Kuala Lumpur to Georgetown
March 28th 1995
We spent four nights in KL and left on the afternoon train from the station we'd arrived at. This station was an interesting blend of colonial and asian style architecture. It' was now surrounded by modern, high-rise office buildings, but it conveyed a feeling of what KL must have been like not so long before. The train left at around two o'clock and it was about six hours to Butterworth, the station on the mainland, where you get off for the island of Penang.
The journey was uninspiring, as most of the route was very built-up and industrialized. There was virtually no interesting countryside to be seen on this particular journey, although i'm sure Malaysia has it's share of natural beauty. Unfortunately, too, the train was air-conditioned, which made it cold and suffocating and we had backwards-facing seats. Nevertheless, we enjoyed the ease and lack of hassle of travelling in Malaysia.
The railway station at Butterworth was right next to the jetty where you caught the ferry across to Penang, which is an island a mile or two off the coast. The ferries were similar to the one we had the misfortune to travel from Timor to Flores in, with the lower deck for cars and the upper deck for passengers. It took quarter of an hour or so to get to Georgetown, the main city on Penang.
That night, we stayed in the Tye Anne hotel on Lebuh Chulia, which was one of the main streets in Georgetown, and was certainly the main tourist street. It was a weird place, with a very steep wooden staircase leading up from the street door to the hotel which was on the first floor and above. Downstairs was a restaurant which did a lot of european food - like baked beans on toast - and was almost exclusively patronized by tourists.
But we didn't like the Tye Anne very much, we both agreed it had a strange and uncomfortable feeling. So the next morning we checked out and went in search of somewhere else. We ended up in the Plaza Hostel on Lebuh Ah Quee, which was a massive place run by Indians. It had a gigantic dormitory, with about thirty beds, all double bunks which were a bit too close together for comfort. However, it wasn't too bad, although we found the other guests extremely unfriendly compared to what we'd been used to. No-one said hello when they passed you, or smiled, or even looked at you - not even the person in the next bed to you! This was a real contrast with the Travellers Moon Lodge in KL, which was a very friendly place. I later realized that this was a result of the fact that almost all the people here had come here from Thailand. I didn't know exactly what it was, but i thought it was because Thailand's packed solid with european tourists and you just got sick of the sight of them, which made you much less friendly. Whatever it was, we didn't like it.
There were, in fact, massively more tourists in Georgetown than anywhere else we'd been up till then. It seemed to be a very popular destination, mainly due to its closeness to Thailand. A lot of people went there for a few days when their thai visa expired and applied for another one so they could go back and spend more time there. A lot of people were also travelling between Thailand and Indonesia - there's a ferry from Georgetown to Medan in the north of Sumatra, which is a very popular tourist destination. For some reason, Malaysia didn't seem to interest very many people, except as a crossroads which they got through as quick as they could. This was strange, as i preferred Malaysia to both Indonesia and Thailand, by a very long way. It wouldn't have bothered me in the slightest if i'd never gone to Indonesia or Thailand again, but i'd certainly have liked to spend some more time in Malaysia.
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I really liked Georgetown. I don't exactly know why. The fact that it was right by the ocean contributed a lot. You could take a short walk from where we were staying to Padang Kota, which was a park area on the water's edge. From there, there were views of the mountains on the mainland, across the channel between there and Penang. To your right, you could see the docklands of Butterworth and on the left, there was the open waters of the Bay of Bengal (although i think it's called the Andaman Sea there).
I also liked that feeling that it was a multicultural city, which was as strong here as it had been in KL. The main indian area was centred around a street called Lebuh Pasar. This was close to our hostel and one of my favourite places to wander through. There were a lot of food stalls doing south indian dishes as well as a few banana leaf restaurants where we could eat well and cheaply. There were also sari shops, music shops with loud indian pop music coming from them, and other shops with an assortment of indian products.
At Padang Kota, in the evening there was a mass of food stalls, with tables and chairs spread out between them. Here the food was mainly malay style and it was a great place to sit by the ocean and eat a good meal. There were always a lot of people around there at that time of day, mainly Malays.
All along Lebuh Chulia, and most of the side streets off it, there were a lot of chinese hotels and cafes. There was a lot of good chinese food available eveywhere, although i didn't eat much of it as it was hard to find anything that hadn't got some animal products in it and, anyway, they tended to use MSG in everything and i didn't like the way that stuff made me feel.
Not far past the Tye Anne, on Lebuh Chulia, near the end of the hardware market, there were a lot of food stalls in the street at night. Near here too, there was a morning street market where you could buy all sorts of fruit, vegetables, dead animals and a fair selection of other types of food too. All in all, Georgetown was a great place to find interesting, good quality and cheap things to eat. And as our stomachs gradually stretched back to normal size, we began to be able to stuff ourselves with less discomfort!
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One day, wandering along Lebuh Chulia, i ran into Martin, who we'd met in KL. He was on his way up to an organic farm in the hills on the other side of the island, where he said guests were welcome and you could stay there and be fed in return for working on the farm. That sounded interesting to me and i began to think about going up there for a while.
Nicki was keen on the idea too. We both felt like doing something constructive with our time, rather than just being vacant wandering tourists, continually consuming and not giving anything back. We were also both really interested in finding out what was going on in organic farming in this part of the world and we were both keen to support any efforts to change farming practices towards this form of growing.
We had actually been intending to try and do this sort of work in India, but it had begun to look more and more like we wouldn't be going there now. Up till this point, we still hadn't decided what we were going to do, but i'd realized i was trying to go the wrong way round the world and had begun to seriously think about going from here to Mexico - where i'd been hoping to go later on in the year. It was a bit of a drastic change of idea, but that was normal for me. My life was one long chain of u-turns and i never knew where i was really going until i'd been there!
The organic farm seemed like a perfect answer to the big question hanging over us - what were we going to do next? We decided to go up and check it out.