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Opinion runs deep… no prizes for guessing the ethnic backgrounds of the people here…
I wrote this last year and forgot about it until I just turned up the draft of it on my hard drive.
Pulau Redang is a tropical island off the east coast of Malaysia. The Berjaya conglomerate owns two resorts on the island: the beautiful Beach Resort and its demented step-child (what Berjaya calls the Spa Resort, except that the spas are actually all at the beach resort). Dave and I happened to be staying at the spa-less spa resort. When we stepped off the ferry, a courtesy bus was there to greet us. The bus was filled mostly with European couples with young kids in tow, young Malaysian couples… and us. We were not a couple. (If you must know, Dave had attempted to arrange for some female company but when he failed to deliver we decided to go anyway since the accommodation was, through some family connections, free.)
The bus’ first drop off point was the Spa Resort and we realized with dismay that we were the only people to get off. There was almost no one around the Spa Resort and it was virtually a wasteland. After we had dumped our stuff into our room, we made a beeline for the much more active Beach Resort, passing by a group of bewildered Singaporeans who also had the misfortune of booking themselves into the Spa Resort. “Wah lau, where are the bloody spas, wei?”
Redang is a segregated island. On the east coast there are a cluster of beachside resorts, restaurants and miscellaneous stalls and stores. At nighttime, things were much more active on the east coast. However, as there are no roads connecting the Berjaya properties to the east coast, the only way to move between the two is to take a boat ride, or a two hour trek through the jungle.
We weren’t about to go wading through the undergrowth in the pitch darkness, so the only real option was to take a boat. We ended up finding an old boatman by the wharf weathered face, toothy grin and all and chartered his boat. The boat was little more than a tin can with an outboard motor and tarp suspended over it by a few rusty metal poles, but it would do the trick.
There are no lights on Redang. There were no lights on boat either. After clambering onto the boat, the boatman apologized, saying he needed to procure a light for “safety reasons”. He steered the boat into the neighboring marina and plucked a light from a miscellaneous dinghy which may or may not have been his. Once the feebly blinking red light was affixed to the stern, we set off. The light wasn’t for navigation, it was to warn other boats cruising in the area not to run us over. It was dark and overcast the sea, land and sky merged into one inky blob, but with practiced experience, our boatman steered us through the shallow waters and we arrived twenty minutes later.
We ate dinner and spent a few hours on the east coast and decided to return when we realized a storm was brewing. By the time we reached the dock the raindrops were the size of dollar coins and we found our boatman huddled under a makeshift corrugated iron shack. We didn’t even know if it was now possible to make it back in this weather, but obviously it wasn’t a problem as the boatman quickly bundled us onto the boat. I was seated at the front, looking towards the back. Dave was on the middle seat, facing me. The boatman was at the rear, manning the motor. We set off.
And it was terrible.
The sea had become incredibly choppy. It was pitch black, so we couldn’t see it, but we sure could feel it. Because the boatman seemed to be gunning the engine in an effort to get back as quickly as possible, he was taking each wave at speed. The boat would catch the crest of the wave, become airborne for a split second, plunge over the top and back into the water with a spine-shattering crunch. Every three seconds.
If visibility was bad before, it was non-existent in the driving rain and spray, which was now entering the boat horizontally, smashing like needles into my back and into Dave’s face. Lightning would occasionally flash, momentarily revealing the tumultuous ocean, the rocky shoreline and Dave’s visage, with was transfixed with a confused mixture of abject terror, pain and a look which said, “Hey this would actually be quite cool if we weren’t about to die.”
It was freezing and we were soon shivering uncontrollably. Meanwhile, our boatman was resolutely manning the till as if it were a cheery Sunday morning. In naught but a t-shirt and shorts, he was standing, one foot perched up on the side wall, one hand on his hip and the other loosely holding the till. He seemed to know where he was going even though we couldn’t see anything. But we needed only to run into some rocks and we’d be instantly stuffed.
Then out of the gloom, about ten metres away, the dim spectre of another boat just like ours emerged, travelling parallel and in the same direction as us. It was not carrying a safety light, not that it would have helped. I could barely see ours and I was only a couple of metres away from it. The lightning flashed once more and I could see four passengers cowering inside the boat, their positions identical to ours.
The boats sped alongside each other for a few seconds and I could hear some shouting over the whine of the engine and crashing of the waves.
And then we sped up. Dave and I exchanged horrified squints of “What the fuck?” and soon realized that the two boatmen had decided to race each other. It was a tough few minutes to endure.
By the time we arrived back on shore, we looked like a couple of drowned rats. I can’t say that I would do it again, but it was quite an experience.
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(0)We went out looking for a drink last night after watching the fireworks over the bay, only to be stymied when we discovered that California has laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol in bars after 2.00am. (In Palo Alto, everything shuts at 1 or 2am, but I always thought that was only because it was Palo Alto, not because the alcohol has to stop flowing…) This country still surprises me sometimes.
I also learnt that in Japan, New Year’s traditions include making mochi – gooey rice cakes. Unfortunately, this tradition also has the side effect of causing several elderly Japanese people to choke to death each year while eating mochi. We get annual holiday road death tolls, in Japan they get annual holiday mochi death tolls. So each year, the Japanese distribute tips on how to avoid death by mochi, including the popular solution of shoving a vacuum cleaner down someone’s throat if they start gagging. My Japanese coursemates insisted this was not a joke. I was still dubious but Google appeared to confirm this improbable tale. Apparently the Heimlich manoevure doesn’t work too well.
In Berlin, New Year’s was described to me as a “war zone”, with people taking to the streets with roman candles, bangers, rockets and all manner of fireworks and miscellaneous incendiaries. And they fire them at each other.
Someone should do a “top 10 most dangerous places to celebrate New Year’s” feature…
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(0)My parents came to visit over the Christmas break. I showed them around the campus, then we spent a few days in San Fran, with a nice daytrip down the coast to Monterey and Carmel. The only thing we did in Monterey was visit the aquarium, which was of particular interest to me since it was one of the filming locations for my favourite Trek movie. As the aquarium doesn’t actually have any whales, nor a whale tank, the digital effects guys had to digitally construct them, along with a backdrop of the San Francisco skyline. The movie was filmed in the 80s and although the aquarium has been updated quite a bit since then, all of the filming spots were pretty much unchanged. Apparently, people have gone to the aquarium after watching Star Trek IV only to be disappointed to find the closest thing to a whale there is the life-sized plastic model they have suspended from the roof.
South of Monterey is the famed Pebble Beach golf course which borders the Pacific Ocean. At $495 for a round, it’s a rich person’s course. Staying there costs a few thousand bucks a night. One of my dad’s friends had the opportunity to play there, but he unfortunately didn’t have time to enjoy the views. Apparently they place marshalls at each hole to keep players moving quickly – they try and push as many groups through as possible since they clear about $2k for each foursome. There are a whole bunch of golf courses in the area, including Cypress Point. Cypress Point is a very difficult course, but it has some admired holes, including the notorious 16th. It’s a par 3, but to make the front of the green, you have to be able to carry your ball over 200 yards. In between the green and tee area, it’s all ocean. I’d need at least a spoon (3 wood) to make that distance. There’s a “bail out” zone to the left, but you still have to carry 150 yards.
On the 22nd, we flew into Dallas to spend Christmas with my uncle’s family. It was a chilly zero degrees C when we arrived. One of my cousins is studying in Boston and he had planned to fly in on the same day, but the weather up there was way below zero and his flight was cancelled. He arrived a couple days later.
I had only been to Dallas once, and that was exactly 15 years ago. My uncle pulled out some old camcorder footage which showed me playing with my cousins in the backyard – we were firing super soakers and chucking water balloons at each other in the dead of winter! This time around, I visited the Sixth Floor Museum, which is housed in the building from which JFK was shot. Quite an interesting place, especially in light of the references to JFK’s civil rights work and display text which was written in a pre-Barack Obama world. Of course, the pall of assassination hanging over the place is sobering, and obviously a concern today. On Christmas Day, we attended a midnight mass which was novelly conducted in English and repeated in Spanish (which really drew out the service…) and went to a Christmas party at a neighbour’s house (to which my uncle’s family had been attending for the last 15 or so years). On Boxing Day, the weather warmed up considerably, hitting an incredible 26 degrees. We took the opportunity to hit the factory outlets. We also did a lot of eating. All in all, it was a good trip.
I’m back in California for New Year’s… I’ve realised that out of the last nine January 1sts, I’ve only been in Australia for one of them. Running back through the past nine New Year’s Days, I’ve been in Hong Kong, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Sydney, Singapore, Hong Kong, Singapore, Lucerne and Hong Kong. Kind of a pity, since Sydney fireworks are such a great spectacle. But I do enjoy Hong Kong where I’m of average height so I can actually see things going on instead of smelling armpits the whole night.
Some photos:
– Miscellaneous Bay Area pics
– Winter Holiday pics
Facebook is a pretty convenient place to post photos these days. One gripe I have though is that I wish they allowed higher resolution photos (perhaps they eventually will, just as YouTube now caters for HD vids). You can’t make prints from photos 604 pixels wide.
Reprising this 2006 post, here’s a list of cities and towns I’ve passed through over the last year. I think I forgot to do this last year.
Sydney, Australia*
Hong Kong, China
Kampala, Uganda†
Moshi, Tanzania
Arusha, Tanzania
Lake Manyara, Tanzania
Singapore*
Redang, Malaysia
San Francisco, CA*
Stanford, CA*
Yosemite, CA
Lake Tahoe, CA/NV
New York, NY
Monterey/Carmel-By-the-Sea, CA†
Dallas, TX
All places had overnight visits, unless marked with †.
* Multiple entries, non-consecutive days.
† Daytrip only.
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