Kuala Lumpur

I flew from Langkawi back to KL for a few days to take care of some errands, the most important of which was getting a 60-day tourist visa for Thailand. I slightly fouled up the application process my first time at the Thai embassy – I didn’t have a photocopy of my passport – and the embassy was closed the following day because of a national holiday, so I stayed in Malaysia for a couple days longer than I had intended. I ended up doing a little shopping and enjoying the nightlife a bit more to fill the time, including a pretty fun rap and hip-hop party called “Ghetto Heaven” that happens every Tuesday night at Zouk. Tough life, I know.

I thought I needed a second Japanese Encephalitis shot, since that’s what I was told when I received the first shot a month ago. However, after some confusion, paper rustling, and a phone call to who knows, the doctor at the clinic informed me that the shot I had already received was of the 1-shot variety, not the 2-shot variety, so I didn’t need a second shot. I’m still a bit concerned that there was so much uncertainty regarding what shot I had actually received. On the outside, I was nodding and listening, but on the inside, I was wondering: “What the hell did you inject me with lady?!”

Also, given that I had some free time and access to an extremely fast and stable Internet connection (a rarity in these parts), I overhauled my online photo portfolio. I pruned the collection a bit, added the online-worthy photos that I’ve taken on this Asia trip, re-edited some of the older photos now that my Lightroom skills are a bit better, and, most importantly, migrated everything to a proper 500px account. I feel like a real photographer now!

Here’s the link: 500px.com/kylegetz

Phuket

Upon flying to Phuket, I met up with Omar, a friend from San Francisco, who is on holiday in Southeast Asia. We spent the weekend in Patong, mostly to enjoy the city’s world-famous (read: infamous) nightlife. I’m not going to transcribe anything that happened that weekend; you’ll just have to use your imagination.

After the weekend in Patong, we took a boat to Koh Yao, a pair of small islands about halfway between Phuket and Krabi that are known for being very quiet and peaceful. It’s a good thing this was the plan all along because I came down with some kind of illness and spent the next three days almost entirely in bed with a high fever. Koh Yao is a great place to do nothing though, so while I’m bummed that I didn’t get to go cycling or kayaking or see James Bond Island, I’m grateful I had the time to rest before Chiang Mai. I may try to make it back to Koh Yao at some point for a do-over.

Chiang Mai

Some backstory is necessary for the Chiang Mai trip. For some time now, I’ve been planning to go to Chiang Mai in November to experience the two lantern festivals, so I also started researching volunteer opportunities there (of which there are many). I settled on a volunteer organization called Friends For Asia, which runs volunteer projects in several countries, including Thailand. They have a lot of great projects and I applied to a few, eventually getting accepted to be an intern at Citylife, the premiere English-language magazine of northern Thailand. My job responsibilities may include web design, graphic design, photography, layout, and writing.

Seeking out an unpaid internship in the middle of a holiday may seem borderline crazy, but I have my reasons:

• After a few months of very free-form, unscheduled living, I was craving some structure/routine.
• Some of the job responsibilities (i.e. web development) match up with my professional experience and some (i.e. photography) match up with my personal interests.
• This is a perfect opportunity to try a different and more creative career without actually committing to it. I can extend the internship on a week-by-week basis if I want; otherwise, it’s over after one month, which is enough time to develop an opinion on whether this kind of work could pan out long-term.
• This is also a perfect chance to get some insights and exposure to a foreign culture that wouldn’t normally be available to a tourist. I will have a commute, coworkers, a boss, meetings, business lunches, happy hours, and all the other normal things that working folks around the world have. I’m really interested in the prospect of having those things in a foreign culture.

I’m actually writing all of this at my desk on my first day here since there isn’t much for me to do yet, which goes to show that first days everywhere are sort of the same. I’m heading out tomorrow to take photos of a new art gallery and a new shopping mall for a couple spreads in the next issue of the magazine, so I think that things will be ramping up very quickly.

The orientation activities for all the new volunteers this past weekend included a tour of a couple temples in the city, so in the interest of not having a picture-less post, I’ll include some photos:

More on the lantern festivals later.

Yup, that’s happening. The Petronas Towers are the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen. They’ve got a futuristic look but they still have the classiness of sparkling diamonds. I’m so enraptured by these buildings that they alone could almost convince me to work for Petronas, if only it wasn’t an oil and gas company. Here are some much better photos taken with my camera and tripod:

A quite decent amount of my time in KL has been sightseeing on foot and shopping (out of necessity). I’ve hit all the usual touristy places (KL Tower, Merdeka Square, Central Market), explored a few neighborhoods (Chinatown, Little India, Golden Triangle), and seen my fair share of malls. Good god, the malls here! Evidently Malaysians are serious about their shopping. There are numerous malls that dwarf anything in SF, especially when they’re linked together to create massive labyrinths of consumerism.

Perhaps the most egregious example of business is Low Yat Plaza, a six-story mall dedicated entirely to electronics. If that wasn’t enough, the first three floors are for only mobile phones and service providers. And if that wasn’t excessive, consider that all the dozens (if not hundreds) of stores and kiosks on those three floors sell the exact same phones and plans. I felt like a crazy person seeing the same displays over and over and over. I honestly don’t understand how they stay in business since it’s nearly impossible to differentiate them from each other, except by the level of pushiness they display to potential customers (which is how I made my shopping decisions).

I thought the cell phone culture in America was crazy, but KL takes it to another level. There are ads for phones and providers everywhere and it seems every corner store has a display case of phones and accessories. I found myself begrudgingly dragged into this culture when my phone adapter and my phone stopped working within a week of each other. Truth be told, the phone wasn’t that useful anyway since it wasn’t GSM; I was already thinking of unloading it. My hand forced, I shopped around and picked up one of the cheapest new phones I could find, the Sony Xperia E. It’s simple, has a recent version of Android, and most importantly, can actually work as a phone here. While I was out tech shopping, I picked up a travel mouse – mostly to make photo editing much easier – and a new laptop sleeve as my old one was already falling apart (admittedly because it was incorrectly sized).

The fancy malls in the nicer areas of town stand in stark contrast to places like Chinatown and Little India, which are run down and a little grimy; you can travel from a $$$$-part of town to a $-part of town in just a few LRT stops. But that’s just a manifestation of one of the foundations of KL: diversity. Everywhere you look, you’ll see Chinese, Malaysians, Indians, Muslims, and the occasional Western or Japanese traveler. Women in formless burkas walk alongside their boyfriends or husbands in Tommy Hilfiger shirts. Regardless of your ethnicity or religion, Chinese food hawkers try to convince you to sit down to eat at their stalls.

Coming from America, and San Francisco in particular, this ethnic and religious mixing isn’t new to me, except for the significant Muslim influence. Malaysia is the first Muslim country I’ve been to; I don’t count Indonesia because I spent all my time in Bali, which is Hindu and animist. In fact, KTM Komuter, one of the light rail lines, has multiple cars per train that are designated for women only.

After a few hours here, I became used to all of it. Truth be told, I actually like seeing women wear hijabs; they’re like long hair, but with a lot more variety of colors and patterns. And I find the burkas mysterious and even a bit intimidating, though that illusion is shattered when I hear the women speak (often to ask a mundane question like how much something costs).

In addition to wandering the city, taking lots of public transportation, and going shopping, I got a taste of the local culture (pun intended, you’ll see in a second) by setting up a lunch date via the website Plate Culture, which I read about in AirAsia’s in-flight magazine. It launched a few months ago and is primarily in KL for now, but is starting to expand to other locations in Southeast Asia. It’s basically Airbnb for meals: you look at profiles, sign up for a meal at a host’s house, and enjoy home-cooked food and conversation with your host and other guests. I had a really delicious vegetarian Chinese/Malay lunch and good conversation with Nicole, a twenty-something professional in the city who loves to cook for others. It was really nice to have a deeper conversation with a local and see how they live. And it was also really nice to be able to safely eat Chinese food without fear of consuming some gross animal part.

Outside of the city center, but still technically within the city, I visited Batu Caves and FRIM (Forest Research Institute of Malaysia). Batu Caves has become an important religious site for Hindus, which doesn’t really interest me, but still has actual caves that you can take a guided tour through. My tour group was very mixed – America, Australia, England, Japan, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic, with no two tourists coming from the same country – and on our hour-long tour through the “Dark Cave” we saw spiders, long-legged caterpillars (including one that ran pretty quickly by us), other cave bugs, and even a solitary plant. We saw one dead bat and heard hundreds more above our heads, constantly flying around and making noise. Coupling all the creepy crawlers with pitch darkness, this was certainly the place where you need to be comfortable with the levels of your various fears. I didn’t realize how dilated my pupils were until we reached the cave opening again; I haven’t had that much trouble adjusting to sunlight in a long time.

FRIM is a forest area that is sometimes described as man-made, but maybe man-preserved is a better term. There are wetlands, arboretums, nature trails, and lots of research centers, but the main attraction is the canopy walkway above the treetops. After a steep and surprisingly strenuous 500m climb, you walk across 150m of suspended walkways that hang 30m above the forest floor. No one else was there when I went, so I got to enjoy the exciting and slightly terrifying heights without interruption. When those suspensions start moving around and those wooden boards start creaking under your weight, you come to peace pretty quickly with placing all your trust into whoever made those walkways.

Now that I have some semblance of an idea for my itinerary through Malaysia, I’ll be heading out of town tomorrow. The next stop is Taman Negara National Park for a couple days of hiking, but mainly for its canopy walkway, which is the largest in Malaysia. After that, it’s on to the Cameron Highlands, then possibly Ipoh, then to Penang and Langkawi, though I’m not sure in which order yet.