KL

We have spent the last two days in the very modern city of Kuala Lumpur. Like the rest of the country, KL is very diverse. The Chinatown and Little India take up substantial chunks of the center of town and we definitely enjoyed eating and walking in those areas on our first day here. We have also been enjoying the Malay's Nasi Kandar, a plate of rice topped with whatever meat or veg dishes you would like. It is quite filling, cheap and really delicious. It is also worth mentioning that almost every dinnner is followed with some durian, which smells bad but but tastes wonderful.
Yesterday, we visited the skyscraper section of town and visited the Petronas Towers, now the largest twin towers in the world. We walked through the extremely modern malls, which are much nicer than any malls in America. We saw the new Tim Burton movie after eating in one of the best food courts either one of us has ever been to.
Along with modernity comes more civilized atmosphere. When you don't want to buy something from a street hawker, they say, "That's fine" and smile. Cars obey traffic rules and are not trying to run you over while you are crossing the street. It's very clean and people are aware of the idea of personal space. KL is a nice city, but it has left me feeling a little bored. After a very over-stimulating 3 months in India, I have come to appreciate a certain degree of chaos, which is somewhat charming and without a doubt exciting once you get the place's rhythm. Yesterday, as our second day of touring this capital city was ending, I jokingly said to S that "I only want to love in a civilized place if our family and friends are there." I was joking but I kind of meant it. That being said, we are very excited to fly to East Malaysia on the 28th. After visiting Melaka and spending a few days in Singapore, we will fly to Kuching, the capital of the province of Sarawak. From there, we very much have an open-ended plan as the weather can make travel pretty unpredictable. We will eventually make our way to Indonesian side of the island and then see where we end up. I think it will be an exciting way to end the trip.

Selamat Datang di Malysia

Welcome to Malaysia!
Family members and friends- we have left Bangkok. Yesterday morning we went back to the hospital to see an ENT specialist about my ear. We checked out of our hotel and brought our bags hoping for good news that we could leave town. After the doctor cleaned out my ear and prescribed new medication, we were in a taxi to the train station to get a train out of Bangkok to Hat Yai, a city on the southern tip of the country. We caught a 3PM train and arrived in Hat Yai at 8AM this morning. We crossed the Malaysian border around noon and arrived in Penang around 2PM. Penang is an island off the northwestern coast of Malaysia that is known for its multiethnicity, thus known as the food capital of Malaysia, and home to well-preserved heritage buildings. We are going to eat at Chinese vegetarian buffet restaurant this evening before we set out to see all the sights tomorrow.

Happy Thai New Year

As my ear pain subsided last night, I decided that I was ready to leave the hotel room for the first time in three days. We decided to go out to dinner and, on our way back from a delicious meal at a street stall, a bucket of cold water was thrown into my right ear. In a fair amount of pain, I rushed back to the hotel room immediately and took some more Aleve. Fortunately, I felt completely fine today and was finally ready to take part in the revelry that is Thai New Year. The tradition during the holiday of Songkran is to arm yourself with a water gun or a water bucket and run around the streets throwing water at people. It is a very festive time and everyone, young and old, is involved. The restaurants and shops have a few employees outside with a huge tub of water bucketing passersby on foot or in a tuk-tuk with H20. If the kids or teenagers get close to you, they will rub white paste on your face, arms, back and neck. It was very fun. We had a great vegetarian meal tonight and are signed up for cooking classes tomorrow morning.

Bangkok

Very Safe in Bangkok

Hello everyone. S and I just wanted to give you a heads up that we are quite safe in Bangkok. As I have come down with an ear infection, we have been hanging out in the hotel, which is far away from where the demonstrations are. We are not going anywhere near the center of town until we leave Bangkok. We will keep you posted on our whereabouts. Love you.

Besides that, not much to report about the city as I have been bedridden and on a course of antibiotics for the last 2 days. Hope to get better soon.

Angkor Wat

The temples of Angkor were just as impressive as we have been led to believe. We hired a tuk-tuk driver for the day who picked up up from our hotel at 5AM. We watched the sun rise over Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious monument. We then spent the next few hours visiting the different temple complexes of Angkor Thom and Ta Prohm, as well as stopping at smaller temples along the way. Angkor Thom's highlight is Bayon- the temple has over 200 serene and massive stone faces on the many towers which jut out from the upper terrace and cluster around its central peak. Ta Prohm is amazing to walk through as the complex of temples has been overgrown by trees and plants.
According to recent research, Angkor was the largest pre-industrial city in the world, with the he closest rival being the Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala, which was between 100 and 150 square kilometers.

Phnom Penh

It is our second day in Cambodia's capitol city and the weather is hot, hot hot. We arrived around noon yesterday, checked into a hotel and headed straight for Psar O Russei, a huge market where we ate from one of the busy food stalls. We had a fifty- cent plate of thin fried noodles with vegetables and then had some Cambodian sweets and dragonfruit for dessert. From there, we headed to the National Museum where we admired over a millenia's worth of Khmer sculpture. The museum was housed in a beautiful early 20th century terracotta building of traditional design. After having a look at the exhibits, we relaxed in the museum's courtyard where we both briefly passed out from heat exhaustion and dehydration. We vowed to always have a large bottle of water with us at all times from then on and then headed to the Royal Palace. The majority of the complex is home of the country's king, which is closed to the public, but we were able to wander around many of the pagodas and stupas. The most impressive of the sights there was the Silver Pagoda, whose floor is covered with 5000 1 kg silver tiles. We had dinner at a really popular local restaurant after a scheming monk at a wat (temple) asked us for money for his personal pursuits.
Today, in an effort to escape the brutal heat, we started our day early, taking a moto-taxi to the Russian market and hit up some more food stalls for breakfast. For an after breakfast snack, we got some durian. We wallked to the Tuol Sleng Museum, a very sad and depressing museum documenting the brutality of the Khmer Rouge during 1975-1979 at the S-21 Prison, which is where the museum is now located. At the museum, there are thousands of photographs of all the prisoners who were tortured and killed there, with all the photos and documents in the rooms where this brutality had taken place. It was very intense and sad how many atrocities like this have already happened in the past and how many like this continue to occur. Don't we ever learn?
We are now back at the hotel escaping the midday heat and will walk around when the temperature starts to cool down this afternoon. We plan to adopt this new strategy of sightseeing as it is going to continue to get hotter as the days pass. Tomorrow we head to Siem Reap and will spend a few days at Angkor Wat.

Now in Cambodia from Phu Quoc

S and I have just arrived in the beach town of Kep in southern Cambodia. We sadly said goodbye to my dad, Heather and Jeremy this morning. We had such a great time traveling with them and are so happy that they came to visit us! We spent the last few days relaxing with them at the beach. Phu Quoc Island is very beautiful, with water that is calm and warm. Two days ago, we celebrated my father's birthday by finding an isolated strip of beach where we looked for crabs, ate lots of fresh fruit and swam without anyone else in sight. Yesterday, Heather, Jeremy, S and I rented motorbikes and rode all over the island. We visited the springs and waterfalls in the north, which were dried up as it has not rained in months then visited Bao Sai beach in the southwest. At first, I was a little nervous on the bike but was really enjoying it by the end.
This morning, we caught a ferry from Phu Quoc to Ha Tien, where we hired motorbike drivers to take us to the border, wait for us to cross and then take us to Kep. We started out the 35 km drive with each of us holding onto the shoulders of our motorbike driver but, once we crossed the border into Cambodia, my driver said he had to go home for an emergency so I hopped onto Steve's driver's bike. Three adults on a motorbike is not particularly comfortable but we arrived safely in Kep around noon. We have just checked into a hotel and are going to go explore the city once it cools down. So far, I have a wonderful feeling about Cambodia. All the border officials were very nice, did not cheat us and were very curious about our itinerary. The landscape along our drive was picturesque, with stretches of farmland as far as the eye could see dotted with small homes with thatched roofs. Kids ran out of their homes to say hello to us as their family's cows grazed in the front yard.
Kep, which was a colonial retreat for the French in the early 20th century, has a nice stretch of beach with lots of Cambodian families picnicking and swimming. This afternoon we will walk along the promenade to the Crab Market and watch the sun set on the beach. Tomorrow morning, we will make our way to Cambodia's capitol city, Phnom Penh.