Day 258 – On mangroves, Chinese delicacies and much dollar American

The new day brought us a new guide – Bala, a 61-year old Malaysian Indian, who speaks the funniest Russian. He used to be a sailor on international ships and knows 11 language (I suspect, the funniest versions of each). Bala is a very colorful character. He looks like a hobbit, has a very strong and curious opinion on every single thing in life, and expresses his ideas in an extremely forward and loud manner. "Work difficult and make money – two things, not same, – he broadcasts from his front seat. - My son to want go college. I say, fool you, only retards go school then to work much, smart peoples work 2 hours one day and to money make. Much dollar American." (Unfortunately, in the English translation, even with my attempt at transporting his accent, it doesn't sounds half as good as it did in Russian, «Работат и дэлат денег – два разный веш. Мой сын приходить ко мне и говорить, хачу учится. Я говорю мой сын – ты дУрак, толко дУрак учиться и много работат, а умный работат мало и дэлат денег. Много доллар американский.»)

He doesn't really know a lot of historic and cultural facts about Malaysia and cannot answer most of our questions on those subjects, but he is indispensable as far as facts of life are concerned. "In the old, man choose woman beautiful. Now, woman has apartments and businesses, and man say, this woman beautiful." "In Malaysia – many temples different, for Chineseses and Indianites (для китайский человек и индийский человек), not for muslims. One temple for pray (храмы для помолится), one for ask important question (храмы для спросить). You want marry, you go temple to ask and ask grandmother (бабушка) in temple, can I to marry this girl. Grandmother look and say, no marry her: she has markbirth on cheek – no good, she to make love all time, you exhaust (хочет лубов делат ден и ночъ, ты – очен устал); she has markbirth on above eye – no good, 24 hour talk-talk-talk; she has markbirth in breast middle – no good, husband kaput, she eat her husband one by one (муж – капут, она кушат мУжей); she has markbirth on chin – no good, always has 'friend' and no marry, but if marry, has 'friend' always too". All the girls took out mirrors and muffled sighs прошелестели over our bus – none of us has any chance to marry a Malaysian Chinese or Indian…

Thus were we entertained all the way from KL to Belum, a road that takes 5 hours… Also, we made 3 sightseeing stops.

A mangrove forest

I am not sure why, but I've been always fascinated by the concept of mangroves. Some of my friends even make fun of this obsession, but seriously, don't you find it plain amazing that trees root themselves in the saline water? Exactly!

On a little motorboat, we spent an hour sailing around the seemingly endless and unbelievably dense mangrove forests. It was heavenly. Now that I know that mangroves also host firefly feasts, I can only imagine how this river looks like at nighttime…

A Chinese fishing village

The village occupies maybe 5,000 square feet. I counted 10 private houses, 1 school, and 2 "common areas", all interconnected by a wooden boardwalk. Everything is slowly moving side to side following the current of the river or the blows of the wind; I'm not exactly sure which. A very loud bird гомон is broadcasted over the whole place. Apparently, the fishermen also catch birds to collect birds' nests that is a delicacy in Chinese cuisine, so this is how they attract new ones into the "nest".

There are very few people: not doing anything in particular, they are simply standing or lying or sitting somewhere, staring at the horizon or TV, not paying any attention to the dirt of the water and boardwalk around them, or the shabby houses nearby. All of them seem to be relaxed, calm and content with their lives. For the 20-30 minutes we were walking around the place, I didn't hear one spoken word here…

A charcoal factory

Originally, we were all against going to the charcoal factory, we couldn't understand why on Earth it would be of any interest to us, but once we were on location, in a fairly small barn hosting a couple of igloo-looking furnaces and mangrove tree logs of various cuts, all of a sudden we all got filled with genuine interest to the process of charcoal manufacturing and couldn't stop the flow of questions making a serious effort to understand why it takes so many days (20!!!) to burn logs and if they are thinking of workflow optimization. It could be attributed to the massive communal hysteria we somehow fell into after an abundant Chinese seafood lunch we had had prior to this excursion: maybe the crabs were stuffed with something funny or the state-of-the-art dishwashing process (see on the photo below) covered the plates with a filament of hysteria-inducing microbes.

Another three hours on the road and we are at one of the two eco-resorts in Belum. Supposedly 5-star, it looks very ascetic: no TV, no bathrobes, no toiletries, no balconies, almost no food at dinner (and the food they did have was pretty inedible). You are left with absolutely no doubt that the hotel founder and owner – a devout muslim Malay – prefers the Spartan lifestyle to Dionysian.

By removing the usual 5-star "luxuries" the place is successful in accomplishing its main task: to make you pay attention to nature, really enjoy it, become part of it. You can rent a boat or a bike; hike one of the many trails into the surrounding rainforest; or simply sit on the bank and watch the monumental stillness of the rainforest covered mountains across the lake.