The leaving of Hong Kong was fun, with drinks on Friday night. I put in a request for the next job that comes up at Ink Hong Kong so perhaps I will be back there one day.

It’s strange being back in KL. In one way it’s comforting because there’s something so easy about southeast Asia – the sunshine, the prices, the fantastically interesting culture – but I’m writing this in the hostel we first stayed when we got to KL in May – the place I wrote my first blog almost nine months ago – and I do feel sad about the way things have turned out, and that my trip is almost over.

Still, I have a little while left and I’m going to make the most of it. Working on a piece on KL today, and then tomorrow off to Malacca for Chinese New Year and to hit the beach. And wherever God closes a door somewhere he opens a window, blah blah blah.

It’s no secret that I’ve always been accident prone. Just in the last 3 years I have managed to get hit by a car, fall down a flight of stairs and chip my elbow, and skid on a pair of shiny shoes and chip my chin (thus giving myself a fetching black and blue ‘beard’). But none of those has been as painful and horrifying as what has now happened to me.

Sunday: Skinning my shin on a sharp stone on the Perhentians (more about them later) seemed ok at first – it was just a graze, unsightly but healing well. I had great faith in the Savlon I religiously applied to the wound (having listened to regular sermons on its wonderous healing properties at the Church of Dad).

But alas, this miracle cure didn’t work and by Wednesday it was very sore; by Thursday agony to walk on. I rested it on Thursday but to no avail. Thursday night was a sleepless one, with many painkillers crunched, and swearing in a dark room.

I went to the doctor first thing Friday morning. Well, actually Jamie carried me to see the pharmacist who referred me to a doctor in about 1.4 seconds. I’m not surprised, people were by now recoiling from me like they would a leper or amputee with gangrene, which by now I suspected this was.

The diagnosis was, at least, painless. Just 40RM (about £7) and 15 minutes later I was diagnosed, drugged up and on my way across the border (thank God for the Malaysian Health Service). I let the boys persuade me that getting on a 12-hour train journey was a good idea, even though there were no sleeper berths left and my leg was by then the size of Jonas Lamu’s (“Not that big…maybe a close second”, said Jamie, charitably).

Twelve hours were spent jammed underneath seats in a third class carriage in quite a lot of pain. Self-medicating was fun, though. Apart from the antibiotics and pro-biotics, there were lots of painkillers. I regret to inform people that I did not keep to the recommended dosage on the Nurofen Extra box. I dare you to try in my place. I also was given some mystery pills: “For leg,” said the woman across the aisle. I didn’t bother asking more. They went down without a murmer.

After popping more pills yesterday than an aging hippy, today I feel much better. Under doctors orders I am lying in bed all day today (Saturday) with my leg propped up (in Surat Thani, Thailand for those who keep track). I still can’t walk on it well but I have cut down the pain dosage and the swelling has gone down a bit (think more Johnny Wilkinson, but not in a hot way).

I also have the delight of a photo taken at the raging height of infection with which to gross out other travellers, scare small children and attempt to replicate in make up for Hallowe’en parties. All’s well that ends well, I say.

NB: Photo not being uploaded because just too too grim but available on request for those who are truly debauched or nosy.

I was taught all the haggling skills I know by my dear friend Hannah, who once got me a beautiful hand-embroidered brocade skirt for all of £7 (down from £30) in India, almost reducing an old lady to tears of frustration as she stalked us through the markets of Anjuna begging for our final offer. I’ve never been that good. I’m always aware of the hypocrisy of a westerner arguing over a few pence with a man or woman who earns a thousandth of what they/we do. But I don’t think that’s a reason for not haggling at all.

I enjoy a good haggle. The banter of it, the order in the seemingly chaotic way of paying for things. Imagine my shock when I find that my boyfriend can’t haggle AT ALL. The whole concept seems to have passed Jamie by and he gets very English about it, squirming with embarrassment at the mere suggestion. Even when I or one of our friends are trying to cut a deal, he will be nervously pushing money towards us, trying to get us to offer more.

This morning, for example, we found ourselves at a shabby-looking stall in central Kota Bharu next to a smelly storm drain where a shifty man shifts huge quantities of dodgy DVDs. Having elected to buy Transformers 2 (of course) the moment comes to pay. I ask how much and are told “10 ringgit” (about £1.60), so I immediately offer 6, knowing I will end up paying 8. Jamie interrupts me with a hand on my arm and whispers in my ear: “I don’t think they haggle here!”
“If not here, where else?” I gesture round me at the shabby table, the dodgy looking men, the ratty-looking drain and continue with the seller who is now demanding 9. I open my mouth to offer 7, but – before I can say anything – Jamie says, “Fine!” and gets out his money. I stare open mouthed… like the beard seller in Monty Python’s Life of Brian before me, I am horrified: “This bloke won’t haggle!”

Haggling isn’t just about the money. It’s like a language where the two parties learn a little something about each other. The seller’s first price says: “I know this is too high, but do you? Are you a sucker?”

Placing your own first offer at a point much lower than you are willing to pay shows that you aren’t to be messed with. One third to one half of the original offer works very well in most places. If you go lower than this be wary of causing offence, but this is rare.

Mock-offence, i.e. “you insult my family,” “that price is highway robbery,” isn’t real and usually just means that the seller is enjoying himself.

Haggling is something human beings have been doing since before money; before even any kind of currency – then we did it with cattle, weapons, women. It is a skill that is as natural to us as conversation and shouldn’t be approached with embarrassment; that is almost insulting to the vendor who gets the right to know how much he will sell his goods for. Far from being something where the westerner gets ‘one over’ on the poor local, the local always ends with the upper hand (they will not sell at a loss) and two people can enjoy the back and forth of this primeval sport.

And so I have made it my mission to educate Jamie in the ways of the haggle. Lesson one: How to buy a fake beard…with free gourd?

Top of most young divers’ lists is still Ko Tao in Thailand, but overcrowding and a lapse in standards has caused the discerning traveller to look elsewhere. More and more of them are heading to the Perhentian Islands, just across the Thai-Malay border.

Malaysia is the fastest growing dive market in the world, and it’s not difficult to see why. The Perentians are a cut above other Thai and Malaysian islands in terms of beauty, dive locations and dive quality. Dives are a mite more expensive than, say, Ko Tao, but the group sizes are halved (a massive bonus for learners) and there are more safeguards in place to protect inexperienced divers.

One school in particular – Quiver – has been getting a reputation among travellers for being great value, great fun and very professional. The owner Kin told me: “We run the place European, not like South East Asian. It’s all about service – if people complain we make sure they go away happy. We want Quiver divers to be the best divers out there.” To help fulfil this ambition Kin throws in a free advanced dive with every PADI Open Water completed, which can count towards the students’ advanced course.

I went along to renew my skills with Jamie, while he did his Open Water. I hadn’t been diving for a good 8 years and was rusty in the extreme. J, on the other hand, took to it like a tropical fish to water, flapping his fins and inflating his BCD as if he was born to it.

Our first minutes underwater gave us a rude shock as a black-banded sea snake came out of nowhere – plunging itself headlong between Jamie and his buddy. They’re deadly poisonous and a bite means death within seconds, but fortunately they can only bite you on the webbing between your fingers (due to the width of their jaws) and we kept our fists tightly clenched until it swam away.

Renewing my diving after so long was strange. I remembered much of the technique and enjoyed the feeling of being in a blue room again, where the surface is the shining ceiling and the coral and rocks are strange chairs, like in a Dali painting or something. But, having experienced such amazing snorkelling in Pulau Weh and other places in the last 8 years, I found myself non-plussed by the idea of putting on so much equipment, looking like a rubber-covered dork, and risking life and limb through nitrogen exposure just to get a better look at some fish. Not to mention that snorkelling is cheaper and needs less excessive preperation.

Much as I enjoyed renewing my skills so I know that diving with Jamie (who’s now obsessed) is an option, it did make me wonder. Of the thousands of people who complete their PADI OW on their gap years, like I did, I wonder how many people actually use them again, and how many, when faced with lugging 30KG of equipment into the sea, simply choose to slip on a snorkel, smile and splash away.

I am sure they were more appreciative than us, whose bodies were more than acclimatised to the heat and smog of Malaysia’s cities and who were disappointed with the soggy highlands. It was beautiful, to be sure, but for all the rolling tea-covered hills and rainforest trekking, the place was damp and dreary and had somewhat of a neglected air.

The main town, Tanah Rata, looks, as one British woman put it, like Cheddar Gorge, with all the shabby tat and tourism that that implies. There are 15 or 16 souvenir shops in a row but little to excite in them unless you’re looking for plastic keyrings in the shape of strawberries or tea bushes. Safe in their position ‘on the tourist trail’ for many years, Tanah Rata’s hawkers, hoteliers and hoosiers have done little to improve the place; there is little nightlife, or day life at all for that matter.

The one light in a dreary three-day trip for us was a walk through the Boh tea plantation, where little has changed in 80 years, since tea was first planted here. The hills are still covered with thick wavy lines of tea bushes, so that bush and hill form a network of green undulations stretching the length and breadth of the valley and beyond. A single lane track still brings visitors to the tea house, where they can watch the colourfully dressed pickers still bowing low over the tea as they pick.

You cannot help but remember the colonial sir and miss who must have sat and sipped on the veranda, much less the Scot J A Russell who dreamt up the plantation in 1927, shipped in Indian workers (who still have their own village, temple, school here) and ruled the place for the last 30 years of his life. His family still run the company, which sells tea to most Malaysian homes and for export.

Malaysian museums and corporate presentations have a particularly effusive turn of phrase, as we had learnt at the Petronas towers in KL.

Here we were invited to ‘Imagine a world’ where people drink 5.5 million cups of tea annually, and where Boh ‘brew passion into every cup’. A world where tea is ‘the glue that binds relationships’. A load of bollocks basically.

It was pouring with rain by mid-afternoon so we just took a cursory glance at the factory, downed a cup of admitedly lovely char and grabbed a taxi back into the uninspiring town.

Blanchett: Snowmen have more pigment

Malaysian women are OBSESSED with skin whitening. I picked up a copy of Malaysian Women’s Weekly the other day (in a purely professional capacity you understand) and more than half of the advertising was for skin whitening lotions, pastes and creams.
One of the biggest companies, SKII, uses Cate Blanchett for its campaigns. In my mind that’s just cruel. Not only are none of girls from the ethic groups that make up the Malaysian people (a mix of Indian, Malay and Chinese) going to reach anywhere near Cate’s skin tone but there’s hardly a caucasian girl who could get there either.
Cate is a ridiculous role model for an Asian girl. Even her name has the word blanch in it – and her skin looks as blanched as an almond. More so because of the ridiculous airbrushing that’s gone into the campaign photography (see picture).
The process of whitening is almost like that of blanching. Stripping skin of its protective melanin in the hope of a pinker rather than yellow tone is dangerous and can even cause cancer. (http://www.bio-medicine.org/medicine-news/Skin-Lightening-Products-Carry-Risk-of-Cancer-13741-1).
I just don’t understand the concept of wanting to be whiter. This is probably because of my hard-wired western love of tanning – the cancer warning is a TAD hypocritical, admittedly. But some women here paint their faces like geishas and go out all whited up like clown and I want to shout “Oi Lady, no! I admire your adherance to the cultural norms of your beauty regime, but when I see you subverting your natural beauty for a look closer to Bozo than Blanchett it makes me want to scream.”

Incense - covers the smell of dissent?

Some say it’s the heat that drives people bonkers here. Others the humidity. Or the strange mix of ex-pats who cross the border here from Thailand on visa runs, keeping themselves topped up with Chinese beer and Indian whisky while they while away the days doing little.

Bonkers it certainly is though. From the Japanese man in the ‘nuthouse’ (hotel Pin Seng) who has stared at the wall every day for nine months, with no rhyme or reason, to the sodden British and European drunks in middle-age who slur out pithy platitudes to accidentally captive audiences on the main drag.

From the start our second visit to Penang seemed dogged with a confused malevolence that none of us truly understood. There were rumours of violence as soon as we got back there. Whispers from other travellers about recent muggings: two girls had had everything stolen the night before. Chased on bikes down an alley, it was said. The stories were layered up with mystery, exaggeration and fear thickly like the smog that permanently hangs over Chinatown.

The racism of the place also seemed to be more blatant with a second glance. Chinese bar owners locked their toilets so ‘Indians not make mess’; Indians glared from behind grills in money changers, suspicious as the white tourists fingered their stained second-hand books.

It didn’t help that the thievery we’d read about in the Lonely Planet came home to us almost straight away – 200 Ringgit gone from our dodgy hotel room, 100 from our companion’s pocket down a back alley. We rallied against the insult anyway, taking advantage of the seedy Soho side of town and living it up at a karaoke bar. We had to show them we wouldn’t be beat I guess: by the heat, the disdain, the crime.

That would explain our beery renditions of the Bee Gees, two MCing English boys inciting the locals to throw shapes while the girls threw them like Saturday Night Fever was only yesterday and not 40 years out of fashion.

On our first visit to Penang I saw the synchronicity, the melding of cultures in close proximity. I saw the beauty of the Chinese, Malay and Indian architecture in a great melting pot of a city. But I guess you see what you want to see. A second glance shows the Chinese grimacing at the constant calls to prayer, a Malay passerby’s askance look at excessive incense smoke from a temple. The locals’ indifference to an English girl almost crying with frustration after being robbed.

And yet, there’s something about the place that saves it from being horrible. Despite all the crime and the dirt and the different factions, it’s still an exciting place to be. The temples are no less beautiful, the food no less delicious. In fact, from knowing the seedy darker side of Penang perhaps you can come to appreciate the cohesion despite division, and the hard-won moments of beauty, clarity and sanity are more precious for being just that little bit more rare?

Penang: lots to do but at your own speed

Some places that are overrun with backpackers make a real effort to keep them happy, with others it seems sometimes that you can’t leave quickly enough for their liking.

Some locals act like you’re a walking moneybox, or some kind of blonde western sex toy, rather than just have a chat or treat you like a fellow human being. In a few, the town is purely for tourists and has no other industry. The locals in these places are all there to serve you, which adds an uncomfortable and rather strained element to travel.

It is very rare to find a place that incorporates a bustling town, with a thriving and friendly local population, great spirituality, good food, night life, beach life, and lots to see and do. So, when you do hit on a place like Penang, it’s all the more delightful.

This place is like an innocent daydream of a place, after the demented global helter-skelter of Kuala Lumpur. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not perfect. The nose lottery still keeps you on your toes, back alleys are truly scary at night, not least because the rats and the cats here have a seemingly equal street presence and size, and the beer could be cheaper.

But it does have everything a traveller could seemingly want, or need. From reclining buddhas to Hindu temples, museums, art galleries, churches, beaches, and food, glorious food from a dozen nations, fused into one glorious whole. The island even has a free wifi connection for those who want to eschew the island’s other delights in favour of catching up with news from home (what, me?)

A major highlight is the background of spirituality here. On the road that separates Little India from Chinatown, for example, is the Gold Dealer Area, also known as Harmony Way because it is home to a huge colonial church, 17th century Chinese temple, still in constant use, various Hindu shrines, where regular Puja take place on the street corners and a giant busy mosque. I can’t think of anywhere else I have been where so many religious centres sit so close and with so little fanfare. The harmony here is totally taken for granted.

Likewise, the syncretism of so many different cultures is also strange and delightful. Little India is so convincing a microcosm that I believed I was back in India; Chinatown is home to a bustling and welcoming community, filled with street shrines and Chinese-run businesses. Cycle rickshaws decorated with flags and garlands zip up and down the backstreets between the two and the wider area.

And if all the culture and romance seem a little too highbrow for you. Fine! Why not fill your face instead? Penang has some of the best food in Malaysia, if not Asia. Take your pick from Chinese dumplings, Indian curries (served on banana leaves and no scrimping on the extras), Japanese pastries in the night market, oodles of noodles, or more of the Malay bakeries where every possible pie and cake can be bought. There’s no chance of leaving this place slim, I’m telling you.

The best thing about Penang is that it’s not just here for the tourists. This is a local town for local people. The restaurants are filled with people on their lunch hours, as well as chubby little foreigners; the temples are in regular use rather than just photo ops; the beaches and markets are as popular with domestic tourists as foriegn ones. So, instead of feeling like the target of unwanted attention, you are almost just one of the guys. And that makes all the difference.

And so it was last night, as Jamie and i were squished onto a table for our tiger and noodles with an old Scottish teacher called Mac. Inevitably (as there was more than one Brit present) the conversation turned to the horrors of the expenses crisis and our corrupt, money-grasping leaders, with their moats, pornos and bath plugs. The same people who are supposed to be leading by example and instead have shocked us all with how little power it takes to corrupt.

Mac, who’s been teaching over here for more than 20 years now (he spent a good decade tutoring maths to the Sultan or Brunei’s children), was as disgusted by all this as the next person (Jamie). In fact, I think the poor man was more upset than us, as for the many years he’s lived among the corruption of the Malaysian government, so he told us, he now has no iddyl, no purity of the homeland.

The stories he told us about the corruption in Malaysia made me almost proud to come from a country where corruption is an extra bath mat or two, not using your influence to have your rich girlfriend killed for money, or turning a blind eye to two prisoners killed in custody every week, say.

In Malaysia, according to Mac, every policeman is on the take. Every official is bribed, and every action comes with a price.
At least our leaders aren’t providing help and succour to the leaders of corrupt regimes (Myanmar) in the form of healthcare, while prosecuting refugees of the same regime for being without identification, leaving them in camps with open sewers and no medical care; their belongings treated “as a money spinner for the local security”.

At least old GB and his cronies push towards a multi-cultural society, while the poor old Malaysian immigrants, whether their families have been here for 2, 20 or even 200 years, get no share in the immense oil wealth, the chance to study overseas, or any of the other perks that the favoured Malays get.

Although it’s obviously not the first time that tales of the developing world have shocked and dismayed me, Mac’s stories made my hair curl. Staying in a country where the only thing that talks is money and the common man has no protection, no voice, no way out of the racist heirachy and total oligachy of a corrupt state, I feel more strongly than ever that the corruption in the UK over expenses should not be allowed to go unpunished. The world of politics is a slippery slope, and each and every one of those MPs who have lost their footing could take us down with them. And we’ll wake up one day and find that we too are at the bottom of it.

PS. For those who are interested there are websites where people explain exactly what is going on in this country far better than I can. www.malaysiatoday.com