Malaysia

Country two of my recent globtrot was Malaysia. I must confess I didn't do much preperatory reading- eveybody knows that it's a tropical country, buisness center, and a vacation colony for China, right?
Not quite.
I'd forgotton that it's also a Muslim country. I got off the airplane at the Kuala Lumpur airport, and for a moment wondered where I was. Headscarves and white caps everywhere. The decrepit terminal made the Nashville terminal I'd always thought of as very modest look palatial. It was so small that you have to go out, up the sidewalk past all the taxis and back inside to get to departures. The whole one story structure is tan corrigated metal with not a scrap of decoration, unless you count the concrete barriers near the entrance and ticket counters, which are bright turquoise. The amminities conisted of a bathroom, MacDonalds ( no pork, of course- I saw none anywhere), a coffee shop, a little bookstore, a cafe, an Islamic bank/ currency excange, a KFC booth, and a waiting area- a couple of dozen seats in a roped off area against the wall. Without a question, it was the ugliest, smallest, oldest, dirtiest, worst organized and most inhospitable place I've ever taken an international flight to.
It was midnight. I was alone, and my flight didn't leave till 8am. I tried the seats for a while, but finally followed another passenger's idea, and laid out the sleeping mat I got in Thailand between the waitng area and a closed booth, put my head on my suitcase, put my beach towel and paro over myself, and slept a few hours. There was a pile of dust on the floor beside me.

From that low, my perceptions of Malaysia steadly improved. The regional airport on Lankawi Island is small, but much nicer. It even has a Starbucks. ( I'm told I was only at the low cost carrier hub in KUL- the other terminal is much better). Someone met me at the gate, so I didn't have to walk 15 minutes after all. The resort we stayed in was lovely- clean rooms, good meals, beautiful pool, palm trees, even thatch umbrellas on the beach. The company was, of course, peerless, and the week passed in a flash. In the short times I did get to go exploring, I found an very diverse crowd- European and Chinese vacationers, and a mixture of Malay people, which I found to be quite friendly. Almost everyone I spoke to could communicate in English, the shopping was pretty complete- I even had the first real pizza I've eaten since the states- and the scenery was lovely. The last day, I went on a Mangrove tour. The scenery in the estuary was quite a curiosity, brackish swamps punctuated by sheer rock spires and hills jutting straight out of the water. Besides the scenery, we fed some eagles, visited a"fish zoo"for lack of a better name, where we played with wild archer fish, putting up bits of bread for them to shoot down, petted mangrove rays, and saw several other fish, and finally walked through a small cave with a colony of sleeping fruit bats. Perhaps the most curious thing were some of the cave formations- under the overhanging rocks near the entrances, were staligtites which grew not in the normal gravity defined direction, but curled toward the light like fingers.

The trip home was also much better. I had traveling companions, and though we again had to overnight in the same terminal, this time we found the real food court, reached by another walk outside, where we pulled up chairs and made ourselves comfortable. A few hours of real sleep does wonders!