Malaysia 2002
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
January 2002
Selamat Datang from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,
Kuala Lumpur is home of the tallest towers in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers. Scott reminded me that these were in the movie Entrapment when Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones were committing a robbery and ended up hanging from the bridge that joins the two towers. Now that I have seen them in person (the towers), I realize it could have happened to anyone.
I did not realize that this is a former British colony until I went to the right side of the car that picking us up at the airport and slid behind the steering wheel that obviously belonged on the left side of the car. I’m not sure who was more surprised, me or the driver who shut the trunk after depositing my luggage and then ran around to the right front door only to find me sitting in his spot. You could have bottled and sold the relief on his face when I stepped out laughing it off like I was the biggest prankster in the world and moved to the back seat. My coworker Jeff looked pretty relieved also. He commented that I didn’t drive that great on the right side and he sure didn’t want to see me drive on the left side.
Kuala Lumpur is a nice, clean, modern city. It sits in a valley with mountains in all directions. At a population of two million (per the unquestionable source of our driver from the airport), it is a village by Asian standards. We walk three blocks to the office each morning and back to the hotel in the evening. The twin towers are across the street from the office and have a huge mall on the lower floors that have stores touting all the latest Western products like Sony electronics, Fuji cameras and Yamaha musical instruments. They also have food court with local delicacies like Kentucky Fried Chicken, A&W, McDonalds and Chilis.
The rig sits on the opposite side of the peninsula from Kuala Lumpur. So we had to go to Kemaman from Kuala Lumpur to see the rig and the tool yard. At the hotel in Kemaman, for some unknown reason, I found myself eating broccoli. I’m not sure how this happened because I normally abhor and avoid green veggies. After eating about half the serving, I cut open one of the broccoli spears and, to my surprise, a small green worm crawled out. This scared me considerably. Not the actual worm, but the fact that the boiled vegetables, which were still wet, had not been boiled as evidenced by the fact the worm was healthy. A worm in your food will make you think you’re sick. Unboiled tap water in many locales can kill you! I didn’t die, or suffer severe gastro intestinal problems making me wish for death later that evening, but this gave me an idea for travelers to remote areas. A worm in the food could become the standard similar to miners using canaries in the mines to check for poisonous gases. “Waiter! Take my vegetables back and finish cooking them, the worm is not even singed!” Sometimes it’s not the unexpected on the plate, but your choices that disgust. The Chinese restaurant in the hotel offers squid with everything, jellyfish 3 or 4 ways, ostrich (actually a tasty option), crocodile, bird’s nest soup (very expensive for bird spit and dirt), fish head any way you like it and other delicacies that may be currently lurking in your garbage.
In addition to the numerous monkeys standing on the road to the heliport in Kemaman, we saw a wild boar run across and had to wait on a herd of water buffalos. The street lights along this route had barbed wire wrapped around the posts. The local rig manager told us that the barbed wire is to try and keep the monkeys from breaking the lights. It didn’t seem to work since over half the lights were not working at 5:30 am. No one seemed to know why the monkeys attack the lights.
The hotel in Kuala Lumpur and the hotel in Kemaman both have signs that say no durian fruit allowed on premises. That interested me, so I asked why. I was told that durian fruit, while delicious and dearly loved by natives, smells like…bad things. One local I asked giggled and said “Tastes like Heaven – smells like hell!” It seems the odor grows in confined spaces. One person told me they made the mistake of putting one in the refrigerator and when they opened it the next day, the entire contents had to be discarded. We stopped at a fruit stand while driving the back roads between Kemaman and Kauntan just to smell one. I have to say it is everything I was told. Why someone would eat one and not hurl it toward a hostile country instead is beyond me. The driver kept looking at items to buy and I gagged out a “Let’s go!”. Then I yelled a “LET’S GO NOW!” I was ready to hurl on his shoes to make my point when he finally agreed to leave. They look like a cross between a pineapple and a porcupine.
Leaving Kemaman when we did, we missed the “Fish Head Curry Promotion” at the Waterfall Café at the hotel. It expires January 31st, so if any of you are thinking about coming this way, you may want to move your plans forward. Until then, I hope all is well!
See you soon,
Keith