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I started off in Kuala Lumpur, and headed up to the Traders Skybar opposite the Petronas Towers, armed with camera and tripod, but I only managed to fire off a few snaps before a friendly waitress came over and told me that the use of a tripod up there was forbidden.  So I opted to have some (expensive) drinks instead, and ended up having a good time, meeting some great Malaysian and Indonesian locals.

From KL I headed to Taman Negara on buses, via a night in Temerloh.

Floating restaurants on the river opposite the national park entrance
Taman Negara is a national park about twice the size of Luxembourg.  Walking in the jungle was very hot and humid, and home to all sorts of wildlife, lots of butterflies, monkeys…

…Unbelievably big ants…

…And apparently some nasty hunting spiders.  This sign was near the start of some walking trails, and I reckon that it was meant as a suggestion to do the walks with a guide!  The park also has tigers, leopards, rhinos and elephants, but I think you have to venture quite far into the jungle for a chance to see any of those!

They have a long and excellent series of walkways, high up in the trees.  You can walk along and spy lots of wildlife and jungle below.

The view from Bukit Terisek.

Having got to Taman Negara by bus, I left by boat, on a journey down the river that took a bit longer than planned.  After about an hour, the heavens opened and we had half an hour of monsoon-style rain.  As we were drying off, the boat’s motor spluttered and cut out.  It wouldn’t restart, so we drifted down the river for a while, wondering if we were going to need to use the little paddle that was tied to the roof.  But we didn’t need it in the end, because a boat eventually came upriver to tow us down the final bit to Kuala Tembeling.

Finally the clouds lifted, but it was still pouring

From there it was a short bus ride to Jerantut (right in the middle of the peninsular part of Malaysia), where I stayed for a night before catching a mail train on the ‘Jungle Railway’.  It took over nine hours on the train to get to Kota Bharu, which is up on the north east cost, a few miles south of the Thai border.  We passed hours of thick jungle, with occasional tiny villages, and gigantic, hot-chocolate-coloured rivers.

The train went fairly slowly a lot of the time, and stopped in dozens of villages.  Some of the stops were for ages (time for a few creepy-crawlies to have a poke around the carriages), but that turned out to be because there’s only one physical train track on the railway.  Use of the track is controlled by a token, which is passed between the drivers and controllers at some of the stations, so a fair bit of time was spent waiting for other trains to clear the tracks and pass over the token.

I stayed in Kota Bharu, which feels very different from Kuala Lumpur, partly because its population is almost completely Muslim and ethnically Malaysian, compared to Malaysia overall, which is a mixture of Malaysian, Indian and Chinese people (thanks to the British Empire).

From there I headed south down the coast, and out to the Perhentian Islands, which were a lovely mixture of clear water, sand, sunshine, and friendly people.

‘Romantic Beach’ on Perhentian Kecil

Long Beach, the main backpacker one

At 9am, there were thousands of these termites crossing the path on the ten minute walk through the jungle between Coral Bay and Long Beach, and when I came back at midday, there were still tonnes of them crossing…

Also on the path I saw some monitor lizards… the first one was massive, about the size of a child!  Honestly!!  This one was a lot smaller, but at least it did pause for a while for photos…

Pasir Petani beach

At the second place I stayed, the Watercolours Impiani (which was very good) on Perhentian Kecil’s Pasir Petani beach, there seemed to be wildlife everywhere.  When I first went into my wooden hut, I was greeted by a brightly spotted frog which was living in the half open cistern of the loo.  Outside the hut (not at the same time, though!) I spotted a snake, the monitor lizard below, several big Golden Silk Orb-Weaver (thanks Wikipedia) spiders, which seem to be all over the jungly bits of Malaysia, funny little squirrels, little ghost crabs on the beach, lots of different butterflies and other insects of all descriptions – including the ones that start up about an hour before sunset, and make a very loud, high pitched screaming sound.

I wasn’t using a telephoto lens, but since this spider was staying very still in the middle of its web, I managed to get brave enough to go really close to it.  The spider didn’t seem bothered, but then suddenly it jolted into action and moved like a flash out of the viewfinder.  I jumped back quickly (obviously), much to the amusement of one of the guys who worked there…

… but thankfully it turned out that the spider hadn’t jumped onto my head or shoulder or anything.  A bee had flown into the web, and the spider killed it quickly before wrapping it up in silk to eat later.

Perhentian Kecil, the smaller of the two main islands, is classed as the ‘backpacker’ one, and having spent five nights there, I went across the water to Besar for the last two nights, and was surprised to find that Mama’s Chalets (which were excellent) were cheaper than either of the places I’d stayed on Kecil – 60 Ringgit, about £12 per night.   Having said that, on Kecil there were some very cheap huts available, from 20 Ringgit.

It wasn’t all blue skies in the Perhentians – most mornings started off overcast, and then the cloud burned off in the afternoon.  But on the day before I was planning to leave, we had proper thunder and lightening, and torrential rain for several hours.

The rain didn’t stop on the next day, and having got packed up and ready to take a motorboat back to the mainland at noon, it turned out that the boat wasn’t coming, so I stayed for an extra night.  The huts were great, but they weren’t posh enough to have aircon, so all of my stuff got damp and heavy – even things in the bottom of my bag.  But the hut was still a lot more dry than the jungle around it, and being in a corner plot, I got a good amount of animal visitors seeking refuge from the weather.  Some of them weren’t very welcome, but I liked these geckos, which had made a home on the bathroom ceiling.  Those four things at the top left are their eggs that had been there for ages, two of them already hatched!

The next morning it was still raining, but the motorboat did come, so we all got completely soaked on the hour long crossing back to the mainland, especially the Swedish couple next to me, who were sitting in the direct line of the sea spray.  That was the start of an eleven hour journey down the coast to Kuantan.  After the boat and a short taxi ride to a town with a bus terminal, I had a two hour plus wait for a late bus, then a seven hour bus journey.

The bus stopped at a roadside cafe for us to get some food, maybe some designer clothing!

Arriving in Kuantan, getting out of my still-wet clothes and into a hot shower – for the last six days on the Perhentian Islands I’d only had cold running water – seemed like a dream about to come true!  But unfortunately the water in the Kuantan hotel was cold too!  It wasn’t until I’d had the shower and was getting dressed that I realised there was a switch in the room to turn on the hot water – Duh!!

Kuantan

The next day I got a bus to Kuala Lumpur and had a stroke of luck.  I was quite late checking into a hotel, and the receptionists had a long discussion about which room to put me in, before asking if I wanted to pay 40USD to upgrade to a superior, twin towers view room.  I said no, but clearly there were no other rooms available, so they had to give me the upgrade for free!  So I had a room with an obscenely big bed, marble everywhere and all the other trimmings.  I celebrated with a beer from the minibar in the massive bath!  It was my first beer since leaving Kuala Lumpur over two weeks ago.  Alcohol isn’t widely available in NE Malaysia, though you can it find fairly easily if you make the effort.  Also, it seems to be about the only thing in Malaysia that’s heavily taxed, so after a fortnight of detox, a cold can of Carlsberg in a hot bath was very welcome!

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All photos © George Clerk.  All rights reserved.  Licenses available at www.istockphoto.com/resonants or please contact me at photos@foogaloo.com

If anybody wants a proper, full resolution copy of one of the pictures in this blog, email me at photos@foogaloo.com, and I’ll send you a code for iStockphoto which will give you ten free credits when you sign up.  You may well find better pictures among the 4.5 million there, and decide to download them for free instead!  Not all the pictures here are on the site yet, but when I’m home I’ll be (eventually) uploading most of the ones that aren’t.

This rabbit above had escaped from a cage outside the restaurant next door, causing much fuss in the mini supermarket!

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Guilin

After arriving and dropping my stuff at the hostel, I went back to the train station to arrange onward tickets, and (not counting the many late night offers of ‘massage’ in Shanghai) had my first direct offer from a Chinese prostitute. She just started walking along with me saying ‘sex?’ then ‘SEX?’ and when I said ‘no thanks’ or something, she gave a coy smile and said ‘But I very beautiful lady.’

Looks quite real? It’s carefully shaped and painted cement. Same thing, in loads of different imitation wood types is done in public parks all over China to make banisters, bridges, etc
Anyway, I stayed in Guilin for two nights, at the great Flowers hostel. At a local restaurant, I went for ‘Diced chicken fried in a bush of chilies, garlic and ginger’ and the description menu was spot on, especially re. the bush of chillies…

The tasty chicken morsels that I managed to find were scorching (spicily) hot, but then eating one of the chilies was a mistake! Weirdly, by the end of the meal the extreme hotness didn’t make me sweat and my nose run at all, it just completely numbed my mouth, and – really – made my lips feel like they were vibrating very quickly. No need for laughing gas at the dentist, after eating this I think I could have had all my teeth taken out without feeling a thing!

Apparently even other Chinese (who snack on chicken feet to pass time on the train) think that the people in this part of China take culinary excesses it a bit far, saying they’ll eat anything with legs that isn’t a table, and anything with wings that isn’t an aeroplane!

After walking down a street full of restaurants, the saying seemed spot on, though you can’t eat civit cats (a type of skunk) any longer, since that was reckoned to be the cause of the SARS outbreak.

Street music
All decent restaurants have lots of cages and bowls / tanks outside, with most of animals being alive (though barely alive in some cases). Only a few larger ones (dog included) were out on the street in half-prepared state. There were all sorts of fish, terrapins, crabs, turtles, tortoises, cane rats, rabbits, snakes, pheasants and many other game birds, chickens, cats and plenty others, all unknowingly waiting to be chosen from the menu.

About ten seconds before I took this photo, a man took a cat out of the top cage by one of its hind legs, with a metal bar at the ready in his other hand in case it tried to bite him, and headed to the kitchen.

The next day it was quite strange to see a cute young girl, dressed in Hello Kitty type fluffy clothes, grab a net, retrieve a large and enthusiastically wriggling carp from one of the bowls, then bludgeon it to death by repeatedly slamming it hard against the concrete floor. Then she cheerfully walked back into the restaurant to show the fish to its diners!

Apart from the culinary delights and numerous prostitutes of Guilin, there were a few nice parks and interesting karst peaks, but really too many scammers and hawkers, from pretty young women pretending to be wanting to chat in English (but actually wanting to sell discount tickets for river cruises, tea ceremonies or opera shows), to an old man who pretended to want to look at my camera, but then took a photo of me and tried to charge for his services as a photographer!

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Li River Cruise

So first thing in the morning, I joined a group of mostly Westerners (the Chinese boat was a bit cheaper, but included an hour of shopping at the start, and apparently had even ropier food than ours!) and we drove for a bit down the Lijiang (aka Li) river, until we had got to the bit where there was enough water to float a boat.

Even here, it was incredibly shallow, and as we boarded the boat, we were all quite impressed at how sleek, modern and comfortable it looked, until we realised that we were just stepping onto this one to get to our crappy, old and tired boat which was moored alongside it!

Then we had a five hour slow cruise downstream to Yangshuo, unfortunately much of the time we were part of a long and closely packed line of boats, with frequent hooting and honking of airhorns not helping any atmosphere of tranquility.

But despite the thick grey haze that made decent photos pretty much impossible, the karst scenery was still amazing, and we saw plenty of activity along the way, including lots of water buffalo, and fishermen who use cormorants instead of rods or nets. Since the birds have rings put around their necks, they can’t swallow bigger fish, which the fishermen just scoop out of their bills as they skim together along the surface on tiny bamboo boats.

Getting close to Yangshuo, there was a quality moment when a pushy Chinese woman met her match – an Italian man. She’d decided that she should be at the front of the queue to get off the boat, and made swift progress through the queue of Westerners (the German passengers were at the very front of course!), by jabbing each of us hard in the arm, making angry hand signals, then arrogantly walking past.

But when she tried it with the Italian, a ten minute battle started, with very cross hand motions, intense staring matches, and lots of angry words coming from each in their own language. Trouble almost erupted when one of the boat’s crew had to get through, and the Italian had decided that nobody at all, no matter what, was getting past him and his wife (who’d been told to barricade the side with her suitcase)!

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Yangsho

So we arrived in Yangshuo, which was just a village in the middle of karst peaks until people started realising its mass tourism appeal, about twenty years ago. Now it is full of Western style cafes and hawkers, including a type new to me – silhouette cutters. These guys will subtly walk along the street next to tourists, and use pocket scissors to make a stylized silhouette, then present for the unknowing tourist to buy. Crafty (no pun intended) because the tourist feels bad about saying they don’t want something that’s already been done just for them. Of course I bought mine, but not before haggling down to half the original price of 10 yuan.

It even includes the famous peaks around Yangsho at the bottom – the crescent moon peak at the left!

Talking of haggling, my poor skills there came in for much abuse from others when I got a t-shirt which had a ridiculous starting price of 340 Yuan (over £20) for 105. The sellers insisted that it wasn’t a fake, though blatantly it was, and made me out to be a ‘very hard bargainer’. But even paying £6 for something I probably should have had for more like £2, I was happy enough. My mistake was in starting with my offer as high as 40 Yuan!

“Scotland’s not a country!”

In the hostel was a crazy Dutch girl Chantelle, who I’d first met in Chengdu, then bumped into again in Guilin. It came up in discussion that somehow, she didn’t think Scotland was a country, and thought I was joking when I told her that it most certainly was. And, incredibly, she’s a Geography teacher!

Anyway, this turned into a battle that I knew I was going to win, until she asked a German guy who said he thought Scotland was definitely a country, but said he’d Google for it. And, to my horror, it turned out that the top result had the title ‘Scotland Is Not A Country’ and listed eight official criteria for a country, only two of which they thought it could meet! Shocking, and it made my position harder to defend. Luckily I’d earler established Scotland’s annihilation of Holland in terms of literature, music, famous inventions, cinema etc. The best Chantelle could come up with for Holland was the invention of dykes (doubtful!), and the company Phillips!

I told the German girl and Finnish guy in my dorm, expecting them to laugh at her foolishness, but they both said something like ‘yes but really it is true I think – Scotland must be not a country’

Later on we met up with Floren, who’d also been in the Chengdu hostel at the same time, and he’d bumped into a couple of Brits, one of whom was a Scotsman, Andy. Only the second Scot I’d met since Norway. I got Chantel to ask what he thought, and his reply was straight to the point: ″F***ING RIGHT IT IS!!!″

Having got up at 6.20 to climb a local peak for sunrise, I was gutted that all the paths I could find weren’t yet open, so I hired a bike overnight and went further away for the next morning’s sunrise, but it was no good – the heavy grey haze prevented any decent photos. That night I tried again at sunset, and got a few sellable pictures, but decided to take a boat ride back upriver to Yangshuo, having fallen off and hurt my knee while chasing water buffalo!

While waiting for a boat, a family were taking ages to wash their clothes, while a man walked a water buffalo down to the river for a quick wash…

Then back up the river for me and my bike…

On a different bike mission, five of us headed South from Yangshuo to a huge cave network, which boasted mud pools that you could swim in. As we approached the cave entrance, there was a group of older European types, and – totally unprompted, an old man amongst them boldly announced ‘Yes… It is true… We are Swedish!!’

But going in it was just the five of us, our guide, and a photographer who sold us pictures at the end. The cave was amazing with stalagmites and tites, some famous ones shaped like Buddhas, and in places we had to crawl on our bellies through tiny gaps.

This is me getting drenched in cold mud by Floren…

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Guangzhou

Many high quality products are made in and around Guangzhou (which we used to call Canton), supposedly including half of all the watches bought in the world, plus excellent banking software of course, but apparently they also make crappy rubbish like Apple iPods here too!!

The city has a great Metro system, just like Hong Kong’s, and – despite lots of inner-city slums, seems quite a modern place. Definitely a place of business and commerce, and it seems you can buy pretty much anything imaginable, in vast quantites, on the street from small specialised shops.

Vases for sale

Since dim sum comes from here, I wanted to try the real thing, but ignorantly didn’t realise that it’s meant to be eaten for breakfast/brunch, so you can only get it here in the morning. Anyway, I did eventually find a place before noon, but despite having at least four mammoth floors to the restaurant, they were full. Even though I was a clueless foreigner (which clearly didn’t endear me to them at all!) they decided to set up a new mini-table, which was placed right next to a very busy meat kitchen, with all sorts of things being chopped up. But the dim sum was delicious, and the tea making and pouring procedure was unbelievably complex!

The Pearl river on a hazy day

Doesn’t look great, but at least you don’t get runover trying to cross the street!

Evening River Cruise on the Pearl River. Tonnes more neon further round too.

Loaded up

Lots of places for you to shop in Guangzhou…