Malaysia is Truly Asia- from the Deep Blue Sea to the Rolling Green Hills…

That’s the ad campaign for Malaysia – catchy, eh? It really is an amazing and diverse country, and we were fortunate to visit it, slipping out just as the monsoon season was about to begin! Malaysia is a nation of 22 million people; it borders Thailand and Indonesia. It’s a multi-cultural country, a blend of Chinese, Indian, and Malay peoples with different languages, religions, and cultures, who manage to get along pretty well and share a country. The predominate feel and population is Muslim. Dating back to colonial times, religious authorities govern spiritual life while politicians take care of the rest. While we were there, a US married couple in their 60s was asked to produce their marriage certificate at 2 am at a hotel. It was quite a public scandal! What we take for granted!

We started out on a beautiful island called Tioman – it’s a tropical paradise where, years ago, they filmed the movie version of South Pacific. We recently got our scuba certification, and Tioman is a great diving spot, so if you check out the pics, you’ll see both land and underwater shots! It’s our first experiment with underwater photography, using a disposable camera, but still pretty cool pics. Scuba is amazing!! And an unintended by product is that you just chill out on the beach when you are done. Very relaxing – and they had an amazing inexpensive spa!

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Next we headed to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capitol and largest city. We were there briefly, but we did see the famous Petronas Towers, the tallest building in the world when it was finished in 1999. And I included the pictures David took while touring around while I was at work!

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We then headed to Georgetown, also know as Penang, the country’s second largest city, where I had several days of meetings with colleagues and David searched out the good hawker stands for us. For just a few ringits you can try nasi goring with anchovies, sizzling noodles, and some great frog porridge, if you’re feeling adventurous. Some places actually have the live frogs out front – so you KNOW it’s fresh.

On our last weekend in Malaysia, we went up to the beautiful, breezy and cool mountain country of the Cameron Highlands. We shot and produced a great video at the Boh Tea Estates (now with voiceover! Another Hong Kong Chronicles technical breakthrough – the TALKIE!). You can see and hear it at:

Youtube link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U-wHS2gKtY

The tea plantations are spectacular, with steep rolling hills in numberless shades of green -- but the Cameron Highlands actually had many other attractions. They cut the tea at 3 weeks so all different parts were at different points of growth – hence all the colors. We visited a lush Mossy Forest, with tigers and elephants! OK, they were tiger lilies and elephant grass, but very pretty. The cup-shaped flower in the pics is the pitcher plant, which gathers water, than lures in insects and gobbles them. We also went to a “butterfly farm” that had several other critters, from bunnies to stick insects, but which we found rather sad as they were caged. Much better was the strawberry farm, where you can do “self-plucking,” for a fair price. I let David do the self-plucking! We saw the beautiful Sam Po monastery set in the hills. And as usual, we ate experimentally, including a record of eating something from each hawker stand one night and a nice Indian sidewalk place with banana leaves for plates. Check out the visuals of Cameron Highlands:

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I headed on to the Philippines for more meetings and David flew back to HK. However, the morning we were leaving the newspaper headline outside our hotel room door read “Saddam Hangs.” Made me a little nervous to be in a Muslim country!