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.