Penang (minus Thaipusam)

PENANG
After our little bus mishap, we finally arrived in Penang around 9:00PM. What we had begun to learn in KL, refer to the picture below:



Despite this logo being on every single cab, no one uses the meter. You had to haggle for every single cab ride. They usually just had set rates but some cab drivers would really try to screw you over so you had to low ball them a bit to get them to the real level. So we hop in a cab from the bus terminal to the Hutton Lodge where we are greeted by this man, Nathan.


Hutton Lodge - Penang

After a day at the Batu Caves, I saw a whole lot of Tamil dudes, but Nathan looked like he was some like Tamil God or Bollywood actor / porn actor. Guy was absurd looking. He had the most perfectly groomed beard, crazy amounts of jewelry, and wore bright white dress shoes every day. We also learned on our final day that he was indeed not a woman slayer.
Nathan, even on his days off, straight chills at the Hutton Lodge. He lives around the block and has been in Georgetown for 4 years, but his life is the Hutton Lodge. So on his day’s off, he drinks free Tigers, gets slammed, smokes countless gig’s and charms those staying in the Lodge. Count Quinn and Eric among those seriously charmed. And mark Quinn as the man Nathan had his eyes on. Never remembered my name or Eric’s always remembered Quinn’s and always wanted to know where he was when he wasn’t present. You can imagine the ensuing jokes, which I unfortunately will leave out.

Anyways, our final night in Penang, Nathan tells us around 10:00PM that he is going home and that he won’t be in early enough in the morning to say good bye to all of us, so he wanted to say his good byes then. In an extremely awkward moment, Nathan gave about a 5 minute slurred drunken speech about how much he would miss us and how we were some of his favorite guests and so on and so forth. The final line was the real kicker. “And one last thing guys, umm…I just want to say…I love you all so much!” and then we parted ways. All 8 of us look at each other with the exact same thought in our head, “Did that just really happen?”. Yes it did. Nathan you will always be remembered. I just wish had more pictures of you.

So that went a little backwards, lets get back to the beginning. I’ll just do day one here. So we had our free breakfast, which btw had nothing on that of the Classic Inn. We got some nasty coffee, some weird random bread every day then a couple of slabs of toast with weird jam on it. We still ate it, but we most certainly missed our roti.

We hit the streets of Georgetown having heard that it was the first outpost of the British East India Company, had cool architecture, and the best food in Malaysia. We quickly grabbed some bagged iced coffee (it really just came in a big plastic bag) and headed out on a walk. We first ended up in Penang’s Chinatown, which was nothing like the one in KL. This was just a market that every day people go to, to pick up daily food, clothes, etc. It wasn’t really to interesting, so we quickly walked through and headed towards Little India.

This was a far larger part of town and a great deal more interesting to me. Little India had countless little shops selling incense, Hindu gear, jewelry, and hand tattoos. Due to the fact that Chris' Korean purchased memory card exploded or something I have no pictures of Little India and neither does anyone else for some reason, but I do promise it was cool.

We next wandered to the Jetty's on along the bay of the island. These are supposed to be old fishing villages inhabited by Chinese fishermen. I spoke a little Chinese, wandered a bit, they were less than spectacular. Here is a picture of me below at the jetty's.

We saw a cool bar nearby called QEII I think and decided we were in dire need of a mid day cocktail. It was ridiculously hot out. After being in the Korean winter (when we left it was in the teens every day) this seemed like the Gobi Dessert. Anyhow, the bar overlooked the harbor and had a really cool set up. Definitely would recommend a stop here while in Penang.






After the pit stop, we wandered a bit longer, until we were informed that there was some great Chinese man who had a big purple mansion by the ocean in Penang. You could only tour the home twice a day, once at Noon and once at 3:00PM. It was the worst tour I've ever been on and the house was not cool at all. If your ever in Penang and hear of some purple mansion, don't waste you're time. I don't even remember its name.

After the disasterous tour, Quinn, Eric and I headed back to the Hutton Lodge. This is where my next disaster occurred. I went to a local Malay joint and asked the guy to get me his favorite thing on the menu. It was this fried rice dish with a bunch of vegetables and anchovies. It was delicious, loved it, best thing I had eaten up that point on vacation and this was day 4 of the trip. Little did I know it would be the last thing I ate for more than 48 hours. Quinn, Eric and I were playing cards while the girls sat near us playing Phase 10 when all of a sudden my stomach started to feel a little weird. I didn't the bathroom for the next 12 hours. Now maybe it wasn't the anchovy thing that gave me food poisoning, but I was the only person of the whole crew that got sick, so I really have no idea what else it could be from. Anyhow, it was Zoe and Jo's last night with us as they were headed to Phuket the following day to meet up with some college buddies. I gave it my best to get better for the night, but in the end the food poisoning got the best of me, although I did my best to not let it hamper my experience over the next couple of days.

I woke up rather early this morning, still feeling a little weak, but definitely didn't want to miss out on anything. We were playing on heading to Monkey Beach, a beautiful beach located in Penang National Park. It was about a 50 minute cab ride to a small fishing village, shown below here:



Once we arrived at the National Park, we were immediately haggled by people selling us they're services to take us by boat to Monkey beach. We eventually found this incredibly nice, yet incredibly strange woman who we haggled down to round trip 130 Ringgit ($45 USD split between 8 of us, ridiculous for a 7 hour day private boat). The woman just screams "Captain Jack Sparrow, come out!". I think she thought we thought it would be hilarious, we didn't. We would be forced to call him Jack the rest of the day because unlike most Malay's he spoke very little English and didn't tell us his real name, or maybe we just didn't understand it. Jack would also serve as our personal monkey guard and beer go getter. He was a good dude. Here's a picture of our ride below. See our main man Jack in the back.



We get to the beach. We're one of maybe 5 - 10 other people there. It was our first beach time, and after being sun burned from just walking around Penang the past few days, I decided to try tossing on some Korean SPF 50. Well, I will never do that again. I forgot that Asians like to keep as white as possible, its a status thing. This stuff turned your skin white, and did not come off. I took tried repeatedly with sand, leaves, ocean water to get this stuff off, I but I ended up looking like a ghost the entire day. I was still feeble from the food poisoning so fending off the monkeys wasn't really my thing that day (though I'm not sure it would have been my thing anyways) and I spent the majority of the day sleeping or resting my eyes in the shade. Here are some pictures of the beach itself, I'll get to the monkeys in a second.






These monkeys sucked. According to Jack, there are two sides of the beach with different families, each warring over the food of the people that come to the beach. We initially lie our stuff down on a table, only to be ushered back by some guy telling us that monkeys stole some of our chips, and that more will be on the way now. We see crumbs falling from the trees, and sure enough a couple of monkeys are chowing down on Julie's pizza chips. Sounds funny? At first it actually was. Then the war with like 25 monkeys began and it was not funny as they ravaged through other unassuming peoples food and nearly attacked us on various occasions. I threw a coconut at the head monkey, bad idea. The thing did not back down, started dashing at me, I obviously got terrified and dove into the water. Quinn stood strong once, pointing sticks at them, although he later admitted he was terrified the entire time. This other Russian woman who was vacationing the world solo was feeding them all Mangos, not scared of them at all. She had to be in her 70's. Was orange tan. Wearing an entirely innapropriate bathing suit with a Maria Menonous like slip, and was taming these little guys. She also started the war. One of the monkey's only had one arm, I'm very curious how this happened. Anyhow, heres some pic's of the monkeys doing their damage.






Anyhow, after 6 or 7 hours at the beach, we headed back, took a treacherous walk down some wooden planks and ended up back right where we started. You can see how happy I was versus Quinn and Chris.



We headed back, had a pretty awful dinner at a nearby touristy joint where I got fried chicken doused in maple syrup, then I went back and fell asleep almost immediately. The others would have they're first experiences of Thaipusam, which I would enjoy the following day.

all photos by Quinn Hubertz
published by Samuel Schofield

Malaysia: KL - Days 2/ 3

Kuala Lumpur Days 2 / 3

Day 2 in KL we got off to a relatively late start considering we went out a little bit the night before. The plan was still the same, head to the Batu Caves.

The Batu Caves are a holy Hindu site that is a shrine to Lord Murugan, who, after I just read his wikipedia, learned that he is a Hindu god worshipped by Tamil's. Makes sense considering Malaysia feels like it might as well be southern India / Sri Lanka most of the time. According to people in Malaysia it is the most popular Hindu site outside of India and boasts the largest statue of Lord Murugan (42 meters or 140 feet) in the world. I'm trying to get the hang of this kilometer versus miles and celsius vs. fahrenheit to celsius thing so bear with me.

We got the free breakfast from the hostel, which consists of free roti, fruit, toast and coffee. For 14 USD a night that is a damn good breakfast. If you don't know what roti is, click on the link. It's amazing. It's like tortillas only softer and better. Plus you can add banana's or fruit or whatever to them and turn them into a desert, not sure how they haven't made it state side yet.

We hopped on the subway for 40 minutes or so and showed up right at the front door step of the caves. After walking through a wave of souvenir shops, Tamil's and food stands, we finally made it to the statue and the base of the steps. The place made me feel as if I was in India. I'm sure it's nothing like India, but being surrounded by thousands of Hindu's doing Hindi chants and such for a full day really made it feel like India, although I really have no idea what it really looks like. I can say it was one of the few times in Asia where I felt totally out of place, like I did not belong at all. Can't wait to one day venture to India.

The hike up the steps was brutal. It was I think, if I remember correctly 252 steps and it was something like 90 degrees fahrenheit with a whole bunch of humidity, incense, people, and monkeys. Serious sensory overload.




Little did I know that this would not be my first monkey experience. On the walk up, I witnessed a monkey grab a bag of banana's from a woman and tear out the banana's, starting a monkey war including growling and and a whole bunch of tree jumping. I also saw a monkey open up a water bottle, only to dump it out, no joke. Oh yeah, and another one punctured a whole in a juice box and sucked out the liquid. These monkey's were a real pain in the ass and seemed to follow us across to Penang.

The cave's themselves we're pretty cool. I watched the Anthony Bourdain episodes on all the countries I was going to before I went (I have a lot of time on my hands) so I had seen what they looked like before. They seemed to be a bit more crowded as it was close to Thaipusam (the biggest Hindi holiday) than it did during his show which was kind of cool, although it appeared to be far more touristy. I would actually be in Penang, Malaysia for Thaipusam, which was extremely cool, I'll write a post on that later.

The caves are made of limestone and are over 100 meters high. Inside there were men and women making sacrifices to Murugan as well as a couple of crazy Tamil dudes yelling and painting faces for some reason. I couldn't tell if he was trying to make the people laugh or cry. He had some guy holding his cigarette and tray of paint colors while he shouted at people who were all lined up to talk to him. I thought of asking him to paint my forehead, but thought twice after looking at this mean mug.

After spending an hour or so wandering and taking pictures, we made the journey back down the steps, saw some more monkey fights, and before we knew it we were back at the bottom. On our way back to the train we picked up some Kway Teow which is this incredible noodle dish served all across Malaysia along with some other small snacks I didn't know the name of. Overall, the caves were really cool, but wouldn't compare to what we would see in Penang for Thaipusam. Including a whole lot of this, something called Kavidi. Check out a quick preview below.

Also, here are a couple pic's we took inside the caves.

We hopped back on the subway to KL Sentral and then to Imbi (our Monorail stop) and back to the Classic Inn for a rest. I was really tired and decided to skip out on the trip to the KL Tower pictured here below.

I'm a little bummed I didn't go seeing as the group that went (Chris, Julie, Quinn, Eric, Justine and Olivia) met a bunch of Korean college students studying English in Malaysia for a little bit. Meeting Koreans abroad is always awesome because Koreans love Korea. If you think some American's love America, they don't at all compared to Koreans. To Koreans, Korea has the best everything, food, alcohol, entertainment industry, you name it, Koreans think they have it the best in the world. You tell a Korean you like to eat kimchi or drink soju and you will see the worlds most genuinely happy person alive. They're being so happy always makes you happy. Koreans are the most genuine, wholesome individuals I have ever encountered. Find the nicest person you know, like by far the nicest person you know, and I'd say that 90% of Koreans are equally as friendly. We would meet many more Korean tourists in our travels so missing out on this ended up not being to big of a deal. But, anyhow, heres a picture of them with Korean students, who now want to be friends here in Korea.

Zoe, Jo, Mo and I stayed at the hostel, chilled, had a couple of Chang's and waited for the other's to get back to go grab some good Indian grub since we had been eating mostly Chinese food since we had arrived. People got back a little later than expected and all the Indian places seemed to close early that day for some reason so we just ended up wandering to one of the Malay places nearby to grab some Kway Teow and roti's along with some other potentially Malay dishes. The food was pretty good. Went back to the hostel early as it was Sunday evening and I was planning on getting up at 6:00AM the following morning to watch the Patriots play the Jets. Great idea. I'm just not going to touch that subject. Still haven't fully dealt with it.

Anyways, the following day we did a little more wandering but mostly chilled at the hostel, as we had a bus to Penang mid-afternoon.

We got to the KL bus station, which really was more like a tent / shack set up with a bunch of wood planks covering the grass. Chris, Justine, and Eric had gone to buy the tickets earlier and told us to expect a serious mad house. They weren't kidding at all. I've peed in some pretty gross places across Asia, but this bus station I think takes the cake. Any how, we are sitting in the semi-air conditioned tent waiting for our 3:00PM bus or whatever to arrive and naturally its late. Out of all the people to buy tickets from, they got tickets from a couple of Malay dudes with bright, bright purple hair. What were they thinking?

Anyhow, we befriend this guy who lives in Penang, but has to go to KL once a month for the day for business and always takes this bus, and tells us he has never had a problem with them before, just our luck, right? Fortunately the bus was only a couple of hours of late and we got into Penang around 9PM, over all a pretty smooth sailing and turned out to be one of only a few minor hiccups of the trip. Here are some other pictures from KL I didn't include.

All pictures from: Quinn Hubertz, Chris Bailey, or Joanna Cohen.

Published by Sam Schofield

Malaysia: Kuala Lumpur Day 1

Kuala Lumpur

We took a red-eye flight from Incheon International Airport to KL landing at something like 5:30AM. I initially thought that there was a huge time difference and it was a 10 hour flight for some reason. It turned out it was only a 6 hour flight with a one hour time difference. Was constantly mocked due to the fact that I convinced everyone else it was that long of a flight, but everyone was definitely happy they weren't in for that long of a trek. So the flight was real easy, although Air Asia, Asia's version of America's Southwest or Europe's Ryanair had the world's smallest chairs that were definitely built for Asian's and not me.

Not really what I had expected at all. I expected huge city, big lights, lots more buildings that looked like the Petronas Towers.

I was wrong, the towers dominated the skyline and there was nothing nearly they're size anywhere to be seen. The majority of the city was relatively run down and it was easy to walk around / take public transit. They had the monorail, which was like the things they have at the Vegas airport or in Disney World that take you to place to place but probably smaller to get you around the city, then one or two other larger subway lines to get you to longer distances. Over all, the public transit was decent, although nothing compared to Seoul. See below.

Kuala Lumpur

Versus...

Seoul

Our first day in KL we just wandered the city. We checked into our hostel, the Classic Inn then headed out for the day. We first headed out to grab some food at a local joint next store ran by some Tamil guys. One thing we quickly learned about Malaysia is that it was pretty ethnically diverse, but only if you were Tamil, Chinese, or Malay. Everyone in the country was one of those three races. The political parties are even divided according to race, according our man Nathan, pictured here below. He was our guy in Penang. He may need his own personal blog, so the picture will have to suffice for now.

Clearly he's the Indian guy in the center. Quinn, Eric, and the rest of the crew made buddies with this guy and made many jokes about him along the way. But back to KL.

Another first impression of Malaysia, everyone spoke English, and spoke it perfectly. Since they were a British colony until 1957, it's just like they're second language. They learn Cantonese, Malay, Tamil, then everyone speaks English so as all the races can communicate. Everyone, I mean everyone speaks English. From our hostel workers to the rickshaw drivers, they all spoke immaculate English, it was pretty crazy. The Korean government spends millions upon millions of Won getting us native English speakers over here to teach they're kids English yet they can barely form sentences. Our cab drivers in KL, who all claimed to have hardly any education, spoke better English than every single one of my students. It was incredible.

We wandered the city, our first destination was supposed to be the city center market, but we ended up in China town along the way. It was pretty much what I expected it to be. A bunch of of Chinese people selling fake gear (they love Paul Smith and this brand called Hackett) along with watches, soccer jerseys, everything one would find at Beijing's Silk Market just a little cheaper and much easier to bargain for. The one thing I have lost in my time here in Korea is my ability to bargain, although I like to think I regained it in SE Asia although this one Vietnamese woman did get the best of me. I didn't bring my nice watch with me on the trip fearing I'd lose it so I picked up a cheap blue fake rubber Casio watch for 10 Ringgit (or about 3 USD) hoping it would last the trip, it didn't. We stopped in Chinatown for an amazing lunch lunch including some of the best hot sauce I've ever had.

From there, we headed back on our journey to the city center market. Along the way, we stumbled upon Independence Square (celebrating independence from the British in 1957) and this awesome fountain.

Next stop was to the biggest mosque in Malaysia. I knew Malaysia was a Muslim country, but being my first time in one, I wasn't really sure what to expect. Hearing the prayer bells 5 times a day and all the woman in burkhas was a little surprising at first, but I got used to it quickly. Heres a good picture of the mosque below.

Masjid Jame Mosque - KL

Supposedly, at the most important time of prayer (I think around 5:30 - 6:00 PM - whenever the sun is setting) the place fits up to 15,000 people! So big I have no idea how this place fits that many. I learned this after I mistakenly strolled through the Muslim only prayer section with 'clearly not a tourist' stamped all over me. I was ushered over by a very friendly Muslim woman who volunteered at the mosque to teach people, like me, about Islam.

It was nice to hear some one talk to you about religion without trying to convert you. All she wanted to do was to teach me about when they prayed, where they prayed to, how they did the prayers. No asking if I wanted to attend a session or anything like that. Wasn't annoying at all and was actually really informative. I wish more Americans were open to coming to Muslim countries and seeing that almost all of them are peaceful, friendly people who simply follow a different faith than what we are accustomed to. Here is a picture of the mosque during prayer time.

Also, since all of us had shorts / dresses on, we had to put on these full body suits to enter the mosque so that none of our skin was showing. We weren't allowed to wear shoes, for the boys, the hood was optional, for women, it was a must. Here's some pic's of the crew in our Muslim gear.

After the mosque, the girls headed home to nap, Eric, Quinn and I decided to go check out the Petronas Towers (see above). They were the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 - 2004 until Taipei 101 quickly shot up above them. I'm fairly certain they are still the tallest twin towers in the world, sorry Minneapolis. They are really, really tall. Looking up at them made me seriously dizzy. They are each 88 stories high and about 1500 feet tall. We go inside, all excited to get to the top of our first major site, and just our luck, the viewing deck is closed for construction. As is the Sky Bar, supposedly the coolest place in KL to grab dinner / drinks on a weekend night. We had heard that there was a casino in KL, so hoping to maybe check that out instead, we asked the worker how to get there. I think his exact response was "Oh no problem getting there. Only 40 kilometers away. First, you take bus. Then you take taxi. Then cable car. Real easy". So that naturally was not going to happen so we made the most logical decision. Head back to the hotel, buy a bunch of beers and play cards.

It was a Saturday so Quinn, Eric and I started playing cards and having some beers around 6, next thing we knew we were all trading shirts deciding who Eric's yellow Bean Pole looked best on. I think we all decided on me, or we all should have at least.

After dinner we bet Quinn that he wouldn't eat a Durian fruit so naturally he did. These things are famous for smelling terrible, I mean terrible. He said it didn't taste that bad. But his breath smelled worse than someone's the night after a long night of drinking for the duration of the evening. These things smelled awful. I didn't want to stand near him the rest of the night. He still claims it didn't taste that bad.

We sent Zoe and Mo off to find some Malaysian vodka and chilled outside a local convenient store in the bar district. Liquor is pretty hard to find in Malaysia considering its a Muslim country. It's also much more expensive because of a whole bunch of taxes I'm assuming. A single can of Chang would run you 9 Ringgit or so (3USD) and that was from a convenience store. The 10 of us finished some nasty vodka, almost tasted as bad as baijiu (Chinese liquor) which is some of the nastiest tasting alcohol around. Anyone who has been / lived in China can attest to that. Makes soju seem seem delicious.

We then walked around the bar area, looking for a cool spot to head into. On our cab ride home from our failed trip to the Petronas Towers, our Tamil cab driver recommended that we head to a bar to find ourselves a "nice Malay girl to spend the night with". We asked if he meant a free lady. He quickly responded "no no boss". The guy loved saying boss. Finished every sentence saying it. I wish everyone called me boss, at all times. So then we asked about free girls, he responded by saying something along the lines of "Oh no boss. That takes to much effort boss. You gotta find a European girl, talk to her, befriend her, buy her drinks, to much work boss.". So we kind of knew heading into it we'd be seeing a lot of old white men with young, attractive prostitutes. This became a major theme throughout the big cities we'd hit on the trip. The bar scene in KL was less than spectacular, I'd say pretty awful. So, we called it an early night as it was a long day and there wasn't much in the way of partying and we had big plans for the following day, the Batu Caves.

pictures from Quinn Hubertz, Chris Bailey or Joanna Cohen.

Back in the ROK

So I got back to Korea early yesterday morning. Had a crazy trip. Saw some incredible things, met some interesting people and went some places I most certainly plan on returning. I'm going to blog about it starting from the beginning (Malaysia), the middle (Thailand), and then ending with Vietnam. It will take awhile to cover all the bases but soon enough I'll have plenty of stories and pictures to share. Look for it soon.

posted by: Sam Schofield