Langkawi: Truly Paradise

On my first pleasure trip within Malaysia in a long, long time (correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the last time I went on vacation inside the country was Tioman way back in June, and even then I worked – a little.), I spent a weekend with a friend on Langkawi, a beautiful island in the north, practically Thailand. I’d heard mixed things about the island. Friends who live and teach up near the border are losing track of the times they’ve visited and absolutely love it, but a number of bloggers I consulted lamented that it was a huge let down. With Malaysia’s beloved East Coast beaches still recovering from flooding – and in any case too far away for a weekend trip – I decided to trust my friends and headed out last Friday. I spent the night on the mainland on the opposite side of the ferry crossing with a friend – whose hot shower and fluffy pillows did not disappoint – and the following morning took the noon ferry across, after a delicious breakfast of Chinese soup (they told me the seafood was cheap up there, but I did not expect a crab claw in my breakfast!). Langkawi is actually a series of islands – 99, my Lonely Planet book tells me – but the name generally refers to the biggest of the set, and the one to which we were headed. The ferry ride, therefore, zigzags through tiny island after tiny island – green, dense jungle rising out of the famously turquoise Andaman Sea – and each one had me pressing my nose against the glass, saying, “Is it this one? Is it that one?” We finally docked at Kuah, the main town and hot spot for duty free shopping (Hershey’s chocolate and alcohol minus the incredibly high tax imposed by Islamic Malaysia – although we purchased neither, our goal being the beach), and hopped in a cab across the surprisingly big island to Cenang, the most backpacker-friendly beach. The ride took us through several villages – I was surprised, as I had been expecting something much smaller – and lasted around 20 minutes, but it was a nice view. The interior of the island remains relatively green and undeveloped, given that Langkawi is one of Malaysia’s premier tourist destinations, with mountains and jungle surrounding the highway. When we reached Cenang we headed to a guesthouse our friend had recommended, only to be told that there was no space. I had never arrived in a place without a reservation before, but it seemed there was be no shortage of hostels and guesthouses, so, undaunted, we took off up the road, knocking at every door but finding nothing – every place was either miles out of our price range or fully booked (apparently the Tuesday school holiday extended to the weekend before, and all of Malaysian had showed up in Langkawi). Finally, the owner at a hostel told us that his sister-hostel had space, so we followed him a little deeper inland to a series of bungalows (not incredibly nice, not worth what we paid, but two beds and a private bathroom). Also following him was a traveler from Germany, who was waiting for her friend and was unwilling to commit to the price before consulting him. We invited her to come in and leave her bags, at least until he arrived. In the end, the two of them ended up being our next-door neighbors and we spent the weekend with them (they even consented to driving us around on two motorbikes to see a bit more of the island without having to pay for a cab). Once we had unloaded and gotten our last bits of work done (end-of-the-month reporting and what not), we headed to the beach, where we sought shade and stretched out, enjoying a peaceful afternoon in and out of the water (the water was wonderfully warm, though not as clear as on the east coast, and the outrageous number of jellyfish kept us from staying in very long). We stayed to watch the sunset, which even the naysaying bloggers conceded was worth the trip. Although the clouds were too low to watch the sun actually sink into the ocean, we had a great gold and pink sky, with beautiful reflections on the sea. Satisfied with our sunset viewing, we headed back to our bungalow, where we got dressed and headed out for the evening. Having heard delicious reports about the foreign food in Langkawi, and always excited for something other than rice or noodles, we headed to a Mexican restaurant (I tend toward the skeptical side when it comes to Mexican food outside of North America, but this one came highly recommended) for what turned out to be a delightful feast of guacamole nachos and snapper quesadillas. Ohhh to have cheese again! Having eaten our fill, we returned to the beach where we found a quiet but nice beach bar. We settled down in the sand and spent the evening relaxing and talking about travels – both of our neighbors are en route from Indonesia to Thailand, which happen to be my two destinations for March/April/May, so exchanging tips and plans with them got me very excited!

Although we got off to a sleepy and slow start the next day – I was ready to be out the door at 8 am, but I guess my travel style doesn’t mesh well with that of the typical Southeast Asia backpacker – we rented a couple of motorbikes for the afternoon (that process added at least another hour, between searching for them, waiting for them, returning one when it wouldn’t let us drive any faster than 20 kilometers per hour…), and drove along the west coast of the island to a spot within the jungle where there is a cable car that ferries travelers up the mountainside (according to the signs posted along the queue, it’s the steepest in the world) to where there is a lookout point, and a glass-bottom bridge that sweeps out over the jungle, allowing for unique views. Unfortunately the bridge was under construction while we were there, but the cable car (minus the random and dizzying imax video of a roller coaster on Mars that we were forced to endure) was worth the trip and the ticket. From the observation point, we could see several nearby islands (on a good day, apparently, you can see Thailand, but I didn’t know in what direction I should be looking, nor how I would distinguish between Thailand and Malaysia, even if I did spot it) and more gorgeous blue water. We returned to sea level and set out for the night market, where we shopped around for our favorite Malaysian snacks (nasi lemak, which I will miss a lot in three weeks) before heading back to the beach, for a repeat of the previous night.

My last day on the island, I planned to take the 6:00 pm ferry back to my friend’s place – I couldn’t turn down another turn in that shower – so I had more or less the entire day at the beach. For once I was happy not to have any real plans. I booked it to the ocean at 8:30, snagged an umbrella and a beach chair (okay, I had to pay for it) and spent the day in and out of the water. I spent a little while walking through the streets around the beach (once it got to be noon and I had to get out of the direct sun for a couple of hours) just seeing what was around. It was a wonderful, relaxing, day, and if it weren’t for my upcoming months of traveling, I wouldn’t have been ready to leave the beach.

I side with my friends on Langkawi – the beach is beautiful, with views of the nearest islands on two sides, but a clear view of the sea directly west for perfect sunset-watching. The water isn’t perfect (but the jellyfish did seem to be less manic in the morning than in the afternoon), but it is warm, and despite poor visibility that might be upsetting to divers and snorkelers, the color is truly spectacular. Although the beachside nightlife isn’t as crazy as, say, on the Thai islands (I’ll report back on that in a month), it’s exactly my scene. Very laid-back, with small outdoor bars with low tables and bamboo mats for non-sandy sand-sitting, and small groups of people hanging out. I definitely prefer that to wild and enormous all-night raves. To me, Langkawi is a perfect in-between of Malaysia and Thailand (although not having been to Thailand yet, that’s just based on hearsay and Lonely Planet). It’s not as strict as the rest of Malaysia (even other islands and retain a sense of the reserved culture that we encounter here), but less crazy than Southern Thailand.

View of the jungle and the ocean from the lookout

Towns of the island below

The early bird catches the best seat :)

One thing I cannot stand.

In Ampangan Woh, the view of the jungle is beautiful. Every morning on my way back from the shower I have to stop and turn around, and look out over the valley at the incredible green that is the mountain rising beyond the river, and the purest blue that is the sky before the afternoon storm clouds roll in. When I wake up in the middle of the night and step outside to use the bathroom, I am sill mesmerized by the sheer number of stars in the sky. The food is delicious and fresh – everything just picked from outside the house or brought in from deeper in the jungle. My hosts are welcoming and kind, and my students are (mostly) attentive, hardworking, inspiring, and fun to teach. I wake up every day thinking how lucky I am to be here, how incredibly different this place is from any other I have ever – or, likely, will ever – see.

But I just cannot stand the shooting of the dogs with slingshots.

It bothers me so much that I have actually yelled at kids for it, and stolen their slingshots away. For the first few months that I lived here, I tried to write it off as just another cultural difference – one that it is neither my responsibility nor my right to try to change. Now and then I would comment on it, or rhetorically question children as to what the dog had done to deserve such treatment (usually the answer was somewhere along the lines of “teacher, he is always noisy,” or, more simply “they’re bad”), but for the majority of the past seven months, I took no drastic measures. I suppose the last straw for me was back in October, when one of the dogs gave birth to five adorable puppies. For a few weeks, these puppies were the darlings of the village – children petted them carefully, pointed them out to me, even carried them up the rocky hill when the path was too steep for their little puppy paws. The love for the puppies faded, however, as their eyes opened and they started to stray further and further from their mother. Soon they, too, became targets for the slingshot-wielding boys, but their small bodies, apparently, couldn’t take it as well as the older dogs. By the middle of November, all but one of the puppies was dead (at the time of writing – January – he still survives, and is doing well. He’s been adopted by one of the families here, and seems to be well cared for). I am no vet, but it seemed to me that their slingshot wounds got infected and they were not able to recover.

As all of this made me madder and madder, I decided to dedicate my monthly project for January to teaching the children of Ampangan Woh – the older students were somewhat involved as well, but the project mostly targeted the young and impressionables – to treat the animals with whom they share their village with respect and kindness. The project included a series of discussions about why it is important to do so: we talked about how the dogs, especially the puppies, are much more helpless than their human counterparts. We also addressed the reasons that some of the dogs are “bad” – we used some class time to talk about how dogs who are beaten – or slingshotted – become afraid of people and why they respond to violence in kind. We also watched a few animal-centric movies (most importantly, Ice Age and 101 Dalmatians, both of which were big hits and have been re-requested several times since) and talked that specifically represented animals as sentient and sympathetic, and negatively affected by humans.

The most fun part of the project: one afternoon I gathered the kids I could track down and we whipped up a batch of no-bake dog treats: essentially peanut butter, flour, and oats, mixed into one delicious and sticky mess. They “chilled” – as much as could be expected in the jungle – overnight, and I told the kids all to come back the following day when they got home from school to hand them out. A couple were eager, and came straight to my house demanding, “Teacher, where are the cookies for dogs?” so I gave them each a couple and we set off in search of dogs. They weren’t hard to track down, but when they came over the kids grew suddenly terrified of holding their hands out to the dogs. I decided to lead by example and carefully held out one of the peanut butter balls – a little nervous myself, to be honest. She sniffed it warily, lifted it carefully out of my hand by the very edges of her teeth, and then devoured it. Nearly as nervous as my students were the dogs, who generally live by a principle along the lines of “beware children bearing gifts.” In fact, I tossed one to a particularly timid dog who wouldn’t even come near us, and he ran away yelping. Eventually, though, they seemed to decide that the smell of peanut butter was too delicious to resist, and as they came around, so did the kids. They, following my lead, started carefully handing out their treats, to the growing delight of the dogs. The kids were literally shrieking with laughter as the dogs licked their fingers, and when I explained that a lick is a dog’s kiss, that was too much for them. We returned over the next couple days, with more and more people willing to participate, and we are now the heroes of the dogs – they follow the kids and me everywhere we go, and the slingshotting, while not completely gone, has decreased exponentially.  

Susahid, age 6, with the puppy

Students making dog treats to pass around

Post-Vacation Blues (and other hues)

Back in Kuala Lumpur, lounging around HQ before it was time to head back to our respective centers, my coworkers and I mourned the end of our vacations. It would soon be back to the same old routine, and though I was missing my students (some of whom I hadn’t seen in nearly two months), I admit that I was wishing for a few more days seaside. We had a brief meeting on that first Monday back, and the next day I hopped on a bus back to Tapah. I did a little grocery and school supply shopping, and then (possibly with a melodramatic sigh), I boarded the same old bus (but with a 50 cent price increase, which outraged me far more than it should have) to the village of Batu Tujuh. I was a little nervous because I hadn’t been able to get in touch with anyone from home, so I wasn’t sure if there would be someone waiting there to pick me up, but I know there is usually someone around who can drive me up the mountain, so I crossed my fingers and got off the bus at the little shop that marks the village. Crossing the street, I immediately spotted Apak, and couldn’t help but grin. He’s one of the ones who has been gone since the middle of November, and I was so glad to see him, especially when he – like most Semai, usually reluctant to show emotion – grinned back, gripped my hand and said “how… you… holiday?” There were several other people I knew gathered around the shop, and there were smiles all around, friends asking how I was, and when I had returned. I was somewhat disappointed to learn that Apak wouldn’t be sticking around – he was only in town to buy a few supplies before heading back to the farm in the jungle – but he gave me a lift up the mountain, where I met one of his daughters, Jawani, and her 9-year-old son, Deni. The three of us said goodbye to Apak, wished him a safe trip back to the farm, and headed back home. All glumness about the end of vacation vanished as we made our way through the village to our house, as students and friends came to greet me and welcome me back. Deni, Jawani, her sister Nani and I, alone in the house with the rest of the family at the farm, had a nice, quiet evening – munching on some of my favorite jungle foods, and watching Jurassic Park.

To be honest, I didn’t do much in the way of teaching that first week back. It turned out that Jawani and Nani were some of the only people in the village – and they’d only come home to be here when I arrived. With so many empty hours, I was a little bored, but the weather and my surroundings cheered me up. I knew the rainy season had to be drawing to an end (it seems like it’s been raining forever – just about every day since October) but that first day of sunshine blew me away. I sat almost the entire day out on the porch, shocked that no clouds rolled in as the morning turned to afternoon. The sky is so outrageously blue some days, it actually stops me in my tracks on my way to the shower. The mountains beyond the river are so beautifully green with the sun shining, and on top of that, the close of the rainy season also means that the fruit trees are starting to blossom. We’ve got lots of gorgeous deep pink flowers lining the paths of the village, and the rambutans are turning dark red. Soon, I expect to be woken up in the morning to the smell of durians coming up from the villages below, and maybe even find some on our breakfast table.

The second week, a few more people returned, as the public school resumed (although it was supposed to start again that first week, the terrible floods that rocked the east coast of the country postponed their reopening nationwide). I managed to get my entire children’s class together, for the first time since before my New Zealand trip, and most of my two illiterate classes. I still haven’t managed to collect more than a handful of my advanced students, but I’m feeling hopeful about the upcoming third week. We had a couple rainy days, but the sunny ones are starting to outnumber them.

This past weekend, I went up to the farm with the family. I’ve been there just once before – back in September, Elma and I spent two nights there. They’ve since built a new house, right in the middle of the rice field, whereas the old house was quite a ways away. The rice plants (hill rice, I’m told, that grows on hills rather than in swampy marshes like I imagine rice growing) are enormous – stalks as tall as I am (in September they were only a couple of inches high and Elma and I had to step carefully so as not to crush them) with many small pods clustered at the top of the plant. They look like wheat plants, and if not for the beautiful mountains of Perak that surround the field, it could be Kansas (I imagine… I’ve never actually seen Kansas). The rice almost ready for harvesting – Amek and Apak say maybe in the next couple of days, after which time there will be a massive celebration in the village. Interspersed with the rice are deep red-purple flowers. I asked Amek’s daughter Ella about them, and she told me that she doesn’t quite remember the story, but it’s along these lines: Semai legend says that once a man fought with a village, so the spirits turned him into a paddy field, with his different body parts transformed into various plants and vegetables, so that he would be helpful to the village. The flowers represent his blood, pumpkins are his legs, etc. For this reason, Semai tradition requires that that all paddy fields have these other plants as well – it’s forbidden to plant only rice.

Petai beans. I always think they look so silly - like someone just hung them up there.

Beras bukit (Hill rice)

View from the new farm house

Soon to be on our dinner table

I love these red flowers, spread throughout the rice fields