Travel with Indigo

Indigo and her owner and crew, now fully rested, departed Singapore on February 11 after arriving there some 52 days earlier. During this period I had flown home for a belated Christmas and New Years, managed to spend wonderful hours with my wife and son and good friends and catch up on much that I had missed. By the end of this stay, though, I confess to have grown anxious to get on the way again. And so it was with eager anticipation for what may lay ahead that Indigo set off up the Straits of Malacca.

The Straits are one of the principal choke points for international vessel traffic, especially for ships traveling between Asia and Europe and North America and, as a result, our radar screen was active. There were ships all over the place but sadly, as we had seen back in the harbor, most were anchored along the shore idled by the recession. For miles and miles the Malaysian side was a mass parking lot of empty ships. Sure we passed many both coming and going but not nearly so many as we would see in better times.

Going back several centuries, the Straits have been a hotbed of piracy. These days the bad guys have become ever more brazen attacking huge cargo and even tanker ships in broad daylight, climbing up anchor chains to kidnap crew and hold them for ransom. It’s not yet reached the level of the Gulf of Aden but it’s still a dangerously active place.

During our transit we posted double watches and equipped the outside watch with alarm devices. Spotting trouble early is essential to repelling an attack. We were never threatened, but two days after we arrived at our destination headlines carried the news that the day after we passed through the Straits, a band of brigands had boarded a tug in mid-day, captured its captain and was now holding him for ransom. Just blind luck kept us out of the newspapers that day. Or was it the contribution I dropped in the box at that Chinese Buddhist temple back in Singapore? Maybe, just maybe, my ugly, snarly, squatty little god for the year of the rooster was watching over us. Who knows?

Our first destination after Singapore was the island of Penang in Malaysia. Giving offense to self-respecting oysters everywhere, it bills itself as the Pearl of the Orient. The guide books say that it’s one of the most visited and best known corners of Malaysia and the only one of the country’s 13 states to have a Chinese majority. Having once been a British colonial outpost, the capitol city of Georgetown now has a collection of buildings from that era, which would be impressive were they not sprinkled about in a maze of tumbledown shops, seedy hostels and fly blown street food vendors.  Just a few blocks away a long strip of incongruous high-rise beach front condos defile both the sky above and the squalid landscape below.

The place is not without its attractions though. It was fun to be pedaled about the narrow streets and alleys of its historic area in a trishaw (bicycle powered rickshaw) watching the vibrant night life scroll by at a stately pace. The once eminent Eastern & Oriental Hotel, a sprawling affair built in 1884 and tastefully restored just a few years ago, is a delight. During its heyday, it was often the haunt of Rudyard Kipling, Noel Coward and Somerset Maugham, among other notables of the time, the names suggesting that it may have been a forerunner of today’s gay-friendly resorts.

But what I gained most from Penang was an appreciation for the Chinese, or at least those of Penang’s past. Dotting the central area of the town are swank clan houses built by prominent Chinese families almost solely for the purpose of extolling their economic and reproductive success and paying homage to ancestors. The Khoo family’s is the grandest of these, a wildly ostentatious, colorful jumble of dragons, lanterns, gargoyles, bronze filigree, ornate columns, ceramic figurines, red lacquered surfaces, and copious amounts of gold leaf. By America’s Puritan minimalist standards, the architecture and interior spaces are vulgar. But jaw dropping too. On either side of its main shrine room are smaller rooms whose walls are adorned with small brass plaques bearing the names of family members and listing their academic achievements. Khoo Yung Foo, Master of Science, Botany, Michigan State University, 1983; Khoo Mao Doo, PhD, Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, 1979. These large, male dominated, close knit-families value higher education and economic success and are not shy about trumpeting their attainments. Their work ethic exceeds even our own. How do you buy stock in China?

One night I took the crew out to what the guidebooks described as a lively outdoor bar with good music. So we sat there in the sultry night air on rickety plastic chairs, chickens pecking at our feet, surrounded by a scruffy crowd of locals and backpackers all listening to a Malaysian band murder what in more skillful hands would have been tolerable music. The girls reported that the restrooms there win the prize for Most Noxious (you don’t want to know the details). Street food vendors were busy nearby selling stuff that smelled enticing but looked unhealthful.

Another night I took everybody to what was reputed to be a fine restaurant located in a restored mansion. Upon arrival in the circular gravel drive, the place looked okay but inside it had the vapid air of an inner city school cafeteria. Service was prompt and the spicy Malay curry dishes tasted as you would expect, but as the place was owned and operated by a Muslim family it served no alcohol.  Mate Bobby was promptly dispatched with instructions not to return without cold beer. Ever reliable, he came back in fifteen minutes with two plastic bags filled with iced down beer thus saving the night. From that nearly tragic experience we learned to ask when booking a table in Muslim countries if alcohol is served and if not whether we can bring our own. Where else in the world but a Muslim restaurant is there no wine or beer served? It’s downright uncivilized.

We were in Penang at the same time as a contingent of U.S. Marines there on shore leave from an enormous amphibious landing ship anchored in the harbor. The guys were clean-cut, well behaved and respectful to the locals and made us all proud, though we went home early and have no idea what may have transpired later. Mischief seemed to be in the air.

Having had quite enough of Penang, we left the harbor and made our way ten miles to Pulau Dyang Bunting, a stunning group of islands whose limestone cliffs rise straight up from the sea. At Monkey Bay we had us a fine beach picnic, a pleasant respite from the grime of city life. There, a large monkey made his way from the tree tops down to our camp where we fed him a variety of food scraps. Confirming his low rung-status on the ladder of primates, he had no taste for fried pork rinds. He loved apples, and each time the old boy was fed some he got a prominent erection thus earning for himself the nickname Adam (early primate, Eden-like setting, bite of an apple and …well, you get it).We never saw his Eve.

Our last stop in Malaysia was the lovely duty-free island of Langkawi, where we docked at the Royal Langkawi Yacht Club alongside some impressive yachts and local boats. At the head of the docks was a fine restaurant and nearby were all the services you could want. This clearly was a different place from Penang and a welcome change.

To give the crew a break and time to attend to various boat issues, I chose to stay a few nights at a new, architecturally stunning, and mostly vacant, Four Seasons. The staff, almost all Muslim, were of a more forgiving sort than we have seen elsewhere. They don’t eat pork nor will they work any place where it is eaten or served. Breakfast at the hotel thus featured such unappealing items as chicken sausage and turkey bacon.

Thankfully, though, they are cheerfully indifferent to serving vital spirits. You can get sloshed–>

The island’s excellent roads wind through a bucolic countryside of jungle covered hills, cultivated rice paddies and roaming water buffalo. Modest homes and shops along the roads are orderly their yards swept clean of the detritus common among Third World habitations.

Langkawi is the first island we’ve visited that is predominately Muslim, and it shows. Walking along the commercial streets the first thing you notice is that everybody is dressed in traditional Muslim garb and their garments are spotless. In the shops, they greet you with a friendly but somewhat distant manner not unlike that of a man greeting his urologist. It’s as if they don’t really care if you buy anything. You have the distinct since that your non-Muslim presence is merely tolerated for the economic benefits you bring, nothing more.

I must say though that by any measure their culture suffers far less from the social pathologies that bedevil most Third World nations. Their rates of disease, especially HIV, rates of alcoholism, divorce and the like are commendable and due in large measure to the strict conduct required by their religion. What I did not much care for is the corollary of this salutary life and that is the obvious regimentation that comes from a state imposed religion.  Outside of the resorts, most all the people adhere fairly closely to Islamic dogma with the effect that vivacity is absent, differentness is not appreciated. But they seem quite pleased with their ways, and it’s surely not my place to say how others ought to live.

We moved Indigo from the yacht club a few miles away to Cenang, one of the more popular beaches, lined with low-rise hotels and apartments. One night we spent too many hours at a fine reggae bar where, upon surveying the crowd, it slowly dawned on me that I was the only gray head in the place. This was not the first time such a revelation had struck me.  It was usually preceded by some cheeky youngster coming up to me and saying something like, “When I grow up I want to be just like you.” Smart ass kids these days.  On several nights we were content to hang out at Calypso, a beachside driftwood shack with sand floor, live music and a raucous clientele. Still no gray heads, but what the hell.

While roaming the beach one day I came upon a startling sight. Four youngish, giggling ladies fully enshrouded head-to-toe in brightly hued Muslim clothing, faces barely visible, were wading into the ocean carrying snorkel gear. Now that’s something you don’t see every day. So I found a shady spot, sat on the sand and watched in wonder as fully clothed they went about snorkeling over an inshore reef. In stark contrast, in the all-Muslim Maldive Islands it’s common for Muslim ladies, vacationing there from rigidly Islamic countries, to sunbathe in bikinis.  They and their husbands happily indulge in the evil spirits too but they won’t touch pork.

After exhausting ourselves with nightlife, we moved Indigo to the remote east side of the island to a spot aptly named Hole-In-The-Wall. With the tender we found the narrow slot in the steep cliffs from which the place derives its name and entered through it into a maze of mangroves and lagoons encased in a natural box of steep-sided cliffs and jungle. Along one shore was a strip of floating restaurants, some abandoned, all forlorn. One of the lagoons passed through a low cave about 150 feet long.

At another place along the island cliffs, low tide revealed a cave that from its deepest recesses I could detect the faint glow of light.  I worked the tender carefully through, avoiding low hanging stalactites, and came out the other end into a wonderful hidden lake with water of the most lustrous emerald green. So high were the enclosing cliffs that it seemed as if I were at the bottom of a huge well. The incoming tide would in a few hours flood the cave blocking my exit so I didn’t linger there as long as I would have liked.

I confounded the crew a bit one night by taking the tender out for some star gazing. It was such a pleasure to be out on the open water alone, to turn off the outboard motor and all the lights and just drift on the outgoing tide. The heavens didn’t disappoint. Over the course of an hour or so I watched a resplendent display of shooting stars streaking across the sky over the Andaman Sea.

With miles of mangroves nearby, I began to wonder if they were home to saltwater crocs– among my least favorite animals–and if these could leap out of the water and snatch me from the tender. Without reflecting much longer on the matter, I hastily concluded the otherwise pleasant excursion and returned to Indigo. Later I learned that there are indeed crocs among those mangroves but there seemed to be a difference of opinion on their leaping talents.

After taking on a full load of duty-free fuel and provisions in Langkawi, we set out for what would prove to be one of our most favorite countries of the entire voyage, Thailand.