Thaipusam Celebrations and Thoughts on Penang

I was afraid it would be impossible to surpass the simple high-altitude perfection of the Cameroon Highlands, but today I find myself here in Penang, tired and hungry from a day of walking in the heat and following self-mortifying Hindu penitents and exploring Georgetown's old British fort, and I'm very much surprised at just how great this city is.

Wait, what's this about self-mortifying Hindu penitents?



It's a festival called Thaipusam, and I know as much about it as this Wikipedia link. Fascinating bit of travel, to find yourself in a strange new city, and a gentle tip from a kind stranger results in stumbling upon something so interesting, people so ecstatic and joyful and welcoming, not just as witnesses but welcomed to come and pray together.


Removing your shoes and entering the temple, all were welcomed to pray or reflect. I was given a coconut laced with a banana leaf, a banana, and some incense. We entered the temple and were marked with a chalky white powder, making our way toward the deity at the heart of the temple.


Outside again, we followed the crowd further down the street, music blasting, people dancing, food and celebration everywhere.


Making our way up the holy mountain.


Climbing the hill, traditional music was blaring out of loudspeakers, but as we reached the top, the music faded and nothing but a giant bell could be heard, renewed with fresh strikes from worshipers. It was a powerful moment, climbing the hill, tired from the long walk and the heat, the bell pounding in your ear and setting the rhythm for the climb, and inside people were praying, laughing, happy that the celebration was over and those hooks and spears could be removed.




And ending the day with a leisurely stroll through Fort Cornwallis.

Cameroon Highlights

The Cameroon Highlands. Specifically, the city of Tanah Rata, a tourist hub. Take the best parts of Vermont - cool temperatures, boundless green hills, friendly locals - and mix generously with a subtropical jungle, insects of sci-fi nightmares, and flowers that would make a botanist all hot and sweaty. A high plateau in the middle of the country, hairpin turns along a mountainside with neat green corduroy belts of tea snaking up the impossibly steep cool-breeze hills, all under a cartoon-blue sky. If this is Malaysia, I don't want to leave.

We started our day off at the "Butterfly Garden," but really it was a petting zoo of bugs, reptiles, and other less cuddly creatures.


Well hello there!


Who's got two thumbs and loves scorpions? This guy!


Not-so-wee turtles.


Their legs are so strange, like a hundred tiny hairs on your arm, like reverse goose bumps. Pretty creepy feeling though, when they move up your arm.


Hello little friend.


Bird of paradise flower.


Like something out of Willy Wonka or Dr. Seuss.


Sarah and I above the highest peak in the highlands.


Hiking in the mossy forest. Wonder why they call it that?


Tea plantations, "BOH." Best of (the) Highlands.


Sample some of the beautiful scenery.


I actually hit the target, twice.


Sarah and I went hiking down to a waterfall and quick as gravity a small brown-black snake reared up and "ran" through the grass, a snake moving the way you hope snakes never move, fast and precise. Our guide got scared and told us "to come dis way plees qweek-ly," and when the guide who does this all the time is scared, you know to be careful. We climbed down to the bottom of the waterfall, and then climbed through the green dense jungle-growth of plants and roots and mud to get to the rocks at the water's edge, and I asked the guide how he knew there were no snakes on those root-steps we climbed over.

Full album here. God I love traveling.

Notes from Melaka

Meleka, or Melacca, was my first port of call in Malaysia. An old colonial town that forged alliances with China way back when the Thais ("Siamese") were aggressive, it was subsequently raped by the Portuguese and then the Dutch and then the English, a long successive displacement of foreign conquerors, and yet somehow the city never seems to have been tamed, despite having a Dutch fountain in the middle of a Portuguese town square with and Anglican church off to the side.



I also know that "malaka" is the Greek word for asshole. I knew this because of my Greek room mate for that one month in Beijing in 2004. So I knew I had to go.



The cool breeze from the sea chased away the perpetual oven of so-damn-close-to-the-equator weather. Sarah and I spent two days there before making it to Kuala Lumpur this morning.

Kuala Lumpur is ... strange.

There's something about the name, something deeply ingrained in my brain from history class, seventh grade with Mrs. Irvin-Davis, eighth grade reading my history book alone during lunch at Skyline. The city was a mental bastion of Asia, of The Foreign, The Other, a place whose name conjures (conjured) images of a place and culture as far away from Wilmington and Delaware and America as you could get.

And inevitably, it's a disappointment. Clear away the romantic fantasies of the naive traveler and you get just another huge city; Asian no doubt, with mosques and Chinese temples and seemingly impromptu markets and too many people and the smells that you can never really describe, the smells you wish you could capture in the moment with your camera that mix with sound and vision to create indescribable memories that aren't easily forgotten. But beyond that, it is just another city. There are giant buildings, there are homeless, there is litter, there are malls and shops like Kenny Rogers Roasters and Starbucks, Gucci and The Gap. Somewhere in the long lost forgotten, when the world was still growing and not as bloated as it is today, everyone decided that a giant gleaming mall full of pointless expensive shit you won't ever need was the pinnacle of whatever it is we're trying to do on this planet.

It's hard to find anything exotic and new and bizarre, it's hard to really marvel as a traveler at the brilliant diversity of language and culture that humanity has to offer, when there's a Kenny Roger's Fucking Roasters next door.

And one final thought: I don't believe in the spiritual loan you get from just entering a temple, for just walking around a mosque and seeing the incense in a shrine. It's backpacker-traveler bullshit, because your spiritual pool should not be so shallow that rejuvenation comes from such empty religious voyeurism. I'm guilty of it, I not only hit all the churches I come across, I hit the mosques (when I'm allowed in), I hit the temples. But they're all the same: a fallible man-made incarnation of the ineffable. I don't need an ancient crumbling whatever to think about that. But then, maybe some do.

Singapore to Malaysia

Singapore was great. Very diverse. Photos here. In Malaysia now. Riding in on the bus, that giddy little-boy grin of coming in to a wildly new place and culture and country. More later.