KL

We chose Kuala Lumpur because it was close enough to bus to, and because flights to Indonesia were way cheaper than they would have been from the now-flooded city of Bangkok (their international airport has since been shut down). It took us about 12 hours to get in, and the whole time I was reading this grueling Steven King story about a group of boys walking hundreds of miles without resting to win a great prize or die trying (The Long Walk, when he was writing as Richard Bachman) and it made the whole drive seem that much longer.

Kuala Lumpur is described as a clean, modern, melting pot of a city-- Singapore's more authentic sister, gleaming and proud, carved right out of the oldest jungle on earth. It had, for a slim period of time, some of the world's tallest buildings, and beautiful government buildings and rail stations and mosques, a hopping arts district, scrumptious delicacies of one hundred different cuisines wafting through the air...

But, expectations are the blue prints for disappointment (words of wisdom ala PT!) We got into that foreign city at two in the morning (the bus driver tried to let us off on the side of the highway, but luckily this Malay kid on board told him how to get to the station) and it was pouring rain. We searched for about an hour before we settled on a tiny room in Chinatown, and felt grateful just to have a bed.

I was glad to only spend a few days in Kuala Lumpur, because it's almost as expensive as Singapore and definitely not as nice as they would have you believe. Garbage is piled high in every alley way, on windowsills and rooftops, in deep trenches by the roadside, and it stinks. It rained quite a bit, and the water steeped all sorts of different smells-- people, stray animals, trash, urine, cooking food, car exhaust-- into a thick stench that rose from the ground and hung at nose level in the heat of the day.

Going from neighborhood to neighborhood was fun, since the ethnic groups that inhabit each section are so different from one another. Burkas and halal food in the Moslem section, fast Cantonese and roasted hanging ducks in Chinatown, high pitched music coming from every single store front in Little India--a sea of little dark mustaches and the sickly sweet mixture of incense and curry.

We busied ourselves writing postcards and reading books. We visited a bird sanctuary and the KL tower (just another phallus on the landscape, I thought). We spent an afternoon in a panicky scramble after we discovered our tickets to Indonesia had been cancelled without warning; always good to check and make sure!

We spent the rest of our time meandering around and getting lost in what turned out to be, more or less, just another big, dirty city in Southeast Asia. Here's a funny thing about sidewalks in KL- they're tiled like a bathroom floor (maybe to look cleaner?) and they're slippery as all hell when they're wet. I never had a spill (J ate it down a flight of stairs in a park, not as hilarious as it sounds) but there were many moments spent almost slipping-- camera in your hand, heart in your throat, crowd of people standing by.. Who the hell tiles the sidewalk in a city where it rains once a day?

On one particularly awful night, in a sketchy hostel where the mattress didn't even come with a sheet, and where construction noises screeched endlessly from morning til night, J awoke to the sound of a woman being hustled against her will into some dark room across the hall. She kept on shouting "No! No! No!" and then there was the sound of many locks clicking shut on the door, and then two men standing guard, just shooting the shit. What could we do? Go out and try to help her, and get knifed and robbed, or worse? It was just sickening and heart breaking, and probably not that unusual. This was when we decided we didn't like Kuala Lumpur.

We left on a Sunday and spent seven restless hours waiting at the airport for our delayed flight, itching to be in Indonesia already. The whole time in KL felt like a long game of waiting. How many days were we there? Four? Five? What did we do that whole time? I have a Malaysian stamp in my passport, but that's about it. Time spent getting from one place to another can feel so dreamlike and vaguely uncomfortable. I wonder how people do those lightning stints of travel-- "Europe in one month!" or "3 weeks, 6 countries, see all of Asia!" We met folks along the way who had it all figured out; maybe they had purchased a big tourist package, or they were still high on the thrills of their last adventure in Cambodia, or they were gearing up for a big jump to Australia.. Seemed like they left very little time to be present and to reflect, which is maybe why we needed a layover in Kuala Lumpur. In-between travel time is good for that -- musing on the move. We weren't alone; there were scraggly backpackers, making their lazy way to the next island, anonymous bodies lying on the floor of a dark night ferry, speeding moped riders with their faces hidden, weaving through traffic and swerving past stray dogs, so many people in transient circumstances-- and us, moving through all of it, trying to get from one place to another and collecting little pieces along the way.

And trying not to lose any of them!


10:29PM
Bali, Indonesia