Malaysia’s syrupy name suggests that it’s a pretty sweet country, but I wouldn’t know much about that. I never made it past the edge of Kuala Lumpur, where I showed the monkeys at Batu Caves what a real monkey looks like. Kuala Lumpur was a most underrated hub, a node all lines and travelers went through without befriending it all that much as a destination. There was no good reason for it, only a self-fulfilling prophecy – as a scandalously cheap Air-Asia hub, it was too good a gateway to stay. For those who lingered just a little longer though, it had plenty of tricks, and green, and it was yummy, and young and old, and diverse, diverse, diverse.
places / stories
Kuala Lumpur / Time Travel and the Apocalypse
Silence was a scarce commodity in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown. Good. „Pull your surface inside out and wrap yourself around me, city,“ I said. The hostel’s lobby was up a skinny staircase inside a lanky 3-4-5-dunno-story building. In my room a bunch of dudes. Good ones. We were a Kiwi-chimneysweeper, a Chileno-Sandalero, a Japanese kind-heart, and a me. One gave me a gift, the other some South America, and the last one – who was the first one – deep words. There was liquor and laughter and maybe cigarettes on a tiny balcony I seem to vaguely recall, and a quick-dry bond held us together for some days before we parted ways for-probably-ever.
One day, we left the hostel cave to check out some sort of city Grand Prix and, wait, Wikipedia is telling me just now that it was the first and only time it was held. Lucky me who couldn’t have cared less about its existence or non-existence and a bunch of wheels going round and round and round and round in tenacious circles.
What else… heavy, heavy rain, drops the size of water balloons, plummeting down from black thunder-skies; Dosas that were even cheaper than in India – Kuala Lumpur was suspiciously cheap in those days, somewhere around recession-cheap – and just as good; and a Quebecois instant-buddy who I surfed a wavelength or two with before he ghosted me. We had team-talked the Chinese hostel owner out of being a racist when he refused a black guy who was an actor on a local soap, and we had talked about lost loves and such depths. Ah well.
Time travel was but a matter of steps in Kuala Lumpur. Embarking at the sci-fi-ristic Petronas twin towers, one could walk back in time an entire century within minutes when headed towards Kampung Baru.
Unperturbed by those metropolitan affairs all around, the traditional village just sat there in the heart of it all and stepping into it was like stepping out of time and watching it move in fast forward right past the fence. These Malay elders were old enough to understand the emotional limitations of money and the value of their lifestyle, and, sitting on billions underneath rotten porches, they didn't throw these investor vultures so much as a bone.
There was also a big old Texan guy, and inside my recollection collection he’s always sitting right in the middle of the lobby with a bunch of backpacker-babies strewn like satellites all around him. He was in on the end of the world, a conspiracy king really, prophesizing that a meteor would hit Indonesia, or a mega volcano would erupt there or something, and the end was very very near. We had a couple of weeks. He drew a blank when I asked why he had set up his expat camp in the immediate vicinity of such definite doom; what he did know instead was that there are underground cities and trains in the US. He had it all on good internet authority. I was in KL (short and cool for Kuala Lumpur) on and off, and when I came back a couple of months later, the doomsday had gone by doomless. When I found the Tex-Mac (in my mind he looks a bit like a burger with a big beard) dishing out a new apocalypse to new listeners in the old lobby, I asked what had happened to the other apocalypse and he was embarrassed. I felt bad. I liked him. Almost as much as the friendly burger man on the corner of Jalan Sultan and Jalan Pudu whose cart we frequented more than was reasonable by any measure.
Batu Caves / When Your Favorite Monkey Is a Thief
