The main goal of the drive to Kuala Selangor was the fireflies on the Selangor river. There’s a small boat-launch where tourists hire electric boats (or rowboats) to cruise around in the dark. The fireflies only live on the mangrove trees, so periodically along the banks an entire tree will be lit up with thousands of blinking lights.
Of course, all of this was completely unphotographable. So, instead, here’s are shots of the river town where we had our dinner.
I’m not sure why this was part of the tour, but at some point we stopped and rode a strange-looking jitney up a hill to look at some old European fortifications which overlook the straight. The main draw of the hilltop is the silverleaf monkeys. Ice-cream vendors sell green beans to the tourists who are then overrun by bean-hungry monkeys.
So far, most of what I’ve seen of the countryside of peninsular Malaysia consists of palm-oil plantations. Our tour-guide Saan’s father used to work as an engineer at an oil factory, so Saan is full of palm-related factoids.
The trees are replanted every 20 years or so, and start producing fruit two or three years after planting. Old trees are shredded into mulch to feed the newly-planted trees.
In many ways this strikes me as an ideal permaculture system — there’s no need to till the soil, harvesting happens at a low level throughout the year (the palms fruit continuously, so workers walk up and down the rows every few weeks cutting down the largest fruits.) Also there’s a fair amount of undergrowth left under the canopy so there’s some biodiversity — lots of ferns and other greenery provide shelter for birds and reptiles. Some plantations let turkeys run in the orchards to forage in the undergrowth.
Right now millions of acres of primary rainforest are being cut down to make way for palm plantations, and that’s clearly a net loss. But compared with corn or cane fields, I have to think that palm orchards are a fairly mild offense on the agribusiness spectrum. They also seem like a great candidate for charcoal sequestration.
We pulled onto a side road to look at some worker housing and a processing plant. The housing is largely abandoned, as the plantation workers have prospered and moved out of plantation housing and into a nearby town, and the rows of houses are bordered with gracefully ruined flower gardens.
Today we’re taking a long, slow, daytime train from Kuala Lumpur to Butterworth, and then a ferry from Butterworth to Georgetown in Penang.
This train is the slowest transport option along this route, and I’ve selected it so I can engage in my favorite pastime, looking out a train window while listening to old-timey radio shows on my iPod.
Unfortunately, my assigned seat is next to a completely filthy and fogged up window. I’ve moved to a different row so that I can see outside, but I may get bumped at any moment.
The next several groups of photos are from a short tour we took last night: A van-ride from Kuala Lumpur to Kuala Selagor.
I was really impressed at the handiwork of these guys — they turned this escalator completely inside-out.
They must’ve been a bit smug about it too, because when I started snapping pictures they lined up and posed like big game hunters.
The next few sets of photos are from Chinatown in Singapore. It’s Lunar (aka ‘Chinese’) New Year next week so there are zillions of temporary booths and candy shops set up.
I’m on a train, on the way to the border. Because of yet another pointless dispute between Singapore and Malaysia, we’ve already officially entered Malaysia (this happened at the train station) but we’ll have to get off the train and walk through Singapore emigration in a few minutes. I think that means that legally speaking we’re in two countries at once.
I’m in a dorm-style sleeping car. Mom and Dad have a private compartment at the other end of the train — I tried to find them a few minutes ago but their door must be closed and I didn’t want to wake up every passenger in search for them, so I just ducked into a random empty compartment and took photos there. It’s small, but quite a bit bigger (and nicer) than the room I rented with Aric in Tokyo. And it has a private bathroom!
I just packed up my room to move out — Mom and Dad and I are going on a brief tour of Malaysia. Among the debris on my desk was the above chopstick wrapper which I carried here from Japan because I couldn’t bear to throw it out.
I don’t think this kind of thing can possibly be accidental.
The only thing requiring explanation here is this next bromeliad photo. There were a couple of buildings which were disguised by having bromeliads stapled all over their outside (I wonder what the r-value is?). That meant that from any distance the buildings were invisible, and they kind of jumped out at you as you approached.
