| Submitted by: Evelyn C. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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We got back to Krabi about 5 PM and, having learned our lesson
from the previous day, were on the 5:30 PM mini-bus back to Ao Nang
after booking our tickets to Penang through the same company that
did the tour. (They seem to do everything.) Our plans to visit
Kota Bharu on the east coast of Western (Peninsular) Malaysia and
then take the jungle railway to Kuala Lumpur had to be scrapped--
there was no reasonable way to get to Kota Bharu from Krabi. In
fact, there weren't too many ways to get anywhere from Krabi. We
settled for taking an air-conditioned mini-van to Penang for 330B
(US$13.20) each, discounted from 350B because we were buying five.
On the mini-bus back to Ao Nang we met a German couple. They
used to be a West German couple. We talked about their change in
status--it turned out that they were in Berlin the day the Wall was
torn down. When the news started to spread that it was happening,
people didn't believe it at first. He was very happy it had
happened, and that Germany was united again, but agreed that the
reunification would be a difficult process. He was only two months
old when the Wall was built--though he knew the exact date--but I
actually remember seeing it on the news. Seeing it torn down was
much better. I remember seeing an episode of *TRUE in which someone
smuggles his girlfriend out of East Germany in a steamer truck and
is ultimately helped by an (East) German train conductor who
explains: 'I am a German. Not an East German or a West German, just
a German.' Now it's true.
For our last night in Thailand we splurged and had fresh
grilled fish with a bottle of wine. The bill for the five of us was
900B (US$36), but it seemed high by comparison to what we were used
to paying. As I said before, everything is relative.
October 20, 1990: We were up early to catch the first mini-bus
at 6:30 AM in order to be in Krabi by 7 AM for our mini-van. Steve
was up even earlier, as he wanted to place a phone call to a friend
whose birthday it was, but the clerk overslept and he didn't have
time.
The 'air conditioning' consisted of a trickle of slightly
cooler air from the ceiling vents of the van. Luckily, combined
with tinted windows (de rigueur on all vehicles here, it seems),
this was sufficient.
We stopped at 9 AM at a gas station in Trang for a rest stop
and picked up breakfast, since the hotel restaurant hadn't been open
when we left. Breakfast was buns with pork inside and sticky rice
with chicken wrapped in a banana leaf. We also bought a bunch of
Thai chazerai.
By 11 AM we were in Hat Yai. Here we had an hour for lunch and
to change vans. What they do is run one van to Hat Yai in the
morning and return it to Krabi in the afternoon. Another van comes
from Penang in the morning and returns in the afternoon. Since Hat
Yai also has a semi-major airport, this maximizes the number of
passengers while minimizing the company's expense--no one is away
from home overnight.
Hat Yai has little to recommend it as a tourist spot, though to
Malaysians it's a popular destination because of the sex and sin
available there that is heavily curtailed in Malaysia, a strict
Muslim country. In Hat Yai we saw our first open gutters/sewers of
the trip--ditches two feet deep and a foot wide which had some
concrete slabs covering them and connecting the street to the
sidewalk, but not many. After seeing the rain later, we understood
why storm drains every hundred feet or so would not be sufficient.
We left Hat Yai about 12:30 PM, heading for the Malaysian
border. It seemed as though every bridge in Thailand were under
construction, at least on the road we were on, though no other parts
of the road were being worked on. I got the feeling the repaired
bridge might not be a major improvement over the original bridge
either.
We crossed the border at two points. First we went through
exit procedures in Thailand, consisting of having the driver take
all our passports in to be stamped while we waited outside. Then we
drove a ways further and got to Malaysia, where we went through
entry procedures, including an X-ray scan of our luggage like you
get at an airport. And finally there was a checkpoint where they
looked inside the van to make sure we weren't carrying any
contraband. The only problem in all this was that we didn't move
along quickly enough in the customs check. I thought the official
was waving us down to the next checker, but he was really waving us
through.
While we were waiting for everyone on the mini-van to finish,
one of the other passengers offered to get us a cold drink out of
the machine there (which took only Malaysian money, and we had none
yet). Though the books warn about accepting drinks from strangers,
we figured a can of soda from a machine was safe enough that we
could risk it, and since there was a long ride ahead, we accepted
and got to talking to him. His name was Tee and he was from
Singapore (though originally from Malaysia). He had come up just
for a short period of time and after a few hours in Penang, he was
returning to Singapore by overnight bus.
We stopped at a small town just past the border and changed our
bahts into ringgits (Malaysian units of currency, which everyone
calls dollars--they probably were originally named that and then
changed, and they still use the dollar sign to represent them).
We've taken to calling the various units of currency 'PMUs,' for
'peculiar monetary units,' a term used by someone in Mark's
department to talk about the money someplace in the Caribbean. He'd
have reall problems here--there are three different one-baht coins
and three different five-baht coins in circulation in Thailand, they
are all different sizes (including one size for a one-baht which is
almost identical to one of the five-baht sizes), and not all of them
have Arabic numerals on them. In fact, there's an old one-baht that
doesn't have Thai numerals either! A handful of change here is real
challenge. In Malaysia there are two versions of each coin, but the
size are the same and they are labeled in Arabic numerals and in
English. It's sort of like how in the United States we have regular
quarters and Bicentennial quarters, or wheat cents and Lincoln
Memorial cents, and that doesn't confuse people. For that matter,
before we complain about other countries' coins, we ought to look at
ours. There isn't an Arabic numeral to be found. They say 'one
cent,' 'five cents,' 'one dime' (what does that mean to a
foreigner?!), and 'quarter dollar.' The latter, by the way, is
uniquely American; every place else seems to have coins in units of
one, five, ten, twenty, and fifty.
In addition to changing money, we changed our watches. In
order to keep bot Western Malaysia and Eastern Malaysia on the same
time, Malaysia is an hour later than Thailand.
The roads in Malaysia are much better than the roads in
Thailand, the vehicles traveling on them are fancier (no seelors to
ply their trade here), and in general the country seems more
prosperous, judging by the general appearance of the towns we passed
through.
We arrived in Butterworth about 5 PM. Butterworth is the town
on the mainland across the straits from Penang. Penang is the whole
island; the actual town we were going to was Georgetown, directly
across from Butterworth. To get there we took the ferry. There is
a bridge from the mainland to the island, but it goes from south of
Butterworth to south of Georgetown *and* costs more than the ferry.
As if to test our seaworthiness, however, they filled the tank of
the van and this for some reason involved rocking the van from side
to side while it was being filled. Maybe there was some blockage in
the line to the tank or something.
Then we took the ferry, which involved a bit of a wait as there
were a lot of cars ahead of us. We got into Georgetown about 6 PM
and got dropped off on Chulia Street (Lebuh Chulia).
Once again the first order of business was to find a hotel.
(One problem with unstructured travel such as we were doing is the
amount of time spent on the mechanics of traveling: finding hotels,
making train reservations, storing luggage.) Here at least we had a
reasonable idea of where we wanted to go: the Cathay Hotel,
described by the guidebooks as having a lot of 'romantic charm.' We
were only a few blocks away and the heat had subsided somewhat so we
walked over.
Georgetown has the sort of architecture one envisions in South
Seas ports--the second stories of the buildings overhang the
sidewalk supported by arches and have louvered shutters on the
windows. All this is extremely practical as well as picturesque--
the covered sidewalks let you walk around even when it's pouring
rain and the louvers let the breeze in while keeping the sun out.
The Cathay Hotel is an older hotel (built in the late 1800s,
I'd guess), painted in blue and yellow pastels. It looks as though
at one time it was quite grand, though at present the interior could
use a paint job, the hardwood floors are in desperate need of
refinishing, and the plumbing is, well, quirky. I loved it. The
rooms are about 15' by 20' with 10-foot-high ceilings--absolutely
enormous. The beds turned out to be foam mattresses about six
inches thick on boards and there was no hot water, but these didn't
really bother me. More annoying was the lack of an elevator (or
lift, as it's called her)--high ceilings also mean more steps.
Still at M$45 (US$18) a night, it was wonderful.
After a quick shower and change we went out for dinner with
Tee, who had helped us find the hotel and was a bit at loose ends
before his 10 PM bus. We started walking down Lebuh Penang looking
for dinner. Food was everywhere! On side streets there were
clusters of hawkers' stands. We chose one group, sat down at the
common tables set up in the street, and then sent Tee, Binayak, and
Mark to order from the different stands. I can't remember
everything we ate, but we did have laksa (the local white noodles)
in various forms, fish ball soup, and a half a duck. Part way
through dinner it started to rain and we managed to move under an
awning. This was good, as the rain turned into a downpour complete
with thunder and lightning. But, as seems typical, it stopped after
an hour or so.
After dinner Tee left for his bus. We had gotten a lot of
interesting information from him during dinner about the current
election campaign in Malaysia (posters and banners are everywhere--
the election is tomorrow) and had told him about politics in the
United States in return. He found our idea of strikes odd--in
Malaysia you need to get a permit from the government to strike! No
permit, no strike. (Seems to defeat the intent of a strike, doesn't
it?)
We walked over to the telephone office and 'phoned home,'
calling family or friends. Steve called his friend whose birthday
it was and we all sang 'Happy Birthday' into the phone--strange!
October 21, 1990: We had a strange night--there was a family
of some sort of animal living in the attic (?) above our room and
all night we were awakened by scrabbling noises. Actually, given
the amount of noise, it may be a whole society rather than just a
family! We hope it was cats, but who knows? We also have geckos in
the hotel, but they're good--they eat the bugs.
Breakfast was murtabak--sort of an Indian/Pakistani pancake--in
a restaurant near the hotel. |
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| Copyright © - "Evelyn C. Leeper" |
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