Part II: Malaysia
We left Germany on a rainy, cold day on a plane to Malaysia. Our first destination was Kuala Lumpur where we were going to buy the bikes.
The big city surprised us, it felt foreign and yet strangely familiar.
It is a city of wide contrast, with an inner city full of high rises, flashy cars, wide streets and a monorail that is actually fast and clean. Walk one street further thou, and just around the corner from the glitzy shopping world you´ll find people living in run down buildings, trying to make an income from street selling.
Our first lunch in KL
Nobody likes to walk, guess why?
The monorail
Many things surprised us: We knew it would be hot, but THAT hot? Coming from winter-cold Germany, 37 degrees in the shade was a tough thing to get used to. We were also surprised how green the city is - trees, ferns, orchids, ... green everywhere, growing out of every backyard and hole in the pavement.
Most of all, we were surprised how nice and friendly the people were to us. Starting in KL, for the whole time of being in Malaysia, I can´t recall anyone being rude to us, we were always greeted with a smile, people were warm and open minded. The happiness was contagious, after some time it just became natural to greet everybody with a smile. I actually ended up getting kind of upset every time I saw a Westerner with his daily grumpy face among all the smiling Asians.
Another interesting thing about Malaysia is the different origin of the people. There are native Malayans, Chinese and Indians. And they all seem to have some little resentments against each other: The Malayans talk about the greedy Chinese, the Chinese tell of the lazy Malayans, and nobody seems to like the Indians too much. But it´s all told with a smile and a winking eye, they seem to get along pretty fine.
With Malaysia being an Islamic country, we were also curious how much this would affect us, how "different" it would be.
Again, we were surprised: Of all the three different peoples living in the country, only the Malayans are Islamic, and they turned out to be the most open minded and friendly people. People seemed to be proud of their diversity, while some expressed concerns regarding the rising radicalization of Islam. Anyway, we really enjoyed how peaceful people were living no matter their religion.
Buying the Bikes
We planned to spend as little time in Kuala Lumpur as possible. We wanted to get the bikes and then leave for the country. Again we could profit from Patrick and Sherry's trip some months earlier, they had written about the dealer where they had bought their scooters. Still in Germany, I mailed the dealer got into contact with Calvin, their sales rep.
Back then he seemed to be a nice guy, and when we met him in person, he was eager and helpful to help us choose the bike.I took the bike we wanted, the Yamaha FZi, for a spin, and liked how fast the small engine could bring the bike up to speed.
We decided to go ahead and buy two FZs, Theresa was going for a blue one, I ordered a black one.
We sat down with Calvin to sign the deal.
When I asked him to give me a good price, he first was surprised to see an Westerner trying to bargain, then agreed to give us 10% discount. He even offered to put his address on the registration form, and was helpful in every way.
Oddly, he started telling us about Patrick and Sherry, boasting how they "accepted the first price I told them, and afterwards even wanted to take a photo with me". I had a weird feeling, why would he talk bad about the only other Western customers he had had? But it wasn't until three months later that I got really angry at him (see part IV)
He told us he would have the bikes ready in a day, and together we went to an ATM to take out the money we needed - only to realize our German bank had set an unchangeable daily limit on our cards! Of all the things we had planned back in Germany, this was the one thing we had completely forgotten about.
We called the bank in Germany to take care of the problem, but the best solution that customer support offered us was to "come to the nearest branch here in Germany, there is no limit if you take money out at a counter"
...
We wagered our options for a few hours, then decided the best solution was to take out the daily limit each day and wait until we would have enough money. Unfortunately, this meant storing all the money in our hotel room, and waiting four extra days until we had all the money we needed.
On a plus side, this left us more time to explore the city. The highlight was the botanic garden: It had beautiful flowers, cheesy fake statues and one definite highlight: a plastic replica of Stonehenge. And yes, people were taking wedding photos there.
With only one day to go before we could pick up the motorbikes, I suddenly got cold feet. How would we find our way out of the seven million people city? How would Theresa handle biking? Her first time without a driving school teacher, on a bike she had never ridden before, driving on the "wrong side of the road"?
I was worried, and decided to ask on the "Malaysian bikers community" forum if someone would be able to guide us out of the city.
I didn't have high hopes, the people had been nice to us before, but answering online questions and actually skipping work to meet us and help us is something quite different.
But then something amazing happened: I had posted in the evening, just hours before we were going to pick up the bikes and left a telephone number to contact me. And within one hour, three different people contacted me, offering their help!
The next morning we went to pick up the bikes, and boy, we were excited. People in KL are used to foreigners and usually pay little attention to strangers, but the second we left the hostel, carrying our backpacks, motocross helmets and all the gear we had, we could feel people staring at us from all directions. It was a friendly stare thou, a stare that would follow us for the next five months throughout Southeast Asia, often leading to interesting conversations and sometimes opening doors for us.
We took the monorail to the shop, paid the last installment for the bikes, and with perfect timing Antusiang and his friend (the guys from the MBC forum) arrived to pick us up. They were going to lead us out of the city, towards the old mountain road.
Paying for the bikes- each note is worth about 10 US Dollars
We put on our gear and started the bikes for the first time.
it was a magical moment - a little crowd had assembled, pedestrians, shoppers, even the mechanics of the bike shops had stopped working and watched as we got on the bikes and followed Antusiang and his mate out onto the road. Years of dreaming, months of preparation had finally come to an end, our trip was live.
The first day riding was amazing. Antusiang and his friend dropped us at the start of the old mountain road out of the city. It was just perfect: The sun was shining, we had a blue sky, the road was old and narrow but in still decent shape, almost no traffic, and lots of bends in the middle of the rain forest.
We didn't really have a destination, we knew we wanted to get to the east coast, but it didn't matter when we would get there, we had five months before us...
Theresa's bike
We stopped for the night at a little homestay in the country. We shared the house with the friendly Muslim owner and his family. We had a private room, but it was a wooden house with lots of openings and clearings, it felt like we all shared one room. We also made our first contact with the "mandi", the Asian version of a shower: You take a bucket, dip it into a lager basin of water, and then empty the bucket over you. After some time we got used to it, but at least in this case we really preferred the European version...
When I asked the owner about his job, he told me "fishing" and showed me the fishponds behind his house. So next morning I asked him about the catch of last night, and laughing he said "none". I didn't understand, so he explained the probably most relaxed job in the world to me:
He kept fish in two ponds. Every night people from all around would show up and pay an entry fee. But they didn't go fishing to eat it or sell the fish! Everyone had five hours to catch the biggest fish he could get. In the end he would bring the fish to the owner of the pond, who put the fish on a scale. The fishers got money according to the weight of their biggest fish: If it was heavy enough, it was worth more than their entry fee, and they went home with profit. If it was worth less, the owner of the pond would be making profit. Afterwards the fish got thrown back into the pond, to be caught again some day, some fish had more than ten hook marks.
It was all just game...
The fish Ponds
Wild buffaloes
a guest house
The next day we visited a nearby elephant sanctuary.
We then left for the east cost, it was already 3:30pm, but we still had hopes of driving the remaining 250 km to the coast. Unfortunately, suddenly the traffic became really dense and slow, and some raindrops started falling. We pulled over and put on our raincoats, and within seconds it started pouring down like no tomorrow. A fully grown rainstorm developed, the tin roof of our shelter got slowly town apart.
the roof of the nieghbour building started to break and fly away
We waited some time, then got back on the bikes as the rain had weakened.
Unfortunately it didn't take long until it got even worse. we pulled over again and were invited by a family to have dinner with them. We tried to pay them for it, but they refused... so incredibly nice people!
By now it was already 6:30 and we had no hopes left of getting to the east coast, so we asked for the nearest homestay and went there. A third time the rain got even worse, we pulled over, but it just wouldn't stop, so we started again, this time in full night, raining so hard I had to open my helmet just to see the road. The raincoat kept me dry though - that is until a minibus overtook me at like 110 km/h, splashing up water from a puddle on the street so hard it hit me everywhere. I swallowed a good amount, it ran down the inside of my helmet into my clothes... good times!
Fortunately, we made it to the hotel not long after, COMPLETELY wet though.
I had a lot of respect for Theresa, this being her second day on a motorbike, she made it trough all of it with ease, not even complaining once.
We found the "homestay", which actually was a little roadside hotel. The owner looked at us bewildered - we were the first Westerners to ever show up. But again people were so friendly to us, we got the best little hut they had.
It was rather run down, but it was dry, and that was all we needed...
The next day we left again for the east coast, and this time we actually got there. We went to "Cherating beach", which may be a busy little backpacker town in the dry season, but the rain season had just started, and most accommodations were almost empty. The town had a relaxed, happy feeling to it.
We found us a nice little hut close to the beach.
The view from the front porch
We made contact with our first big lizard:
I couldn't stop watching them, Theresa was more interested in the thousands of geckos in and outside our hut.
It was here we met Mohdi for the first time. He had seen us post online, and sent me a message asking if we could meet him. We sure did, and he showed up on his brand new yellow Kawasaki.
He invited us to have a traditional lunch with him, we were taught how to eat with our hands. Unfortunately I am left handed, and for some reason the Asians don't ever eat with their left hand, so the whole little restaurant was giggling when they saw me do it...
Mohdi had traveled a fair bit of Asia himself and was able to give us lots of helpful information, we held contact to him during the whole trip. In the end we really could call him a friend, without his help some things would have been fundamentally different. (see part V)
(his bike is the yellow one)
It was great to relax by the sea, make new friends, meet locals, unwind from all the stress back home in Germany.
time for another mango shake
taking the shortcut
But after a few days we wanted to get going again. We wanted to go to an island. Initially we had the "Perhentian islands" im mind, but fellow travelers advised us against it. So we consulted our "Lonely Planet" and headed for a tiny little island called "Pulau Kapas", in hindsight one of the best decisions we did.
on the way to Pulau Kapas
Pulau Kapas was heaven:
A tiny little island in the ocean, 500 meters across, so small there was not a single road, the thick jungle went right up to the beach, our cottage was ten meters from the beach. No noise except birds and the ocean, amazing food, perfect weather, we couldn't have had it any better...
(well maybe except for the snake that awoke us one night, but the next day the owner assured us that they were "only a little bit poisonous")
After a few days on the island we wanted to get on the road again, and decided to drive to the "Cameron Highlands", the tea growing capital of Malaysia.
The drive itself was quite interesting, be it cows on the road, thundering rainstorms, or broken roads, it never got boring. We were getting used to our bikes, and bit by bit felt more confident on the road.
Our daily dose of rainstorms
suddenly the road was gone
"Be aware - Wild Elephants"
first thousand kilometers, no crash yet
In Cameron Highlands we were surprised - it might have been a tea growing village, but it felt a lot more like one big tourist trap. Wealthy people from KL would drive here for a weekend getaway. Interestingly, it was still easy to get away from the crowds: all the Asians would go to one of the tea plantations, walk into the fields for ten meters, have a relative take a photo with their cellphone camera, and then rush back to the entry to drink an incredibly overpriced tea and have a muffin. We decided to go for a hike in the plantations, and within seconds we had left the crowds behind. The plantations were beautiful, lots of rolling green hills. History has it that the English founder of the town went for a hike in the plantations, got lost and never came home. This couldn't happen to us, from every hill we could look back to the entry and see the flashes of the Asians taking photos in full daylight.
We also met a lot fellow motorbikers here, a Frenchman who had driven on his BMW GS all the way from France, and a couple of Asian bikers from Penang. They all had some sort of motocross leg protection, something we were completely lacking. We talked to them, and immediately one of them offered us to show us around once we got to Penang and to take us to the shop where we could buy them. We agreed and left for Penang a few days later.
Some more rainstorms (and a huge bridge) later we got there. We found us a little hostel in Georgetown, and the next day the old biker came to pick us up. He had changed his big bike for a small scooter, and not only showed us where to buy the leg protection, but also took us all across the city so we could get our bikes serviced for the first time and demanded nothing in exchange, he didn't event let us buy him his lunch. Again, it was amazing to see how nice people were to us...
pedestrian protection: over 9000!
By now we had spent a few weeks in Malaysia. It had been a great time - it wasn't as munch of an adventure as the trip later would develop into, but it was the perfect place to relax and unwind - and meet some incredibly friendly people.
But now we had seen enough, and decided it was time to discover a new country - Thailand!
[Part 3 in 1-2 weeks]
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