January 27th, 2009: I wake at 06:30, finish packing up, and head for the ferry. Just before I leave, mad Aussie Brian asks for some more of the packing tape to reattach the very important no smoking notice that fell down. I tell him he can have the whole roll of tape. I ask Ben how to get to the jetty and walk down, about a 15 minute walk. On to the ferry. The sun just peaks over a hill as we cross the water. It is a beautiful sunrise, the light catching ships and the windows of the Komtar tower lit up and reflected in the water. A few girls are standing at the front of the ferry, making a good composition against the lit water. Cranes are visible in the distance. I stop for breakfast, a couple of egg rottis, and in the process discover where all the ticket counters were hidden. I grab a nasi lemak for a later snack, a plan which proves fortuitous later on. There are two women at the ticket vendor's office this morning. A young Malay girl is talking on a cell phone while a middle-aged Indian woman of medium complexion, wearing a dark dress and carrying a few extra pounds, says to wait until the bus shows up.

Getting from Kuala Selangor to anywhere else can be an ordeal of bus travel. There are two options to get to Pulau Pangkor, about 150 km north of kuala selangor. One is to take local buses, transferring at local towns to the next bus in the journey to mulut. This is probably the cheapest and may even be the fastest route. Another is to take the local bus back to Kuala Lumpur and from there catch an express bus up to mulut. From mulut there's a ferry to the island leaving every 45 minutes from morning until the last ferry at 20:30. Tourists get off at the second ferry stop which is closer to tourist hotels and sites. I chose the second option, which was probably a mistake. I took a local bus to the Kuala Selangor bus station, waited an hour for bus 141 to KL, switched to bus 147 a few km from KL. Bus 147 arrived after 1.5 hours, but then sat in infamous KL traffic for another half hour. I got a ticket to mulut for myr$24.70, though the seller wanted to return only 20 change out of the 50 I gave her, as if I couldn't read the price on the ticket stub.

Having an injured foot is a wonderful excuse to be a completely lazy backpacker. Oh, I can't schlep my backpack. Oh, I need to just sit here on my fat ass. My poor foot. That is, until another guest happens to want to go to one of the same places that sounded interesting. You know, like a wall of fireflies lighting up the night. Even if I couldn't remember quite why this was sitting in my mind, as if a wall of flashing insects, trees lit up by flying enzymes burning the night, needed any more reason.

The last week in KL has been uneventful. I sat around on my ass a lot, with my infected foot in the air, surfing the 'net and messing with my photos. You know you're sitting too much when your ass starts to hurt. A couple of days ago I went with a fellow guest to see the Batu Caves. These are a series of large limestone caverns used by hindu as a shrine. There are several small temples around and inside the caves. It is kitschy. The big event occurs around january or february, in the festival of thaipusam when some 1 million hindu come to the caves. The truly devoted attach objects to their bodies by passing pins and various other sharp implements through their skin. They then walk up the steep 200+ steps to the caves. It seems rather painful.

If you happen to need medical attention for an infection in Malaysia this posting provides answers to the following questions:

- What to do about cellulitis? See a doctor and get antibiotics.

- Where to see a doctor who speaks english in KL? KLCC medical center.

- What sort of medications might I get for cellulitis in Malaysia? Antibiotics and others.

- Can I get antibiotics over-the-counter in KL? Yes, just look around.

The situation with the pirates off the coast of Somalia must be one of the more bizarre stories floating around the world these days. Indeed, it can be hard to decide who the real pirates are; perhaps there are pirates and there are pirates.

An article by Jeffrey Gettleman in the New York Times of Sep 30th, 2008, Somali Pirates Tell Their Side: They Want Only Money is truly strange. Some highlights from this article:

- Somali fishermen turned to piracy when their nation collapsed and foreign fishing fleets started plundering their coasts.

- A bunch of Somali pirates stumbled on a shipment of arms, including Russian tanks and antiaircraft guns, destined for Kenya. These pirates are asking for a negotiable sum of USD$20 million to release the ship and say they just want the money, not the weapons. There may have been a gun fight between pirates on the ship. ("Dude. get your hands off my tank or I'll pop you like Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan! ... This is my tank, go get your own friggin' tank!")

in the mossy cloud forest monkeys dissolve. their hoots filter among elemental sounds. branches shake, monkeys leaping, monkeys walking, tan hides, fur that was leaves, moving between sky and land. birds, or frogs, or lizards of sound call to those that understand their words. in the cloud forest, trees dissolve. if you should reach out, for as the call of keas, the ground yielding, there is no sure footing, if you should reach out and try to touch that which is substantial, you will touch only the illusions you came to destroy, they will run through your hands like tears, like broken waters. branches are not branches, they are light moss that drapes itself from branches. wood is not wood, it is watery matter through which swim bacteria, or some insect unknown to science that someday will fall from on high to escape its naming. the trees will make the rain, as they have for 100 million years--there is no ordinary counting of the times the sun lifted mist from their bodies, or for the cries of monkey-mothers whose young fell, monkeys who are as infants to the forest. we would know which trees have survived, if only there was an imprint of their endless sorrow in the granite rocks. masks of native wood carved by native hands, filled with sadness and strangeness, stare down from shelves and walls. within their curves moves the wind, down valleys of carved wood, my mind's hands run within river channels--perhaps there is an imprint here, a translation for young who cannot read, or there is only an illusion one sought to destroy, to understand.

there are stories of apportionment--when god was handing out this or that, such and such got it, or the bird which is red because it stole a feather. tea is one of those: when color was being handed out, tea leaves took the darkest, deepest, truest shade of green. but this green is only there to be seen when the tea is viewed through polarizing glass and is stunted and warped, from the tree that it would be into a tiny shrub, hacked at every 20 days by drug-addicted apes yielding shears and machines.

where do we eat? but in town we couldn't tell if it was chicken or meat? the lament of the unintiated. eat anywhere, the first place that strikes your fancy, the cheapest. so ask the guests, so i answer. today will be an easy day. a civilized day. of tea and deep green leaves growing in mist. such are the best plans laid. waylaid. on the way to breakfast the weekly vegetable market, so naturally i must buy oranges and dark green cucumbers and limes to put in my drink. a quick breakfast at one of the two indian shops open on sunday morning, a bottle of water, nasi lemak for lunch. at the bus station a tall aussie asks about my camera, shows me his bag--a daypack for a month, and 50% of that is taken up with his camera bag! i'm so envious of his light pack. another aussie joins in.

but the jungle is shaking, the mist-lady caresses it, the rain pounds it till the trees break and shatter into flowers deep in their violet beacons. monkeys hoot, hoot here and there in the lady's caress, hoot amidst the ciccadas' long trill that drums into the ear, where the feet of the many-legged centipedes crash. the birds laugh, laugh at the foolish ape, scatter with their fearful shrieks. the women are free to roam, they are locked into their demanding jobs, which they have not started yet, discourse in sterile rooms. the man is trapped, captive from the fear of loss. the women are here, their heads covered in cloths, they sit and eat, they buy the red love of strawberries that grow under artificial suns. the chicken pays the price, its thigh painted red, drizzled in lime, it is eaten. and the rain, the rain puts the mountains in its washing power, and the mountains cling to the trees' roots, shaking in the lady's embrace.

leaving kuala lumpur is a momentous event, a joyous day. somehow i extended my stay in kl beyond what was strictly necessary.

on monday i went to the indian visa agency to drop off my passport. though i had been told by the office in jb that the fee was myr$152, as is also stated on the website, the visa office in kl said i had to pay myr$236 as an american--the 152 fee is only for british. amazingly, i had exactly myr$237.70 on me, leaving me with $1.70--not even enough for the train rides back to the hostel. instead i walked back, which turned out to be rather fun. spending $1 on water got me the rest of the way. none of the money changers in the area by the visa office would take travelers checks, which was a moot point as i did not have my passport. so i changed a bit of cash back at bukit bintang and went to hide in the hostel. tuesday evening i picked up the passport with a shiny new visa stamp. walking back, a blind begging man was singing across from a mosque.

internet here in kuala lumpur has become terribly slow the last few days. we even completely lose connection several times during the day. when i say slow, i mean it can take hours to download a few megabytes and some sites, including my webmail, might never manage to load in the browser. at the moment it's running slightly better, but still very slow. this is probably due to the loss of several undersea cables between egypt and italy affecting south asia, including cables that carry traffic from india. strange that a cable outage to europe affects websites in the us, but i guess that just has to do with how traffic was routed or how it has been rerouted.

in the morning i am lazy and i don't run out at sun-up to take pictures. i have an omelet and chat with a schoolteacher from san francisco making a visa run from southern thailand. to anyone wondering, the only impact of the mess in bangkok that she noticed was that there were fewer tourists in the south. no one has been able to figure out what was going through thailand's government when they reduced the on-arrival visa for people arriving by land from 30 to 15 days, certainly not a good move when your tourist industry is already suffering. actually, we all know what was going through thailand's government, it's the same thing you'll encounter at home on any given day. i walk down to the portuegese settlement, about a lazy half-hour walk involving careful dodging of traffic and random asian-style steps. i even pass local fish spa and scenic prison. i stop for lunch and try some strange sweet drink but decline further attempts to quaff the remaining syrup. the portuegese settlment is nothing special in the day. men are working on a walkway. the streets are lined with one-story homes of no particular persuasion. it's hot.

melaka was recently awarded unesco world heritage status. i stopped by the ethnographic museum, which is housed in an historic building constructed by the dutch and which served as their administrative center. founded around 1400 by a palembang prince, melaka has had an amazing history in which control has passed from one set of rulers to another. first, it was ruled as a sultanate. zheng he stopped here with his huge chinese fleet. portugal took over in the early 1500s, followed by the dutch, the british, the japanese, the british again, and then malay independence. melaka was an important port for arab, indian, and chinese traders who relied on the seasonal trade winds. basically, it's one huge historic mishmash. today the historic area is a big tourist playground filled with cars.

we would like now to return you to our regularly scheduled programming. we apologize for the interruption in service caused by technical difficulties and hope you enjoyed looking at pretty pictures while we sorted out our new equipment.

Coming to a new country is one of the most exciting parts of travel. Granted, going from Singapore to Malaysia is not an earth-shattering experience, yet it still manages to take me out of the usual zone of familiarity. I was in Singapore for 10 days. Singapore does not hold much attraction for me. It is a big city. Clean. Shiny. With many shops. What do you do in Singapore? Shop. Shop till you drop. It's equatorial and humid, so you also get to sweat, but to me it felt cool after the heat of the Northern Teritories in the build-up to the Wet. Walking around the Raffles Shopping Center, a large modern shopping complex, I wondered what it would be like to grow up in Singapore. The experience would include a lot of shopping. There are a few other things to do in Singapore, and perhaps I might even avail myself of them when I return.