Penang
Penang is an island off the coast of Northwestern Malaysia. We only stayed in Penang for about 24 hours, so there’s not much to say about. There were some cool historic buildings and lots of white people, and I broke my Nikon for the 2nd time so I was unable to use it for the rest of my trip.
The Beaches
The next phase of our trip was the relaxing, beach phase. After visiting some very big and busy cities, we wanted to relax, sleep, and get really freakin tan. Unfortunately, we didn’t plan this part of the trip as well so we were left scrambling trying to figure out how we were going to get from the Phuket airport to a beach area that was on the other side of the bay. Boats and cars were not an option, so we were forced to take a 4 hour bus ride to our destination of Krabitown. Buses in Asia for the most part have been and awesome, cheap and convenient means of transportation. Our 4 hour bus ride to Krabitown was the exception to that rule. I don’t know any other way to describe it except that it was the bus ride from hell. It all started out okay. Seth and I got the last two seats in the back of the bus that were unfortunately next to the smelly bathroom. But a smelly bathroom is tolerable. Then the Thai techno music started playing. It wasn’t your low volume background kind of music either…the music was BLASTING and to top it off, the big mystery box behind our two seats turned out to be a gigantic base that thumped along with the techno music. What really surprised me was the no one else on the bus seemed at all phased by this. I was beginning to think this party bus must be the standard in Thai buses. While we’re complaining about the rave that has apparently started on our bus, the bus keeps stopping along the road and picking up more and more people off the side of the road. When Seth and I got on the bus to begin with, the seats were all completely full, so the new passengers all had to stand in the aisle. Eventually, after many, many stops, the bus was so full you could barely move. A woman and her daughter were sitting on top of the base that was still booming behind us. Another older women ended up sitting on the base right next to Seth and puking in a bag. After 4 hours of this, we eventually made it to our station (mind you, it’s about 9pm right now and we’d been traveling since around 11am) and then had to figure out how to get the beach area called Ao Nang, where we wanted to stay the night. Luckily for us, there were two English-speaking Russian guys about our age who happened to get off the stop with us and were heading to Ao Nang as well. We shared a ride in the back of an open-air van/truck thing and ended up bonding with the two guys. One was a stock-broker (picture Arnold Swartzeneger saying it) and the other sold internet lines to other countries (or something like that). We ended up going out with the guys for dinner and drinks once we got to Ao Nang and had a really great time talking to them about Moscow, where they both live, and talking about places we’ve traveled to so far. Unfortunately, we didn’t end up running into them again.
Ao Nang ended up being a super-touristy town with lots of shopping and decent restaurants, but a pretty shitty beach. We decided to only stay the night in Ao Nang and instead take a long tail boat the next day to a nearby beach called Ton Sai. I had heard about Ton Sai before my trip from a friend who had visited there before. It ended up being a really neat place to stay. The beach wasn’t outstanding at all, but the atmosphere of the place and the little bungalows and huts that people stayed in made it worthwhile visiting. The best way to describe the beach is a hippie haven. There were lots of outdoor bars with mats and hammocks to hang out on, Bob Marley and Dylan music playing, some “magic cookies” advertised at one place, and lots of dudes with dredlocks. We stayed in a little hut for two nights there, and probably would have stayed another if I hadn’t had a cockroach crawl on me in bed during the second night.
One day, we paid only the equivalent of $15 each to take an all-day, long tail boat tour of 4 islands around Ao Nang. We spent an hour or two at each of the four islands, and went snorkeling at two of them. The first set of islands we went to were our favorite. The water was crystal clear and the sand was white. The first islands were unique because during low tide you could walk between the three of them on a sand bar. There was also awesome snorkeling all around the islands and we were able to see some beautiful fish and coral. Later in the week we went back to the first set of islands and spent the whole afternoon there.
The rest of the time in Ao Nang was kind of ruined because I got sun poisoning and some sort of stomach bug at the same time. I spent a day laying in the hotel room doing nothing and couldn’t eat a real meal for like two days. But it passed right in time to go to Lao Liang.
Lao Liang was the part of our trip that I was most looking forward to, and it lived up to all my expectations. Lao Liang is a little island in the middle of nowhere that is uninhabited except by this company that runs a little sort of mini tent resort. The tent resort is set on a kind of small white sandy beach surrounded by high limestone cliffs and facing crystal clear, blue water. Getting to the island was kind of a pain in the ass, but it was well worth it. Besides the workers, there were only maybe 10-15 other people on the island with us. We stayed in this large two room tents facing the ocean that had actual mattresses in them. All of our meals were taken care of for us, and the bathrooms were actually really nice. Almost everything on the island is made from natural materials found on the island. There are hammocks and mats all over the place for people to lounge on. They had snorkeling gear and kayaks that you could rent as well. The first night we had a delicious seafood BBQ and drinks on the beach while looking at stars. Since we’re in the middle of nowhere, the number of stars we saw were stunning. I don’t think I would ever want to go back to any of the places I’ve already visited, but this island was one place I could definitely see myself going back to.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Monday, January 11, 2010
Melacca
The second stop on our South East Asian adventure was at a small, quiet, laid-back city called Melacca. Melacca is interesting because it was ruled by the Portuguese and the Dutch at different times in history, so a lot of the architecture has a European feel to it.
We only stayed in Melacca for about 24 hours, but it was nice break from the noisy, fast-paced, big city atmosphere of Singapore. We spent most of the day on Friday (after wandering around for a while looking for a place to stay) walking around Chinatown and up and down a small river lined with little houses that looked like it belonged in Europe somewhere. We had an awesome Malaysian lunch consisting of laksa (seafood, buttery noodle soup) and stingray (my new favorite sea food!) at a little café, ate some Malaysian pineapple tarts, and walked through a number of Buddhist temples. In the evening we had a couple beers outside at a small restaurant along the river and ate dinner at an Indian restaurant. I’ve never eaten Indian food before and I’ve discovered one of my new favorite things: roti. Most of the other food is a little too spicy for me, but I’ve already had roti a few more times on this trip because it’s sooo good.
Friday morning we explored a few more things in the city, including an old Portuguese fort and a museum. For lunch we ate another famous Malay dish called chicken and rice balls, which of course was amazing. I’m pretty sure I’m going to come home from this trip weighing 200 lbs. It’s a really nice change from Korea, eating all of this new and unique food, because Koreans eat pretty much the same thing at every meal. It’s also been really nice to be able to speak to people in English and to see people of many different cultures.
Kuala Lumpur
After spending 24 hours in laid-back Melacca, we took a bus to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. We had intended to stay in KL for 5 days, but after 3 days realized we had seen pretty much everything we had wanted to see. Some of the more notable things to see in KL are the Jamie Mosque, Merdeka Square, Petaling Street and of course, the Petronas Towers. After a couple of days of the typical sightseeing adventures and feeling exhausted from walking around for hours on end (I’m kind of a baby when it comes to that much walking) we decided that we had seen enough of KL and it was time to move on to the second phase of our vacation: the beaches. But before we traveled to the beach, I really wanted to go to the Kuala Gandah Elephant Sanctuary that I had found out about online before our trip. According to the things I had read, the sanctuary was home to elephants that had either been orphaned or had been attacked by people or another animal. At the sanctuary you were supposed to able to feed, ride and bathe with the elephants. The sanctuary was one of the things on the trip that I REALLY wanted to do, but I knew getting there was going to be a little difficult since it was 2 hours outside of KL. Seth and I decided to make it into an adventure by renting a car and driving ourselves out to the sanctuary. We had a lot of trouble finding a place that rented cars, but at around 9 o’clock on the morning of our trip, we were able to find one. We picked up our car and Seth drove the two hours out to the sanctuary. For the first time in our trip, everything went exactly as it was supposed to and we had no trouble getting there (side note: people in Malaysia drive on the opposite side of the road which made the trip that much more interesting). We arrived at the sanctuary, had a quick lunch, watched a 30 minute video about elephant relocation that didn’t explain much about the actually sanctuary itself, and went with a bunch of other tourists to see the elephants. The whole experience with the elephants was really amazing. It was more touristy that I had hoped it would be, but we were still able to feed baby elephants peanuts, feed the old elephants (one was 72 years old!) fruit by actually putting our hands in their mouths, take a quick ride on and elephant, and swim with 2 babies and an old elephant. The swimming activity was by far the best part. They led the elephants into a nearby river. Seth, the other tourists and I all lined up on a dock where we took turns climbing onto the big elephant. After we climbed onto him he would take a few steps out into the river and then fall over sideways with everyone on his back. After you fell of the big elephant, you swam over to where the baby elephants were rolling around and playing in the water. There you could touch them and wash them with a brush, and just watch them roll around ungraciously in the river.
We then drove the 2 hours back home and quickly got ready to go out to dinner. We had made a reservation for that night at a place called the Sky Bar for after-dinner drinks. We had an awesome hand-made pizza dinner overlooking a park and then made our way to the Sky Bar. The appeal of the Sky Bar is not only its swanky interior that consists of cushioned lounges surrounding a pool, but the perfect view of the Petronas towers from each cushioned cubby. The Petronas towers are by far the most beautiful modern buildings I have ever seen, especially at night. They almost don’t look real. The Sky Bar was also really beautiful and was the perfect ending to our time in KL.
The second stop on our South East Asian adventure was at a small, quiet, laid-back city called Melacca. Melacca is interesting because it was ruled by the Portuguese and the Dutch at different times in history, so a lot of the architecture has a European feel to it.
We only stayed in Melacca for about 24 hours, but it was nice break from the noisy, fast-paced, big city atmosphere of Singapore. We spent most of the day on Friday (after wandering around for a while looking for a place to stay) walking around Chinatown and up and down a small river lined with little houses that looked like it belonged in Europe somewhere. We had an awesome Malaysian lunch consisting of laksa (seafood, buttery noodle soup) and stingray (my new favorite sea food!) at a little café, ate some Malaysian pineapple tarts, and walked through a number of Buddhist temples. In the evening we had a couple beers outside at a small restaurant along the river and ate dinner at an Indian restaurant. I’ve never eaten Indian food before and I’ve discovered one of my new favorite things: roti. Most of the other food is a little too spicy for me, but I’ve already had roti a few more times on this trip because it’s sooo good.
Friday morning we explored a few more things in the city, including an old Portuguese fort and a museum. For lunch we ate another famous Malay dish called chicken and rice balls, which of course was amazing. I’m pretty sure I’m going to come home from this trip weighing 200 lbs. It’s a really nice change from Korea, eating all of this new and unique food, because Koreans eat pretty much the same thing at every meal. It’s also been really nice to be able to speak to people in English and to see people of many different cultures.
Kuala Lumpur
After spending 24 hours in laid-back Melacca, we took a bus to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. We had intended to stay in KL for 5 days, but after 3 days realized we had seen pretty much everything we had wanted to see. Some of the more notable things to see in KL are the Jamie Mosque, Merdeka Square, Petaling Street and of course, the Petronas Towers. After a couple of days of the typical sightseeing adventures and feeling exhausted from walking around for hours on end (I’m kind of a baby when it comes to that much walking) we decided that we had seen enough of KL and it was time to move on to the second phase of our vacation: the beaches. But before we traveled to the beach, I really wanted to go to the Kuala Gandah Elephant Sanctuary that I had found out about online before our trip. According to the things I had read, the sanctuary was home to elephants that had either been orphaned or had been attacked by people or another animal. At the sanctuary you were supposed to able to feed, ride and bathe with the elephants. The sanctuary was one of the things on the trip that I REALLY wanted to do, but I knew getting there was going to be a little difficult since it was 2 hours outside of KL. Seth and I decided to make it into an adventure by renting a car and driving ourselves out to the sanctuary. We had a lot of trouble finding a place that rented cars, but at around 9 o’clock on the morning of our trip, we were able to find one. We picked up our car and Seth drove the two hours out to the sanctuary. For the first time in our trip, everything went exactly as it was supposed to and we had no trouble getting there (side note: people in Malaysia drive on the opposite side of the road which made the trip that much more interesting). We arrived at the sanctuary, had a quick lunch, watched a 30 minute video about elephant relocation that didn’t explain much about the actually sanctuary itself, and went with a bunch of other tourists to see the elephants. The whole experience with the elephants was really amazing. It was more touristy that I had hoped it would be, but we were still able to feed baby elephants peanuts, feed the old elephants (one was 72 years old!) fruit by actually putting our hands in their mouths, take a quick ride on and elephant, and swim with 2 babies and an old elephant. The swimming activity was by far the best part. They led the elephants into a nearby river. Seth, the other tourists and I all lined up on a dock where we took turns climbing onto the big elephant. After we climbed onto him he would take a few steps out into the river and then fall over sideways with everyone on his back. After you fell of the big elephant, you swam over to where the baby elephants were rolling around and playing in the water. There you could touch them and wash them with a brush, and just watch them roll around ungraciously in the river.
We then drove the 2 hours back home and quickly got ready to go out to dinner. We had made a reservation for that night at a place called the Sky Bar for after-dinner drinks. We had an awesome hand-made pizza dinner overlooking a park and then made our way to the Sky Bar. The appeal of the Sky Bar is not only its swanky interior that consists of cushioned lounges surrounding a pool, but the perfect view of the Petronas towers from each cushioned cubby. The Petronas towers are by far the most beautiful modern buildings I have ever seen, especially at night. They almost don’t look real. The Sky Bar was also really beautiful and was the perfect ending to our time in KL.
Singapore: Three Days of Watching the Bus You Want Drive By
Our first stop on our 23 day adventure through Southeast Asia was Singapore. Our stay in Singapore was unique because we were fortunate enough to have an old friend of Seth’s (who lives in the US but is home visiting his family in Singapore) and his girlfriend (who is also Singaporian but living in the states) give us the grand tour for 2 days. They were both really friendly and made excellent tour guides since they lived in Singapore until college. Honestly, If we didn’t have them to show us around, I’m not we would have seen half of what we did. Seth and I didn’t have much success navigating the public transportation. More on that later…
Singapore is a melting pot of South Eastern Asia cultures and it’s very apparent when you walk around the city, especially after spending 6 months in a very homogeneous country. It was really refreshing to see people who looked and dressed differently from each other. Singapore is mostly a mix of Chinese, Malay and Indian people, but there are some other groups mixed in as well. Seth’s friend YS is sixth or seventh generation Chinese living in Singapore. He explained that people like him don’t identify with Chinese culture as much as they do with Singapore culture. Recently there has been an influx of Chinese to the country which has caused some tensions between the Singapore-Chinese and Chinese. YS also explained that when the British came to Singapore, they brought with them their Indian servants ,which is why there are so many Indians in the country. In Singapore there are different areas where large groups of each of these ethnicities reside (Arab Street, Little India, Chinatown, etc) each with its own unique cultural flavor. Little India was my favorite by far. It’s very colorful and very different from any place I have seen so far in my life.
The official language of Singapore is English, although people speak a variety of other languages. It was nice to be able to communicate with random people again, even if their English is difficult to understand. At one point our trip we ended up in a taxi with 2 Vietnamese people who were speaking in English to the taxi driver and even though they were speaking English, Seth and I could barely understand a word they were saying.
One of the more interesting things we were able to experience because of our tour guides was Singapore public housing. Their public housing is different than anything I have ever seen. Its unique because the different developments are self-sustaining. High rise buildings are set up around the perimeter of a town square area. Within the town square is pretty much anything you could ever need to get by in life: food stores, bakeries, computer stores, furniture stores, restaurants, banks, a post office, etc. YS’s girlfriend’s family lives in one of these public housing complexes and explained that most people don’t need to leave their complex to go shopping at all. They took us to two different developments where we walked around and tried a bunch of delicious foods (including an actual ice cream sandwich where they put a block of ice cream on a slice of white bread…apparently it’s a favorite of kids). It was interesting to get to see a side of Singapore that most tourists don’t get to see.
One famous landmark in Singapore is the Singapore Flyer. I believe it is (or was) the tallest flyer in the world. It looks like a giant Ferris wheel that takes about a half hour to complete a rotation. Instead of individual chairs, there are giant pods where 10-20 people can sit and stand and look out the windows. The Singapore Flyer was one of the main things I wanted to experience in Singapore since I’ve never been on anything like that before. Wednesday evening we decided to go and ride the Flyer. Our excursion ended up being a huge disaster (as were most of our attempts at public transportation). We missed our bus stop by miles, ended up at a popular shopping district that was nice to walk around, went and got 2 beers at a trendy bar where the beers ended up costing over $15 each (oops!), took the subway to what we thought was the flyer and ended up in some construction area with hundreds of men from Bangladesh who were loading into the backs of trucks after their shift, took at taxi with a really nice Vietnamese couple who made the same mistake we did, and just made the final ride on the Flyer. After exiting the Flyer at around 11:00 (mind you, at this point we hadn’t eaten dinner) we attempted to find a bus that would take us back to our hotel. After about an hour of wandering and waiting we gave in and took a taxi home. As you can imagine, neither of us were in the best of moods by the time we got home that night.
Thursday night, also New Year’s Eve, didn’t start off that much more successful. At this point we had run out of Singaporian dollars so we needed to find a place to exchange money. After missing a few buses and getting on the wrong bus, we eventually found a stand where we could change money. Our next stop was at an ocean-side restaurant to get a famous Singapore dish called chili crab. We ended up missing our bus stop and riding the bus 30 minutes out of our way but eventually got to our restaurant. We ordered our food (which was DELICIOUS by the way) and when it came time to pay, realized that we didn’t have enough Singapore dollars or enough US dollars to cover the bill. Luckily, the wait staff was really nice and let us pay in part Singapore, part US money. After dinner, with only about 20 minutes to spare until midnight, we rushed downtown to see some fireworks at 12am.
Some other interesting places we went included:
- Sentosa Island which is like a mini island theme park and very touristy, minus one beach area we found.
-Buddha Tooth Relic Temple which is a temple that opened in 2007 that supposedly houses one of Buddha’s teeth. However, the tooth was tested recently and it was discovered that it’s not a human tooth. The temple was really beautiful though, and is the only temple I’ve ever been in that has AC and an elevator .
-Hawker centers which are centers with little tiny booths that sell a wide variety of delicious S.E. Asian foods. Surrounding and in between these stands are little tables for people to eat at. The hawker centers are awesome for two reasons; the food is super cheap and the food is really delicious since each stand specializes in only a few things.
So to sum up our 3 days in Singapore, we spent a lot of time waiting for buses, getting on the wrong buses, and rushing around. But minus those temporary moments of frustration, I had a really great time, saw a lot of unique things, and ate some delicious food.
Singapore is a melting pot of South Eastern Asia cultures and it’s very apparent when you walk around the city, especially after spending 6 months in a very homogeneous country. It was really refreshing to see people who looked and dressed differently from each other. Singapore is mostly a mix of Chinese, Malay and Indian people, but there are some other groups mixed in as well. Seth’s friend YS is sixth or seventh generation Chinese living in Singapore. He explained that people like him don’t identify with Chinese culture as much as they do with Singapore culture. Recently there has been an influx of Chinese to the country which has caused some tensions between the Singapore-Chinese and Chinese. YS also explained that when the British came to Singapore, they brought with them their Indian servants ,which is why there are so many Indians in the country. In Singapore there are different areas where large groups of each of these ethnicities reside (Arab Street, Little India, Chinatown, etc) each with its own unique cultural flavor. Little India was my favorite by far. It’s very colorful and very different from any place I have seen so far in my life.
The official language of Singapore is English, although people speak a variety of other languages. It was nice to be able to communicate with random people again, even if their English is difficult to understand. At one point our trip we ended up in a taxi with 2 Vietnamese people who were speaking in English to the taxi driver and even though they were speaking English, Seth and I could barely understand a word they were saying.
One of the more interesting things we were able to experience because of our tour guides was Singapore public housing. Their public housing is different than anything I have ever seen. Its unique because the different developments are self-sustaining. High rise buildings are set up around the perimeter of a town square area. Within the town square is pretty much anything you could ever need to get by in life: food stores, bakeries, computer stores, furniture stores, restaurants, banks, a post office, etc. YS’s girlfriend’s family lives in one of these public housing complexes and explained that most people don’t need to leave their complex to go shopping at all. They took us to two different developments where we walked around and tried a bunch of delicious foods (including an actual ice cream sandwich where they put a block of ice cream on a slice of white bread…apparently it’s a favorite of kids). It was interesting to get to see a side of Singapore that most tourists don’t get to see.
One famous landmark in Singapore is the Singapore Flyer. I believe it is (or was) the tallest flyer in the world. It looks like a giant Ferris wheel that takes about a half hour to complete a rotation. Instead of individual chairs, there are giant pods where 10-20 people can sit and stand and look out the windows. The Singapore Flyer was one of the main things I wanted to experience in Singapore since I’ve never been on anything like that before. Wednesday evening we decided to go and ride the Flyer. Our excursion ended up being a huge disaster (as were most of our attempts at public transportation). We missed our bus stop by miles, ended up at a popular shopping district that was nice to walk around, went and got 2 beers at a trendy bar where the beers ended up costing over $15 each (oops!), took the subway to what we thought was the flyer and ended up in some construction area with hundreds of men from Bangladesh who were loading into the backs of trucks after their shift, took at taxi with a really nice Vietnamese couple who made the same mistake we did, and just made the final ride on the Flyer. After exiting the Flyer at around 11:00 (mind you, at this point we hadn’t eaten dinner) we attempted to find a bus that would take us back to our hotel. After about an hour of wandering and waiting we gave in and took a taxi home. As you can imagine, neither of us were in the best of moods by the time we got home that night.
Thursday night, also New Year’s Eve, didn’t start off that much more successful. At this point we had run out of Singaporian dollars so we needed to find a place to exchange money. After missing a few buses and getting on the wrong bus, we eventually found a stand where we could change money. Our next stop was at an ocean-side restaurant to get a famous Singapore dish called chili crab. We ended up missing our bus stop and riding the bus 30 minutes out of our way but eventually got to our restaurant. We ordered our food (which was DELICIOUS by the way) and when it came time to pay, realized that we didn’t have enough Singapore dollars or enough US dollars to cover the bill. Luckily, the wait staff was really nice and let us pay in part Singapore, part US money. After dinner, with only about 20 minutes to spare until midnight, we rushed downtown to see some fireworks at 12am.
Some other interesting places we went included:
- Sentosa Island which is like a mini island theme park and very touristy, minus one beach area we found.
-Buddha Tooth Relic Temple which is a temple that opened in 2007 that supposedly houses one of Buddha’s teeth. However, the tooth was tested recently and it was discovered that it’s not a human tooth. The temple was really beautiful though, and is the only temple I’ve ever been in that has AC and an elevator .
-Hawker centers which are centers with little tiny booths that sell a wide variety of delicious S.E. Asian foods. Surrounding and in between these stands are little tables for people to eat at. The hawker centers are awesome for two reasons; the food is super cheap and the food is really delicious since each stand specializes in only a few things.
So to sum up our 3 days in Singapore, we spent a lot of time waiting for buses, getting on the wrong buses, and rushing around. But minus those temporary moments of frustration, I had a really great time, saw a lot of unique things, and ate some delicious food.
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