Day 259 – The don’ts of the day

The ascetic feel of the Belum resort revealed its healthsome effect on us from the early morning: Zhenya (my roommate for the trip) and I woke up with dawn and took our towels down to the lawn with a lake view to do yoga. It was only 15 minutes, but we finished absolutely winged. What a beautiful start of any day! I should definitely resume my daily yoga exercises that I stopped a while ago when I set out on my journey (of course, my yoga mat has visited Mexico, Brazil and Argentina with me, however for the past 8 months it has been used maybe 3 times in total).

The day promised to be pretty athletic: the plan was to climb up some little mountain in search of the world's biggest flower rafflesia, followed by another climb to see some "cascades" (waterfalls).

Don't sweat it!

Dear God! Both climbs were ridiculously difficult! My new linguistic task is to find synonyms to the expression "drenched with sweat". In fact, what we all looked like after our rafflesia trip was way beyond "drenched". Sweat was not dripping down our faces and bodies, it was pouring, showering us, clouding our eyes. The paper napkins that I providently put in my backpack to wipe my face were so pathetically useless that it was really laughable. At some point a death by complete body sweat-out was a very real possibility for me. No joke, I was actually worried.

And what's worse, both trips were absolutely anticlimactic (again, this favorite epithet of mine for Malaysia)! Only at the very top the guide told us that the rafflesia in this particular forest is the smallest species. So technically, what we saw was the world's smallest biggest flower… As to the waterfalls, well, only a couple of weeks after The Smoke That Thunders it really looked like a tiny creek to me…

Don't sit next to your mother-in-law

A very fast boat ride around the little islands for several hours though put me right on cloud nine. As we were zipping by gigantic million year-old trees of the rainforest, each of them appeared to have some kind of a monster face, and suddenly I was transported by my imagination into a scary and wonderful fairy-tale world. It even took me a second to realize where I was when we finally arrived to our next destination, an Orang-Asli – local aborigines – village.

They are an interesting people, those Orang-Asli. They don't mix with the other Malaysian peoples. Their life expectancy is about 35-40 and they refuse to work or study (at least, in our sense of these words). They live on hunting, as well as fruits and vegetables growing around. Also, they get some miserly financial allowance from the government, but they don't seem to need much. We were there during the day, when all men are out hunting, I guess, because there were only women and children in the village. They did nothing. Just sat or walked around. Like in the Chinese village the other day, I didn't hear one word spoken between them. They do use products of the outer civilization though: there were lots of empty coke cans, candy wrappers and chewed gums scattered around on the dirty premises. We also witnessed a curious twist on the use of modern consumer goods – several Pampers on a dryer rope.

Orang-Asli believe that if you make love during the day or sit next to your mother-in-law at dinner, it will rain at night. They also move away from one island to settle on the next one every time somebody dies, thus cursing the present living grounds…

Don't go to Penang if you want to swim

And we are back on the road (ironically, I'm reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac); going to the Penang island. In many travel guides, Penang is advertized as "a sea pearl of Malaysia, with its beautiful pristine beaches and turquoise water". Well, fine, maybe it's a "sea pearl" in the sense that it is located in and completely surrounded by the sea. As to the beaches and water, my personal advice is, if you want to have a quality swimming vacation, go to another Malaysian island. There are a few deluxe beach resorts here, but even at those the sea leaves much to be desired. Another tiny interesting fact about Malaysia – all beaches are public, so if you want to have a lawn-chair on the sand right by the water, you still have to pay for it, even if you are staying at your 5-start hotel-resort; alternatively, you can walk back and forth from your hotel's free chair positioned outside the beach on some grassy area.

For the locals, Penang is about business (it's a major port). For the tourists, Penang is about history, religion and food. The Chinese, Indian and Malay are represented on the island in pretty much equal numbers, so there are three main "boroughs" in Georgetown (the capital) – Little India, Chinatown and the unnamed Malay area. Each features its own authentic food, temples and stories.

I've been really waiting for a camera with smells to be invented, but in Penang's Chinatown I was thinking that it would have been a really controversial thing: some people would have probably died to host the Penang picture show at their places whereas others would have not let the photographer cross the threshold of their house – the smells of the famous "food row" are incredibly offensive and delightful at the same time. Without a resident Chinese though we dared not try the local delicacies, what a shame! However, the seafood restaurant we picked instead was delicious and dirt cheap (and none of the staff spoke English, so it was still a lot of fun).