I’m writing this on the train that runs between Lhasa and Beijing. We left the Tibetan capital a few hours ago, the start of the last phase of all the railroad adventures we’ve had on this trip. Eventually I hope to report on the highlights of those. But first I’d like to share the top 3 insights we gained from all the driving we did in the previous week.
1) The Chinese take the screwiest approach to accident-reduction you’re likely ever to see.

On the roads between Lhasa and Mt. Everest (and other points), government officials have set up a complicated system of speed-control checkpoints. Over and over, our driver would stop and our guide would dash into a roadside office to have the time recorded. Further down the road would be another checkpoint, and we would have to take care not to reach it sooner than the time allotted. If we did, that would indicate to the speed-control cops we’d been driving faster than permitted. 

The problem with this strategy was that the time allotted was often too long. And the intent was laughably easy to subvert. Our driver never drove at speeds that seemed reckless to Steve and me, but over and over, he would have to halt shortly before a checkpoint and wait for anywhere from 5 minutes to 20. This rigmarole increased the time of our final drive from Shigatse to Lhasa to seven and a half hours, instead of 7 or less.

In addition to the pointless checkpoints, the Chinese authorities often set up phony police cars…

And phony policemen (often holding phony radar guns) along the side of the road. Apparently everyone knows they’re fakes and can be ignored (except for the occasional rube who blunders along and believes them?)

We also saw occasional installations of wrecked cars adorned with lots of wordy warnings. Tashi said the signs described the gory details of how everyone in the car had died due to reckless driving. Sometimes we passed under actual working video cameras set up to check driver speeds, but apparently every professional driver on the road knows the location of every one. Ours always slowed to a crawl (for the few seconds it took to pass under the speed detector).

2) Fueling one’s vehicle might be an act of terrorism.

We didn’t see many gas stations, though of course they do exist, sometimes resembling their American counterparts but sometimes tucked away inconspicuously on a small town’s side street. That’s not so strange, but what boggled Steve’s and my minds was learning that every time Tibetan drivers need fuel, they must present their id card and fill out special forms. They have to do this regardless of whether they’re filling up a van full of foreign tourists or a simple motorbike. We were told that the reason for this was to reduce the risk of some Tibetan dousing his body with gasoline and setting himself on fire in protest of the Chinese presence. That’s happened a lot over the past 65 years of the occupation, and apparently the authorities still consider it a serious threat.

3) There’s more than yaks and hillside monasteries to catch the traveler’s eye out in the country. 
To keep big trucks off one 50-plus-year-old bridge, the road masters built a special jig at each end of the span. Our 8-passenger Hyundai van squeaked through — but with only inches to spare.
A bit further down the road, we passed a congregation of trucks and vans.Tashi declared that it was a Chinese filmmaking crew making a movie. We also were amused by the sight outside tiny roadside establishments of kettles of water surrounded by parabolic mirrors set up to catch the sun’s rays and keep the water hot — solar heating in the service of sanitation (and a steady source of hot water for tea). 
We failed to catch a photo of any of those, and I felt it would be intrusive to aim my camera at the old lady who walked across from where our van was waiting for one of the speed-control stops. She casually climbed down into the ditch next to the road and squatted. All I could see was her head and shoulders, but it was obvious she was hitching up her skirts and apron. She squatted in that position for a couple of minutes, craning her head to observe the infrequent passing traffic. Finally she re-arranged her skirts, climbed out of the ditch, re-crossed the road, and went back to stand near a small cluster of storefronts. If she washed her hands, I didn’t see that.

Never have I longed to climb Mt. Everest. However, a year and a half ago, when I learned we could visit the base of its north face, the idea of doing that seized my imagination, and it proved surprisingly hard to shake. Wednesday morning, as we were driving up the road that leads to the base camp, it struck me that ever since 4th grade, when I learned the name of the tallest mountain on earth, Mt. Everest lodged in my brain as a mythic spot, with the details of the myth growing in complexity over time (as I read Into Thin Air, saw various movies, and otherwise embellished the indistinct image in my mind.) When we crossed the last pass, and the great span of the high Himalaya stretched before us, I felt the same jolt I felt last year in Jerusalem when we visited the Garden of Gethsemene and the spot where Jesus is believed to have been crucified — the jolt of seeing the real physical object underlying the mythic one.

Every other hairpin turn brought the mountain into closer view out my side of the van. It was spell-binding to take in not only the massive striking triangular form of Qomolongma (as the Tibetans have long called the most famous peak) but also to see the threadbare villages shivering in the nearby valley floors; to learn first-hand just how difficult it is to approach this monster mountain, even as a lowly tourist.

Such a visit requires special permits that are even more complicated than the already crazy-complex ones required for Westerners who wish to visit Tibet. No independent travel is permitted, so that makes it expensive too. The Chinese government is deadly serious about scrutinizing all the paperwork. Our Chinese and Tibetan permits got close attention in Chengdu Airport, and on the road, we probably had to stop 10 times to have our paperwork inspected. Most of the time our guide was able go into the inspection offices alone (sometimes just with the permits; sometimes with them and our passports). But at the start of our final approach to Everest, Steve and I had to present our physical persons, to be compared against the passports and other documents.

For a visitor to reach Everest Base Camp also means paying special attention to the task of acclimatization. Just arriving in Lhasa is rough. At 12,000 feet, it’s one of the highest cities in the world. When we came to Tibet a year ago, we felt slammed by symptoms of altitude sickness within an hour of disembarking from our flight from Kathmandu. And Everest Base Camp is almost 6000 feet higher than Lhasa. Even if you’re not planning to climb the additional 12,000 feet to the summit, visiting just the base camp means spending a minimum of 5 nights trying to get accustomed to the dearth of oxygen (only 50% of what it is at sea level).

Our trip was interrupted last year by Steve’s mom’s health crisis only two days before we were scheduled to hit the road and head for the Himalayas. I was still seriously sick from the altitude; had dreadful headaches and no appetite. Couldn’t sleep night after night because I felt like I was suffocating. Moreover, I had caught a cold and developed a terrible case of bronchitis in Nepal, so I was coughing almost hard enough to break a rib. Had we set off southward, as we would have done were it not for our emergency return home, I now think things could have gone badly. I learned on this trip that there is no possibility of helicopter evacuation from this part of Tibet. Our guidebook says one person a year dies from altitude sickness, but our guide Tashi told us that this year 16 Indian pilgrims perished from it while attempting to walk around Tibet’s holy western mountain, Kailash.

Given that background, I was fiercely determined to stay healthy. We sanitized our hands religiously as we shared metros and buses and trains with hordes of folks on the Malay peninsula, many of whom quite obviously were fighting respiratory infections. I started taking Diamox (the drug often used by mountain climbers to speed up the acclimatization process) a day before our flight to Tibet, and on the day of our visit to base camp, I added in a steroid (dexamethazone) recommended both by the CDC and personal friends. It all seemed to work. Or maybe we just got lucky. We avoided catching any colds or developing any traveler’s diarrhea, and when we left the tiny town of Shegar Wednesday morning, neither of us had any obvious signs of mountain sickness.

We had other reasons to rejoice. At the Pang-la Pass, Tashi confided to us that he was getting his first view this year of Everest and its massive companions: Malala, Lhotse, Gyachung, Cho Oyu, Xixiabangma. Tashi has probably made the trip to the base camp 100 times over the course of his guiding career, but this year we’re the 6th group he has accompanied. All the other 5 were greeted by a bank of clouds and fog and dust that obscured the fantastic sight. “You had to imagine it,” he said. But the sky was cloudless for us, and the snowy giants shone knife-edged against the preternaturally blue background.

By 11:30 we were checking into our room at the small hotel across the road from the monastery at the foot of the mountain. Here too there was good news. We’d been warned that the monastic-sized cells were unheated, with outdoor toilets located some distance away, no running water and often no electricity (when the wind blows the lines down). But a strong incandescent lightbulb clicked on in our room, which was further equipped with heating pads under the grubby sheets. I checked out the squat/pit toilets and found them to be less frightening than the ones we’d experienced on the road from Lhasa a few days previously. Those were big enough to actually fall in (and die shortly afterward, I presumed), worse than anything I’ve seen in Africa (where we’ve now traveled in 11 countries). Returning to the room, I repeated one of my favorite mantras for such situations: “Camping would be dirtier.”

We piled in the van and set off on the short ride down the road to the spot where the tourist tent camp is normally set up. We’d been booked to sleep in it last year, but the timing of this trip brought us here a bit later in October — just four days after the tent camp was taken down for the season. Slightly disappointed by this news at first, I now realized that spending the night in the communal tent would have been hideous in the ferocious winds that were developing. I had read that it’s possible to hike from the tourist tent camp site to the true base camp — the spot where the real climbers stay and from whence they depart. Steve and I climbed out of the van all geared up. I was wearing pants and long underwear, with six layers on top (including a fairly heavy down jacket), and Steve was similarly armored. We both had our collapsible hiking poles. The sun was shining brightly, but we walked only 100 or so feet down the road into a driving icy wind that occasionally blasted our small patches of exposed face with gritty sand. We stopped. I felt like I was moving in slow motion, with great effort (the way I felt approaching the summits of Mt. Fuji and Mt. Whitney, my previous mountaineering efforts that made me realize I would never, ever want to climb Everest.) Steve felt the same way, so we sheepishly told Tashi it would probably be better for us to be driven the 4km to the base camp.

There, Tashi declared he would wait in the van, but we could take our time climbing up to the large flat area where the serious expeditions pitch their tents. We moved slowly and carefully and reached it without incident. Once at the top, we estimated the gusts to be 60 mph or more. Time after time, they threatened to knock us off our feet. The site struck me as being perhaps the most dramatic and simultaneously brutal places I’ve ever stood (or wobbled). My iPhone died. (We later joked that it must have been on strike, declaring that I needed to take it back to some kinder, warmer place or it would never work for me again.)

In all, our visit to the climbers’ base camp lasted about an hour. Then we returned to the guesthouse and had a surprisingly tasty, if simple, lunch. The communal dining room is a congenial space, warmed only by a yak-dung stove, and after getting a bit more organized in our room, we returned there with our iPads and grabbed seats in front of one of the south-facing windows, with their commanding views of the mountain. We sat there for 5 hours straight, often glancing up and out.

From time to time, a mane of clouds appeared around the summit, and I thought of how similar clouds in the past have been harbingers of sudden homicidal storms. More than 250 people have died trying to reach the top of this monster since the first Westerners started vying for that honor in 1921. The wind whistled and howled; at times it shook the walls of the dining hall and forced cold air through the crevices. But no storm materialized. As sunset approached, the shadows on Everest deepened and spread, and near the summit, the remaining light made the mountaintop glow pastel orange, then coral, then pink. In a matter of moments, the color drained away. All that was left was white snow and menacing shadow.  

I was prepared for some of the contrasts we would encounter on this trip, as we traveled from temperatures in the mid-90s at sea level near the equator to the Himalayas in late October. We chose our clothes carefully. But I forgot about the culinary contrast that would ambush us. The Malay peninsula has one of the world’s highest concentrations of mind-blowingly great food. From there we’ve gone to the place that has the worst food I’ve ever eaten. It’s been a challenging adjustment.

We got our first reminder of what was coming on the Sichuan Airlines flight from Chengdu. Sichuan is a modern Chinese carrier with a good reputation; its attractive Chinese flight attendants wear stylish uniforms. Not long after we took off, one approached me down the aisle, passing out what I assumed would be hand wipes. Instead she extended a tongs and placed into my hand a chunk of hot boiled potato. It came without salt or butter or fork or even a lowly napkin to place it on. It was a portent.

We also got boxed breakfasts, though for some reason mine featured a rubbery egg slab, while Steve got a dish of unseasoned rice porridge, along with two packets of some salty beans and pickled cabbage to mix with it. A bit later, the attendants passed out paper cups containing yak butter tea, that peculiarly Tibetan concoction of the slightly sour yak butter mixed with salt, milk, tea leaves, soda, and hot water. (I would recommend against Starbucks adding it to their menu.)

After our arrival at Lhasa airport, our guide and driver immediately headed for the town of Tsedang where we would stay the first night (Friday). It was lunchtime, and Tashi recommended that we take our lunch and dinner at the hotel restaurant. Though edible, the Tibetan lunch buffet proved less than thrilling, and we took it as another bad omen that the tastiest choice consisted of rubbery globules the size of golf balls that were stuffed with some form of yak meat (one we could only hope was not from the part the spheres resembled). 
Dismayed by the prospect of eating a second time in the restaurant, we decided to check out the two restaurant choices listed for Tsedang in our Lonely Planet guidebook. We were feeling the altitude and moving slowly, but we eventually located the Tibetan one that reportedly featured a “traditional setting, partial picture menu, and lots of local color.” From the street, it promised to have all of that, so we returned for dinner a few hours later. We slipped in the door behind a portly monk in flowing maroon robes, but every head in the place (all Tibetan) swiveled to stare at Steve and me. Waitresses giggled. I slipped into a booth as quickly as possible while Steve went to ask if they had an English menu. That drew guffaws from the serving crew. 
The menu indeed had some photos, but not one word of English, so we couldn’t tell if any given dish included yak tongue, pig intestines, or similar popular ingredients. So we sadly gave up and returned to the hotel (where we were pleasantly surprised to find a good Chinese stir-fried chicken and fried rice).
Saturday we traveled to the site of the oldest monastery in Tibet, and had to eat in Tibetan joints for lunch and dinner. It was a good news/bad news experience. Good news: they were extremely inexpensive (we spent a total of about $14 to feed both of us both meals) and did have (sort of) English menus. Bad news: they didn’t have most of the hundreds of items on the menus, so we wound up eating yak and potato stew for lunch and yak and noodles for dinner.

Good news: both places felt extremely atmospheric and Tibetan. Bad: a big part of the atmosphere was dark and grubby. Good: neither one of has had gut troubles today.

Happily, before arriving in Tibet this trip I read My Journey to Lhasa, a wonderful account by a crazy French Buddhism scholar and adventuress who in the early 1920s posed as a fake Tibetan pilgrim and trekked for four months in the middle of winter in order to become the first Western woman ever to reach Lhasa. Alexandra and her adopted Sikkimese son (a respected lama) slept on the ground, begged for their food, and often hiked for 24 hours without eating or drinking anything. She shrugged off the hardships and claimed to be having a wonderful time. So any time I’m tempted to complain about my yak meat and noodles, all I have to do is think of Alexandra (and NOT think of Singapore.) 
On other fronts, tonight (Sunday) will be our third night at altitude. We’ll be sleeping at about 14,000 feet, and although we both still pant a bit when we climb stairs, neither one of us is experiencing much in the way of altitude sickness. Thankfully, I am NOT waking up in the night feeling as if I’m suffocating (as I did last year). So we’re optimistic that we will continue to be okay when we reach Everest base camp Wednesday morning. 
Along with the food, the Internet in these parts is nothing to rave about. So I plan to keep writing as long as my iPad has a charge. But I may not be able to upload what I write until Thursday night, when we are scheduled to stay in the second largest city in Tibet (Shigatse).

 For foreigners, there are very few ways to get to Tibet. Before the monster earthquakes struck last year, you could be driven from Nepal, but today (18 months later) the roads are still blocked; the border still closed. So you can take the train from Beijing. Or fly from one of only three cities in the world — Kathmandu in Nepal, Beijing, or Chengdu.

That’s why Steve and I went to Chengdu, a place I’d never heard of until recently, even though it’s China’s 5th biggest city, with more than 17 million residents — twice as many as in New York. We flew through Chengdu last October when our trip to Tibet at that time was interrupted by Steve’s mom’s hospitalization. When she passed away in August, we decided to tack a return to Tibet on to the excursion we’d planned to the Malay peninsula. It seemed easiest to travel from Bangkok to Lhasa via Chengdu.

Indeed it was easy to book a flight on Thai Airlines; easy to reserve a hotel in Chengdu on booking.com. We had no trouble finding the taxi queue in front of Chengdu’s impressive airport and giving the driver the hotel address (written in Chinese on the printout of my reservation). We felt like yokels on the ride, gaping at the massive office and apartment buildings, the wide boulevards, everything looking clean and at least as well maintained as Park Avenue in Manhattan. The Wangfujang district in which our hotel was located provided the coolest surprise. With an ancient Zen Buddhist temple complex at the heart of it, sections of the surrounding area have been preserved (or more likely recreated) to look

 historic and traditional. Low wooden buildings house shops selling jewelry, bamboo art objects, intricate silver work, and more, and our hotel was a haven of dark wood and Buddhist art (and a relative bargain at $67 a day, including breakfast). On the surrounding streets, nicely arranged piles of produce spilled out into the sidewalks; old folks gathered around card tables playing mah jong.

We were delighted, but it didn’t take long for us to feel like fish very far from our aquarium. Almost no one spoke any English, and worse, essentially nothing was written in Roman characters.

We pounced on the opportunity to put Google Translate through its paces and can now report that it may do a decent job with French or Spanish, but it is laughable (literally) at translating written Chinese.

At first we weren’t worried. We’d eaten at plenty of hawker centres in Singapore and Malaysia by looking at pictures and pointing. But when we tried that at a little joint near our hotel, the girl behind the counter made it clear many of the dishes displayed weren’t available. We finally secured some noodle-heavy dinner, but we were growing alarmed! Here we were in the capital of one of the great cuisines of the world, and it seemed possible we might not find any place good to eat! Potential catastrophe! (We’d checked out the restaurants in both our hotel and a fancy modern one nearby and rejected both as being unpromising.)

The logical thing to do would be to check Yelp, but of course it doesn’t exist in Chengdu. Even worse: Google doesn’t exist in Chengdu! The Chinese government is still blocking it. I won’t bore anyone with the tedious details of how annoying it is to try and search for things online without a decent search engine. After wasting quite a lot of time being reminded of this, we finally figured out that Apple Maps (which is not blocked) has a “restaurants” filter that’s pretty useful.

Using that, we found a place that sounded promising. We walked to the lively little street it was located on, but then were confused about which of the many eateries was our goal. We picked out the most likely one, walked in, and asked the girl at the front door if it was Weidangjia. She looked confused, but another young woman got up from her nearby table and interceded. She spoke English! With her help, we learned that Weidangjia was actually two doors over. She led us to it and further helped us secure a table and order our food, then she took off to return to her own dinner party in the first restaurant.

Our dinner was delicious and the interaction with the friendly young woman warmed my heart. But I have to say, the rarity of such encounters in China is pretty striking. People don’t seem mean or hostile. But I once again got the sense I’ve gotten on previous visits: that the Chinese in China are under a lot of stress. There are a literal billion of them, and so many are smart and disciplined and hard-working and ambitious. The competition is so fierce. I notice many faces that look harried and brusque and tense.

But maybe that’s just a passing traveler’s misapprehension. Our other stand-out experience in Chengdu both confirmed and contradicted my theories. The mountainous western forests of Sichuan are where pandas live in the wild, and Chengdu is the base for one of the most important panda research centers in the world. When I learned that it’s open to visitors, both Steve and I were eager to go.

The girl at our hotel’s front desk wrote out the research station’s name in Chinese characters, and we caught a taxi in front of Wenshu temple. We went immediately after breakfast, as we’d heard it was best to try and beat the afternoon crowds. I felt optimistic. It was a cool, rainy Thursday morning in late October. How many people could be there? Silly me. Hundreds, many assembled in huge groups, jammed the front plaza. It looked more crowded than the front of San Diego Zoo on a beautiful Labor Day weekend. 

None of that wound up ruining our time there. The paths leading through the grounds pass through dense, darkly graceful bamboo thickets.

We’d read that something like 60 giant pandas live at the research facility, and though many were off display, we still saw around a dozen, including four youngsters devouring bamboo. In the nursery, four infants in incubators were screened from the crowd, but in the adjoining enclosures, three little ones piled up, napping, while one curious guy crawled around exploring.

Cameras clicked. People cooed. Doubtless because of the way the human brain is wired, looking at those big-eyed, round panda faces was making everyone happy. The crowd was probably 99% Chinese, but it felt very convivial and very chill.

Even through my earplugs, through the glass windows and heavy wooden shutters of our hotel room, I could hear the thunderous rain falling Sunday when we woke up in our hotel in George Town on the island of Penang off the northwest coast of Malaysia. It was still pouring when we ate our breakfast around 8 am, and the weather forecast on my phone promised a 50 to 80% chance the downpour would continue throughout the day. As we had only one day in this World Heritage Site city (the one-time capital of all of British Malaysia), we resigned ourselves to venturing forth armed with our umbrellas, raincoats, waterproof sandals, and the determination to ignore any uncomfortable dampness.

Out on the street, the rain brought at least one benefit: lowering the temperature into the high 70s. When we’d ventured out Saturday afternoon after arriving by van from the misty mountains, it had been at least 20 degrees hotter. The intensity of the sun beating down made me reel. In contrast, walking in the hard steady rain surprised me. I hadn’t done it in memory, but it wasn’t bad.

Something else Steve and I haven’t done in a long time is to wander into a strange city with a plan of discovering it only aided by a map and a guidebook. Usually I’m more organized; I could have hired a private guide to tour us around, or joined the food tour that gets good reviews on Trip Advisor. But we also knew that the historic heart of George Town is small enough to cover on foot. Sometimes you just want to poke around and puzzle out a place at your own speed. That’s what was calling to us Sunday.

It paid off. Next to the elaborately British Colonial city hall, we found a “speaker’s corner” deserted in the rain. But in the grassy field next it, we stared at a huge circle of bears, each posed in the identical posture (palms raised high), but uniquely decorated. The field was so flooded we hesitated to make our way to the explanatory sign. Then a Malaysian guy came along and braved the soggy ground, and I followed him to learn that the installation was a salute to international harmony, conceived of by some Berlin artists. There were bears for almost all of the 140-plus countries in the UN, each one painted by artists from its country, to represent their national spirit. I couldn’t resist going further, to see America’s ursine avatar (a bear done up as the Statue of Liberty). I was hooked. Steve at first refused to follow me, declaring that he was afraid there would be leeches in the shallow water. But eventually, he couldn’t resist either.

Moving downward through the alphabet, I had worked my way around to the French bear when I glanced down and noticed something moving in the inch-deep water — long wormy creatures wriggling along at a brisk clip. Leeches?

I thought there was a good chance they were leeches but what a dilemma they presented! I wanted urgently to finish looking at every bear. But I didn’t want any leeches attaching themselves to my vulnerable feet. I finally figured out a way to complete the circuit by walking on the bears’ concrete pedestals. 

I can’t say which was my very favorite; so many were charming. But the Moldovan bear gets the prize for humor. 

The rest of the day brought other discoveries big and small. The charms of Georgetown hadn’t been all that obvious in the streets around our hotel. Traffic was hellish, and even on our short walk Saturday afternoon, the shoddy condition of the city’s walkways appalled us.

We’d read that the whole place looked decrepit 20 years ago, but it had great history and a big enough stock of striking (if dilapidated) architecture to win the World Heritage Site designation in 2008. Since then, money to spruce it up has poured in. 

Today even in the central core, there’s still a roughness to the place; it’s no Brugge or Barcelona. But it has some gems. We’d never anywhere seen anything like the complex created and still owned by the Khoo family, one of the Chinese clans that immigrated to the island in the 1800s. They multiplied and prospered and by the dawn of the 20th century were rich enough to build a temple that reportedly made the gods jealous enough to burn it down. The Khoos shrugged and built a replacement (the one we visited). It’s hard to imagine how its predecessor could have been more ornate and gorgeous.

Even more impressive to Steve and me was a volume on display from the family’s genealogical records. They went back more than 1000 years. 

When we got hungry, we walked into a seafood joint in the center of town and asked if they served fried fish. A friendly young woman led us to a table piled high with whole fish and directed us to pick out a good one.

She weighed the red snapper we chose and said it would cost 40 ringgits (about $9.50). A few minutes later, the fish appeared on our table, reincarnated.

Working only with forks and spoons, it didn’t take us long to reduce him to rubble (he was delicious)..

By late afternoon, we were ready to head back to the hotel, but the rain, which had disappeared for a while in the middle of the day, returned with a vengeance. Happily, we were just a block or two away from one of George Town’s many small but intriguing museums. The Upside Down Museum is probably the cheesiest, but I’m a sucker for anything this weird. I wondered whether we’d be disoriented walking from one room to another in which all the visual cues were upside down. Now that we’ve done it, I can report: the answer is no. The main thing visitors experience is being bossed around by young Malaysian employees who tell you how to pose to look the weirdest and then take your picture in room after room. It wasn’t all that interesting. But on the other hand, I now have quite a collection of photos like the following:

More than any of the sights, what the guidebooks rave most about is the food to be had on Penang. To me it felt like a mixed blessing. From our very first meal, it seemed astoundingly good. For lunch Saturday, we walked in the infernal heat to a nearby Chinese family restaurant filled with what appeared to be locals. The fried rice was the best I’ve ever tasted, the rice shot through with subtle flavors and studded with prawns and tender bites of chicken and finely minced vegetables. We ate it with chicken in savory plum sauce, soybean pockets stuffed with prawns and served on crispy noodles that melted into silky smooth strands, and home-made tofu fried and then braised in clay pots along with minced beef and salted fish. Every bite made me swoon, a revelation and so seductive we had to consume almost everything they put before us. (With beer, it came to less than $20). Stuffed as we were, we nonetheless went out for excellent north Indian food Saturday night.

Sunday lunch was that super-fresh fried snapper, and for our final dinner in Malaysia, we walked to a food court just a few blocks from our hotel. It wasn’t as big as some of the places we saw in Singapore, but I couldn’t count all the dishes available. Culinary inventions from Indian and Japan and Korea, a dizzying number of Chinese and Malaysian favorites, even Italian, Mexican, Middle Eastern choices. Our stomachs were only big enough to accommodate three separate dishes plus rice and beer and durian ice cream. To see all those interesting choices but not get to try the vast majority of them felt cruel. For all that’s wonderful about home, there’s no place there where we can eat like they do it Penang.

Steve and I now know how the tea gets into our teabags (on those occasions when we drink tea instead coffee, i.e. rarely.) We learned all about it Friday in Cameron Highlands. This region of Malaysia is an archetypal former British “hill station,” shockingly cool, high, and misty — in all ways perfect for growing Camellia sinensis. I’d been on a tea plantations in Uganda and Rwanda, but had forgotten how glorious they can be. Few agricultural crops are more beautiful. In Cameron Highlands the sculpted bushes blanket the steep slopes and rolling valleys in a quilt of greens so bright and intense they make the Irish countryside look insipid.

We had arrived in the town of Tanah Rata late Thursday afternoon, after a trying almost-7-hour journey from the jungle, so we didn’t feel like doing more than checking into our charming B&B (the comically named Do Chic In), dropping off our dirty laundry in town, having a few drinks, and eating a good Indian dinner. Also, after consulting with one of our hostesses at the guesthouse, we had her book us into a half-day tour of some of Cameron Highlands’ most popular activities. 
Visiting the Boh tea factory (founded in the 1920s by a Scottish family that still owns it) is near the top of the list, though as it turns out, tea-processing isn’t anywhere near as complicated as wine-making; we blew through the factory pretty quickly. Basically you dry the freshly picked leaves overnight, then crumble them, let them “ferment” for an hour or two, toast them, and screen them into different particle sizes. All this was being done on the original machinery installed in the factory almost 90 years ago.

I popped briefly into the gift shop, and Steve and I tasted two varieties of the Boh in the tea room, but the hour allotted to our stay at the plantation felt more than adequate. In contrast, I wished we had more time in the Mossy Forest that lies further up the mountain. Less than a week before, we’d been dazzled by the magnificent artificial Cloud Forest biome in Singapore, where we’d learned about the wonders of these rare and fragile ecospheres. Now, suddenly, unexpectedly, we were in an actual example of one!

It was magical. A penetrating fog pressed in around us, but there was enough light to take in the spectacle of moss covering almost every surface. The sole exception was underfoot, where the layers of compressed compost had built up over the ages to a depth of 12-15 feet. It gave a bouncy quality to walking on the flat stretches, though mostly the path wound upward for the short distance it extended.

After the forest, everything else we did in the highlands was an anticlimax, if pleasant. The whole area is all so British; we got the most intense dose of that when we had tea and tea sandwiches and scones and clotted cream in a dead-perfect clone of an English country pub. 

We tried to burn off some of the calories by taking a long walk back to the guesthouse, detouring through a state park with a beautiful waterfall. Then I got my head and neck massaged (less than $10 for 30 minutes with a master), while Steve did email in a nearby coffee shop. In the evening, we ate a Chinese feast cooked by the guesthouse owners (for about $6.50 per person) and discussed politics with the two Dutch couples also staying there.

Now we’ve moved on to our final stop in Malaysia, the city of George Town on the island of Penang. Once again, we’re sweating profusely and eating some of the best food in Asia.

A big percentage of the Malay peninsula was traditionally covered with tropical rainforest, but big chunks of it either have been or are being clear-cut, often to create palm-oil plantations. We’ve passed many logging trucks and sawmills laden with the stout corpses of mahogany and other tropical hardwoods, many a hundred or more years old. But we have the sense that harvesting and selling the wood isn’t the main driver of this environmental devastation; rather it’s the boundless appetite for the oil to fry up all the rice and samosas and other savory dishes.

Still, some nature preserves have been created, and a huge one is the Taman Negara National Park, said to be at least 130 million years old. It’s not on the railway line, so not easy to get to. But Steve and I were determined see it. Monday we endured a twisty 3-hour ride from Kuala Lumpur in a van owned by a big Chinese Malay outfit. The van took us to the Tembeling River where, after a quick lunch, we climbed into a motorized pirogue for the 3-hour river trip to the national park.

I have to report: there are aspects to trips like this that I find enchanting. You’re low enough so you can dip your hand into the cafe au lait water, and the reflections of the jungle along the bank often take my breath away. But three hours is hard on the butt and back and knees (mine, anyway). The heat and whine of the engine and monotony of the passing scenery are natural soporifics. Both of us dozed for part of the ride, and by the time we reached our destination, we agreed we’d prefer to take the van only for the return trip.

We had only one day (two nights) at the “resort” next to the river, just within the park boundaries. With so little time, we practically raced from one activity to another. If a bit frantic, this schedule certainly gave us a taste for the place, which, if you like ancient equatorial rainforests, is magnificent.

Highlights for me were the daytime outings. First thing on Tuesday morning, we trekked 3 hours, climbing from the riverbank a thousand feet up to a vantage point that offered great glimpses of the surrounding country. The change in elevation took us from the steam bath at the bottom to sections that felt almost temperate. And the forest was fantastic, dense and tangled and home to creatures ranging from pit vipers to macaques and gibbons to aboriginal humans who still hunt with blowpipes and poison darts. (The scariest jungle denizen we saw were just the huge golden orb spiders still clinging to the elaborate webs they construct daily).

The flashiest part of our jungle trek (and most-advertised to tourists) was a canopy walk said to be the longest in the world, more than a half-kilometer long and strung from a series of six or seven platforms affixed to huge trees. At the highest point, it swayed almost 150 feet above the forest floor. Even there, at the center of it, the tallest trees stretched far higher over our heads.

In the afternoon, we took a riverboat upstream to visit a tiny village of Bateq people — some of Malaysia’s Orang Asli (“original people”). They and other tribes ARE the people who still support themselves largely by hunting forest animals with poison darts. In fact, a big part of our time with them consisted in learning how they make the blowpipes and darts — and trying our skill at hitting a target with them. Some of the details of Bateq’s lives are pretty astonishing: it sounds like they’re still largely hunter-gatherers, with some tribes more nomadic than others. Our guide claimed that the villagers we were visiting pack up their simple belongings and move pretty often — every time one of the group members dies. He further explained that the Bateq dispose of their dead by wrapping them up in leaves, putting them on platforms, and hoisting them up huge trees deep in the jungle.

I don’t regret doing either of the night activities we engaged in. On the first evening, we set off a little before 9 pm on a walk in search of exotic jungle fauna. We didn’t spot any sun bears or black panthers or elephants or Sumatran tigers (mostly they’re glimpsed in remoter areas of the park). But we did ooh and ah over a very large black scorpion and a couple of shy green tree snakes. Even if we’d seen nothing, we heard enough buzzing and clicking and chirping and croaking to make me feel Yoda would have felt right at home here.

Steve felt the second night’s activity was a bust, but I found it both wild and educational, in its own way. It had been billed as a “night safari” in which one would be driven along the edge of the park to look for bigger wild animals from the comfort of a vehicle. But the vehicle turned out to be a small extended cab pick-up truck. The back was open and equipped with two rough benches running down the long axis. Five of us crammed in there, including Steve and me, while two other guys and a spotter/guide had to sit on the roof. (“Just don’t tell my mother about this,” yelped one of the tourists, a tall, good-humored rheumatologist from Amsterdam.)

We tore down the highway and within minutes stopped to admire something marvelous: a white sloth running along an electrical wire. I’ve never seen a sloth before and didn’t think they could run that fast. He must have been scared of us. In a moment or two, however, he settled into that famous, cartoonish and comical slow-motion amble along the high wire. We drove on, and after a while turned off onto a rough dirt road that at first took us through a palm-oil plantation. I found it creepy, dense and vaguely menacing with all those thick palm fronds not far overhead; I kept thinking about the huge bird-eating spiders that live in these parts. But soon we moved out of the plantation and for an hour or so drove through ruined countryside littered with the corpses of dead palms and occasional clumps of human garbage.

The spotters shone powerful flashlights out both sides of the truck. They lighted little of interest: some wandering cows, a large owl, a small feral cat. Distant lightning flashed. For mile after mile, we saw nothing moving in the moonscape all around us. It seemed exactly what one should find when you cut down a magnificent forest, plant palm trees, and later abandon them: almost nothing that’s alive and wonderful. 

[I wrote this a few days ago, but couldn’t post it from the jungle, where the Internet was slow as a sloth.]

When I’m planning a visit to a city in a country I know little about, I often google the phrase “36 Hours in [City Name].” “That’s the title of the popular New York Times travel column that offers itineraries for slapdash visits to intriguing locations around the world. It’s been mocked for its unrealistically fast pacing. But I’ve gotten good ideas from it for locales as far-flung as Hanoi and Bogota.
I didn’t have time to do much research in preparation for our one-day visit to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. But while I blogged on our train ride Sunday from Singapore, Steve burrowed into the aging library copy of “Lonely Planet Malaysia, Singapore & Brunei” that we brought along. He supplemented it with some fact-gathering courtesy of Google and learned enough to create an entertaining day. I’ve summarized it here for anyone planning a visit to Kuala Lumpur soon.

5:15 pm Sunday — Arrive at Kuala Lumpur’s central railroad station and buy a $2.17 ticket for the taxi ride to our hotel, the Majestic. The Majestic is a much better class of joint than we normally stay at. People compare it to the Raffles in Singapore, where the least expensive rooms these days fetch around $700 a night. When I learn that I can book a double (Majestic) room for less than $100, I can’t resist. And when we check in, the desk clerk murmurs that for an extra $60 or so per night, we will get access to their sumptuous buffet breakfast along with a large suite in the historic old building (instead of the prosaic new tower) and a butler who will serve us our breakfast in our suite if we wish. We can have our dirty clothes laundered for free. We can drink up all the contents of the minibar, again at no charge. And we can participate in the high tea and cocktail hour with all the booze and munchies we want. This too will be complimentary. I find it irresistible, and it proves to be a decision we do not regret. 

6:30 pm — In the hotel’s “library,” we are plied with cocktails, good South African wine  and enough tea sandwiches and hot hors d’oeuvres to extinguish 90% of our appetite. We nonetheless tipsily make our way to the “Colonial Cafe,” where we consume one Colonial salad and one bowl of Mulligatawny soup. We return to our winsomely comfy quarters and are sound asleep by 10.
8 am Monday — We eat too much of the buffet breakfast, but cannot help ourselves because the Malay pastries and crepes are so intriguing (if kind of creepy). Also, the contestants for Miss Malaysia Universe 2017 are in the hotel this day for 12 hours of instruction in makeup, hair, and comportment. It’s fascinating to watch them file in and pick at their Malaysian pastries.

9 am — We hit the street, and it’s our lucky day. Instead of yesterday’s gray, rainy, sweltering weather (which made the city look bleak), the skies today are sunny and blue. Under them, Kuala Lumpur looks jaunty and energetic. The Majestic is very close to the Tun Abdul Razak Heritage Park, and we follow a winding path through it, noting its how many alluring attractions it contains: the world’s biggest aviary, an inviting planetarium, a butterfly garden, an orchid garden. We don’t have time to visit any of them. But if we had an extra day, we could readily pass it here. Instead we get lost, trying to find our way out of the park. The temperature is climbing well past 90. Our printed street map is not to scale, and Google maps is lnon-functional. It takes a while, but we finally make our way to Little India. 

11 am — A huge chunk of the ethnic enclave appears to be torn up for reconstruction. Many big chunks of the city are, which compounds the inherently confusing jumble of streets. We resolve to come back to Little India in the evening, when it’s not so hot and explore further. For now we head to KL Tower, one of the tallest structures in the world. Kuala Lumpur has many skyscrapers, but somehow the city feels very different from Singapore. The infrastructure is more dilapidated. Walkways are crumbling. Signage is poor, and it’s much harder to find our way around. That said, Steve’s research online has made us aware that Malaysia is about as prosperous as Greece, Poland, and Portugal, and many times richer than Thailand, the Philippines, or Indonesia.

Noon — Kuala Lumpur’s tallest buildings, the Petronas Towers, are closed on Mondays, and this happens to be a Monday. But the KL Tower is almost as tall and equipped with the glass-bottomed viewing platforms that have become a minor fad in recent years. For about $22 per person, we spend a highly satisfying hour ogling the 360-degree views and experiencing the glass-bottom viewing experience.

The KL Tower…

…and the great view of the Petronus Towers, even taller.

1 pm –We walk to Jalan Alor, an open-air dining street in the city center where the guidebook promises one can get every imaginable Malay or Chinese dish. Indeed there are many frog dishes on the menu of the place we plop down in, along with about 200 other choices. We eat rice, barbecued pork, savory soup dumplings, and beer for less than $18 for two.

2:30 pm — We’re not far from the city’s monorail line, and we quickly figure out how to use it to get to the Chinatown. But we’re appalled that the automatic gates that should keep people from falling 30 feet to the street below are broken. It gives a whole new urgency to the injunction “Mind the gap!” 

2:45 pm — We stroll up the main pedestrian street in the Chinatown, and I buy a chillable eye mask for a little under $2. But we don’t linger. The day is still sweltering, and even though the Chinatown is close to our hotel, it can be devilishly hard to navigate from one point to another in this town.

The main pedestrian street in KL’s Chinatown
3:30 pm — Back at the Majestic, we gratefully ease into one of the two disappearing-edge pools. It feels like paradise. We linger, then shower, then I finish writing my last blog post about Singapore. 

6 pm — We return for more of the South African wine and filling cold and hot snacks. The staff dazzles us with their attention and solicitousness. They promise to book a taxi to take us to the travel agency where we need to go first thing the next morning.

7:15 pm — We decide we’re so full we don’t even need soup or salad. We also can’t muster the energy to make our way to Little India in the heat. Instead we chill in the air-conditioned comfort of our suite. 

10 p.m. — Asleep again. 

5:22 am Tuesday — I hear the first Muslim call to prayer of the morning, issuing from the large mosque next to our hotel. It’s more melodic here than what I remember in the Middle East and North Africa. Somehow it reminds me of a Gregorian chant. It almost soothes me back to sleep, but we have to pack, eat more of the monster buffet breakfast, and head to the travel agency, where a van will transport us on the next phase of our Malaysian adventure: a journey to Malaysia’s vast national park in the middle of a 130-million-year-old tropical rainforest. 

For our last day in Singapore, we took a closer look at a couple of the city’s most dumbfounding landmarks. One, weirdly, is a public park, the Gardens by the Bay, built in 2012 at a cost of more than a billion Singapore dollars, and now one of the city’s premier tourist draws. It’s free to enter much of it, but you have to pay to enter the two enormous “biodomes.” One of them, the Cloud Forest, was the most fantastic plant-exposition-space I’ve ever seen.

We got there early to beat the crowds and took the elevator up to the top of the 10-story-tall artificial mountain that’s at the dome’s heart. It’s been planted with many of the rare and beautiful plants that grow at high altitudes in the tropics. From the top, you stroll down walkways that simultaneously bring you close to the exquisite flora while taking in dizzying views of Singapore’s science-fictional skyline.

I was almost rubbing my eyes like a cartoon character at all the beauty — botanical, architectural, sculptural. After we staggered out, all but dazed by it, we moved on to visit the adjoining Flower Dome, which proved to be well done but paled in comparison to the wonders of the Cloud Forest and seemed much more mundane (probably because it showcases plants from the world’s drier Mediterranean regions — like our home.)

We ate lunch at a hawker center within the park then did a lightning tour of Marina Bay Sands, the eye-popping hotel and casino that adjoins the urban gardens. It’s very Vegas (perhaps in part because it’s owned by Nevada gaming magnate Sheldon Adelson).

But we weren’t sneering at it; that’s hard to do. In fact, after returning to our hotel to pack and eating our final dinner (in Chinatown), we returned to the enormous plaza between the Sands and the reservoir (aka Marina Bay). We’d heard that a free, superb sound and light show was presented nightly at 8. When we arrived shortly before then, hundreds of people had gathered in anticipation of it. 

I wondered: what do you do to impress a 21st-century horde? I found out that what works pretty well is to puff a wall of fog at several spots along the waterfront, with the glittery Singaporean nightscape behind it. Then with rousing music surrounding the crowd, you project on that ephemeral misty “screen” primal images of human happiness: young lovers kissing, parents gazing rapturously at their babies, children romping in the surf, beaming elders. If incoherent, it also somehow felt magical.

We didn’t linger, but rather, as soon as the mist dissipated, Steve and I raced through the passageways back to the Gardens by the Bay, to ascend to the top of one of its “supertrees.”

On the roof, we sipped wine and gazed some more at the incomparable skyline, until a few minutes before 8:45, when we descended to take in the free spectacle staged nightly in the supertree plaza. Music began to pulse, and the trees sprang to lighted life — changing color and all but dancing to the sound track, which consisted exclusively of songs from late 20th-century American and British musicals: Chicago, Evita, Les Miserables, Fiddler on the Roof, and more. This was both oddly beautiful and simply odd, and once again I felt ecstatic to be a part of the epic cultural mash-up.

Among the many delicious aspects of our visit to Singapore has been the food. Our guide on the bike tour that first morning was blunt. “Every single Singaporean is a foodie,” he declared. Most people don’t cook at home, he said, at least in part because they can choose from such a vast profusion of excellent dishes, many available at rock-bottom prices. Of course it’s also possible to pay a lot in restaurants. Singapore regularly shows up on lists of the world’s most expensive cities. But it also is blessed with dozens upon dozens of so-called “hawker centres,” each offering a head-spinning number of Items to eat.

 

We did most of our eating in the centers. They’re are a bit like American food courts, except they lack air-conditioning and an industrialized approach to food production. A handful may have branches in a couple of centers, but most aren’t chains. Everything is cooked on the spot after the order has been placed. I read that Michelin’s recently published guide to Singaporean dining includes a number of hawker centre stalls.

Some of the offerings were too weird for us to consider:

Still, we were reasonably adventurous. At the recommendation of our bike-tour guide, we ate barbecued sting ray…

… and oyster omelette…

….and something that the locals call “carrot cake.”

On our last night, we sought out one of the most beloved local dishes — Hainan chicken rice — at the stall in Chinatown where Anthony Bourdain swooned over its deliciousness (His photo is prominently displayed on the Tian Tian stall.)

It was tasty, but we thought our noodles with roast duck was even more irresistible. We gobbled both dishes down with stir-fried bean sprouts and good Singaporean beer, and the total came to just over $15 for the two of us.

There are so many things we didn’t have time to try —  even at McDonald’s! 

It makes me imagine coming back just to eat more.