Asian Adventure: Part 3
Penang, Malaysia
Some people travel with a sense of freedom and adventure. Every hiccup is a lesson learned and nothing can go wrong because it’s all part of the experience. Others, like myself, travel the world thinking everyone is trying to mug you, drug you or steal your organs.
No, I’m not one of those people who walks about with their money and passport hidden up their butt like a suppository but I am the sort of person who flinches when a man in the street uses the shotgun he is holding to gesture to where the nearest toilet is (true story).
Penang is nice. Hot, but nice. I just found myself a little uncomfortable there. Besides the weather causing me to sweat like a tap after taking 2 steps outside, it was probably the most culture I’ve ever been exposed to. I had culture shock. The majority of the tourists and visitors to the hotel we were in were from the Middle East. There were women in burkas everywhere. By the pool, in the pool and even jet skiing! I shit you not, jet skiing.
Hawker Markets
One of the highlights were the hawker markets where you go for delicious food (Elle discusses it in better detail on her blog The Spicerack). When it was described to me the idea of “a community of outdoor street vendors cooking a variety of delicacies” didn’t really appeal to me. All I heard was “a bunch of dirty outdoor vendors all cooking various street animals”. Mean, I know, but I’m picky with my food and the thought of these hawkers cooking anything that would appeal to me seemed unlikely. It’s not till you are there and amongst all the beautiful aromas and cooking styles that you realise this is the best, most honest food you’ll ever had, and everything cost less than a sausage roll. Plates of different delicious foods piled up as I ate my way across 4 countries in one night, all from the one table.
Of course there was shopping at night markets. Well, Elle shopped, i followed, Frappachino in hand.
We did a few tours in the mountains to look at temples and what-not (*yawn*). Not really my thing, anything like that becomes an exercise in seeing how much I am able to sweat. I’m not comfortable.
stay puft marshmallow man
My favourite thing that we saw was (of course) the Toy museum. Now when I told about this Toy Museum I wasn’t too excited, I imagined a boring collection of wooden toy soldiers, musty teddy bears and creepy ceramic dolls with broken eyes. Boy was I wrong. A more accurate name for it would have been the Amazing Action Figure Archive. It housed literally thousands of action figures dating back to the 80′s, dozen’s of life-size statues of some great characters and even an original Ecto one Ghostbusters car, the toy that I wrote about melting at school. I really wanted to steal it except it’s Malaysia so i’d probably be executed or something.
Overall, Penang is a beautiful place, the people couldn’t be nicer and some of the best food I’ve had in my life. But when I’m on holiday I want to relax a bit more whilst still enjoying a tropical back-drop. Which brings us to the final leg of the trip, Koh Samui, Thailand.
Asian Adventure Pt 4 Coming soon!
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Asian Adventure: Part 2
The view from the pool... to the street
Singapore
By far the most efficient airport I’ve ever experienced. We were off the plane, through customs and in a cab to the hotel before I knew what had happened. My favourite part was at the baggage claim. There was a driver waiting for someone holding a sign up for a “Mr Yap”. I immediately imagined one of those small celebrity dogs coming through the airport to be picked up in his own limo. Of course, the classic Seinfeld steal the limo caper came to mind:
“He doesn’t know O’Brien, if he knew O’Brien he wouldn’t have a sign”
But I don’t think I’d pass for a Mr Yap… nor a small celebrity dog.
Singapore is a beautiful, clean, polite city… almost too much so. Sometimes you feel like Big Brother is watching and if you miss the bin with your rubbish they’ll pull a van up and take you away screaming and everyone will just watch on, not helping out of fear that they too might get taken… Or something like that. Or maybe they all just respect their city and act civil to one another (looks at Sydney).
For a city with a population in the millions I never saw the streets bustling with people or the roads congested, they all move around like ninjas. I don’t mean to imply that just because they’re Asian that they’re ninjas, I meant in the sneaky way… not that Asians are sneaky.
We did all the sites and touristy stuff. The Flyer (think London eye), the night Safari (which was pretty awesome), the cruise on the river thingy (*yawn*). This was all made all that more interesting by the fact I was now deaf in one ear.
In the days before we left I spent 2 days confined to my bed with the trifecta: Shakes, sweats and sniffles. While I was feeling much better when it came time to fly out I was still stuck with a head full of mucus. The flight was excruciating enough as it were but when my ears didn’t pop properly on landing I knew something was wrong. I had got an ear infection from flying that left me deaf in my left ear and every time I spoke I lost my hearing entirely. This added a whole new dimension (or rather, removed one) to being in a foreign place.
The hotel we were in had an infinity pool that was 5 stories up. The whole external side of the pool was clear glass so if I were able to put my head under water (damn ear infection) I could’ve looked through to the street below. This was cool except that every time I went for a swim I was expecting it to crack sending me to the street in a waterfall… but it never did
Another good thing about Singapore is that they still have a Starbucks on every corner, which is great for me as I’m addicted to White Mocha Frapachino’s (No joke here, just the facts). Generally, I’m like a small child when you take me shopping. I moan and drag my feel and complain the whole time. I love a good whinge. But put a White Mocha Frapachino in my hands and I’m golden. I just walk around sucking on it quiet as a mouse for hours. My girlfriend would make a point of our first stop when going on a shopping expedition to be to pop into a Starbucks and load me up with the frozen coffee goodness. She’d then get a couple of hours of polite, co-operating Mitchell to take shopping before my eventual regression into being a moany prick.
And just like that our whirlwind couple of days in Singapore were over. It was back through the spotless streets (is that someone being dragged into a van for littering?) to the super-swift airport to begin the second stage of the holiday. Penang, Malaysia.
Asian Adventure: Part 1
So, for the last two years my girlfriend has been trying to kill me. No she isn’t poisoning my cereal. Nor is she cutting my brake lines. No, she is going a much more subtle route. She keeps taking me, a fair-skinned ginger to the hottest, sunniest part of the world that is Tropical Asia. She imagines that by taking me to these dangerously UV heavy places that I’d burn so badly she’d be bringing me home as a pile of ash in an urn.
Last year we went to Bali which I managed to survive (much to her disappointment). This years attempt on my life she decided we’d do a hop-scotch from Singapore to Malaysia to Thailand. Surely one of these countries would cause my ghost-white skin to burst in to flames?
The first part of the trip, as is the case with nearly all trips, is the act of getting there. We flew out from Sydney to Darwin. Too easy (except for the small child sitting behind me who kept kicking my seat). The next stage was Darwin to Singapore, our first port of stay. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, this is where things started to fall apart.
We all boarded the plane alright in Darwin, all eager to get on the road, so to speak, to Singapore and begin our adventures. After 30 minutes of sitting in the plane still on the runway the planes Captain came over the speakers to let us know the engineers were fixing something and assured us we’d be in the air in 30 minutes.
40 Minutes later…
The Captain again comes over the speakers and informs us that the problem is a bit worse than they first anticipated and that we’d have to disembark the plane and they’d be bringing the back-up plane around. The estimated time of prepping the new plane and taking off would be about an hour. My question is, if the back-up plane is so good, why wasn’t it the main plane in the first place?
So we all shuffle off the plane and back into the terminal. Remember, this is Darwin terminal so it isn’t really the glitziest of all airports. It had very few seats, 2 vending machines (one of which didn’t work) and if it did have AC it wasn’t very effective. While we sat there waiting for our second plane to be prepared I began to check out my fellow postponed passengers.
There is a dude taking this extra time in the terminal to drink 6 more Bundy & Coke cans while (pretending) to read his Matthew Reilly book. He was trying to impress the attractive young girls who were also reading… as far as I could tell, he’d drunk more rums than he’d read pages.
There was Adventure Granny. An old woman who was on her own and looked like she was off to trek through the jungles of Malaysia barefoot. If the planes pilot died and the plane was going down, I imagined she’d be the one to jump in and land it safely… whilst fighting off the bad-guys… and dispensing granny-isms like “in my day we didn’t shoot at our elders, darling!” as she did it.
Then there was Clown Dad who was doing his best to keep his 3 young kids entertained while we all waited for the flight. He went through all the good dad joke gear, from the elevator behind the lounge to the got your nose. He must have got low on material because he then proceeded to pretend to shop-lift books from a closed book store… not the best way to entertain your kids, family shop-lifting.
And then there were ze Germans, a couple who if you close your eye and picture the most stereotypical German backpackers you’d be spot on. Attractive, dark skin, blonde hair, just oozing sexiness. They were all over each other, I though they were going to do it right there in the terminal in front of everyone… certainly would’ve made the waiting go a bit quicker.
70 Minutes Later…
The poor air hostess came over the mic with the obligatory feedback sound. She told us that the back-up plane that had begun to be made into our main plane also had a defect and that it would be easier to fix the problem with the original plane than the back-up plane so they’d be bringing back our first defective plane and fixing it then we’d be off. Brilliant.
50 minutes later
We’d all boarded again and were all keenly anticipating the second attempt (well, third kind of) to get to Singapore. We were all set and in the air before I knew it. Finally. Cue baby crying…
Nightmare on Ginge Street
When will I learn? I can not stand out in the sun. In fact, I shouldn’t go outside during the day, period.
Boxing day 2006
In Newcastle, the only place to be on Boxing Day is at the famous Newcastle Boxing Day Races. It’s a day in the middle of summer where girls wear as least as possible and the dudes wear suits and look at said girls. Also some horses race, I assume. I’ve not actually witnessed this but I imagine there is some sort of animal racing about.
I’m sure when the day started I’d have left with sun screen on (like every good ginge), but over the course of the day, out in the 40 degree heat in my suit I sweated it off and didn’t reapply. Needless to say, my pale freckled ginger face burned like a crumpet in the grill.
Before I even went to bed my face was red raw, sunburned to the point of looking like Freddy Krueger himself (one of the worlds most famous and feared ginge’s).
Normal folk who get some sun go from: Normal > a bit red > tanned & beautiful. I, along with my fair skinned brethren go another route. We go: White > red raw > peeling an entire layer of skin off > white again.
When I go for a skin cancer check-up my doctor, Dr Freckle (that’s not his name but it’s what I call him) just shakes his head as I come in, amazed I’ve made it through another summer without turning into a pile of ash. He says that it’s not a matter of if I’ll get skin cancer, it’s a matter of when I get skin cancer. I laugh and say “yeah” jokingly but he just repeats it again with a straight face. He is very reassuring.
So the next morning after my day in the sun, as I sat eating my cereal, something drops into my bowl. To my disgust, it was my own face. My burns were so bad that my face was weeping into my breakfast!
To make things worse, I had to work at the Video Shop for the day. Every single person that came through that day went through the exact same exchange:
Them: Get a bit of sun yesterday, huh?
Me: Yep.
Them: You know, with your skin type you really should wear sunscreen.
Me: Yep.
But the indignities weren’t over yet, it was also my mum’s 50th birthday a couple of nights later, so i had to endure a party full of relatives and friends asking the same rhetorical question: “Get a bit of sun yesterday, aye?”
It was from that day on I swore never to get that burnt again. Not because of the dangers of skin cancer. Not for the fear of wrinkles. Not even for the sake of all the embarrassment I’d gone through. I swore off getting sun burned just so I would never have to endure a week of you damned tanned day-walkers commenting on my inability to endure the sun over and over.
