Date:     Sun, 27 Nov 2005

To:         touring@phred.org

From:    “Michael Ayers” <michael@terminalia.org>

Subject: Gondwana - Mildly Monsoonal in Malaysia

 

Selamat Phreds,

 

Another country is complete as I’ve finished the ride along the length of peninsular Malaysia. (Unfortunately a visit to the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, on the northern coast of the island of Borneo was not practical, though I would have loved to go there. Of course, none of the Malaysians I asked had ever been there either, so I suppose I fit in, in that respect.) In many ways Malaysia was not what I expected before I arrived, but that always makes finding the reality of a place more appealing.

For the time being I have left Gondwanaland though I will return sometime around the beginning of the year. That’s a little fuzzy, since I’m not exactly sure where the official plate boundary is. For now, I have been heading north through a wholly different environment and society than what I last rode through in Western Australia. For some reason I expected the county to be largely agricultural, at least away from the mega-capital city of Kuala Lumpor, with lots of rubber plantations, bananas and other tropical crops . However, that was one of the things that turned out to be different than I expected.

The exact route I used changed a few times since I first planned the Stage. Originally, when the tour was going to start 6 months earlier than it actually did, I was going to travel along the east coast from Singapore directly to the Thai border. However, this time of year is the monsoon season in Malaysia (but further north in Thailand and Cambodia it will be the dry season) and the east coast gets most of the rain, something like 500-800mm a month. Yikes! Riding through Malaysia at this time of year was one of the weather compromises that had to be made in the grand scheme of the tour. The west coast is the more crowded and developed part of the country, so I originally planned to ride right up the middle of the peninsula, where it might be a little drier and quieter. That route changed a couple of times before I was through, however.

For the most part, Malaysia has been the easiest place I’ve been so far, in terms of practical matters. The roads have all been in generally good condition, and fairly easy to navigate except for one or two places where my map was rather out of date. There is also enough English spoken here that I actually missed the fun of trying to communicate in a different language.  Food has been pleasantly plentiful and tasty, with options ranging from numerous local restaurants, fairly decent mini-marts, and, in the larger towns, well-stocked supermarkets. The other pleasant surprise in post-Singapore Asia has been the return of affordability of all the necessary items. Food, accommodations, and net access are all considerably less costly than what they had been for the last couple of months. If this keeps up, which I suspect it will, I will be able to splurge a little every now and then, and still recover the cost overruns from the end of Australia and Singapore.

The first change in my route came right after I found my way through Singapore, and entered Malaysia by crossing the Singapore-Johor Causeway.  I thought it would be interesting to visit the historic city of Melaka, which would mean going along the west coast for a couple of days. In Johor Bahru, the second-largest city of Malaysia, adjacent to Singapore, I realized straight away that my preconceptions of the country were not exactly accurate. The city center was rather nice, and a little more attractive than Singapore, but the route out of town was quite congested and surprisingly familiar. The six-lane highway was lined with banks, glossy car dealers, Mattress SuperCenters, and rows of townhouses with terra cotta tile roofs. If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn I was in southern California, not southern Malaysia. It wad about 30 km before things quieted down a little, but even then it was very hectic. The highway was lined with homes, and light industry, not the farms I was expecting, and the towns along the way were more like cities than the dots on the map would have indicated. Consequently, there was much more traffic than I expected. Malaysia has apparently decided to join the ranks of the HighwayNations. That was mostly ok, just a little surprising, and the only real challenge was finding a good place to set up the tent in the evening. I eventually did of course, though on the first night I learned that it’s a good idea to not set up too close to the local mosque if you wished to sleep through the 5 AM call to prayers.

Melaka was the first day off I took in Malaysia, and it was an interesting place for a break. The city was the capital of the 14th-century Melaka Sultanate, encompassing most of the Malay Peninsula and a large part of Sumatra, and one of the most powerful nations of its day. Later the city and its nation was occupied in turn by the Portuguese, Dutch and British, and lost much of its status. Today it is a nice place, with many good places to eat and several nice museums surrounding the ruins of the colonial-era fortress. After the layoff of a couple of weeks I really appreciated the day off after only a couple days of riding as well.

From there it was back to my original route through the interior of the country. There, the rains began, though it was usually only a brief period of actual rain with mist or just clouds the rest of the time. After being so hot and dry in Australia, I actually didn’t mind and did not make much of an effort to stay dry. It was there as well that the agricultural areas I expected actually appeared. Large rubber plantations were there, but palm oil was the most common crop. The edges of the latter plantations made good places to sleep for the nights, but they were not without peril.  On one occasion overnight rain woke me up and I felt too itchy to go back to sleep. It wasn’t until morning that I realized that I had been infested by fleas. Yes, fleas. I think that’s the only time I’ve been able to say that. And yes, they were all singing “Food around the corner” (for those of you old enough to remember that old cartoon with the singing flea.) On another occasion tiny ants actually chewed through the floor of the tent and made for a similarly sleepless night.

The destination for that section was Taman Negara National Park, which is said to contain some of the oldest rainforest in the world. Here’s a tip for those of you who may visit there on a tour someday. All of the Web sites and guidebooks lead you to believe that you can only get to the park by a riverboat. That’s not exactly correct. While the park, and its upscale resort, are indeed only reachable by boat, it is on the opposite bank from Kuala Tahan, the village which services the park, and which is accessible by a good road. So, I could have ridden all the way there, though I didn’t realize that until after I had taken the 3 hour riverboat ride. That was ok, as I quite enjoyed the boat ride as the Tahan River is undeveloped and lined with tall forest. In fact, there is a surprising amount of uncut forest remaining in Malaysia which was nice to see.

Kuala Tahan was one of my favorite places visited so far. It is a small place, mostly just a collection of guesthouses, hostels, a couple of hotels, floating restaurants and Net access places which cater to the tourists, mostly European budget-travel types, who have come to see the park. I stayed two nights instead of one, since I needed a little extra rest at the time.

The park itself was very nice, with a high-wire canopy walkway through the jungle. There is some large wildlife in the park, such as elephants and tapirs, but I only managed to see a few nice birds and lots of butterflies. One other nice event came as I was on the way to see a bat-filled cave (I can say now that a guano-covered cave like that one is not a really great place to be during a jungle cloudburst.) There, along the trail came a small group of Orang Asli people, the indigenous tribes of the Malay Peninsula. I was hoping to meet folks from one of these gourps, but there are very few left and as they still live a nomadic life, are not always easily seen. I was curious whether the Orang Asli are descendants of the original Africa-to-Australia migration that occurred tens of thousands of years ago. If superficial appearances matter, which of course, they don’t, some of the Orang Asli appear similar to the people I met in PNG, so there may indeed be a connection there. Unfortunately, though I wanted to say hello and maybe grab a photo, they were rather shy and quietly walked past without saying anything. Incidentally, Orang means “people” in Malay, and Asli is “first” so Orang Asli, not surprising;y, means First people. Someone like me could be called Orang Laru, or “people from other places”, though I can’t say I ever heard that term used. Another word Utan means “jungle”, so our red-haired ape cousins, the Orang-Utan are “people of the jungle.”

From there I changed my route again and cut over to the west coast again, thinking it might be a little drier there, and because a new road which did not appear on my map made a more direct route to the northwest corner of the country where I was headed. That region of the country, and further to the north, posses some very interesting karstic landscape, caused by the erosion of uplifted limestone seabed. So while this was not Gondwanaland, much of the country exists due to uplift caused by the collision of Australia with southern Asia. Whether or not that route diversion was actually drier is hard to say. It rained a little each day, which was a little chilly during the one big climb (topping out at just under 1500 meters) of the route in Malaysia. However, during my last few days in the country I learned that the east coast was experiencing extensive flooding, with several towns being evacuated. I probably made a good choice there, in spite of the traffic found on the west coast again. It was not too bad this time, as I found a route with occasional quiet sections along the way to the most northwesterly border crossing into Thailand at Kaki Bukit.

Thailand is where I am now, and things are going ok, save for having to trash a tire already, which either got a cut in its sidewall, or had some sort of defect. Blech.

 

Terima kasih,

Mike

 

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The Tour of Gondwana

May 02005 - Oct 02007

http://www.terminalia.org/tour