Somewhere, and I’m not entirely sure where, there is a journal with this whole story in it. The one thing I do know is that it isn’t here in my house in Toronto because I’ve rooted around for it a few times. It’s probably in a box stored at my father’s condo in Surrey, or it could be in Socar’s apartment in Vancouver. It’s definitely not in Pennsylvania anymore, if it ever did make it there amongst the assortment of items stuffed in luggage cross-country. I’ll have to see what I can conjure up from memory. And, if I ever finally get all my things together under one roof (it’s been 5+ years and it hasn’t happened yet), I might even dig up that travel journal, which is one of several, to see if I remembered all this correctly!
Next weekend is Chinese New Year’s, and since I won’t be here I thought I’d scan a few photos from the one time I’ve actively celebrated Chinese New Year — 17 years ago.
In January of 1993 I was on a little island called Tioman off the east coast of Malaysia. I had a very loose plan that I’d formulated while lying in a beach hammock for the better part of a week. There I would read books, listen to music, watch the waves crash on the beach and think about the future. The most pressing item of any given day was keeping the monkeys from stealing our clothes and avoiding the giant lizards that would jaywalk across the paths between the beach and the hut. I had time to think about what my next step would be, and I’d just decided that next step would be to eventually reach Penang and buy a plane ticket to Britain. Penang is on the northwest side of Malaysia, so I looked at a map and opted to head west and follow the coast north instead of taking an inland route.
Originally my one-way ticket from Australia was Sydney-Auckland-Singapore-Kuala Lumpur, but after the frenetic pace of Singapore I escaped to tranquil Tioman and chose to do the rest overland, skipping the Singapore-KL leg altogether. I had no real timeline except my money was running out, and Malaysia is a developed country and therefore not cheap.
In Mersing my plan was to negotiate a lift to Melaka. I’d spotted a few travellers who were also on the Tioman-Mersing ferry with me, and I asked them if they were heading to Melaka. I was in luck! There were two German guys, a Dutch girl, and a Canadian guy from Richmond (south of Vancouver) — one of only a handful of Canadians I met while overseas and ended up travelling with.
They were all heading to Melaka for Chinese New Year, but that meant we would need to hire a car (and driver) that could fit five people PLUS backpacks. It took a while since we were in a crowd of people at the ferry terminal with the exact same idea and most of the cars were too small, but — hallelujah — we finally found a driver with a Mercedes who would take all of us. I’m sure it wasn’t legal, but we were crossing the country after all, and there was some urgency to the situation, the situation being that practically the whole country was hitting the road to Melaka, too. If we were ever going to make it there and still have a place to stay, we’d better hurry.
We hurried, alright… to a series of near collisions! Every 40 seconds! I had to shut my eyes nearly the whole way to Melaka, except my whole life was flashing before my eyelids, all 20 years of it, so I alternated between a) covering my face with my hands every time I saw the bumper of another car careen in front of our taxi, and b) watching in abject horror as the driver yanked the steering wheel over to pass other vehicles ALONG THE SHOULDER. Which wouldn’t be such a bad idea except he wasn’t looking for other vehicles doing the same thing. Everybody was doing the same thing! Malaysian highways are mostly good, believe it or not (they collect tolls, which is an unusual sight — a Muslim Malaysian woman with a headscarf in an ultramodern toll booth on a pristine highway in the jungle), but when they’re jammed full of vehicles, it’s anarchy! I also hitchhiked in Malaysia, but it wasn’t until after the madness of Chinese New Year.
Since I was the shortest in our group, I was assigned to the middle space between the two Germans, but imagine six people jammed tightly in one vehicle overflowing with backpacks that didn’t all quite fit in the trunk. Seat belts? What seat belts? Our visibility was compromised, and so was our ability to do anything but hope that our breakneck speed would get us to Melaka instead of send us into the ditch or into the path of an oncoming car. We were swerving all over the road and weaving in and out of traffic while hanging on for DEAR LIFE.
[The windmill is a throwback to Malaysia's colonial days, they were ruled by the Dutch in 1641. They were also ruled by the the Portuguese in 1511 and the British in 1795.]
Since I’m writing this 17 years later, the outcome was obviously in our favour, but I’ll never forget that crazy hellride between Mersing and Melaka. It was epic! Hours of epic! (3-4 hours, according to this local.) By the time we reached Melaka it was very late at night and I believe it was the Dutch girl who we were counting on to get us into this particular guesthouse. This part’s fuzzy, but I think she’d stayed there before and had rung the owners to tell them we were on our way. Somehow I doubt they were expecting five travellers, but we were five paying travellers and money talks in these parts.
I’m sure we all slept like babies that night.
The next day, which was the official Chinese New Year’s, we celebrated being alive to celebrate Chinese New Year’s. There were a couple of English blokes staying at the guesthouse who joined us in the evening when we headed out to participate in Melaka’s New Year festivities. In the darkness and crowds we lost one of them to the deep ditches along the side of the road that carries all manner of waste, and the only reason I know this is because we didn’t see him until the next day when he informed us of the reason for his sudden disappearance. I would’ve felt more sorry for him had I not been recovering from my own sorry state, which I’ll get to in a minute.
The group of us wandered the busy streets of Melaka, searching for a party, and we found one: the other English lad (the one who managed to avoid the ditch trap) saw us walk by and waved us into this restaurant. In the top photo, he’s the one with the glasses, beaming. Can you see why he’s beaming? Yeah, all that booze was FREE! I know what you’re thinking… how on earth could it be free? I suppose technically we couldn’t call it free, but the owner of the restaurant had fallen asleep in his chair, which for all intents and purposes, meant that there was no bill. Which made it free, right?
Using that flawed logic, we saw it as an open invitation to squeeze ourselves into the restaurant and eat and drink whatever was put in front of us. That night, it started out with peanuts and Carlsberg. Cases and cases of Carlsberg. Every time I looked over, someone was carrying a case of Carlsberg to distribute bottles around the restaurant. Malaysia has its own beer, but for some reason we were provided with an endless supply of the Danish stuff. Who were we to say no?
From what I can recall, I think the English bloke said the owner was already giving it all away for free, and after he fell asleep no-one could rouse him again. The generosity continued without him.
I don’t remember how long this continued, but I distinctly remember sometime in the evening bottles of Hennessy cognac getting passed around, too. By this time we were all extremely merry and probably in dire need of some real food to counteract the peanuts sloshing around in our bellies. I kept passing on the Hennessy because I was full of beer. Last I checked, cognac and beer aren’t in the same family and therefore I would be asking for trouble if I introduced the cognac to my beer-saturated system. No thanks, I kept saying every time the Hennessy crossed my path, no thanks, no thanks, no thanks. Thanks, no. No. Thanks. No. No thanks.
The next thing I vaguely recall is leaving the restaurant with the group and dancing in the streets. The firecrackers were going off left, right, and centre, and people had set up speakers to blare dance music. We were all dancing and saying Gong Xi Fat Choy! to everyone. That’s pretty much the last specific thing I remember when I woke up the next day. Oh, and another bottle of Hennessy appearing out of nowhere while we were dancing. They told me later that I said yes to that Hennessy, for some reason, after saying no to all the previous Hennessys, and combined it with a few puffs of someone’s spliff. Let that be a lesson to my 20-year old self!
I was feeling so rotten and inhuman I spent most of the next day in bed at the guesthouse. I had some company, though, since the English lad who fell in the ditch was also convalescing. He filled in the blanks for me: apparently I was shortly incapacitated by that Hennessy (assisted by all the preceding booze et al), and the others couldn’t carry me all the way back to the guesthouse. They had to hitch a lift with a car for my semi-conscious body! The amazing part, in my view, was that they were able to recover my flip flops (each went its own way) in the big street mess, my daypack was fully intact with contents accounted for — passport, money, the new music player I’d spent all day haggling for in Singapore, the camera I spent a second day haggling for in Singapore, and everything else.
The only casualty of my foolishness in Melaka was my dignity. I’ve had many misadventures abroad, but that particular incident ranked pretty high on the foolishness scale. But I have lots of good memories of Malaysia, especially the food, the scenery, and the kindness of people, especially when I was hitchhiking there (stories for another day). Whenever I make it to Denmark, however, I will drink anything BUT Carlsberg…
Video for today: Bill Cosby again, in one of his classic comedy performances about drinking
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