Letting Go in Langkawi

A three year old screaming - quite articulately - for his mother's breast milk prevented us from napping (or eating, or having faith in humanity) on our flight from Kuala Lumpur to Langkawi.

It was pretty bad.

Luckily, the rest of our Langkawi trip truly proved to be paradise.

It was 11 PM by the time we got to our hotel, our ears still painfully ringing with the sounds of a (walking and talking) child demanding breast milk.  As we signed papers, we were given towels soaked in jasmine water and a cocktail of freshly squeezed fruit juices to wash away our trauma.

We walked up to our room, immediately taken by the hardwood floors (Vin and I were still in new-home mode).  We freshened up while watching some National Geographic (did you know there are Amazonian ants that torture predators to death?) and then ran down to catch the hotel's late night happy hour, enjoying some bourbon and live jazz.  At some point, we were the only patrons left, and the singer and band directed their attention - and intense eye contact - to us.

I woke up early the next morning to finish work, softly typing out desperate emails to my colleagues in efforts not to wake up Vin.  My mind and stomach were still churning with thoughts of affirmative defenses when we walked into the sunny dining room, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a more joyous stress - choice of breakfast.  There was a buffet and a la carte.  There was hot breakfast, pastries, Malaysian food, Indian food, fruit, continental breakfast, British breakfast, a noodle bar, a cheese station, a champagne bucket, parfait bar, bread baskets, and a bar with freshly squeezed fruit juices.  There was roti canai, nasi lemak, baked beans, toast, huevos rancheros, and taro dumplings.  There was iced coffee and kiwi juice and mango smoothies.

Vin and I had everything, obviously.

   

The next few days proceeded similarly.  We would wake up, eat gargantuan breakfasts, nap by the pool, nap by the ocean, swim in the pool, swim in the ocean.  At 3 PM, the hotel would have its afternoon happy hour, of which we were compelled to take advantage.  Our anxiety from work, from the breast-milk-demanding-toddler, from the intense eye contact by the hotel's band, gradually dissipated.  We were happy and forgetful.

While we were never hungry for lunch, we were always ready to eat dinner.  After watching a couple of hours of National Geographic, we would head down to the main restaurant, and both nights ate stellar Indian food, some of the best I have ever had.  Knowing they would be made with filtered water, we excitedly ate all the chutneys.  Yes, we've become our parents, and we're here for it.

Vin and I were genuinely afraid to leave Langkawi.  We felt almost heavy with our relaxation.  And we didn't know where else to watch National Geographic.  (Seriously, it's not on Netflix.)  But, we had to move on to Siem Reap.  Our paradise had to become a memory.

Our hotel gave us a little tin containing two truffles when we left.  We ate them on the way to the airport.  They were delicious.

  

Kuala Lumpur (Day 3): A Bat Poops on Rucha

Many of our friends (and Instagram travel bloggers) told us to skip Kuala Lumpur.  We were told there's not that much to do, it's too conservative, it's just another steel city.  Based on his last visit, Vin was also tepid about the city, resigned to spending time there only because our last minute flight deal flew in and out of Kuala Lumpur.

Turns out, we absolutely loved it.

For our second full day in Kuala Lumpur, we opted for a tour to the Batu Caves, Royal Selangor (pewter museum), a couple of war memorials, the National Mosque of Malaysia, the National Palace, Independence Square, as well as a batik print artisan shop and chocolate shop.

We filed into a white van around 8:30 in the morning, cozying up to an Australian family and a mother and daughter from Eastern Europe.  We rode a short half hour to the Batu Caves, which houses several Hindu temples in caves on a hill.  We walked up 272 brightly colored, wet, narrow steps, stopping every so often because I suddenly remembered I was afraid of heights.  While Vin took some pictures of a sweaty, nervous me, a bat defecated on my arm.

The summit was cool, dark, and covered with rock.  We took off our shoes and wandered through some temples, taken most by the pinks and blues and greens that stood in such stark contrast to the grey rock.

Our walk back down the steps was slowed by all the foreigners' excitement about the monkeys.  There were so many monkeys.  Monkeys on the railing, monkeys on the steps, monkeys eating Snickers and Nature Valley granola bars.  The thing is, there are lots of monkeys in India.  And, my family history is particularly rife with monkey stories.  My grandparents had to put bars on their windows after they had an epidemic of monkeys stealing their fruit.  My great aunt has a scar on her arm from a monkey bite.  My dad and his cousins used to wage war on the monkeys on their terrace by throwing rocks at them.  My mother told me never to get too close to monkeys because they slap hard.  Monkeys, monkeys, monkeys.

And so, I was not stopping on the steps to take monkey pictures.

Our next stop was a batik print artisan shop.  The model of this tour was the same as tours we've taken in Mexico, Morocco, Indonesia - the first stop is always the main attraction, the one thing people care to write home about (here, the Batu Caves), and the second stop is always some sort of craft shop selling local goods.  Someone gives us a tour of the facility, a history and background of the process of creation, and then expects us to buy something at haggle-free, tourist surge prices.  The ubiquity of this tour model, of this effort to prey on tourists' bleeding, curious, vacationing hearts, was comforting.

Our next stop was Royal Selangor, a pewter museum.  In addition to learning more generally about pewter, and, more specifically about the importance of this product to Malaysia, we  were happy to learn how sustainable the museum's and manufacturer's practices are.  For example, the museum reuses leftover pewter shavings to create entirely new pewter goods.

Sustainable Pewter Manufacturing

Malaysia's Largest Pewter Mug

Lime Soda in Pewter Cups

After some employees hovered over us at the gift shop, we got back into the van to finish our tour, visiting two war memorials, the National Mosque, the National Palace, Independence Square, and a chocolate shop where we tried chocolate that was surprisingly too spicy (apparently Malaysia used to be the world’s largest cacao producer).

It was only 1 PM when the tour guide dropped us back to our hotel.  We quickly got free samples of durian cake from a pastry pop up in the lobby, remembered how much we hated durian, and ventured off for lunch.  Vin had discovered a vegetarian restaurant called Blue Boy, about a 30 minute walk from our hotel.  It took us closer to an hour to find it, however, as we circled the block it was on for about 20 minutes, before finding it behind an alley.  We were dripping with sweat as we walked in.

Blue Boy was small, though larger than a food stall, completely open on one side, and had only plastic lawn chairs.  The restaurants was filled with signs about saving the oceans and switching to paper straws.  There were flies every where, and a table of old men playing cards and drinking tea.  And we ate one of the best meals we ever had.  At the very least, it was the best assam laksa and fried  kway teow we had ever had.  Tangy, spicy, hot, and unfortunately finite.

 

Our next stop was the Petronas Towers.  Our gait had slowed.  The sun was aggressively beating down on us, and we just wanted to lie down in the air conditioning and feel the laksa in our bellies.  We were thus relieved to find out the tickets to the top of the towers had sold out.

Since we couldn't head to the top, we just took the escalators a couple of flights to Madame Kwans, so Vin could try the national dish, Nasi Lemak.  We just couldn't seem to stop eating.

We still had a couple of hours till our flight.  We thought we'd end at Marini's on 57, a rooftop bar that specialized in whiskey cocktails.  Vin and I love whiskey and we love rooftops.  

Unfortunately, the security guard turned us away because of my oversized jean shorts (and probably the bat feces on my arm, the sweatshirt tied around my waist, my sweaty hair matted down at the sides by my glasses).  Vin quickly found some other rooftop bar, Sky Bar, which had a pool, 2-for-1 drink specials, and an unobstructed view of the twin towers.

And in a few hours, we left Kuala Lumpur.

Kuala Lumpur (Day 2): Street Food, Speakeasies, Spas

Our next genius move was to deliberately not set an alarm for our first morning in Kuala Lumpur.  The front desk called at 2 PM, to ask if someone could finally clean our room (a thinly veiled attempt to ask if we had died/if we had been taken hostage/if they should call Liam Neeson).  We jumped out of bed, got ready, and quickly finalized some stops for our first day, all the while eating the free rice snacks we had taken from the Tokyo Priority Passlounge.

We first headed to Masjid Jamek, the oldest masjid in Kuala Lumpur.  Despite the 90-degree weather, Vin wore jeans and I wore a maxi dress with a cardigan, out of fear that my oversized jean shorts would be rejected.  The masjid’s beautiful dome shone bright white amid the grey steel of the city enveloping it. 

We trekked across a moat, studied some unhelpful signs, and thought we were heading towards it, before realizing we had actually walked past the masjid.  Our jeans and sweaters mocked us with their futility, and uncomfortably stuck to the backs of our thighs and arms as we took from afar obligatory masjid selfies that we could send our parents.

We then stopped over at the National Textiles Museum.  In educating tourists about the rich history of Malaysian textiles, like batik print, the city was able to subconsciously encourage foreigners to purchase its artisan goods.  Unfortunately for Kuala Lumpur, it was wasting its air conditioning and education on two impermeable travelers.  We're Indian; we basically invented this game.

yes, my feet are very large

It started heavily pouring as we walked over to Kuala Lumpur’s Central Market.  We first ran for cover in an air-conditioned convenience store, expressing more (nostalgic) glee about the canisters of Horlicks than the batik print adorned mannequins at the museum.  After overstaying our welcome, we sat on random plastic white chairs scattered immediately outside, and watched waves of rain crash into the streets.  Vin’s glasses fogged up, and after we failed to figure out our international data plan or steal free wifi from nearby shops, we discovered a small, cramped spa on the other side of the building.  There was only one man and one woman inside, and they warmly waved us in, tempting us through the tinted glass windows with bottles of water.  We decided to wait out the rain with some spontaneous foot reflexology.

By the time we finished our relaxing (but ticklish) massage, the rain cleared up.  We walked through Central Market, eyeing the souvenirs for which we said we’d come back (but never did) and the durian from which we said we'd run away (and always did).  

All we really wanted to do (all we ever want to do) was eat.  We strolled over to Kuala Lumpur's famous Jalan Petaling, a bustling street in its Chinatown.  I held my backpack on my chest, embracing my conspicuous tourist appearance, as I watched in awe at the hawkers, local food shoppers, people buying durian, vendors selling $2 iPhone chargers, and the motorcycles inches away from us, on either side.

already sunburned

Vin specifically wanted to get claypot chicken from Hong Kee, a street vendor he'd visited with his best friends in 2013.  We finally found it, sandwiched between other similarly busy street vendors.  They didn't have vegetarian claypot, so I just ordered a refreshing Tiger, wanting nothing more in the heat than to sit and sip.   Vin's very large claypot and a beer cost us less than $7.  We were happy.

  

As only Vin can do, he discovered a speakeasy, PS150, and in a city where large pockets of the population abstain, our search for this particular speakeasy felt authentic (even though PS150 has a Tripadvisor page).  As we neared the location (per our little blue dot on Google maps), we did not see anything that could be a bar.  The street was quiet, dark, and the all shops were closed.  No one stumbled out of any building; the only movement was the sudden scurrying of roaches and rats.  We stopped at what would have been the bar, only to see some sort of small street front store, selling random knickknacks and gum.  No one was at the counter.  

Vin the Radiologist noticed the back wall had a thin, almost imperceivable seam.  He thought it was a door.  I pushed it slightly, and saw only a barren room behind, so quickly closed it back up.  I was afraid of more scurrying.  "No, this has to be it," he said, and brazenly walked in.  He peeked his head back out with a dimply smile, and I knew we had found it.  

We walked down a large dark hallway, and I saw one or two people sitting in private, Zenkichi-style booths to my right.  We walked all the way to a bright open room, with even more foreigners sitting under a beautiful beer bottle light fixture.  Victory.  I love beer and I love light fixtures.

We walked through another door and sat at the bar, so we could watch the artists create our cocktails.  In efforts to reduce its carbon footprint, the bar's only rule was that we not take the menus.  "We'll email you the pdf," the waitress explained, "so we don't have to keep printing new ones."  With that request and their abundance of metal straws, Vin and I were sold. 

   

We got an order of vegetarian popiah with our drinks.  They were hot, crispy, and absolutely delicious.  Our drinks were beautifully made by a bar tender who had gotten into a car accident in Langkawi (our next stop) a few weeks earlier, and he warned us of the perils of biking on the island while he vigorously shook our drinks. 

   

We begrudgingly left PS150 in search of more food.  We walked over to Jalan Alor, the famous night market.  The chicken wing place Vin wanted to try was closed, so we just continued our aimless wandering, taking in the glorious smells of kaffir lime and peanuts and rice.  

We walked back to the hotel, bellies and hearts full, and promptly fell asleep.