I’ll miss Thailand, but there is definitely something nice about crossing the border south into Malaysia, a country that, for all its money and regional influence, a surprising amount of people (me included) no almost nothing about.
Southern Thailand is a vacation destination. Island hopping in the Andaman Sea, you bump shoulders with honeymooners and people taking two weeks off from work. It’s an expensive place to travel, and it doesn’t meld well with the rest of the standard SE Asian poor man’s trail.
But, it seems, now in Malaysia we are back on that trail, hard. The food is cheap and the people traveling are weird. Fewer Swedish bombshells wearing fedoras on the beach, more crusty old men walking through the streets in floor-length dresses. The dregs of western society come here to scoop together some new affirmation. It is a different vibe, one that I hadn’t realized I’d been missing for the past month. That sort of breezy transience, everyone is just passing through; you carry a continuity with you on your back.
There is so much to see here and I have huge constraints placed on me in the time and money departments. I never realized that Peninsular Malaysia held so many gems. The dense foliage and mountains of Borneo hold a well known steamy jungle playhouse, but this bloated stretch of land between Thailand and Singapore – who knew? Here on the island of Penang, the history of conquerors and colonists are steamed together in a sweet and tangy mélange of noodles, sauces, and midnight buffet lines that stretch out the door. But the jungle clad thumb of land that was once called Malay also boasts the worlds oldest rain forest, complete with the world’s largest flowers and some of the most massive trees humans have ever walked between. Kuala Lumpur, the shy but kaleidoscopic cultural blender of a city whose only mark on the international consciousness seems to be the massive twin Petronas Towers, can proudly call itself the greenest city in SE Asia, a park-clad capitol waiting to be explored. Or there is the eastern coast ballooning into the Pacific, with some of nature’s most perfectly manicured beaches and islands, mile-long sprawls of blinding white sand stretching into an azure ocean teeming with life.
You get fewer travelers here than come to visit the ancient inland empires of Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Part of that is due to a sort of blank slate when it comes to Malaysia. There is less of a defining aesthetic character here. Malaysia is a cultural scattershot of Chinese, Indian, ethnic Malay and English colonial influence. It’s reflected in the food, the urban planning, the money. It’s that last one that I never grasped the gravity of, until now.
Malaysia boasts the highest GDP per capita of any country in SE Asia (excluding the city-state of Singapore), a fact that’s echoed in the infrastructure, the condo blocks, the ubiquity of the automobile. As an important trading center, the Malaysian economy has grown steadily since independence was granted in 1957.
Now, parts of it look like Florida. Driving south through the evening, you can’t tell the difference (except that you are driving on the left side of the road). It’s straight, flat, a superhighway, the grey guardrail a blurry smear in the framed view out the window. Two lanes with white, fluorescent dividers ushering a mass through a forest of billboards, big green exit signs, and roadside emergency call boxes. The blazing sun sets behind the palm trees and stucco developments with Toyotas and Nissans parked outside. These are big, two story houses in the suburbs, with red roofs and lots of windows. It’s a sight that screams comfort and sprawl. It’s what people with money do.
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