Part 1. California
Since my last travel blog, From Sri Lanka in 2018, I've managed several major trips (Sicily, France, Crete, northern Italy, Portugal, northern Spain, France again, Mexico City, the American west (several times)) and too many minor ones to mention, yet I failed to produce blogs about any of it. I guess the bloom is off the blogging rose, but this time I'm going to really try to overcome my senescent lethargy, and produce something readable. Really.
The idea for 2023, effectively post-covid, was to 1) escape the winter, and 2) keep the aging skiing muscles from atrophying - seemingly contradictory goals. The solution was to head to equatorial Asia with a 2 week stopover in snowy California. And it really was snowy this year - so much so that our prospects of making it up to the Sierras weren't looking good when we left NY in mid January. Weeks of precipitation had clogged up most of California, but somehow our timing was golden, and we drove up to Tahoe on dry roads and skiied Heavenly Valley and Kirkwood without any injuries to our declining bodies. I don't know how much longer I can do this, but every year skiing proves itself to be like riding a bike - once you learn it you never forget it.
Part 2. Singapore
Our good luck held until our flight to Singapore pulled away from the gate at SFO, and then promptly returned to it. The pilot invoked, ominously, mechanical problems. I've been through this before. It usually involves wheeling in a new airplane and a 12 hour delay. But this time they fixed it, whatever it was, and 3 hours later we got off the ground for our 17h flight. Despite flying steerage, we had great seats - basically a whole row to ourselves, all the movies you could watch, all the food you'd care to eat. Flying all over the world like this is highly politically incorrect, frivolously burning barrels of fossil fuel, but it's really my only ecological crime, and I promise to cut back soon. Very soon. Really. I promise
I expected Singapore to be modern, prosperous and expensive. But I didn't expect that it had allowed technology to run amock. Instead of passing out a universally standard index card-size immigration form to arriving passengers, like every other country, Singapore makes planeloads of weary travelers (did I mention that the flight was 17 hours?) scan a QR code, with their foreign, probably de-charged smartphone (no smartphone, no entry), download an app, launch it, scroll through pages of trivia, and electronically submit a virtual entry form before - not instead of - scanning your passport and being photographed and fingerprinted. No paper forms accepted. In fact, no paper forms existed. Singaporeans born today will evidently grow up with no knowledge of pen and paper, as you and I have grown up ignorant of oil lamps and chamber pots.
Still, the modernity of the place does not disappoint. One ride on the metro makes a New Yorker look down and slowly shake his head. What have we been doing for the last century, as the world passed us by and figured out how to live? How can we be happy, proud even, about our antiquated urban transport that is, by comparison, such an embarrassment? E.g., no one gets shoved onto the tracks in Singapore, primarily because they aren't all psychopaths, but also because the broad, clean, well-lit platforms are separated from the tracks with sliding glass partitions that open in coordination with the opning train doors: A half-century-old technology that New York can't even be bothered to consider, let alone implement. I guess I expected that, and the gleaming skyscrapers, the clean, manicured streets, the orderly traffic, the utter lack of visible poverty, etc etc. What I didn't expect is that it's an English-speaking city. Not a city with a former British connection and thus with many people who can speak English, like, say, Hong Kong, but an English language city, like New York. The road signs are in English; the TV is in English; the restaurant menus are in English. Thank you Sir Thomas Raffles.
I think that in that sense it must be unique in Asia. But more startlingly, it's on the equator for fucks sake. Maybe at the latitude of California or Scandanavia it wouldn't seem so out of place, but on the equator!? Where's the torpor? Where's the squalor? How do they do it?? Well, I guess we know how they do it - enlightened fascism, shall I call it? It's gotta make me rethink my unyielding opposition to authority. Not enough to flip me over to the dark side - just rethink.
Speaking of rethinking, we had an interesting afternoon with Aaron, an expat American we knew 20 years ago when we would occasionally show up at one of Cindy's houses on the same weekend. Seems he is now in the wooden furniture business in Singapore, and he relieved us of any naive hopes we may still harbor about saving the natural world. According to Aaron, outside of Europe and America, and maybe even there too, all commerce is 100% currupt. Re his little corner of it, he assured us that any written attestation on environmental sustainability barely rises to the level of a joke. Embossed labels guaranteeing whatever is environmentally fashionable at the moment are offered up with every natural product he buys. Want an affidavit certifying that the mahogany tabletops you're offering as part of that Danish coffee table set are made from trees farmed in Florida? The Indonesian lumber company will gladly supply it along with the shipping container of logs clear cut from ancient rain forests on Borneo. But there is a bright side, at least for us. We don't have to lament the sad world our grandchildren will inherit, because we don't have any.
We had allocated only a few days for expensive Singapore, and then decided to start our planned train journey across Malaysia by flying to Kuala Lumpur. Part of the motivation for that was to give us another shot at the Singapore airport, which we couldn't really appreciate the first time through, basically experienced as a frustrating effort to get out of the airport. But this time we had several hours to take in the full splendor of what air travel should be. I wish it had been longer.
Part 3. Malaysia
The authoritarian dictatorship of Singapore has brought incredible prosperity in a few decades. Commie/crypto-fascist/Orwellian China did more good for more people than anyone anywhere anytime. And yet, I loathe those regimes to their immoral cores. But at least it makes you think, like, is there a tradeoff between morality and prosperity? Here in Malaysia the Muslim government orchestrates the usual oppression of non muslims, and Malaysia is the most racist jewhating country outside of the Middle East, but they've built an architecturally impressive country, and the trains run on time. So here in Asia, you could at least understand handing over your soul to the likes of Xi Jinping in exchange for a ticket out of millennia of rural destitude. But what do our American fascists, i.e. Republicans, offer us? Shut down social security and medicare. Women turn over their bodies to the state. A police state for the poor, A theocracy for the middle class, no trains for anyone. A bleak dystopia - and that's their sunny side. And millions of people are lining up to trade their souls for that. What's wrong with us?
A note about the jewhating racist Malaysians. They couldn't be nicer to us, even though 60% of them think the Jews control the world financial system (Hitler would be proud) and virtually all of them think the Jews stole Judea from the arabs, and they should give it back and return to Auschwitz. It forces me to think in a way I'd rather ignore. The fact that a majority of the people I pass on the street here want me dead is more than disconcerting. Of course, it doesn't come up. Don't ask don't tell. I'm a Jew and an atheist, but the racists couldn't care less about theology. Atheist is no get-out-of-the-oven-free card. My American passport, my shiksa wife, provide superficial protection. I feel shame for participating in the sham.
Still, I can't avoid thinking about being so consensually loathed. Blacks in America, particularly in red states, must feel this sort of thing, but it's not the same. A black person buying a condominium in a white neighborhood in Tallahassee is well aware that most of his neighbors think he's unfit for anything more than cleaning their streets or cooking their fries, or for being their slave, for that matter. But no one wants him dead. They just want him to stay in his place in society - his low place, way below them. The veiled woman who cheerfully sold me a ticket for the fast train to Penang wouldn't tell me to sit in the back of the train if she found out I was a Jew; she'd tell me to get out of her country, to get out of everyone's country, to get out of existence. The Jews don't have a place - any place. It's not the same thing.
And just why are all the women, even little girls, veiled here? Even if I can put aside for a moment the racist symbolism it expresses to the likes of me; even if the Moslems had an epiphany and realized they wished the Jews no harm after all, I'd still be appalled by the veil. What an awful way to live. I'm no scholar of Islam, but the explanation I always hear is that they do it because it suppresses male lust. Nonsense, but let's go with it. Instead of burdening half the population with the odious task of mollifying the other half, why don't Moslem men take responsibility for their own libidoes? A modest proposal: let the women wear bikinis wherever they venture in these hot climates, and mandate that the men wear blindfolds in public (and be accompanied by an older female relative, of course, to lead them across the street), under penalty of flogging, or worse. I anticipate the usual objections to my scheme - mostly involving the divinely ordained role of women as servants and toys - but let's just try it out for a century or two. After all, we can always go back to the old, tried-and-true ways. Just ask the supreme court.
Our plan for Malaysia was to make 3 long stops - Kuala Lumpur, the Cameron Highlands and Penang Island. We soon dropped the Highlands, for reasons of logistics and safety, and had to replan everything else. KL was on the agenda because I wanted to see the Patronis towers (the Moslem world's twin towers, still standing) and because any big city is always worth at least a few days. Penang because of my love for panang curry. As it happens we didn't go up the Patronis towers, and the island may not be the namesake of the curry, but we had a great time nonetheless.
Jeez, people are friendly here. A guy, seeing us a little puzzled about which exit to take from the subway, ended up walking us a half mile through teeming streets to our hotel in Chinatown. Chinatown KL was much like other such places I've seen - crisscrossing alleys lined with people selling delicious food. But in this case it was overshadowed by the second tallest building in the world, the Merdeka tower, looking a bit like a black monolith from another solar system. We couldn't enter it because it hasn't opened yet. The locals are a bit mocking about how long it's taking to get it up and running, proving they're not from New York, where a 3-station subway extension takes 50 years to build. So, yes, the architecture is pretty amazing, but the best thing we found in KL was the beef rendang at a halal buffet over a parking garage near the botanical gardens. Vaux le voyage, as the Michelin guide would put it.
Penang is actually an island a mile off the Malay coast in the Andaman sea, but the main feature isn't so much the tropical rain forests and beaches as it is the (ex-colonial) city of George Town. We ended up spending a week there, in a pretty shabby hotel, but we must have liked it since we originally booked for 3 days and then kept adding to it. It's a mix of cultures - less Moslem-dominated than KL, with beautiful Buddhist and Hindu temples and Chinese clan houses. Our most notable experience was hiking up 800 m Penang hill, on a 90/90 day (oF / %humidity). It's about the same height as Mt Tam, which I think of as a stroll, but it was hellishly hard. I think my days of strolling up mountains are over. I'm self diagnosing cardiac insufficiency, or maybe just youthfulness insufficiency. Beth took it in stride, but she's 17 days younger. There's a reward at the top - a cafe with a wide selection of kacang fruit bowls. This is a dessert we discovered on our last trip to Southeast Asia; shaved iced smothered with fresh fruit and various delicious syrups and a smattering of add-ons. Almost worth the climb. We got down via the venerable funicular - the way everyone else comes up - which is a pretty thrilling ride if you're in the first car.
Part 4. Thailand
We left Panang the way we came - by ferry, with the notable asymmetry that the taxi to the hotel, from the touristy ferry dock, cost 30 Malaysian Ringget, about $US 7, but the taxi back, called for us by the hotel, cost 6 Ringget. More evidence that you're probably not far off to always assume that if they know you're a tourist, you're a mark. Our next destination was an island in Thailand and was going to require several iffy transportation steps, so we allocated 3 days for the journey, just in case. We got off to a rousing start by missing the train to the Thai border. Well, not simply missing it, but getting to platform 2 a half hour early while it left from platform 4. That put us on the next train, 2h behind schedule, with a 5 minute window to make it through Malaysian border control before they closed for the day. somehow we made it, and were able to buy tickets on the Thai side for the last train out that day. Pleasant surprise: we had to buy couchettes on a sleeper car. I haven't done that in 50 years, and it turns out to be a great way to travel. Gotta do it more often. First, vendors run up and down the isles selling delicious food at third world prices. After sufficient time to eat it, the porter comes down the isle and makes everyone's bed. Unfortunately we were only going about 5 hours (I think the train went overnight to Bangkok) so we had to get off at the small city of Surat Thani at midnight. Knowing this I booked the closest hotel to the train station I could find, about 2 miles away. Midnight at the Sura Thani train station is not a happening place, and there were no taxis to be had. A couple of guys on motorcycles offered to take us to the hotel, but as they had no solution for our luggage, we passed. Just when we were giving up all hope, one of the motorcycle guys came back with a pickup truck, thus saving us from a long, rural walk in the dark. Our hero, but it gets better. The hotel was closed and dark, and unresponsive to doorbell rings, knocks, and phone calls. On the brink of resigning ourselves to a night in a grungy train station, our hero went around to the back of the hotel and somehow found, and roused, the manager, who reluctantly let us in and showed us to our (very nice) room. In this case, the service provided by the taxi was well worth the tourist supplement.
The next day we had another glitch, when we couldn't find the van that was supposed to take us to the next ferry, to the island of Ko Samui in the gulf of Thailand. No one speaks English here, off the tourist track, but another very helpful guy, a bus driver at the train station, told us, tirelessly using Google translate, that we should take the local bus to the ferry company office in town (the Sura Thani train station is 10 miles from Sura Thani. Go figure.) and take the van from there. that worked, and we eventually found ourselves on a lumbering car ferry slowly crossing the straight to the island. Since we hadn't used up all the time allowed for this travel section, we had 2 extra days before our next hotel reservation, so we hastily found a place not far from where the ferry took us, and settled in to wait it out. The Rajapruek Hotel turned out to be a tropical paridise, with 2 swimming pools and a beautiful beach, so the two day wait wasn't a chore.
There's gotta be hundreds of beach resorts catering to westerners all over Ko Samui. I picked one, called Bandara, on the north shore, lined up with a dozen others along the beach, to be our 5 day indulgence. If Rajapruek is a tropical paradise, Bandara is a luxury tropical paridise. Our bed is 10.5 feet wide. You just have to close your eyes to the business model - hundreds of smiling locals, some of whom I'm told are from Burma, scurrying around fluffing the pillows, cleaning the pools (there are 4), serving drinks on the beach, offering massages etc etc. Do they hate us, behind the smiles? I find it easiest just tell myself I've earned it, scurrying around someone else's laboratory for years, while "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us", as the Soviets used to say. Maybe they really were paying us, if I can afford places like this. This is our third Thai beach vacation in 6 years - Phuket, Krabi, and now this. Habit-forming, apparently. And I'm not really much of a beach person.
That wasn't such a handicap at our next beach hotel, In Chaweng, since there was no beach there. It had apparently eroded away since my sister visited a few years ago and dined nightly at tables on the sand. I had wanted to check out the main tourist beach on the island, Chaweng Beach, sort of a Vegas by the sea. But the promotional literature neglected to mention the lack of any actual beach. Rising seas? Drifting sands? Never did find out, but the honky-tonk Vegas is still there. So we whiled away our final couple of days on Ko Samui checking out the churning street scene and sampling the food and music. Next stop, Bangkok, our true destination.
Six weeks and 10,000 miles for a dentist appointment, and well worth it. Dr Kitema restored my runt eyetooth to its youthful glory for less than the cost of a cleaning in Manhattan. And she throws in, for free, the satisfying knowledge that you've evaded the American medical gouge-the-suckers monopoly. We had planned a couple of extra days in Bangkok, in case there were any dental contingencies (there weren't) so we had to find something to do in a city where we had already exhausted all the A-list tourist attractions. Bangkok is a super cool place just to walk around, and the food alone is worth the trip, but the best thing we found was the Ancient City, a private park in the suburbs. Some rich guy decided that the problem with the Thai people was their lack of national pride pursuant to an underappreciation of their history and achievements. Thus, the Ancient City - a 400 acre park in the shape of the country with dozens of life sized reproductions of major Thai monuments, temples and other wonders. The Vatican meets Disneyland, Thai style. It's too big to see in a day on foot, so they give you a bicycle on the way in. It would have been even better if we hadn't previously been to most of the places represented.
Finally, I would be remiss not to report on the most crushing disappointment we suffered in Bangkok. The Bing Su is gone! It came as a total shock, since the kacang in Malaysia was extant and terrific. Both of these terms describe a ubiquitous Korean dessert we discovered a few years ago in Thailand - a hemisphere of shaved ice infused with sweet milk and smothered with fresh fruit and and/or countless other goodies. Five years ago they were everywhere, and now they're gone. Evidently, it was just a craze, like the hula hoop, or CB radio. We found one little shop that had a version of it, but you could tell their heart wasn't in it. I guess now we'll have to go to Korea.
Part 5. Tokyo, Japan
I've always been afraid to go to Japan - way too expensive. 20 years ago we had free plane tickets that would have gotten us there but we deferred, in favor of Argentina, when I saw what a night in a hotel room the size of a coffin costs in Ginza. But times change, and it's pretty convenient to change planes in Tokyo on a flight From Bangkok to New York. So I found us a decent hotel in Nihombashi and arranged for a 4 day layover. Good decision. Turns out Tokyo is another better-than-newyork city but without the overhanging spector of fascism you feel in Singapore. And it's not prohibitively expensive for us anymore, so I guess we'll have to go back, since 4 days barely scratches the surface. We lucked out with the weather (with afternoon highs approaching 60 oF), given that our tropical travel kit was not configured for winter, and hit a few of the obvious tourist highlights. Continuing our tour of the world's greatest metro systems, we crisscrossed the city of 13,000,000 people without a hitch.
The highlight for us was probably our dinner with Junji, who was a visiting professor at U Mass a couple of years ago. Junji and wife Ahmi and son Jun took us to an okonomiyaki restaurant, where you make your own Japanese pancakes at your 12" high table with a built-in griddle. Delicious, if a little cramped for western legs. 9 year old Jun (who speaks excellent English, as do his parents) showed us his live beetle collection and took us trainspotting at a nearby railroad crossing, where we watched a dozen train lines doing the work of an advanced civilization. Metro lines, commuter lines, shinkasen bullet trains. And this was out on the edge of the city, not near the central stations. It'll be sad taking the LIRR into Manhattan from the airport.
Everyone we encountered in our short time in Tokyo was exceptionally pleasant. Random people expressed interest in us and tried to be helpful. We were even interviewed by a tv station when we arrived at Nirata airport. So I mean no offense by what I'm about to say, but something about the friendly Japanese reminded me of the friendly Malaysians - groupthink. In Tokyo everyone wears masks - indoors and outdoors - on the streets, in the parks, in the trains. In Malaysia no one does. In Malaysia everyone hates the Jews, in Japan everyone evidently hates the covid virus. I hate the covid virus too, so I'm with the Japanese on this one, but masking outdoors? Driving masked in cars alone? It's just virtue signaling. Thousands of masked pedestrians swarm around me on the sidewalk, forcing me to admit that people anywhere can come to believe anything, independent of reality, apparently. I'll go out on a limb here and say that it's no more rational for the Malaysians to hate the Jews than it is for the Japanese to wear masks outdoors. So this, then, is the human condition, and, clearly, it's hopeless. The majority of people everywhere, everytime, everyculture, are unimpressed by reality. Lincoln said you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. Maybe so, but that doesn't help much. QAnon, prayer, Auschwitz, Donald Trump, etc etc happen time and time again - all driven by mass delusion - and there's no end in sight. Sorry to end on such a grim note, but the masked minions, sympathetic as they may be, focus the mind on how far we are from enlightenment.
Well, mission accomplished - winter evaded. Time to fly home, back to where people drive on the right, as god intended. Only a 13 hour flight - piece of cake. And, according to JAL, we'll land one hour before we take off.
