Penang

For some inexplicable reason, it took me a little while before I got into the swing of things in George Town. I'd say it took me a solid 48 hours before I was starting to feel the city. I don't have a good reason for this other than maybe the weather was getting to me; if it wasn't hot and humid, it was raining. But I'll give credit where credit is due: in the evenings in between torrential downpours, it's very pleasant here. If it's not too muggy.

The art walk is what turned it around for me. In the past few years, the city has commissioned some specific types of urban art: about fifty steel, two-dimensional sculptures that tell the history of George Town, often humorously (like large one-panel comics), and more than a dozen wall murals of people or animals in everyday activities. With the aid of a really helpful map provided by the tourism center, I wandered the city for hours and hours (over the course of two days), sweating in the damp heat, visiting each piece and duly checking it off the list. The part of me that enjoys crossing things off lists (to completion!) was supremely satisfied by this exercise.


A pleasant side-effect of this journey was that I covered more of the city (the heritage zone, specifically) than I would have ever seen in any guided tour. As a result, I discovered several really great restaurants that weren't mentioned in any guidebook; the importance of these discoveries became magnified as I slowly realized that eating and drinking were going to be my two main activities during my time in Penang, as it was just too damn hot to summon the energy to do anything else. George Town is known as the foodie capital of Malaysia and it certainly lived up to that; some of the dishes I had here rivaled anything I've eaten in Asia. Or ever, for that matter. Case in point: one of the vegetarian places close to Little India (adorably and appropriately named The Leaf) had a pasta dish of spaghetti with vegetables in a pumpkin cream sauce. Sure, it's not a Malaysian dish by any stretch of the imagination, but it's fucking pumpkin cream sauce. Game over man, game over. Oh yeah, and it cost all of $3. That's three, as in the number that comes after two.

On Friday night, I was feeling pretty jazzed about life, thanks in part to this Geographer remix that I've been playing on loop for days, so I got dressed up (read: jeans, shoes, and a plaid shirt) and went to Macalister Mansion, which is a vehicle for the swankiest cocktail lounge in all of Penang. Several massive menus of wines, whiskeys, and cigars were placed in front of me as I slid up to the bar. I was feeling pretty happy with my plans for the evening as I sipped on Chilean Carménère and Glenmorangie, two of my favorite drinks in the world.

As the evening wore on, I ended up chatting with one of the bartenders and the sommelier, who introduced me to his group of friends that had shown up at the bar at around 1:00. They immediately treated themselves to bottle service, which is apparently the thing to do in Malaysia, as it's significantly cheaper than buying drinks individually. Whiskey is also big in Malaysia, so when I say "bottle service", I'm not talking about Grey Goose or Patron or whatever they push in Vegas. I'm talking freaking Laphroaig single malt. It wasn't long before they had poured a glass of that delicious, peaty nectar and sent it my way.

Close to 2:00, the group (including Fadlin, the sommelier) decided to head out to one of George Town's clubs and insisted I join. I was happy to oblige. We drove to a club that was admittedly past its prime for the evening, as only two dozen patrons remained inside, but that didn't stop the DJ from blasting ear-shattering electro house for the next hour, nor did it stop the tattooed, basketball jersey-clad hype man from yelling and cursing into the microphone every few minutes, nor did it stop my new friends from getting more bottle service (Johnnie Walker Black this time).

Maybe five minutes later, an overanxious (and over-intoxicated) kid sitting at the next table over accidentally knocked the bottle of beer out of my hand, which shattered on the floor, sending glass and mediocre Asian lager in all directions. For the next couple of minutes, there ensued the predictable choreography of us picking up the biggest shards with our hands, a barback swooping in with a broom and dustbin, and the aforementioned lush buying me a new beer. After all was forgiven and things returned to normal - meaning we were each yelling over screeching electronica to the person standing next to us - I told Hakim, one of the guys in the group, that I found it funny that everything I had seen or heard that evening was exactly the same as in the States. The conversations, the drunks, the annoying DJ behavior, the music, the couples making out in the parking lot, even the bottle being knocked out of my hand. Everything. I felt like I was out on the town with my friends back home. After I told him this, he turned away thoughtfully for a minute or so, then turned back to me with this typed on his phone:

And as we're crossing border after border
We realize that difference is none

He told me those were lyrics from a song and some quick Google sleuthing reveals it's a song by Gogol Bordello (a Gypsy punk band from New York). The sentiment behind those lyrics is actually something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I'd like to defer my thoughts on this until I'm closer to being done with my travels, but for now I'll just say that I've stopped seeing the differences in all the places I've been and nowadays I mostly see only the commonalities.

After shutting down the club, the group piled into the cars once more and drove to a random street in who-knows-where (I was many drinks deep by this point), where a lone street vendor had his cart and a few tables set up. Fadlin helped me with my order to make sure my food was vegetarian and a few minutes later I was devouring a pile of delicious, semi-spicy noodles (with a fried egg on top, of course) along with everyone else. A couple other friends of the group showed up and joined in for a while before it was time to head out again, several people on their way to more partying, several on their way home, and me back to my hotel.

The entire evening was random and unplanned and really, really fun. I could tell within a few minutes of meeting Fadlin and his friends that they were solid people. As I got to know them a bit better over the course of the evening, this opinion solidified further. They were incredibly gracious and hospitable and invited me along for all their shenanigans as if I had been part of their clique for years. I really did feel like I was partying with my friends back home, even to the point of noticing that some of these folks reminded me of very specific people I know in San Francisco. To them, it was probably nothing to have me tag along, but for a solo traveler, experiences like this are incredibly meaningful and it's given me a new perspective on what it means to be hospitable to strangers.

The rest of my time in George Town was mostly uneventful; again, I blame the humidity and daily thunderstorms. Most of my time was spent sleeping, eating, drinking, or pecking away at my laptop in a coffee shop. I did manage to make it out to the only skybar in town for a few drinks and a terrific view from the 360-degree rotating restaurant.


Tomorrow I take an early-morning fast ferry (ominously referred to as the "vomit comet") to Langkawi for some beach time, jungle trekking, waterfalls, and the like. I've read that jellyfish stings are common in the waters there and that you're supposed to swim fully clothed. I'm not crazy about that requirement, but then again, I haven't had the best luck with beach-related animal encounters.

Full photo album: George Town

Middle of Malaysia

Taman Negara

The minibus ride along the winding highway from KL to Jerantut was pretty uneventful, though I did have an unexpected moment of nostalgia along the way. At one point, I looked up from my book (On The Road, funny enough) to admire the countryside and was greeted by an expanse of rolling hills and valleys covered in dark green trees. A rest stop with a McDonald's whizzed by, as did a massive billboard for paintball. Involuntarily, I was transported twelve years back in time, sitting on a Greyhound bus making its way along the winding highways in Pennsylvania or New York as I traveled between college and home. In that moment, the two scenes were almost identical, but I snapped back to reality when I noticed the palm trees everywhere and that all the signs were in Malay, not English. Still, it was a funny flashback to have, especially considering I had just read the part in the book where Sal wakes up in a motel room in Iowa and literally has no idea where he is.

Once I reached Jerantut, I took a three-hour boat ride with other backpackers up the river to Kuala Tahan, a small village that is across the river from the entrance to Taman Negara National Park. The boat ride was uneventful but very memorable; even though the wooden seats hurt after a little while, the sights and sounds of speeding along the water through the jungle never got old. As the afternoon wore on, the sun disappeared behind dark clouds, the chatter on the boat faded, and the whole scene felt almost like Rambo or Apocalypse Now as we continued to make our way upstream.


Kuala Tahan is a Malaysian village second and a base camp for adventure travelers first. The vast majority of the village buildings are restaurants or accommodations, mostly guesthouses and hostels. The one distinguishing feature though is that most of the restaurants are floating barges whose entrances are rickety boards of wood slanting up from the rocky shore. When a boat speeds by and its wake hits the barges, you can feel the restaurants bob up and down a little.


Like most visitors to the park, I planned to spend only two nights in the area, so the activities started right away. After a floating dinner, I joined a dozen other travelers for a guided night walk through the jungle to spot nocturnal animals, mostly insects. From that point of view, the tour did not disappoint, as we saw lots of very large bugs; think ants the size of bees and spiders the size of your hand. More interesting to me though was simply the setting: walking through a pitch-black jungle with only flashlights to light the way, listening to all the new and unusual sounds.

I got up early the next morning and hiked to the park's canopy walk, the largest in Malaysia. Even though half of it is closed for maintenance, it was still worth the trip, especially because I was the first and only one there. The novelty was lost a little bit since I had done the other canopy walk in KL only a couple days before, but it was still undeniably cool and clearly the biggest attraction of the park.


After a strenuous, mostly vertical hike to a small summit and the subsequent exhaustion-induced nap back at my guesthouse, I set out for afternoon activities of visiting a local Malaysian tribe and a boat ride through river rapids. The tribe (Orang Asli) is nomadic and the people are true original Malaysians, complete with their own language and customs independent of everyone else. One of the elders showed us how they make fire and how they make their blowdarts and blowpipes, after which we all got to try our hand at some target practice. Let's just say I wouldn't make a very good hunter.


The boat trip through the rapids was a little contrived (most of the reason we all got wet was because the tour guide was intentionally rocking the boat) but still super fun. He stopped the boat at a random spot on the riverbank and we all got to swim in the muddy river for a while. The ominous clouds, eerily quiet jungle, and lurking in the murky water elicited more Rambo sensations. Normally this wouldn't be worthy of writing, except that it's the first time I've been able to go in the water on this entire trip since my leg wounds are now finally healed. Here's hoping my new skin is strong enough to keep out Malaysian river bacteria!

That night, I enjoyed a few hours of loud thunderstorms from the relative safety of the floating restaurants. I've always loved watching and listening to thunderstorms (from someplace dry) and San Francisco's unusual geography and climate rudely deny me that joy.

Cameron Highlands

The next day, I took a minibus to Tanah Rata, the most popular city in the Cameron Highlands. Three hours of very winding roads eventually planted me in a surprisingly cool-weather town surrounded by hills and green fields of tea leaves. I saw tourists wearing pants and jackets in the late afternoon and I myself was a little bit cold in just shorts and a t-shirt. I had found some weather relief at last and it was delightful.

The next morning, I set out on a half-day hike led by Jason, a local tour guide and the husband of one of the women who works at my guesthouse. A native of the highlands, Jason studied, lived, and worked abroad for many years before returning home to do what he loves: explore the beauty of the highlands and introduce others to that beauty. He is intelligent, environmentally and politically conscious, and a fluent speaker of English, making him a perfect guide for the day. We had some candid conversations about Malaysia's struggle to achieve "developed nation" status and how that often involves sacrificing the environment in the name of financial expansion. The topic of conversation migrated to conservation, pollution, recycling, and McDonald's.

As for the trek itself, we spent a couple hours ascending one of the jungle hills, paused a bit for some snacks and photos, then spent almost three hours descending through primary rainforest. The trail was narrow, mostly unmarked, and virtually indistinguishable from other paths through the jungle, so I was extremely happy I hadn't attempted this hike on my own. The jungle was cool, quiet, and very peaceful as we hopped over fallen trees and slipped through the mud. About halfway through the descent, the nagging clouds finally opened up and it started lightly raining. Surprisingly, this was the first real test of my raingear (even after two and a half months in Southeast Asia) and everything was a-okay. Given that I was dry (from the rain, but not from sweat), hiking through a rainy, peaceful rainforest was a really special memory for me.

Once we reached the end of our descent, we spent some time wandering through the tea fields of the Cameron Valley Tea Plantation, chatting with and watching some of the workers (who work six days a week, rain or shine). After getting a tour from Jason of some of the facilities and a lecture on how tea is harvested, we sat down in the plantation's restaurant to enjoy some conversation, pastries, and hot tea, all of which were appreciated after a cool and very soggy morning.


After returning to town via an impromptu car ride from Jason's "big sister" (which had humorous undertones of him being a helpless high school kid), I relaxed for the rest of the day and treated myself to lots of food and drink and laptop time in town. The trek was surprisingly strenuous; I ate two full dinners that night just to get back to normal and my legs are still a little sore (three days later).

Ipoh

The next morning, I hopped on a bus to Ipoh, a mid-sized city about halfway between the highlands and Penang, my next destination. Lonely Planet says that Ipoh is a bit of a foodie destination, though after a few days here, I think that's a very generous label. Given that I'm a vegetarian and not crazy about Chinese food in general, I found Ipoh to be a little bit lacking in food options. That said, I've found a nice Western cafe (with a fantastic name), an upscale Indian restaurant, a Vietnamese place, and a Western-style bar that I'm happy to revisit because they serve up some satisfying meals. For about $6, I had a massive feast at the nice Indian spot, complete with multiple courses, cloth napkins, and even waiters in vests and bow ties.

Besides eating, there isn't much to do in Ipoh beyond walking around Old Town (the birthplace of Ipoh white coffee) looking at colonial-inspired architecture. The "glory days" referenced by tourist literature and alluded to by the various heritage sites are long gone; these days, the city feels dreary, dingy, and lonely. I ended up spending more time here than I should have, mainly because I needed some rest from the fairly active last two weeks and the mild touch of tummy issues I picked up in the highlands. Feeling much better now after a couple days of playing video games on my laptop in my aircon hotel room, I leave tomorrow for Penang, a far more interesting place and a legitimate foodie destination; in fact, Penang is supposedly the foodie capital of the entire country.

Next post: Penang and George Town!

Random thought of the week: Darlie has been my favorite foreign toothpaste thus far, though it's funny to note that until 1990, it was incredibly racist: it was actually called Darkie and had a pretty terrible picture on the packaging. Not joking.

Full photo albums: Taman Negara, Cameron Highlands

Kay Ell

Before getting into my thoughts on Kuala Lumpur and what I've been up to for the last week, I'd like to share the view I currently have from my table at Skybar:


Yup, that's happening. The Petronas Towers are the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen. They've got a futuristic look but they still have the classiness of sparkling diamonds. I'm so enraptured by these buildings that they alone could almost convince me to work for Petronas, if only it wasn't an oil and gas company. Here are some much better photos taken with my camera and tripod:


A quite decent amount of my time in KL has been sightseeing on foot and shopping (out of necessity). I've hit all the usual touristy places (KL Tower, Merdeka Square, Central Market), explored a few neighborhoods (Chinatown, Little India, Golden Triangle), and seen my fair share of malls. Good god, the malls here! Evidently Malaysians are serious about their shopping. There are numerous malls that dwarf anything in SF, especially when they're linked together to create massive labyrinths of consumerism.


Perhaps the most egregious example of business is Low Yat Plaza, a six-story mall dedicated entirely to electronics. If that wasn't enough, the first three floors are for only mobile phones and service providers. And if that wasn't excessive, consider that all the dozens (if not hundreds) of stores and kiosks on those three floors sell the exact same phones and plans. I felt like a crazy person seeing the same displays over and over and over. I honestly don't understand how they stay in business since it's nearly impossible to differentiate them from each other, except by the level of pushiness they display to potential customers (which is how I made my shopping decisions).

I thought the cell phone culture in America was crazy, but KL takes it to another level. There are ads for phones and providers everywhere and it seems every corner store has a display case of phones and accessories. I found myself begrudgingly dragged into this culture when my phone adapter and my phone stopped working within a week of each other. Truth be told, the phone wasn't that useful anyway since it wasn't GSM; I was already thinking of unloading it. My hand forced, I shopped around and picked up one of the cheapest new phones I could find, the Sony Xperia E. It's simple, has a recent version of Android, and most importantly, can actually work as a phone here. While I was out tech shopping, I picked up a travel mouse - mostly to make photo editing much easier - and a new laptop sleeve as my old one was already falling apart (admittedly because it was incorrectly sized).

The fancy malls in the nicer areas of town stand in stark contrast to places like Chinatown and Little India, which are run down and a little grimy; you can travel from a $$$$-part of town to a $-part of town in just a few LRT stops. But that's just a manifestation of one of the foundations of KL: diversity. Everywhere you look, you'll see Chinese, Malaysians, Indians, Muslims, and the occasional Western or Japanese traveler. Women in formless burkas walk alongside their boyfriends or husbands in Tommy Hilfiger shirts. Regardless of your ethnicity or religion, Chinese food hawkers try to convince you to sit down to eat at their stalls.

Coming from America, and San Francisco in particular, this ethnic and religious mixing isn't new to me, except for the significant Muslim influence. Malaysia is the first Muslim country I've been to; I don't count Indonesia because I spent all my time in Bali, which is Hindu and animist. In fact, KTM Komuter, one of the light rail lines, has multiple cars per train that are designated for women only.

After a few hours here, I became used to all of it. Truth be told, I actually like seeing women wear hijabs; they're like long hair, but with a lot more variety of colors and patterns. And I find the burkas mysterious and even a bit intimidating, though that illusion is shattered when I hear the women speak (often to ask a mundane question like how much something costs).

In addition to wandering the city, taking lots of public transportation, and going shopping, I got a taste of the local culture (pun intended, you'll see in a second) by setting up a lunch date via the website Plate Culture, which I read about in AirAsia's in-flight magazine. It launched a few months ago and is primarily in KL for now, but is starting to expand to other locations in Southeast Asia. It's basically Airbnb for meals: you look at profiles, sign up for a meal at a host's house, and enjoy home-cooked food and conversation with your host and other guests. I had a really delicious vegetarian Chinese/Malay lunch and good conversation with Nicole, a twenty-something professional in the city who loves to cook for others. It was really nice to have a deeper conversation with a local and see how they live. And it was also really nice to be able to safely eat Chinese food without fear of consuming some gross animal part.

Outside of the city center, but still technically within the city, I visited Batu Caves and FRIM (Forest Research Institute of Malaysia). Batu Caves has become an important religious site for Hindus, which doesn't really interest me, but still has actual caves that you can take a guided tour through. My tour group was very mixed - America, Australia, England, Japan, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic, with no two tourists coming from the same country - and on our hour-long tour through the "Dark Cave" we saw spiders, long-legged caterpillars (including one that ran pretty quickly by us), other cave bugs, and even a solitary plant. We saw one dead bat and heard hundreds more above our heads, constantly flying around and making noise. Coupling all the creepy crawlers with pitch darkness, this was certainly the place where you need to be comfortable with the levels of your various fears. I didn't realize how dilated my pupils were until we reached the cave opening again; I haven't had that much trouble adjusting to sunlight in a long time.


FRIM is a forest area that is sometimes described as man-made, but maybe man-preserved is a better term. There are wetlands, arboretums, nature trails, and lots of research centers, but the main attraction is the canopy walkway above the treetops. After a steep and surprisingly strenuous 500m climb, you walk across 150m of suspended walkways that hang 30m above the forest floor. No one else was there when I went, so I got to enjoy the exciting and slightly terrifying heights without interruption. When those suspensions start moving around and those wooden boards start creaking under your weight, you come to peace pretty quickly with placing all your trust into whoever made those walkways.


Now that I have some semblance of an idea for my itinerary through Malaysia, I'll be heading out of town tomorrow. The next stop is Taman Negara National Park for a couple days of hiking, but mainly for its canopy walkway, which is the largest in Malaysia. After that, it's on to the Cameron Highlands, then possibly Ipoh, then to Penang and Langkawi, though I'm not sure in which order yet.

Full photo albums: KL Architecture, FRIM Canopy Walk

Final Thoughts on Ubud

As I sit here in one of Ubud's many cafes with my laptop, I'm struck by the strangeness of having to write a summary of a place that has been my home for the last month. As I look up from my screen, my eyes are met by tourists peering through shop windows, locals riding two or three to a motorbike, poor children begging for money, touts yelling across the street at passersby, and even a mouse running up the side of a building, carelessly knocking offerings to the ground. All of this has become commonplace. It's weird to think that in just a few hours I'll have a new culture and a new landscape that will be "home".

The concept of "home" has occupied my thoughts lately. For most people I know, it's a simple, straightforward concept. In my case however, I have three homes. Hockessin, DE is home because that's where I grew up and where most of my immediate family still lives. San Francisco is home because that's where I've lived the most as an adult and where I'll be returning when I'm done traveling. But in the most immediate and daily sense, wherever I lay my head is home. For the last month, my home has been a breezy and sunny third-floor bungalow in beautiful Ubud. Even though I've become very comfortable with being nomadic, I'm occasionally struck by the oddity of having three homes, yet not really having a home at all. Filling out my current address on websites has become a lot trickier than it used to be.

My opinion of my current home away from home away from home hasn't really changed much since my first post. Ubud, and really Bali in general, is a complex dichotomy of tradition and modernism, of wealthy tourists and poor locals, of preserving culture and welcoming foreign influences (and money).

Tapping into tourism money leads to a lot of hovering and hawking; the Balinese haven't quite mastered the soft touch of salesmanship. I'm watched like a hawk if I peruse the wares of any shop and some restaurant employees will practically accost me (albeit in a very amicable way) if I stop to look at the menu outside. Walking the major streets of Ubud is tacitly inviting a barrage of offers for trinkets, sunglasses, carvings, massages, food, drinks, and taxis. The taxi touts are the most annoying as they verbally assault tourists with one-word sentences from across the street. Hello? Taxi? Yes? Transport? Yes? Cheap! Cheap! After about a week here, I had to adopt my San Francisco style of never leaving the house without sunglasses and earbuds.

I'd like to think that the Balinese are just hospitable to a fault and I realize that they're all just trying to make ends meet. I still think a more passive approach would yield better results (and I've had this exact conversation with other travelers), but I try to be mindful that the locals' livelihood is at stake. Their communities and economy are now very much dependent on tourism, so they have to hustle every day.

Once I learned to filter out the touts and the obviously non-Balinese stores and the big buses of daytripping Japanese tourists and the stupid wooden penis keychains for sale at trashy souvenir shops, I started to discover a place that appeals to all the senses. The landscape is painted every shade of green imaginable and the roads are lined with temples and beautiful architecture. The food is cheap and incredible and caters to everyone (more on that here). At night, there is a symphony of crickets and frogs and birds and music (both traditional and modern) that wafts in through my open windows; in the morning, the tune changes to roosters and children playing and locals working. And all the while, the fragrant aroma of incense seems to be everywhere. Some of my fondest memories here will be the times I sat on my patio, just watching the clouds or the setting sun or the stars or the moon as a stick of incense burned on the table next to me. Those times were some of the most peaceful and pleasant I've ever experienced.

In the interest of assisting my own fallible memory and providing some transparency to my devoted readers, here's a (mostly complete) list of what I've done here:

• Several museums and many art galleries
• Visited villages and shops outside of Ubud
• Several self-guided photo walks
• Read a lot on my patio
• Wrote a lot (mostly about food)
• Lots to Balinese massages ($8 an hour!)
• Sacred Monkey Forest
• Volunteered part-time for two weeks at BARC (the only operating dog shelter in Ubud)
• Made extensive use of a gym membership
• Nursed my leg back to reasonable health
• Skyped with friends and family
• Witnessed a once-every-three-years cremation ceremony
• Hiked the two Lonely Planet treks
• Gunung Kawi
• Cycling tour through the countryside
• Took thousands of photos (and kept several hundred)
• Started learning HDR photography
• Explored the shit out of this town on foot

For the second two weeks of my stay here, I had something of a 9-to-5 life: I'd get up early, eat breakfast, volunteer at BARC for a couple hours, take the middle of the day off to go on a photo walk or explore a new part of town, volunteer for another couple hours in the afternoon, then head off to the gym and dinner afterwards. My time at the shelter was pretty typical for a volunteer, as I alternated between cleaning shit (literally), doing dishes, and playing with puppies.

A funny side-effect of the routine is that I'd go through various news feeds on my tablet in the morning as I ate breakfast, leading to me being much more well-informed about U.S. and world events than I ever was before. However, I don't know why I bother, as the vast majority of news stories (especially from the U.S.) are frustrating, depressing, or infuriating. I've changed my habits to read either GOOD or Gawker instead. I'd rather be inspired or entertained, thank you very much.

Part of me still feels a bit of FOMO that I didn't explore the rest of the island or the neighboring islands, but I'm quite happy with how the past month has gone. And I have the pictures to prove it! My general philosophy with this type of traveling is to spend more time in less places; call it the Jerry Maguire mentality of backpacking. My interactions with locals have included some really meaningful conversations about culture and society and politics. Multiple times, I've had the subtle joy of seeing sincere flattery and a smile come across the face of a local when I casually drop in conversation some lesser-known fact about Balinese culture. Going on multiple tours of the countryside and privately owned rice fields and traditional Balinese homes was also really memorable, both for the photo opportunities and for the chance to connect with people, especially when it was just one-on-one.

There were a lot of "pinch me" moments when I'd suddenly remember where I was. It became so easy to forget that fact when I had a daily routine for a couple weeks. I'd be walking home from the gym, listening to music, enjoying the perfect weather and the scenery and the incense and the buildings and the people, and it would hit me: yes, I was just walking home from the gym, but I was walking home from the gym in Bali. It's funny to contrast my current feelings of comfort and routine with my feelings of wonder when I first arrived.

I'm sad to be leaving but it's definitely time to move on. Next transient home: Malaysia! When I was researching this trip a few months ago, I hadn't really considered Malaysia, but once again, Lonely Planet has succeeded in overwhelming me with a million things to do, so I'm currently pruning my list of choices and working on an itinerary through the country. The first stop will be Kuala Lumpur for a few days and everything after that is still up in the air, though I'm aiming for some time in Taman Negara National Park, the Cameron Highlands, Ipoh, Penang, and Langkawi.

As my time is running out and I still need to pack before my flight, I'll close with this photo, which is most definitely overly romanticized, but, in a way, captures how I've come to view this place through my rose-colored glasses.


Full photo albums:

• L.O.L. Bar
• Agung Rai Museum of Art
• Museum Puri Lukisan
• Blanco Museum
• Ubud Rice Fields
• Bali Art
• Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary
• Ubud Mass Cremation Ceremony
• Lonely Planet Treks
• Dogs of BARC
• Gunung Kawi
• Ubud Cycling Tour
• Other Ubud Photos