It has been exactly a month since I last put fingers to keyboard to update the progress of our little expedition across Malaysia. A lot has happened since then, some good, but lately some very bad.
First the bad news. On March 20th, while we were on a sidetrip from the bicycles to the bright lights of Kuala Lumpur, we dropped into an Internet cafe to check our e-mail and update the web page. One of Joanne's messages, from her cousin Magaly in Toronto, marked "URGENT", contained the terrible news that Joanne's father had died two days before, peacefully in his sleep. He was 82. Needless to say, it was an enormous shock to Joanne, and her first priority was to get back to Toronto as quickly as possible. We raced back to the coast by bus to pick up Joanne's bicycle and luggage (which we had left, along with my stuff, at a hotel on the beach during our trip to the capital) and caught a pre-dawn flight back to KL airport where we cajoled and begged Joanne's way onto a completely full flight home via Hong Kong. I stayed behind, in a bit of a state of limbo and shock.
Joanne's first thoughts were to get home for the funeral and to comfort her mother. She would like to come back to resume the trip that we planned together and started together, but whether she will be able to return, and if so, when, is an open question. I am continuing on my way for the moment, monitoring developments by e-mail and hoping that she will be able to return to Asia in a few weeks. I realize, however, that the fun of a long trip like this may have to take a back seat to more pressing real-world concerns.
It's heartbreaking for Joanne to lose her father, and it's also a bitter disappointment for her to have to suspend this trip. She and I had originally talked about travelling together through South-east Asia in 1996, but her father's health deteriorated that year and she felt that she had to stay with her father in Toronto instead of coming with me. Then in 1998, after I had spent the summer cycling in Pakistan, China and Tibet, and the fall tour guiding for Butterfield and Robinson in Europe, we set off together through the Middle East, bound eventually for South-east Asia and Angkor Wat, which Joanne has wanted desperately to visit for several years. However, along the way we spent more money than anticipated, and I was surprised to find out in February that Butterfield and Robinson had given me the axe, and that I wouldn't be guiding for them that spring as I had hoped. The trip to Angkor was postponed again as Joanne went to work in Japan for nearly two years to save money for a big trip, and I ping-ponged back and forth between South America and Japan, juggling teaching English with travelling in the Andes. Finally at the end of last year, more than 4 years delayed, our trip to see Angkor Wat and the rest of South-East Asia by bicycle was ready to go. And now, once again, Joanne has been forced by tragic circumstances beyond her control to, at the very least, delay the trip again.
But time is a cruel mistress, and even a year's travelling contains within it certain time constraints that we cannot avoid. The weather plays a major part in travel, and certain places cannot be visited at certain times of the year. (Western Tibet, for example, should not be visited in August. By anyone. Not even my worst enemies.) The Similan islands, one of the top SCUBA diving locations in the world and a place that Joanne really wants to visit, are affected by the same monsoon season that brings torrential rains to the Indian subcontinent. From late May onwards, the oceans around the Similans are so storm-tossed that no diving is possible. The mountain passes into and out of Tibet, in particular the last pass before reaching Nepal from Lhasa, are usually closed by snow in November, by which time the weather at high altitudes is getting a mite cold for cycling anyway. If we want to see the Similans this year, it has to be within the next 6 weeks or so. To have a realistic chance of reaching Tibet and cycling on to Kathmandu before winter closes in, we need to leave Chengdu by mid-September at the very latest.
These time pressures mean that I will continue cycling along the route we had planned, up through Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, hoping that Joanne will be able to rejoin me at some point further along the route as soon as it becomes possible for her to do so. I feel bad because having put in a lot of hard work on hilly and somewhat unrewarding inland terrain at the beginning of the trip, this is the easy, flat stuff, cycling from beach to beach with the occasional boat trip to a tropical island thrown in, that Joanne would relish. I hope that she will be able to rejoin me by the time I reach Bangkok at the very latest. If she can come back even sooner, there will be plenty of opportunity for SCUBA diving, snorkelling and beachcombing before we hit the hot, hilly interior again in Laos and Vietnam.
All this has rather taken the shine off the events at the beginning of March, but I should bring everyone up to date on what's going on. We spent five very soggy days in Kuching at the beginning of March, getting rained on for hours a day. We visited the Semenggok wildlife rehabilitation centre outside town, and it was a depressing contrast to Sepilok, where we saw orang-utans in Sabah. There are nine orang-utans in rehab at Semenggok, where formerly pet orangs are taught to survive again in the wild. It was fruiting season in the forest there, and none of the orangs came to the daily feeding session because they were too busy gobbling up jackfruit from the trees in the forest. This is a good thing; rehab is supposed to produce independent, self-reliant adult orangs, and not seeing any orangs at feeding time shows that it may be working. The other animals at the centre, however, were another story. Sun bears, bearcats, eagles, hornbills and gibbons sat depressed in tiny cages. Some of them, like the eagles and hornbills, may be too injured to survive in the wild. The sun bears, however, are viewed as too dangerous to set free again anywhere near humans, which nowadays in Borneo means anywhere at all. The animals sit listlessly, staring vacantly out of their bars, or pace dementedly around their cages like prisoners or mental patients in solitary confinement. One of the saddest sounds was the captive gibbons hooting excitedly at another group of gibbons kept in cages in the quarantine area, desperate to make contact with their fellow apes.
We talked to the lone Westerner working at the centre, a middle-aged English volunteer. He said that the sun bears were having a new, much larger enclosure built for them, away from the public viewing area, and that the bear cats and the gibbons might eventually have the same thing, getting away from the sad Third-World-zoo atmosphere that pervades the place. Reading the comment book, the Malaysian visitors expressed satisfaction at seeing bears and gibbons, but disappointment that there were no orangs to be seen. One visitor suggested that a few orangs should be kept in captivity permanently "so that we would have something to see and not end up disappointed." The Western tourists' comments were less pleased about the whole place. Walking back to the main road, we found dropped jackfruit and other fruit pits on the path, evidently dropped by a passing orangutan from overhead while we were at the visitors' centre. We would have been better off and less depressed if we had simply spent a couple of hours sitting quietly on the path watching for passing orangs, although the mosquitoes would have sucked us dry long before then.
The Sarawak museum was similarly disappointing. The new wing of the museum was closed for renovations, and the old wing looked as though it hadn't been dusted since it was established in 1891. The one highlight was some of the fine carvings produced by indigenous Dayak tribes in the interior in the years before they were converted to Christianity. Now the art has lost the meaning it once had and it's ground out to satisfy the tourist market. Kuching was awash with more touristst than we'd seen all trip, wealthy older tourists over for a few days of shopping and a longhouse experience.
Kuching has an interesting history as the capital of a kingdom carved out by a British adventurer, James Brooke, in the 1840s. He was granted control over the Kuching area by the Sultan of Brunei in return for suppressing piracy by some of the local Dayak tribes. He proceeded to take over all of present-day Sarawak in bits and pieces and had himself declared Rajah of Sarawak. The handful of British administrators he brought out to run his administration were granted grandiloquent titles straight out of some Balkan Kingdom of Ruritania, and he and his family ran the place as their hereditary fiefdom until 1942. There's a bit of the old historical feeling around, with gracious colonial buildings here and there and a nice riverside promenade, but there's not as much history to see as the tourist brochure hyperbole might lead you to believe. I wonder if the legions of tourists on the streets of Kuching found themselves wondering exactly why they'd chosen to come.
Our other sortie from Kuching, to Bako National Park, was more successful. Bako is a small park near Kuching that manages to cram almost all the plants and animals to be seen in all of Sarawak into one place. There are mangrove swamps, peat swamps, cliffs with scrub and heath forest on the top, and lush rainforest below. We saw the comical proboscis monkeys with their red faces, pot bellies and huge noses that the Malays call orang belanda, or Dutchman, because of the physical similarities between the two. There were langurs and macaque monkeys and wild pigs that all passed by our cottage, and the beach was alive with more hermit crabs than I've ever seen anywhere else. Bako was a big hightlight of Borneo, although the boat trip there and back in a tiny boat through mountainous waves was about as close to shipwreck as I'd like to come.
We flew from Kuching to Johor Bahru(JB), the Malaysian city near Singapore. The former Singapore Prime Minister, Lee Kwan Yew, caused a furor a few years ago when he called JB a city of carjackers, prostitutes and drug dealers. The fact that what he said was true cut little ice with the idignant Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed. Lee Kwan Yew didn't say, although he might have, that JB also has the worst traffic and ugliest urban sprawl in Malaysia. It was an unpleasant 30 km through insane, dangerous traffic from JB airport to the Singapore border.
Crossing the Causeway to Singapore was like entering another world. The streets were clean. The drivers were courteous. Everything was well-ordered and worked. Seven Elevens sold smoked salmon sandwiches and Starbucks frappucinos (Joanne's personal food obsession). We were happy until we saw the prices for everything from food to hotel rooms to bicycle equipment. 28 Singapore dollars bought us a broomcloset with no windows or ventilation to not sleep in, and when I went to buy new underwear at Marks and Spencers, I found that two pairs would set me back $44. On special. Our shopping for bike parts likewise got no further than the price tags: $35 for a very ordinary pair of bike gloves. $80 for a new tire.
We set out to see everything we wanted to see as quickly as possible. Singapore Slings at the Long Bar at Raffles Hotel. Check. The excellent Singapore Zoo. Check. The wonderful Jurong Bird Park. Check. The orchids at the National Botanical Gardens. Check. Some necessary shopping and a few frappucinos for Joanne, and it was time to retreat to dirty, badly-organized but cheap Malaysia.
We met a fellow Canadian cyclist, Marcel Gijssens, at our hotel who had just arrived from Bangkok by bike. Before that, he and two friends had ridden from Beijing to Bombay (although they had flown from Chengdu to Lhasa), and he had lots of stories to share of his time in Tibet and China, from getting arrested and interrogated for two days in northern China to doing battle with stone-throwing kids in Tibet to blowing out his knee trying to catch up to some French cycling club who had a jeep to carry all their luggage. It was nice to meet a fellow eccentric. We traded Paul Theroux's Riding the Iron Rooster, a book about travelling through China, for the Lonely Planet Thailand.
The first three days of riding out of Singapore were tough. It was hot, with bursts of torrential rain. We had to ride through the ugliness of JB again. I broke my first spoke of the trip. And the promised flat riding failed to materialize. In fact it was the hilliest riding of the trip, through yet more hideous oil palm plantations. To add insult to injury, we biked 27 hilly kilometres out of our way to visit a beautiful island only to find that all budget accomodation on the island had closed down; would we like to spend $100 a night to stay at a resort with a disco and karaoke bar? We didn't. The next day Joanne biked out to the main road and, exhausted, threw herself and her bike into a taxi to take her the 45 km to Mersing, while I biked it, bloody-mindedly determined to cycle every bit of the way from Singapore to Kathmandu.
From Mersing, we took a boat out to Tioman Island to relax and recover. Tioman was nice, although the coral around the island looked dead and the beach was no great shakes. We returned from the island ready for more cycling, this time along flat coastal roads. And after a last burst of relentless small hills, we were finally on a pancake-flat coastal plain, and even I had to admit that it was more fun rolling along flat ground through forests and across bird-filled marshes, with little traffic on the road, than grinding up and down oil-palm-infested hills in Sarawak. We saw pretty birds, kingfishers and bee-eaters and sunbirds, and rode side-by-side conversing. It was like a real bike trip, and at the end of the day, we went swimming in the ocean. We reached Kuantan, meeting an older Dutch couple cycling south and learning that in July and August hordes of Dutch cycle tourists infest the Bangkok-Singapore route. It's actually a bit surprising that we don't meet more cyclists coming the other way; we see their names in hotel registers, but somehow we pass each other on the road without noticing, probably because we're in hotels or on offshore islands or in restaurants when our fellow madmen come the other way.
It was from Kuantan that the ill-starred trip to KL started, so, after meeting my friend Karen Fry in KL (she was overnighting on her way from Japan to Cambodia), I set off on my sad and solitary way north from Kuantan. The riding was easy for three days, stopping at the travellers' beach hangout of Cherating (why do people flock there? The least appealing beach on the east coast) and the turtle nesting beaches of Rantau Abang. No leatherback turtles were around laying eggs; the season starts in May. The golden sand beach was really beautiful, though, a vast step up from Cherating, and I was sad to tear myself away to come to Kapas Island, where I've spent the last three days. I loved Kapas: white sand, great coral and fish life, few people, deserted beach coves. I wished that Joanne were there as well. Now it's time to bike north to the Perhentian Islands, reputedly the nicest islands in Malaysia but groaning under the mass of backpackers packing it. And then it will be time to head across the border to Thailand and get serious about putting some kilometres behind me, and, insh'allah, welcoming Joanne back to the trip.
Greetings to everyone, and I hope that the next instalment of this travel log will be more cheerful. And if you have a spare hour or so, please check out some other articles that I've written over the years about some other trips. You can find the links by going to our home page (click below) and then clicking on the "Other Links" button. Please let me know if you like any of the stories, or if you hate them, or if you think I should have stuck to astronomy. Also, please note that as Joanne has her digital camera in Toronto with her, there will be no new photo pages until she returns. Come back soon, Joanne!