| From Shopping to the Jungle Train Our Journey Through Singapore and Malaysia |
| We spent nearly a month in Sumatra visiting the Orangutans, hiking through the jungle, and visiting massive volcanic lakes. We finally left and took the shuttle boat over to Singapore, a small island located on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. It is a relatively new country, separating from Malaysia in 1965. The strict government is very demanding and allows for little freedom of the press and severly frowns upon politcal criticism. What they were able to do though is "fix" many of the problems that other SE Asian cities have. There is no trash on the streets, the air is clean, and the public transportation is extremely effective. Singapore has beautiful parks and amazingly, the tap water is even drinkable. We enjoyed the cleanliness of the city but it was very expensive compared to our standards. Singapore is known for being one of the shopping capitals of the world. The famous Orchard Street has 50+ shopping malls (each 5-7 stories tall) lined up right next to each other. Hundreds of people just shopping! Armani, Guchi, Prada...you name the store and Singapore had about 10 different branches or it around the city. On the down side, there was a very sterile feel to the city, almost a sad feeling. All the culture seems to have been removed as Western capitalism forced changes. In the country's effort to succeed commercially by building huge mega-malls they seemed to suffocate it's soul, removing the traditions and customs. There are still small patches of the former China Town and Little India but I can only imagine that they are a small portion to what existed before Sony, Olympus, The Gap and every other major world company moved in. For our final evening Summer's friend, Gareth, showed us a night out in style. We ate like kings at the Lau Pa Sat Festival Center. When the Singapore government made it's sweeping changes they also swept up all of the food hawkers. Instead of roaming the streets in free-wheeling pushcarts, the government designed specific food hawker centers where people can congregate to eat. It's an area with countless food stalls where you can literally get anything you want. You start off with some Vietnamese Spring Rolls, share some fresh Crab, enjoy a spicy Indian curry and then wash it down with jugs of beer. We left Singapore and returned to Malaysia. We moved from one big city to another, this time the capital of Malaysia - Kuala Lumpur. This is another well kept city with an interesting fusion of old world charm and modern commercialism. Fortunately, the forward progress of capitalism didn't stamp out many of the cultural aspects of this bustling town. It proudly displays the tallest building in the world, The Petronas Twin Tower, which stands over 450m (1,476 ft) tall. They are a beautiful sight, especially at night when lit up. We were able to use it as a landmark as we meandered through the city. Our final destination in Malaysia was the Taman Nagara National Park. We had a few day treks and luckily made it without any leeches attaching themselves to us. We then continued north on our Malaysia travel by boarding the "Jungle Train" to the east coast Malay/Thai border. We had six hours of traveling through jungle - outside our window were beautiful greenery and limestone cliffs. We fianlly reached the border late at night and just minutes before it closed. We learned quite a bit in both Malaysia and Singapore and, given more time and money, we are certain that these countries could have had much more to offer. As always, though, we must continue down the trail. Our path was going to take us far north to visit the hill tribes of Thailand...yet another great adventure! Next: Our Northern Thailand Journal Entry |