In the mid nineties I
traveled all over South East Asia passing through Malaysia
several times and I managed to explore most of the country including getting
over to Borneo. It has always been a favorite
of mine, a mix of cultures with a positive feel to it, although most travelers just
pass through, regarding it as expensive and not that interesting. I was last
here in 1998, when the roaring of the Asian tigers was muted as they were going
through the Asian financial crisis at the time, a local version of what we are
all now experiencing. Abandoned building sites were fairly common, as the money
ran out. Returning this week after eleven years I was eager to see what had
changed.
Zooming into the city from
KL Airport on the super fast express train, you do feel that you’re in a
country that’s still going places. Out of the window we pass by palm oil
plantations and the odd stands of forest and bananas, watered by big brown
rivers. Mixed in with all these are developments, huge apartment blocks, some
of them twenty to thirty stories high, have been built with new ones being
added. For some reason in a country that has a lot of land in proportion to its
population, these monoliths are all clumped together, so a group of them
probably contain the population of a small town.
Beside the railway you also
see brightly colored buildings, Chinese and Hindu temples, and the more subdued
mosques. Malaysia
has a mix of races that all seem to get along together, although this has not
always been the case. As a traveler it’s difficult to tell what tensions lie
under the surface, but it has always appeared to me to be a tolerant place, it
certainly makes it colourful.
As the train approaches Kuala Lumpur, their big
ass status symbol appears on the horizon, the Petronus towers, the largest
buildings in the world. This is Malaysia’s
statement – we have arrived and if the number of new apartments still going up is
anything to go by, the country continues to boom on.
In KL itself, little seems
to have changed. Malaysia has a distinct smell, it’s the smell of spices, very subtle,
not overpowering, mixed with cloves, again not too much; almost as it has just
wafted over from Indonesia. The train station is filled with little kiosks
piled up with goods, and the buildings are dimly lit, as if they couldn’t find
any higher wattage light bulbs. I find my hostel in Chinatown,
which is as hostels always seem to be in this country, tiled floors, no
windows, a fan and nothing on the walls.
The night market in Chinatown has changed very little, although they do seem
to have built a roof over it but very high up, so you still feel as if you are
outdoors in a street and not in a building. Stalls are piled high with
counterfeited goods, clothes, DVD’s,CD’s, watches and bags; though the software
hawkers seem to have gone. Waiters try to hustle into their restaurants to
drink their overprice beer, all is noise and bustle.
But it’s the little things
that bring it all back, the chopped up fruit sold by the bag with a cocktail
stick to eat it with, fried rice with a fried egg on top for breakfast. People
walking by with plastic bags of Milo, the
chocolate drink; yes - this is a familiar place.
There are some changes,
Starbucks and Nandos have arrived as has Macdonalds, which were here before but
now seem to be on every street corner. People use them for directions - turn
left at Macdonalds, after all you can hardly miss them. Also continuing their
plan for world domination, Tescos has arrived big time; their own brand products
are omnipresent.
Travelling up to Georgetown,
the Malaysians don’t seem to have a problem with their colonial past so haven’t
gone in for renaming places, the countryside seems much as I remember it. There
are still quite large stands of wild looking forest at the side of the road,
mixed in with the palm oil plantations. As we pass towns, more of the high rise
apartments are going up everywhere. On the outskirts of towns cookie cutter
estates are being built for the middle classes which to a western eye these
look rather soulless places, as the developers forgot to plant any trees or
gardens.
When I tell people I haven’t
been here for eleven years they all say, you must have noticed a lot of
changes. Well the answer to that is no. Some new buildings have gone up, but
where in the world haven’t they? It’s not the swanky new buildings that make a
country, its the people, the smells and the small everyday things. I wonder if
this will continue to be the same, as I make my way up the peninsular to the
countries further north.
