Christmas in KL

Feeling guilty about having spent so much time not really doing anything in the Cameron Highlands I took a bus south to Kualar Lumpur where I spent an equal amount of time doing an equal amount of not really anything. The bus drove down a rainforesty road that wound its way through the mountains, and when it got to the flatlands offered spectacular views of some crazy droog things (yes, droogs! Look them up!).

And guess who I found in KL - my old pal Jasper! He was on his way back to Europe after some crazy times in Bali and needed to do some Christmas shopping. So Jasper, a Dutch girl called Margot and I spent the next few days exploring all KL had to offer - its malls.

In the first mall we came to we discovered a small bookshop somehow enclosed within which was an estimated cubic metre of Mills and Boon romance novels. Naturally we had to avail ourselves of this bountiful resource by buying the one with the stupidest title: 'The Ruthless Greek's Virgin Princess' (actually, they were all about that stupid). The hostel's rooftop garden and its views between the city skyscrapers were the setting for an evening of reading aloud the erudite tome but the others lost interest between the sex scenes. Come on guys - you've got to appreciate its literary style!

Other activities in KL included hanging out at the Beatles Bar, which played the same 20 Beatles songs on repeat, arguing over the rules of the card game shithead, singing karaoke with varying degrees of talent and success, looking up at but not from the Petronas Towers (Malaysia's proudest achievement in its 50 thousand year history), not forking out for an indoor rollorcoaster ride after an epic search for it, and seeing 'Avatar' twice because it was friggin' awesome. I actually stayed an extra night in this mall city just to see it for the second time.

Christmas was spent ten pin bowling at midnight (Jasper's superior skill and uncanny luck won him every game), searching for an open bar at 2 am, and during the day in a brief phone call to the family at home and then churning through 'War and Peace' in my hotel room.

I miss Sumatra: the chaos, the gritty reality, the brash cultural idiosyncrasies, the cheap food. Malaysia is all so... easy. Things run on time, people speak English, there aren't any surprises and fewer catastrophes. Malacca, my next destination, with its grungy Chinatown, awkward suburbia sprawling from its historical centre and subsequent identity crisis is a reminder of what I'd left behind. Here I visited four musea in one day and ate at a self-deep-fry restaurant (where I skewered my thumb so deeply with the tail of a prawn that our whole table got free beer). I even tried to see the real Malacca by hiring a dual suspension mountain bike but I ended up just heading to the nearest non-oil-refinery-contaminated beach, which turned out to be about 35 kms up the coast.

The next stop was Singapore, the setting for the greatest cyclo-battle in world history. I can't help barracking for the Japanese whenever I hear about that one. As soon as I entered my dorm here I knew that my time in Singapore would be dominated by partying when a group, already frenetically drunk, immediately absorbed me into its immanent town hitting expedition. We traveled via the exquisitely efficient metro system to a bar called Zouks which turned out to be so packed with hundreds (thousands?) of people that I experienced a rare feeling of claustrophobia, and, not having a Singaporean SIM card at this stage, lost everyone almost instantly and spent the next 40 minutes struggling impolitely for the door. Baulking at a taxi-ride home in Singaporean dollars (which are about the same as Australian ones) I chose to run it. At every turn locals responded with my pleas for directions with the qualifying addendum 'But you'll never make it'. Needless to say that I did.

Singapore is expensive. It's not so much that individual items in Singapore are individually more expensive than elsewhere, although they are, it's more that staying in a place like Malacca one can get a feel for the town by living cheaply. In Singapore one can only get a feel for the town by living it up - I was spending $100 per day for my week here, four times more than average. On one night out on the town I contributed to the purchase of a $50 cocktail - an 'intravenous drip' at a medically themed bar. At another bar - from which we with difficulty escaped wallets intact - a jug of ordinary Hoegaarden cost $120 (but, as the waitress explained sympathetically, if we bought two we could get a third for a measly $40).

Happy hours are often great value though. After I'd been taken under the wing of my orchestra's harp player and girlfriend of my replacement at the Paint and Wallpaper, Deon, we steeped ourselves in an afternoon of happy hour beer at a waterfront brewery. It turned out that sitting right next to us was my friend Lucia, a viola player also in orchestra. Small microbrewery-in-a-large-city world.

But the main event here was New Year's Eve. In fact, that's really the whole reason I came down to Singapore in the first place. The Welsh persons and French Canadians from my dorm and I headed down to the super-commercial Sentosa Island during the afternoon, which one reaches by monorail, for some beach party awesomeness. I was initially quite disappointed, the weather was gloomy and there was an evident lack of fun people. I mainly amused myself during this time by visiting the purported 'Southernmost Point of Continental Asia' - i.e. the furthest south you can go without gravitationally disconnecting yourself from land, although they didn't express it like that.

But pretty soon the party got started. Thousands of people were thronging the beach, initially only pretending to be drunk to save money but soon falling into mutually reinforced enjoyment. As things ramped up towards the big moment we all got pretty wild about some of the bars along the beach: one had a swimming pool that was swamped in foam such that it made everyone wet and slimy - it's been a while since I've had so much fun at a bar. In fact this fun was so all-encompassing that it took me some time to figure out why everyone was shouting out in unison single digit integers in reverse numerical order.

At about 5 am I decided it was time to pack it in. I'd lost my companions to homeward urges long ago and so decided to wait it out until the trains started in the morning by asking for a garbage bag from one of the Aftermath Crew and sleeping in it on the beach - those things don't really breathe well.

But Singapore isn't all fun and parties, there's a serious side to it too - it is, after all, a police state. At one point I saw about a dozen cops in riot gear marching purposely down a well-behaved shopping street at five metre spacings toting fully automatic weaponry - their fingers poised precariously on the triggers and their faces sporting expressions of hardened determination as though preparing to massacre a band of gum-chewing miscreants. Despite the fact that Singapore has so many excessively strict laws I'm pretty sure I managed to obey all of them during my time there (except of course public urination, but we're all human). And yes, the trains do run on time.

A beautiful city though. It has some spectacularly massive buildings spanning all architectural eras of the last two centuries: Neoclassical, Victorian Colonial, International Style and Whatever The Next One Will Be Called. One vast Art Deco monumental skyscraper adorned with sombre high altitude male caryatids looked like an evil vision of the future - if the year was 1936 and the future was 1963.

For the last couple of days I had accepted Deon's extremely generous offer for me to stay at her flat in what Singaporeans affectionately misnomer The Heartland (what we would call suburbia) - I think a more anatomically correct term would be Skinland, or at least Muscle-Tissue-Land. In order to visit the Singapore Botanical Gardens (which I found, like many things, to be inferior to Melbourne's) I ended up having to take seven buses. However, Deon's place was amazing - I spent a non-negligible amount of time enjoying her huge swimming pool and learning to play her harp (and doing pretty well too I might say). She has three generations of women living there: grandmother, mother and herself. We capped off my stay with a rambunctious video chat involving my old household, the Paint and Wallpaper, over a couple of... over a reasonable number of beers.

The next day I extracted myself from Singapore knowing not my destination but only a direction - north. My departure would prove to be a little more involved than might be assumed.

Nightlives in Surabaya and Yogyakarta: A Comparative Study

I've noticed something about traveling around by public transport. It's almost as if, in any given landmass, there are two landscapes. The first landscape is the normal topography, with valleys and mountains and plains, while the second is an abstract landscape representing how easy it is to get to places.

In this way, big cities and tourist attractions are at the bottom of troughs or hollows, and the tiny villages and uninhabited places are at the tops of ridges or mountains. If you happen to be standing at 'high altitude' in this landscape it can be very easy to get to somewhere of 'low altitude' - almost like rolling downhill.

This was my experience in getting to Surabaya from Ranu Pani. I was taken down to Tumpang by motor bike over a narrow paved road along a spur, passing steep sides, jungle and amazing views of paddy field valleys and small towns. At Tumpang, I walked straight into a bemo (a minibus) which took me to the Malang Bus Terminal. Here the buses left every 100 seconds to Surabaya. It all seemed to happen automatically, without really having to think about it.

Surabaya is a hole. I spent an entire day just trying to see some water (in ocean form) and ended up getting stuck in the labyrinthine docking infrastructure, still unsuccessful. I then compensated myself by crawling around inside a decommissioned submarine.

But I was still determined to see the real Surabaya, and what better way to do that than go to a club and drink in a city of strict non-clubbing non-drinking Muslims? Well even that proved difficult, as I spent three hours relentlessly trawling the city looking for activity, pausing only to get a haircut.

The haircut I got turned out to be 'The Dutch Man' judging from the way everyone could pick that I was from Melbourne with uncanny precision before the cut, and then proceeded to assume I was Dutch immediately after. This would have results later on.

Eventually, I stumbled into a place that seemed to be happening. Not having anyone to talk to I sat on my own on a table in the centre of the room, drinking a Bintang and pretending to be fascinated with the live band but really just hoping someone would come and talk to me. After forty minutes of polite nods and nervous smiles I bumped into someone with a small amount of English who then proceeded to introduce me to an expanding group of friends (whose English skills diminished with the inverse square of the acquaintance level). We ended up drinking a Kava/Guinness hybrid and meeting the band between sets. The proprietors were keen to get me dancing and visible like one of those chained monkeys one sees around here as some kind of 'white guy' endorsement of their establishment.

But suddenly, at about 11 o'clock and with the action still ramping up, I was told to leave immediately and whisked into a taxi. Was I committing some horrible social faux-pas of which I was not aware? Was there to be a big drug-deal or corruption scam about to unfold (one of my more aged and enlarged acquaintances said he was the police commissioner)? I'll never know, but it did leave me with a sour taste of the evening that surpassed even the kava's. At least I got a good haircut.

The nightlife in Yogyakarta was very different (like Sirius against Barnard's Star), as I discovered after traveling by train there the next day - and meeting my first Westerners in four days. Here I soon met a 26 year-old Dutch psychologist called Jasper who initiated contact by speaking Dutch to me (that haircut...) and is very similar to me in many respects. The next night we hit the town, visiting a few pubs and bars before stumbling out onto the main street to discover spontaneous parties erupting all over the place, with live musicians roaming around brandishing double basses and gamalan instruments. We soon enlarged our circle of young white tourists (one of whom was armed with stories of living in Antarctica) and decided to hit the seedy and expensive Republic Club. My night would have been a major success were it not for smoking a cigarette for the first time in my long life and throwing up all night from the effects (although it's hard not also to blame the stout and arak-spirit-mixed-with-orange-juice combo).

I ended up staying a week in Yogyakarta, four days more than planned. In that time Jasper and I hired motor-scooters to see the outlying Buddhist and Hindu ruins, met a MacRob girl called Anh visiting from Melbourne whom we quickly inculcated into the group and took geohashing, then further expanded our circle of friends by climbing Indonesia's most active volcano: the 3000 metre Gunung Merapi, again at midnight, with more Dutch, Australian and some Swiss travelers. On the way to the base of that mountain we were worried for our lives after we complained to our driver about his Indo-pop CD - he expressed his displeasure for our poor taste through his driving.

Soon I had to leave my new friends, as the nomadic life of flux dictates. I was off to the ever-suffering beach resort of Pangandaran and the next cool city of Bundang. Keep an eye out for the next exciting post - in which the earlier Airport Dramas conclude with a twist.