A load of rubbish

To a visitor, probably the worst thing about Malaysia is rubbish. There’s litter in the streets, on the beaches, in the jungle and on every river bank. Waterfalls attract heaps of the stuff, even waterfalls that are two hours' walk from any road. Presumably people go to a waterfall simply because it is so beautiful, so how can they think so little as to leave rubbish behind? And I’m not just talking about a carelessly dropped sweet wrapper – I’m talking about piles of bottles, plastic bags, food-cartons and left-overs.

Out by a swimming spot in a pretty river, a friend of mine encouraged other picnickers to make use of her bin-bag. Grudgingly, they did. Then with a big grin on his face, one man threw the whole bag into the river.

You have to be quite determined here about refusing plastic bags in shops and at stalls. Even a snack like a single doughnut comes in a paper bag which is immediately dropped into a plastic one, even though it is almost certainly for immediate consumption. People don’t say no to this, but the second they walk away, the bag is dropped. Or binned, if in a shopping mall – the one place where people seem to use bins. City streets are kept reasonably clean by an army of sweepers, but in the countryside the rubbish just heaps up.

At the Gap resthouse, on the way up to Fraser’s Hill, I watched a kitchen worker come out of the hotel, cross the road and empty a whole bin of waste into the trees.

Snorkelling off Perhentian, I started to dive down to pick up drinks cans. I tossed them into our boat. As we moved around the island to different snorkelling spots, my pile grew. Returning to the boat after a swim, I noticed that they had all gone. Either they had vaporized or our boatman had chucked them back into the sea. This is one of Malaysia’s most gorgeous islands, it relies heavily on tourism, yet people are happy to spoil it.

Everywhere you go, you see people simply dropping rubbish where they stand, even when there is a bin nearby. They toss it out of car windows. My polite “Excuse me, I think you’ve dropped something,” only receives a reply along the lines of, “I don’t need it,” or “It’s finished.”

In the UK, only louts and children do this. In Malaysia, it’s the norm. And almost nobody seems to mind. This year is ‘Visit Malaysia Year’. There is a huge awareness campaign, sponsorship abounds and no doubt the budget is huge. I can’t help feeling that what they really need is a public education drive along the lines of a ‘Keep Malaysia worth visiting’ campaign.

Jalan Alor

Jalan Alor, in the heart of the city, has to be one of KL’s greatest nightspots. This is a place to come for food. All sorts of food. The street is crammed with local restaurants and food stalls, serving every Malaysian dish you could wish for. The abundance and variety can seem quite staggering. The little carts that make up the majority of stalls advertise everything from frog porridge (soggy rice – with frogs of course) to carrot cake (a savoury stir-fried mush). Bundles of squid hang above woks alongside leafy green vegetables. The air sizzles with the sound of frying and a thousand delicious smells assail you. There are barely-cooked shellfish which ooze blood (?) as you pick them from their shells, there are butter prawns with fried curry leaves, wantons, laksa, black pepper venison, soft-shell crab, lala, steam boat, chicken fish and a hundred kinds of noodles. Sugar cane squeezers grind to produce glasses of sweet, refreshing juice, while a huge stack of spent canes builds up on the pavement. On long thin barbecues satay is grilled, row upon row, smoke billowing as the cook fans it vigorously breaking off only to slop spicy peanut sauce into plastic dishes.

There are fruit stalls where you can buy mangosteen and rambutan and a dozen other local treats. An old man weighs huge, spiky durians before splitting them open with a hefty swing of a parang. At a table nearby, groups of people bite into the gorgeous, rich, creamy flesh of these mighty fruits whose stench overwhelms unsuspecting foreign passers-by.

Tables from stalls and restaurants spill out over the pavements, onto the road, where they butt up against parking meters, streetlights, parked cars and trestle tables full of pirated CDs. While you eat at one cafe, you can order extras from other nearby stalls. Cars nudge their way between pedestrians, men selling tacky light-up toys or packs of socks and children selling tissues. Mini-skirted girls in Heineken or Tiger outfits flit between tables taking orders for beer.

The whole street is buzzing. The lights and movement, sounds and smells give you a kick of excitement, but the atmosphere is always relaxed and friendly. This is Kuala Lumpur at its best.

Kuala Gandah elephant sanctuary

Yesterday I visited the Kuala Gandah elephant sanctuary. This is a place that I’ve heard many people raving about, but had never been to. My friend Kate had her sister’s family staying, so we had six excited children with us to make the trip worthwhile.

Unfortunately, there was no information given by the elephants’ keepers, although there may have been some on display somewhere. It all had something of a feel of a circus, with “Next activity, feeding the elephants!” announced over the PA system. The elephants were all chained to the ground by at least two of their ankles, with only a couple of inches of movement allowed. However, hand-feeding them with fruit proved a big hit with the children and the keepers kept an eye and showed the kids what to do.

The largest two elephants were then taken off to give rides to visitors, the keepers sitting on their necks steering by poking them in the backs of their heads with narrow metal sticks. This horrified me, as it is quite possible to lead such a tame elephant by a rope. The rides lasted all of about twenty seconds, but again the children were delighted, especially those who had never been here before.

The final activity proved a bit too daunting for all except Anna – riding an elephant into the river then being dumped into the water as it plunged for a swim or a roll. To keep Anna company, I joined in with this one, but to be honest, the highlight was swimming in the river rather than sitting on the poor elephant. All of the Anna’s brothers and cousins joined us and we spent a wonderful hour or so swimming and playing in the brown water of the jungle river.

My initial feeling was that this place was offering little to the elephants. However, a bit of research has shown me that the foundation is mainly concerned with removing elephants from areas where their natural habitat has been destroyed and transferring them to national parks and reserves. Unfortunately, this wasn’t made clear at the time. Nor was the future of the elephants who were resident at this sanctuary, seemingly with the sole purpose of entertaining tourists. It set me to thinking about the David Sheldrick elephant orphanage I visited near Nairobi. There, keepers stand with the animals, explaining how they look after them, how the programme of care changes as the elephants mature, how they are eventually released into reserves or a protected and limited (but large) area, in which they can live wild. Everyone loved watching the youngest being bottle fed and enjoyed looking in on the bedrooms where the keepers slept with them. I think there may have been an opportunity to pat the babies on their heads, but that was about it. Yet the place was teeming with visitors. It isn’t necessary to make a circus there. However, my real sadness was not from the activities at Kuala Gandah but from the way the elephants were chained, prodded and yanked about. Yes, I know this was essential for visitor safety, but without such close proximity it wouldn’t have been necessary at all.

The organisation’s website isn’t particularly endearing, as it rants about “the world's 10 BIGGEST CULPRITS that keep on warming up the fragile world and yet blames Malaysia for supposedly cutting down all the forests.” I had heard that a past volunteer had caused problems, but didn’t expect to see this on the website:
“all volunteering & internship opportunities have since been stopped for an indefinite period as a result of various problems caused by an insensitive, ignorant & " ugly " North American.” The authors are also at great pains to make us appreciate how “thankless” and dangerous the work of the sanctuary is. Too see more, take a look at http://www.myelephants.org/ .

I had a wonderful day out, thanks in great part to the company, but I would only recommend this to families with children. Adults might have to put their gut feelings aside, but it’s definitely better than a zoo and it's quite an experience to get so up close and personal with these amazing animals. I'm glad I went to see it for myself and very grateful to my lovely friends for taking me along.

The sanctuary was further than I expected from KL, but the last few kilometres were bliss, giving me a view of the Malaysia I love and have missed – the narrow roads winding through the lush greenery, wooden houses with children playing outside, the rich smells of the earth and leaves and flowers, fruits and fried things for sale at the roadside, insects chirruping, the warm humid air soft and sweet, enveloping us as we arrived.

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Kuala Lumpur

Stepping out of the airport building, the hot thick air hit me. It always does, without fail, wherever you have come from. I find it at once both stifling and comforting.

All week I enjoyed being back, pottering about and spending time with the friends I have missed. On Sunday evening I stood at the edge of the night-market, watching. And the sensation that had been nudging at me all week became clear, a reality: this is no longer my home. What made me see this was the other matsallehs, the expats. How they, despite being as foreign as me, belong here. There was a purpose and certainty in the mundaneness of their evening that I will never have again.

Edinburgh - Heathrow - Entebbe - Nairobi - Dubai - Kuala Lumpur

A lot of flying.

Yao's Second Flight

Yao’s first flight had been earlier that morning, to Nairobi where I came across him at the transfer desk. Half an hour into our conversation, our boarding passes arrived and we discovered that we would be sitting together on the flight to Dubai.
“God is good,” he said.

He was on his way to Osaka to attend a month long training course. He was a teacher, deputy head and French teacher at a secondary school in Cote D’Ivoire, further up the ladder than me, yet until today he had never flown before. Flying is something I take for granted. He told me how he’d miss his students and daughter while he was away.

It wasn’t until we were in the air that his ‘novice flyer’ status came up in conversation and then it quickly explained his blank reception of the bags containing blanket and headphones, his sharing of my video screen in preference to using his own and other minor uncertainties. But still his calm assurance threw these things into a stark contrast. He professed no fear of flying and most refreshingly, had no fear of appearing uninformed or inexperienced.

At dinner time, he asked advice about what to eat first and, “Is it alright to eat the bread with this?” I realised what an inadequate model of etiquette I was, as constrained by space I forked food one-handedly into my mouth, inelegantly juggling and stacking the containers on the over-full tray. We talked on and off, explored the in-flight entertainment (on both screens by now) and the time passed all too quickly.

He was enchanted by the night-time view of Dubai on our approach to landing, delighting in identifying roads by their strings of orange lights, then individual cars and later the tall buildings of the city. I have never lost that sense of wonder, viewing the world from above. I hope he doesn’t.

As we taxied, seemingly for miles, I told him that Dubai was a much bigger airport than Nairobi.
“I’d never seen anything like Nairobi airport before,” he replied. I knew he was in for a shock. Nairobi is a typical developing country airport, small for a capital city, slightly shabby and decidedly dull. Dubai glitters with opulence, shops overflowing with unnecessary and expensive goods, floors gleaming, lights twinkling, the whole place looking much like a top-end shopping mall. We walked around together, Yao so quiet that I couldn’t tell whether he was overwhelmed or simply unimpressed. I tried to see it through his eyes, this movie-set of an airport, the likes of which he had never seen before. How far apart our worlds must be, yet however much I told myself this, all I could see how similar we were, but for the accidents of our homelands and the experiences they’d given us. And now we were just two travellers in a place that was no place and at no time.

With hours yet to go, our gates were not yet displayed, but Yao was uneasy with my nonchalant assurance that they’d appear in an hour or two, so he went to make enquiries. I walked him to his gate, where he wanted to wait and promised to return once I’d done the things I needed to do. Realising he’d have no currency, I took him a Coke – and writing this I remember the similar kindness I received here back in March– and we said our goodbyes again.

Over the months, I’ve met many people who’ve asked me to return or visit them in the future, but none has struck me as more sincere than Yao, nor has made me want to do so as much. I had found a friend in the nationless sky.