Melaka/Malacca

Click the pix for larger picture.

After a restful night at the Embassy Hotel in Mersing, we caught an early afternoon bus to Melaka/Malacca.   This is an historic World Heritage city that was the original trading port for the Malaysian peninsula.

This was also to be the most trouble free bus trip of our entire journey.  The scenery was basically palm oil plantations, and palm oil plantations that had been cleared for replanting.  Its novelty wears off rather quickly, so I used this mundane scenery to do some reading and writing.

Malaysian buses are very nice, especially the seats.  They are roomy, deeply cushioned and have the ability to recline in a manner I’ve only experienced with a La-Z-Boy easy chair, never mind the person behind you.  They all have decorative curtains with a distinct oriental flair.  Except for the smattering of ill washed fellow travelers one feels like a real pasha. 

The Melaka bus terminal is decent enough, and we took a taxi to our hotel.  The hotel we booked is a modern three star place on the edge to the historic district.  The street was Chinese and had a number of food carts along the edges.  Since it is the Chinese New Year holiday season, there were also stalls selling the same crappy Chinese candy and cheap decorations we thought we had escaped from.  Fireworks were also readily available.

Melaka is a little disappointing.  It has a very nice area with well preserved buildings, but the effect was spoiled by all the cheesy New Year decorations and the constant stream of cars through its narrow streets.  Food and drink prices were extortionate.

However, we had several pleasant visits with shop owners, who were invariably friendly after finding out we lived in China.  The Chinese antique shops had a much greater selection of antiquities than anything we ever encounter in China.  The Chinese in China have little appreciation for this sort of thing.  It’s a little sad that you have to leave China to get a good look at artifacts from its past.

There is a maritime museum located in a replica of a Portuguese trading ship.  It gave a pretty good account of the history of the port, with a healthy lambasting of the Portuguese and a generous accounting of the merits of Islam on the Malay people.  Across the street from there is a wonderful shopping bazaar and food court.  Food courts are the way to eat in Malaysia.  Malay and Indian food abound, and you can point out what you want if you don’t know the names.  If you like spicy foods you are in heaven.  Since many Malays eat with their fingers, there is no problem for you to grab a chicken leg slathered in chili paste or curry and woof it down.  Hand washing sinks are everywhere to accommodate just such dining methods.  If you don’t like spicy food, then you will be sad.  Bland food is rare, and if that's what you want, then you should visit England.

Tioman Island

Ferry to Tioman

Mersing Ferry Terminal

Embassy Hotel, Mersing

The next morning dawned bright and sunny and we caught the ferry to Tioman Island.  The boat was a smallish passenger vessel good for a hundred or so people, with an air conditioned, comfy seating area and seats with enough room underneath to accommodate our bags.  The boat was fast, the sea was choppy and nobody puked.  There was a movie being shown, and although the engine noise was drowned out the sound, it was close captioned for the hearing impaired, which we were.  It was a “Death Race” movie, which had lots of mayhem, explosions and gratuitous violence, a perfect companion for a bouncy ride to a tropical island.  It was also about 90 minutes long, which is about the length of our voyage.

We landed at Tekek, which is the main village.  There are some cars and motorbikes and it’s kind of bustling.  It seemed pretty nice, but our final destination, Juara, was a little further, on the other side of the island.  The journey to Juara requires either a death march, or a 4 wheel drive ride over the mountain.  We opted for hiring a vehicle which took us up a very steep and winding concrete road like path.  We saw lots of jungle, some monkeys and a damn large lizard.  The journey is about 7 km and takes about 30 minutes.  We arrived at a lovely place located in a cove with the nicest beach I’ve ever seen that wasn’t cold.  It’s the off season, and it’s really off.  We went first to a place that is run by an Australian surfer dude that gets way more credit in the guide books than it deserves.  It was jam packed with seedy types and dreadlocked unfriendly folks.  They had that look of people with enough means to not have to work, but still be able to travel in a kind of cushy hippie lifestyle that I doubt the grandparents who set up their trust funds would approve of.

That was at the north end of the village.  We had our driver take us to the other end where we found a lovely lodge with bungalows set in a nicely landscaped grounds just steps from the deserted beach.  We got the winter rates, and had the whole place to ourselves. After spending the last 5 months in noisy, crowded China, the paradise aspect of our vacation spot was enhanced even more.  It took four days of travel in buses, jets, taxis, boats, 4 wheel drives and foot to get here, and it was completely worth it.

It’s quiet this time of year, very quiet.  The only vehicles are the very occasional motorbike, and the even more seldom seen 4 wheel drive vehicle.  The beach is deserted, and the only sound is that of waves lapping on the shore.  The water is a perfect temperature, and at least for the first 3 days of our stay, very calm.  The cove is surrounded by jungle, and it truly is a paradise.

Juara Beach Resort

We spent the first two days laying about and swimming, trying not to get sunburned.  Since it is near the Equator, the sun can be pretty intense.  Most restaurants are closed for the off season, and we found the ones that were open mostly staffed with indifferent people serving slowly prepared food of varying quality.  After some trial and error we fell into a pattern of going to a certain place for breakfast, and a couple of other places for dinner.  The tiny market offered mostly junk snacks.  They did have Sour Cream and Onion Pringles which is a chip flavor totally alien to the Chinese, who prefer flavors like shrimp and blueberry. (I am not making this up). 

We could find no beer except in one bad restaurant.  Tioman is a duty free place, but I didn’t think to get anything in Tekek, and Juara during the monsoons seems to be under some kind of Islamic Sharia anti alcohol cloud.  However, the owner of our bungalows had a bottle of duty free Guervo Gold that he sold to me at cost, somewhere in the neighborhood of less than 20 dollars, American.  It goes really good with mango/orange juice which Allah in his infinite wisdom allows.

Laundry Day

Main Street

We managed a few excursions and saw some interesting critters.  There are some little crabs that are very fast sprinters, and we discovered some mud skippers near the mouth of a small river.  We saw monkeys in the trees and squirrels.

Muddy Mudskipper

The third day was the beginning of the Tioman surf competition, held in sleepy Juara.  We didn’t know what to expect.  It was at the northern part of the place, about a 20 minute walk from us.  We headed there to check out the action.  There is surf during the monsoons on the north beach, and there were some pretty good surfers from around the region there.  Just like surfers and snowboarders in the USA, these dudes are shaggy, relaxed and appear to have no means of support other than whatever menial work they may deign to do when friends and relatives get sick of them and throw them out.  They have all the manners and charm of their American counterparts, too.  I felt right at home, or at least the home I left four years ago.  There’s nobody like that in China.

Cheeseburger in Paradise

 

Our friends left the fourth day, on their way to Singapore, then Indonesia.  We decided to spend 3 more nights.  We went again to watch the surfers, and the event had gotten much larger and louder.  The Beastie Boys were hollering through the sound system, so we spent 5 or 6 minutes there then returned to our end of the village.  It began to slowly get busier and louder as locals and  surfers began to filter toward our end.  An open air bistro had a band playing, and it was almost like tourist season, except there were still no fat, white people, and our lodgings acquired no new guests.  That night it began to rain.  It rained a bit more.  We were to leave on Tuesday, when the owner came to us on Sunday and told us we should try to get off the island before the weather got really bad.  He himself was on his way to the mainland to celebrate Chinese New Year with relatives in Johar Bahru and would share a ride with us to the ferry.

He refunded our money for Tuesday night, and we spent the day mostly laying about reading.  Then my Kindle broke.  It just made a funny image on the screen and died, leaving behind an image resembling a mostly shaken Etch a Sketch, not unlike Mitt Romney after the Republican primary.  No remedy from the Kindle website was effective in reviving it,  so I am no longer the Kindle fan I once was.

On Tuesday morning we headed back over the mountain in the rain to Tekek.  We arrived there to learn that there would be no ferry to Mersing due to rough seas.  We headed across the street for some breakfast at a big food court.  All the surfer dudes were there since they couldn’t get off the island either.  They were noisily lounging about smoking and laughing trying to purchase as little as possible and still be able to keep a table.  Nobody seemed to mind.

We had fired rice with a fried egg on top, and some coffee.  This was Malay style with plenty of good spices, including this chili paste with dried fish.   This might be a good time to mention Malaysian coffee.  It’s very good, in fact it’s excellent.  A common way to serve it is with the grounds in a bag, like a teabag, only bigger.  If you ask for it with milk, it comes with a sweetened condensed milk added.  It’s better than anything I’ve had outside the US, with the exception of Guatemala. I normally drink tea, which is also excellent here, but I find myself drinking coffee in the mornings.

After finding out the exorbitant rates for the lodging in Tekek, we returned to Juara to stay another night at our private resort.  The owner upgraded us to a premium room for the same price.  It had TV with one HBO channel, a big bathroom and two queen sized beds.  Since it was mostly rainy the TV was an added bonus we were happy to have.

Later the day became only cloudy, and we enjoyed the quiet and solitude of Juara.  The surfer dudes were all over on the other side of the island since they lacked the means to get back to our side.

That night it started raining in earnest with little let up.  It was the kind of rain we get in South China, the kind that leaves you amazed that the sky can hold that much water in the form of vapor, then suddenly release it in such prodigious amounts.  

I doubted the ferry’s ability to run under such conditions, but the next morning found us going over the mountain again.  There were places in the road where the water cascaded along its length, and the streams we crossed were swollen enough that even the locals were expressing some amazement. 

When we arrived in Tekek, we were surprised to learn that the boats were going to be running.  The scheduled departure time was 11:30, which gave us over an hour to have some more yummy breakfast.  After breakfast, we wandered over to the ferry building to learn that the boats would be delayed until sometime between 3 and 4 o’clock.  That left us with some time to kill, and nowhere to kill it, since it was still raining hard enough to float an ark.

We hung out in the food court, doing what I have well become accustomed to doing, while living in China, waiting patiently.  Fortunately, there were plenty of empty picnic style tables in areas where the businesses were not open, so we lounged about commenting on the rain and how good the drainage systems there seemed to be.

Fine Dining Establishment

That Was Good!!!

Waitingwaitinewaitingwaiting

Somewhere along the way we were informed that 4 o’clock would be the departure time.  At around 3, it began to rain as hard as it seemed to any time during the day, and I figured we would make a dash across when it let up.  We did have umbrellas, and the ferry port is just across the street, but we also had to cross a bridge that is covered with a metal roof and  the effect is sort of painful on the ears.

We went over when the rain let up enough so that hearing damage on the bridge was no longer and issue, and we got in line to get our boarding assignments.  We went into the waiting room, a clean, modern and comfortable place, which is good since we didn’t begin boarding until almost 5 o’clock.

It actually stopped raining and the sea was calm.  The skies had a high overcast that looked kind of exhausted from producing so much precipitation.

The previous week our voyage to the island was pleasant, since the cabin was air conditioned and we had “Death Race” on the TV.  The voyage back was less so.  It was not hot and sunny, so they didn’t have the air conditioning on.  The cabin was stuffy and sultry.  We were surrounded by slightly unwashed guys who all were adorned with essence of heavy smoker.

We set sail, but in the wrong direction.  We voyaged about 7 minutes the wrong way to drop one guy off at the next village.  We then began to go the right direction, but then docked right back where we started, and stayed there for a few stifling minutes more, until we finally set sail for the mainland.  The trip then proceeded without any more delays, a hundred plus souls on their way to mainland Malaysia after a two day wait.  The atmosphere  remained unventilated but some of our fellow passengers provide us with some entertaining variations of  flatulence.

When we docked some two hours later, I was truly amazed at how refreshing and cool a steamy tropical evening could be.

We had chosen to go to Tioman in spite of warnings of monsoon because I was in dire need of some serious rest and relaxation.  I got all that I needed and more.  In retrospect, 3 or 4 nights would have been adequate, giving me enough recuperation to tackle the demands of Malaysian bus travel.

Get Out of China!!!

We are in Malaysia for our winter holiday.  At present, I can’t think of a nicer place on the planet to be.

We began our journey the usual way, the bus to Hong Kong.  It picks up its first passengers down by the waterfront about a 25 minute walk from our place.  It had rained most of the night, a rather Oregon like 55 degree, steady downpour, but stopped about an hour before we left the apartment.

I was glad.  The weather prior to the previous day had given us a   long spell of pleasant days, with daytime temperatures reaching the mid seventies.  One of the reasons I wanted to go to the tropics was to escape dismal winter weather.  Our previous couple of winters qualified well within those parameters, often with fog and winds from the northwest that made mock of the term “sub tropic”.  Leaving a balmy spring like clime to go swelter in the steamy jungle did not completely sit well with me.

Anyway, we left home around 7:30 am on a Sunday, which is a very pleasant time to be out, since most folks are still at home sleeping or breathing second hand smoke.  We did not even need to walk all the way, since an early taxi came by.  Was this to be a good omen?

The bus trip was uneventful, with a surprisingly small number of passengers on board.  I thought with the Chinese New Year would have resulted in a packed bus, but apparently massive exodus of people returning home to be with their families does not include Hong Kong residents working in Zhanjiang.

We stayed at a different hotel than usual, since our favorite hotel was engaged in some serious holiday price gouging.  The place we stayed in provided a slightly smaller room with a smaller bathroom for half the price of our other hotel.   Some Hong Kong accommodations have a different layout, with rooms scattered about a building on different floors, interspersed among offices and such.  This is one of those kinds of places.  No lobby, just an office up on the 15^th floor.  To get to our room, you unlocked a door, and walked down a down a short hallway with 3 other rooms attached.  There were several of these pods scattered about, I think.

In Hong Kong space is at a premium, and there are many such places calling themselves hotels.  They are in a sense, I guess.  Sort of like a family is still a family even though its members are living all over the country.

The next morning we went to the travel agent to book our return bus tickets to Zhanjiang, and were told that there were no buses running the two days after our return flight to Hong Kong due to the fact that the buses would be busy hauling people back to Hong Kong.  Apparently the exodus for the holiday is more away from Hong Kong to stay with family, rather than to Hong Kong.  The only people going to Hong Kong must be tourists, which is why there is hotel price gouging.

I reserved two more nights at the cheapo “hotel”, and figured that our holiday would just have to involve some Hong Kong tourism.

We caught the bus to the airport and got to experience the joys of checking in at a budget airline.  The budget airline check in counters are in another terminal.  So we had a pleasant stroll through the massive Hong Kong airport to the boondocks check in counters.  We were greeted with two long lines going to two check in clerks.  Good thing we arrived two hours early.

I have never flown out of China or Hong Kong without having at least one large group or family ahead of us in line who have absolutely no clue as to what they are doing.  The have mass quantities of luggage, often what appears to be their entire household possessions, and there are always irregularities in their paperwork, either tickets or passports.  It takes what seems like 15 or 20 minutes to get them squared away, and you wonder if the flight may leave with most of its passengers still waiting for their boarding passes.  We had at least 2 groups of these types of travelers in front of the two lines.  Eventually they got sorted out, then things moved along OK.  We found out that our departure gate was in the main terminal, so we got to hike back, wondering if we would make it through departure customs and security.  Security didn’t take long at all since this is Hong Kong and they have an ample number of security stations and don’t require you to remove your shoes and keep invasive searches to a minimum.  Customs was quick and we hiked to one of the farthest departure gates.  We arrived just in time to queue up for boarding. 

Waiting for takeoff.  Smoggy day at the airport.

Our budget airline was Jetstar, and wasn’t too bad.  We had paid extra for our meal and drinks when we booked our flight, and it was OK airplane food.  The Airbus didn’t malfunction and we arrived in Singapore more or less on time.

Benign Neglect and Population Control

China’s One Child policy was first implemented in 1979 in order to slow down its booming population growth. An excellent summary of the law can be found here.  In spite of many hardships and human rights issues that have resulted in enforcing this law, it has succeeded in slowing the growth of the population here.

This is an overpopulated country.  I don’t think anyone who has been here can make a convincing argument that this place needs more people.  Besides taking an active effort in controlling the birthrate, I sometimes wonder if the government here also takes a somewhat passive role in  reducing the population, by allowing reckless and dangerous behaviors in its populace and institutions that cause more deaths than you might find in other countries.  

Here are some examples that come from China’s indifference regarding safety and its Laissez-faire attitude toward business.

Traffic Accidents

Lots of people are killed in China each year in traffic accidents.  Most drivers are rank rookies with little training or practice, and their numbers are increasing every day.  Seatbelts, child car seats, and motorcycle helmets are seldom used.  Traffic laws are scoffed at and rarely enforced.  The result is vehicular carnage on a scale that only the Chinese are capable of.

It is believed that police under report the number of traffic deaths each year.  In 2007, for instance, police logged 81,649 deaths, compared to 221,135 listed on death certificates, according to a recent study.  Five years later we have more incompetent new drivers and more carnage. 

 Keep buying those cars and motorcycles, folks, and pay no attention to those red and green lights.  Those are just suggestions.

Air Pollution

Air pollution was linked to at least 8,572 premature deaths across four major cities in 2012, according to a study by Peking University and Greenpeace published Dec. 18.

Something to keep in mind is that there are 640 major cities in China and air pollution exists in nearly all these places.  Can we assume that over 5 million people die prematurely from toxic air?

The pollution comes from everything from factories and vehicles to citizens burning garbage.

If the government was to make a real effort to clean the air, it would have a negative effect on this highly successful population reduction agent

Bad Water

Half of China’s population (nearly 700 million people) consumes drinking water contaminated with animal and human waste that exceeds the applicable maximum permissible levels, and while there has been an overall decline in mortality from infectious diseases, diarrheal diseases and viral hepatitis, both associated with fecal pollution of water, they are the leading infectious diseases in China.

Smoking

As with any issue in China, the numbers on tobacco, cigarettes and smoking are daunting: More than a trillion cigarettes produced by the state tobacco monopoly; more than 300 million smokers, 740 million second-hand smokers, and, by 2020, some two million annual deaths related to smoking.

As many as 60% of men smoke, although only 3% of women say that they do.  One of the negative aspects of the One Child Law is the practice of selectively aborting female fetuses due to the preference of a male offspring.  Having most of the men and few of the women smoking is a positive move in helping to balance this gender inequity.

The State Tobacco Monopoly Administration both runs and regulates China National Tobacco Corp., the world’s biggest cigarette maker with a market share about the size of Philip Morris International Inc. (PM) and British American Tobacco Plc (BATS) combined. Tobacco tax generated 96 billion dollars in revenue in 2011.

There is not a lot of incentive for the government to trample on the rights of people who choose to smoke themselves to death. 

Work safety

Work-related accidents killed 75,500 people in China last year.  That’s over 200 workers a day.  Some “Workers’ Paradise”.

Corruption

Bribery and cronyism results in corners being cut in construction, resulting in shoddy buildings and infrastructure. For example:

Six bridges have collapsed since July 2011.

This building fell over.

And thousands of crappy buildings, including schools collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake resulting in the deaths of thousands of people.

There are many other unsafe situations here, some of them due to carelessness of individuals, and some of it because evil people are making a quick buck by skirting safety practices.  There is lead in paint, Melamine in milk products, and excessive chemicals in food.

Libertarian Americans and others who believe that the government has no business trying to regulate what happens in peoples’ lives would love the way this government doesn’t regulate.

I doubt that these issues that cause the premature deaths of millions of Chinese every year are a deliberate effort by the government to thin the population down a bit, but it seems to be working anyway.

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