Malaysia

We have travelled a bunch in Malaysia before and actually seen a fair bit of the country. This time we are only here for a week so it was really about 4 things.

1. Visiting Margaret's aunts, uncle and cousins
2. Trying as much of the incredible variety of food available in this melting pot
3. Shopping  since clothes really are the cheapest here of anywhere we have been and we need to restock some things after 6 months on the road with growing kids.
4. Relaxing in one place instead of moving around so much. We are booked into the Berjaya Times Square hotel for the whole week which means we have a great pool and we can walk to innumerable restaurants, multiple mega-malls, a tech mall with every gadget you have ever heard of and an indoor amusement park. 

So here is a quick summary of our week

Saturday-Late flight in then straight to Berjaya Times Square hotel. This is a very large hotel in the center of town that is attached to a very large shopping mall. 9 floors of stores and an indoor amusement park with an indoor roller coaster, bowling, archery, laser tag, and all kinds of other activities. Less than full occupancy for stores though and seems a little bit run down compared to our memories from 6 years ago. Most likely the newer fancier stores have moved on to the newer fancier places like the Pavilions.  KL and this area in particular though are a real melting pot. My first ride down in the elevator I got on on the 41st floor. Two women in full burkas who must have started on one of the 3 floors above us, likely penthouse, were already there. Next a young middle eastern man got on and spent the whole ride preening in front of the mirror. Probably heading out to the clubs. After him an older Chinese couple. Then finally 2  transvestites in miniskirts. That's KL,gotta love it.

Sunday.  Walked over to the new fancy mall at end of Bukit Bintang-The Pavilions. Met the kids teacher Sherry at Madame Kwan's- a Chinese Malaysian restaurant. Wandered around the mall a bit and then headed back. Dropped off about 30 pounds of laundry at a neighborhood place. Got it all back neatly folded a few hours later for about $14. Had dinner at a middle eastern restaurant. Bought mangosteen on the street and were happy to get them for 7 ringgit per kilo until we found them in the grocery store around the mall for 4 ringgit per kilo.

A perfect mangosteen

Monday.  Walked over to local restaurant for our favorite breakfast of roti canai. Did some shopping in the mall with the kids and bought Nyonya deserts. Had dinner at a local Malay restaurant called Songkit. Dinner was with our friends Ana and John. We first met Ana when we took a cooking course with her about 6 years ago at her cooking school-Lazat.  Since then they have visited us in Colorado and Ana even summited Mt. Elbert with me a few years ago.

Tuesday.  More roti canai for breakfast. Did some more shopping including mangosteen from the grocery store this time. Finally went to a restaurant called the Fatty Crab with Margaret's Aunt and cousin. Its a sprawling open air place in the suburbs that only serves 4 things; fried rice, chicken wings, chili crab, and chili prawns. Its so well known that when we got in our taxi the driver said, "That's a famous place." By the time we were down the table was a mess of crab carcasses and our hands and faces were covered in juice. Stopped in the mall for a late night snack of Nyonya desserts before bed.

Making curry paste at Lazat

Grinding ice for kacang at Lazat

Wednesday.  Had lunch at nearby Malay restaurant, Sarang Cookery. Ordered way too much including gado gado, nasi kerabu, roti jala, chicken soup.  Went out to Lazat for a late afternoon cooking class of Nonya cuisine. This included otek otek(fish custard steamed in banana leaves), chicken curry,  onde onde(palm sugar wrapped in rice flour), roti jala (lace pancake). Totally stuffed by the time we ate that for dinner.

With Ana at her school

Boiling onde onde

Tasting onde onde

Cooking lace pancakes

Thursday  Met Margaret's cousin Jessica at the bird park. She took us to a Kelantan(Margaret's family's home state) restaurant for lunch where we had  red rice, nasi kerabu, grilled turmeric fish, fried chicken, steamed rice with chicken. Ate too much again. Then back to mall where we actually went to the indoor amusement park. Did a couple of rounds on the bumper cars. Its a weird cultural experience to be crashing a bumper car into a woman in a full burka but everybody was happy. Rode the roller coaster at least 5 times. Even more surreal to see women in burkas screaming on the roller coaster.  Certainly makes you realize that people who at first glance seem very different  from you are actually the same. We all like amusement park rides. Later for dinner we went to Lot 10. This is a basement food court with a bit of history. When that particular mall was built it displaced a bunch of family food stalls. Some had been open for more than 70 years. In return they were all given spots in the basement food court. Its mostly Malaysian Chinese cuisine.  I had some sort of thick fried noodles

If Hitchcock's The Birds had cranes

Friday.  Ana's driver picked us in the morning and we met her at a local wet market. She takes her cooking classes there so everyone there knows her. Margaret wanted to buy some very specific Malaysian cookies that to me taste like cornstarch and also something called meat floss. We started out with more roti canai for breakfast and then Ana introduced us to a bunch of shopkeepers in the market and Margaret found everything she was looking for. Hopefully it makes it through all the customs inspections we still have left. (I'm guessing NZ and USA will be problematic). Then we went to lunch with Margaret's cousins at a local dim sum place that specializes in Malaysian versions of Cantonese dimsum.  After that we did something really unique and went to what I would call a durian market.

Durian is a tropical fruit that looks like a big spiky green football. If you crack open the foot ball you find 3 or 4 nuggets of flesh you can eat. Each is nestled in its own section of the fruit and is about the size of your fist. Each nugget looks like a kidney, thymus, brain, or some sort of weird alien internal organ and ranges from white to yellow in color. It has the consistency of slimy custard with a small seed a the center. The most distinctive thing about durian though is the smell. I think it smells like a dumpster during a hot July day. It is so strong that durian is banned from hotels and most public transport. During durian season these huge tents pop up where you can buy durian and eat durian. That way you don't have to stink up your house and car. You choose some durian and maybe a coconut to drink with it. There are typically about a dozen strains to choose from with the Musang King being recognized as the best and most expensive. Your chosen durians are split and brought to your table. You eat until you are stuffed. They even provide gloves to wear so your hands won't stink and washrooms to clean up afterwards. We spent an hour or two at the SS2 Durian Emporium which is apparently one of the larger and better known. Then back to the hotel Grab driver(kind of like Uber) lamented that even if we wore gloves and washed up afterwards that we were still stinking up his car.

Tasting durian. Look at all the tables. Place was the size of a city block and all dedicated to durian!

This is what it looks like

Huge dumpsters full of durian rind

Choose your durian at the SS2 durian emporium

Friday night we went to one of the newest attractions at the mall, a set of escape rooms. The kids have done these before but I've always refused. For some reason the thought of being locked in a room with some people while trying to solve puzzles in order to get out always seemed weird to me. I told the kids I would rather pull out my teeth with rusty pliers. Turns out I was totally wrong. We did two escape rooms. We did the Alice in Wonderland one in under 30 minutes as it was the simplest.  The Chocolate vault room beat us but if we had another 15 minutes and one more hint I think we could have finished it. The cool part was that each room was actually several rooms with multiple puzzles or locks having to be solved before you moved on to the next. I was impressed that each of us managed to contribute multiple times in meaningful ways to solving the puzzles and we did it without yelling at each other. Pretty good family bonding/team building.


We are now sitting in the airport waiting for our flight to NZ. We have a week in NZ followed by a few days in the Cook Islands and then a week in Tahiti and then home. Hard to believe this almost over. Time went by really fast.

Kunming-last stop in China

We took another private van from Dali to Kunming. The high speed rail connection between the two had opened a week or two before but we didn't know that so we used what had become our old standbye in China. Asking the hotel owner if they knew someone who wanted to make some cash driving us to our next town. We only got to spend a few days in Kunming and I wish it could have been more.  The climate at 6200 feet is great. Not too hot and not too humid. The city has several subway lines as well as cheap taxis so its easy to get around. Food is very good but not quite so spicy as Chengdu. People seem very nice, friendly, and helpful. Tons of interesting things to do in the area of which we could only hit a few. If we come back to China I could easily see spending a month in the Kunming area and another in Sichuan.

The first night in Kunming we walked down to a local pedestrian square and had dinner and saw a movie. Movie was called Animal World and it was based on a Japanese movie that was apparently based on a Japanese Manga and I thought it was awful. Kids liked it a bit more. Apparently they are thinking of bringing it to the USA but if you have your choice of this one or "Dying to Survive" choose the latter. The next day we basically spent wandering around Kunming. We walked to the zoo which was crowded but mostly depressing. They had a cage full or sad raggedy looking raccoons. Thought it was funny that pandas are a big deal in the west and trash pandas are a big deal in China. From there we walked over to Green Lake park. This is a park full of ponds and intertwined waterways with bridges, bamboo, snack stands, and places to just relax. After that it was off to a neighborhood that turned out to mostly have expat type restaurants. We had "pizza" at a local pizza place. It wasn't as bad as the pita bread with cheese melted in the microwave that we had to start our trip in Nanxun but it wasn't great. Salads were welcome though as green salad is sort of rare in China. They prefer their lettuce boiled or steamed.

The next day was going to be our last full day in China and I decided at the last minute to book a guided tour with a driver rather than try to do it ourselves. We had used China Highlights before and they came through this time with a guide and driver at the last minute. We decide to see two nearby sites. The Shilin Stone Forest is a famous UNESCO recognized site with pillars of eroded limestone spread over several square miles. The other site was Jiuxiang cave which I think was even more spectacular but less well known. We went to the cave first. It is a huge cave with a large river rushing through it. Seemed as big as my memories of Mammoth cave and Carlsbad. You follow the river as you climb up and down multiple sets of stairs winding your way through the cave. The only difference between this cave and all the ones I've seen before is all the multi colored lights deployed through out the cave and at the end of the tour you pop out the bottom of the cave and get on a chairlift for a ride back to the parking lot.

After the cave we went to Shilin Stone Forest. This is another area of eroded limestone. Unlike the caves or the rounded peaks of Guilin in this case the limestone eroded into pillars up to 30 meters tall. The whole region is studded with them ranging from little nubs only a foot high called teeth all the way up to the huge pillars.. The area has been known and described in Chinese literature for centuries. You see farmer's fields where the crops are planted right around the pillars. A section has been set aside as a AAAAA Chinese tourist site and Unesco heritage site. So of course it had all the tour buses and big tour groups I"ve mentioned before. The grass and plants around the pillars here have been manicured a good bit instead of being left natural but its still beautiful.  We spent a few hours being guided through one small set of paths amongst the tallest pillars but in looking at the map two things were clear. First, you could spend several days wandering amongst the pillars and still not see it all. Second you could easily get lost. The whole area reminded me of the slick rock canyons of Utah but with limestone instead of sandstone.

After the tour we tried another hot pot place in downtown Kunming. The place looked like it provided each person with a single pot with 3 different sections each with a different broth. However after long discussions between Syd and the manager he decided we couldn't handle the spicyness of most of the broths and ingredients. We ended up with two pots of mushroom broth and two pots of fish broth and some random ingredients he thought we could handle. It wasn't bad but I guess if we are going to have the full experience we are going to have to work on our tolerance of spice.

The next day we had breakfast and headed off to the airport. We found a nice restaurant at the airport and killed a few hours eating noodles and drinking tea. I finally got to try "over the bridge noodles."  This is a local specialty that you can google. They were good but I'm not sure what the big deal is.  Now its off to Malaysia for a week or so.

Dali-first hand experience with Chinese mass tourism

If you visit almost any highly rated tourist sites in China you are likely to encounter crowds of Chinese tourist and the typical Chinese tour group. These groups arrive in buses that hold between 20 and 50 people and come with a guide. The guide is equipped with a flag on the end of a telescoping pole so that all her clients can find and follow her and with a portable loudspeaker so they can all hear her. These groups arrive en masse with many sites having dozens of buses at any one time. The groups storm in and march to the best sites, see them briefly, and then move on to the next. The tours also focus on food and shopping. We saw these groups at many of the best known sites in China. The only exception was early in our trip when the unusual snow storm brought tourism to a stand still and gave us the amazing experience of having Nanxun and Moganshan buried in snow but devoid of tourists. However, we never experienced them personally. Typically we either visited sites on our own or if we couldn't do that we hired our own private guide as we did in Xian, Li river, and  Dujiangyan. That all changed in Dali

We had taken a private van for 4 hours from Tiger Leaping Gorge to Dali. After arriving in Dali we spent a the evening walking around the Dali old town. See my comments on Old Towns below. Dali old town is bigger than most and surrounded by a medieval wall with gates but I'm not sure how much of it was actually old.

When we had checked into our hotel they asked if we wanted to arrange a tour of the big lake, Erhai, for which Dali is famous. I had heard that these tours were easy to arrange through all the hotels in Dali so I hadn't arranged anything ahead of time. They had a menu of options for the tour but none of us fully understood all the choices. The Mandarin in Dali was a bit confusing to the kids so I just signed us up for the most expensive tour when they said it included a boat ride on the lake, lunch and a visit to three sites.  I figured we would spend the day on the lake cruising to 3 different sites while enjoying lunch. Sort of like our Li river cruise. Plus I figured picking the most expensive one would cut down a bit on the crowd size. I was wrong.  Turns out we actually signed up for a mass market Dali tour.

Our hotel behind the corn fields but with a view of the lake

These trucks with 2 stroke engines and exposed belts are everywhere in rural
China. Get your arm caught in a belt and I'm sure it will rip it right off.

Flower gardens and pagoda in front of our hotel with lake Erhai in back

The next morning our inn keeper walked us a a half a mile or so where she handed us off to some women acting as a middleman. She walked us a few more blocks and then loaded us on a medium sized bus with about 40 or so Chinese tourists. The guide turned out to be this incredibly energetic woman. She started by taking attendance, as she would after every stop. Each family was called out in turn. When our turn came she didn't call out "Merrell" but instead called out "foreign friends." She seemed relieved when she realized we spoke varying degrees of Mandarin. Tour started with an hour long bus ride to the north end of the lake. The guide kept up a continuous stream of speech for the entire hour. She told jokes, quizzed the kids, and told stories about the area and scenery. First stop turned out to be building for a typical Bai lunch. The Bai are one of the 56 ethnic minorities recognized in China and are concentrated in Dali. Lunch was a big platter with about 10 different bite sized samples on it. These included small pieces of several vegetables. a very small piece of chicken and one piece of something that looked like SPAM. Along with this we got a bowl of broth and a bowl of noodles. Throw everything into the hot broth and let it cook for a few minutes and then eat.

Bai lunch.

Next stop was the pier where we all got on a big boat for our cruise on the lake. The boat had 5 decks and there were several hundred people waiting to get on. It was the second most crowded I've felt in China second only to Beijing train station during the New Year migration. Somehow we all made it on to the boat. First deck was a private space where you could rent a tea table with tea and snack for $20 per table for the duration of the voayage. Deck 2 was entirely made up of a performance space as we were going to be treated to a 10 minute performance during the cruise. Performance could only be 10 minutes as they had to do 8 or 10 performances in order to get everyone in during the time of the cruise. We were assigned to performance number 5. Decks 3 and 4 seemed to be entirely composed of private karaoke rooms! Don't know why you would pay for a sightseeing cruise and then do karaoke the whole way. Deck 5 was packed front to back and wall to wall with everyone on the trip. We quickly ran back down to deck 1 and paid for a private table by a window. Best $20 of the trip.  The private room on the first deck also came with a guy who looked like a Catskills MC complete with bad toupe. He was apparently a calligrapher who would draw you a custom calligraphy to commemorate your cruise at Erhai but spent most of the cruise literally passed out at his table. We cruised across the lake to an island that had a few statues and walking paths, a restaurant, a hotel, and a shit load of places for people to take selfies with the lake in the background. These weren't just scenic locations for selfies. They were little docks and piers with decorated benches and tables at the ends designed specifically for selfies. We spent an hour there got back on the boat and headed back to the other side of the lake. Turns out we were only going to see one site on the lake. On the way back performance number 5 came up and we trooped up to deck two for our 10 minute Bai musical show accompanied by "3 courses of Bai tea"  That was 3 dixie cups and 10 minutes of lip synching by some people in Bai costumes who looked bored to death. When we got back to the first deck someone had tried to usurp our $20 table but we sent them packing.

Bai three course tea ceremony with performances. See my 3 teas.

Official cruise calligrapher passed out at his table

$20 tea table with snacks

One of several "selfie piers" Check out the line waiting to take their selfie on the lake.

Turns out our next site was  Xizhuo old town or "ancient village" on the lake shore. China is full of these ancient villages. Some are truly old. Some were old and have been retrofitted or modernized. Some are modern but made to look old.  All of them have the same recipe.  Picturesque streets and alleys that wind and twist around until you get lost. Jewelry stores with a guy pounding some silver on an anvil out front. Candy stores with some guys pounding nuts or taffy with a wooden mallet out front. Snack stalls selling things you can't always identify and cooked in unusual ways. Tea shops. The occasional western store like McD's or Japanese store like MiniSou tucked into an old looking building. Crowds of Chinese tourists wandering the streets. We spent another hour or so wandering this old town. Then it was back into our bus for a trip to the last site.

Xizhuo old town

Old Town snacks

These were actually pretty good. Like a stuffed pastry cooked between two
pans of charcoal. The upper pan is lowered on top to cook the top sides.

We drove further north and ended up at Tianlong ropeway. This was an old cable car that took us a few hundred feet up a mountain for a view of the lake and a brief walking tour of a small cave on top of the mountain. We finished up here with a Bai tea ceremony where 20 people were packed into a tea room and served several local teas accompanied by some very aggressive sales tactics by the nice ladies pouring the tea. They would have done great selling time shares in Ft. Lauderdale or Mexico. We avoided most of the hard sell by pretending we only spoke English and escaped without buying any of their tea, most of which seemed kind of bitter. Margaret actually made some noises about tossing hers out the window when they weren't looking instead of finishing it.

Erhai lake

After that it was back to the bus and back to Dali. I have to say we totally enjoyed the whole day. Our guide went out of her way to make sure we didn't get lost and at least kind of knew what was going on. The people on the bus were nice. It was cool to see a little bit of China the way all the Chinese tourists see it and Dali is so touristy I think you would have a hard time avoiding the crowds anyway. We finished our day with a great dinner near our hotel. Some of the food was ordered by Syd and some was us just telling them to bring us whatever they thought would be good.

Horses heading to Dali old town

Dinner in Dali old town

With Dali beer

Building a new "old town" in Dali.

Tiger Leaping Gorge

We spent today exploring Tiger Leaping Gorge. This place is pretty spectacular. From the top of the surrounding peaks to the river below is about 3800 meters. That's 12000 feet from river to peaks. Even just the walls closest to the river are several thousand feet high. Black Canyon of the Gunnison is about 3000 feet deep. Grand Canyon about 5000. Hell's Canyon is the deepest in America at around 8000. So this one is amazing. And at the bottom is a narrow river channel boiling with brown water as the Yangtze runs through. In the center of the canyon is a rock in the middle of the channel. This is where the name of the Gorge came from. The legend is that a tiger leapt from one shore to the rock and then to the next shore in order to escape a hunter. As Nick said when we saw the rock, "Dad, I'm pretty sure even if a tiger could make that leap he would have no where to go on the other side. He wouldn't be able to climb those cliffs." Pretty good story though.

After breakfast Nick and I took a shuttle a bit less than a mile down the road from our guest house. Here was one of several competing paths down to the river. These paths were built by local families who agresively watch the entrance to the paths and charge a toll. Its usually a sweet old lady manning the toll gate but no one gets by without paying their $2. The lady who ran our guest house actually recommended we go down path #1 and come up path #2 as they are the most interesting and path #2 is the fastest way back up as it includes about 100 feet of ladders straight up a cliff. That doubles the cost since you have to pay the toll on two paths but oh well.  On both paths there were multiple little huts where an old lady would be set up with benches, a fire, snacks, drinks, trinkets, and other stuff designed to separate you from your money. I called these the "old lady toll booths" or the "old lady tax".  It took us about  2 hours to go down what I'm guessing was about 1000 feet of vertical and less than a mile of walking. So way steeper than a staircase. At the bottom the river was running so high that the usual viewing area was awash and closed. There was also a suspension bridge out to the actual tiger leap rock. You couldn't quite go all the way to the rock because it was awash too but you could walk about 3/4 of the way across the bridge for some amazing pictures. Then it was time for the steep climb back up. This only took about an hour because we weren't constantly stopping to take pictures and because we ate up 100 feet of the vertical all at once on a huge scary ladder bolted to the cliff face.

After lunch we all went on a hike up above the village where our guest house was located. We are in the center of the gorge and until about 10 years ago the only way in was hiking. Many guests still choose to do the 8 hour hike in we spent about an hour and half walking on that trail. It climbs several hundred feet above the village and the road and then traverses the gorge. There are several guest houses in isolated villages along the route so many people do a 2 day hike in followed by a bus ride out. We did the bus in and out and just did some shorter hikes but still pretty spectacular and a bit less work.

Cataract behind the guest house

Our guest house

Village under towering walls

The path down the cliff

Ladder up the cliff

Tiger Leap Rock-note person on bridge!

From peak to river

Looking up river

Normal viewing area awash-can you see poles marking viewing area?

Suspension bridge to Tiger Leap Rock

View down river

Nick took this one of a wildflower high above the gorge

Family photo up high in the gorge

Tomorrow we leave for Dali. Hard to believe less than a week left in China and only a month left in our trip.