I must admit, Malaysia was one of the countries I was most looking forward to because I knew absolutely nothing about it. Turns out, it is one of the fastest growing economies in South East Asia and is quite a success story. It’s official religion is Islam, though they give their people freedom of religion. It is kind of like Singapore in the sense that it has some very strict laws, although Singapore certainly takes the cake there. One of Malaysia’s laws is that possession of illegal drugs is punishable by death. Pretty harsh consequence but I suppose it’s a great deterrent. Malaysia is mostly composed of Malays, but has significant populations of Chinese and Indians.
We almost always have to go through customs when we enter a country and today was certainly the worst-planned customs process. Usually, the customs officers board the ship and we’re called up to this large room in small waves to give them our passport, which they stamp and then we move on (this is when face-to-face inspections). Malaysia being super strict decided they wanted our fingerprints, meaning we had to go to their facility to use their cool fingerprint scanning machines. As I had an overnight trip, we were supposed to be called first. We were, but we couldn’t leave because our trip leader had already been called down off the ship (which you couldn’t get back on until the ship was cleared because o Malaysia’s policy) so we left late. Trying to get the whole ship cleared so we could all leave the port, they called all the rest of the students off the ship, meaning that all these people got in front of us in the line. Imagine several hundred people standing in the massive, snaking line inside a large warehouse-like building with little air circulation in the tropics. It was not pleasant. Once you made it through the passport checkpoint and received your passport, there were two lines for the different machines. One line had only one customs officer dealing with people at a time while the other had 3 officers. It took FOREVER! We left an hour later than we were supposed to leave (and we had been out there 20 minutes early).
So finally, I embarked on a cave exploration overnight and visit to one of the larger cities in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. As it is a five-hour journey to Kuala Lumpur, we stopped on the way at our first cave. As Malaysia is a tropical nation now in the rainy season, there will just be downpours at different parts of the day that unexpectedly come and go. Well, it was raining when we got to the cave so we had to run inside. As we entered, there seemed to be many other people inside as well. Turns out, they’re filming a movie in the cave, Vikingdom (=Viking Kingdom). Haha, they had pretty sweet Viking outfits on, but I still can’t figure out the connection between Vikings and caves in Asia. The cave was quite large and had some really cool stalagmites and stalactites. We followed the tour guide to the wind tunnel. It was a long, oval tunnel in the side of the cave. I thought it would have been windy there, but I guess it must have just been formed by wind. Unfortunately, there was some sort of miscommunication or something because our tour ended there and we didn’t get to see the second half of what we were supposed to see (according to the description on the itinerary). We were kind of upset about that but the tour guide insisted that it ended there and didn’t seem to know about the other features we wanted to see. Oh well.
Back on our way to Kuala Lumpur, we made a pit stop at a small shopping mall area. They had so much angry bird stuff and original power rangers, batman, etc. It was a good thing I hadn’t gotten any Malaysian money yet because they were really cool. Eventually, we arrived in Kuala Lumpur, and since we were now an hour and 40 minutes late, we decided to drive around and see some of the sights rather than go straight to the hotel. We stopped outside the King’s palace (they have a King who they elect, he is kind of basically ceremonial like Queen Elizabeth). We could only see it through the gate, though. Then we went and saw the outside of a cool Mosque, shaped like the underside of a diamond. Then we headed for the restaurant for dinner and the cultural show. The traffic is absolutely horrible in Kuala Lumpur, even at 8pm. It took us 45 minutes to go three blocks. It was bad.
Eventually we made it to the restaurant, which was quite upscale (they had told us to bring nice clothes, but we hadn’t been able to change so we were a bit underdressed). It was a buffet of Malaysian food with a stage so we could watch the performance late on. The dancers performed a few traditional Malaysian dances, then a Chinese dance and Indian dance. They finished off with their Malaysian theme song: Malaysia, truly Asia. As one friend put it, it had elements of Mario Cart in it. It was a pretty ridiculous song. Then we went to the hotel, which was also very nice, not as nice as the Royal Palace in India, but it was still very gorgeous.
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