Popagandhi

In 2005, a 20 year old newbie backpacker trudged through the Cambodian border at Aranyaprathet on foot and her first instinct was to reach for a stack of paper in her 65L backpack. Just to locate the section, “At the Poi Pet border… expect to pay extra for a Cambodian visa”, and additional instructions on how to bribe immigration officials, hitch a pick up truck, ride a shared taxi, or board a minibus to Siem Reap after clearing immigration. That was my first introduction to the world of crossing land borders. It was also the first of the series of month-long backpacking trips to come, the short regional jaunts that would come to define my time at university.

If I were to do it again today, knowing what I know now, and owning what I now own — an iPhone — things would have been simpler:

Travelfish.org has been my exclusive source of travel information in Southeast Asia since they opened for business. When I saw it for the first time, I told many friends that I would never buy another travel guidebook for Southeast Asia again. Five years on, many of them didn’t believe me, but that held true — the well-written online guide to many Southeast Asian countries is still free, and even better. Five or more years of travelling the region with Travelfish meant I’ve discovered many personal favourites through it. From the lovely cottages and wonderful food of Chiang Dao Nest, to the former Golden Triangle of Mae Salong, to the Gibbon Experience Project, and what smaller temples one should see other than the Angkor Wat itself, I mostly learned about them on Travelfish.

The first Travelfish iPhone app covers Angkor, or rather the town of Siem Reap and the nearby temples of the magnificent Angkor Wat. I’m a fan of both Cambodia and of the iPhone, and I continue to be fascinated by the direction travel seems to be going with all the possibilities on smart mobile computing devices like the iPhone. While there are many apps that help travellers find out where they are and how to get there and when (GPS apps, travel itinerary apps like TripIt’s, apps to find restaurants nearby), I’m more interested in where I should go, and why. A combination of Travelfish’s good writing and the intuitive nature of a well-designed iPhone app, I thought at some point, would be a breakthrough. So when Stuart announced the launch of their first ever iPhone app, Angkor, I jumped on the opportunity to review it.

Weighing in at a reasonable 43.6 MB, the app works great offline — which is a huge plus for travellers on the go without connectivity. The menu is laid out in 8 clear sections, in large icons. Tap on any of those icons, and that’s where it gets interesting. The app is locked in landscape mode, which suits the way they’ve thought about user experience. You drag your finger to the left and right of a series of flash cards in each section: overview, map, district, type of hotel/restaurant/activity. I’m particularly excited by the fact that maps work great offline and get even better with connectivity. I don’t always have data on my phone when I travel, but wifi spots are easily located. I can think of plenty of ways in which the maps feature could change the way I travel. Instead of using Google Maps and having to input the address of where I’m going (always a chore because address formats and spelling is so frequently frustrating in this part of the world, or in a language you can’t write), with data access I can simply locate myself on the inbuilt map that’s pre-populated with Travelfish-recommended hotels, bars, restaurants, and also with useful spots like transport locations. The filters let you turn on and off each category of landmarks on the map — again, very useful. The four walking tours suggested in the app are also marked out on the map, and you can turn any of them on or off. I can see how useful it would be if I were walking around Angkor Thom, needed to see what the nearest temple to drive to was, and whether it was worth making a detour: I can simply locate myself, tap any of the nearby pins and read all about them.

Other sections are Background, Sleep, Eat and Meet, See and Do, Transport, Walking tours and Photos. Having been to Angkor/Siem Reap several times, I’m familiar enough with the area to say the recommendations and reviews are spot-on, and the writing a joy to read. More importantly, at US$7.99, it’s a steal for all that valuable information — and for the pleasurable experience of using such a well-designed, well-written app. Download now. Leave the guidebook at home. There’s another one for Koh Samet as well (in case you’re in Bangkok and planning an island getaway). I truly believe they’ve set the bar for travel guides on the go.

Yemen is all over the news these days for all the wrong reasons. Those of you interested in that sort of thing would do well to read Waq al-Waq as a necessary companion blog to Western reporting on Yemen, which does tend to come across as uninformed and inaccurate most of the time.

I still miss that country greatly and think constantly about what a wonderful experience it was, to have had the chance to see it. Here are some of the beautiful people I met.

A three month old living being called Cookie rules my life now. She is the reason I wake up early, cuss more times a day than I should, run from phone calls with my family screaming “Poop! Poop!”, and also the sole reason I am finding it harder to drop everything and go. She makes me chatter feverishly (and gibberish-ly) to her, and just about everyone around her — she’s a well-loved little baby Cavalier that’s found a way into my heart, my life, and my travel plans.

Life has taken on some strange turns.

It’s the boxers. And the fact that I live in a neighbourhood with Giant Supermarket trolleys all over the park.

She also has a website.

2009 was a year of many things: it was the year of change and death. More so it was the year of change because of death. Many famous people died that year; my grandfather, who was not famous, somehow also did the same. In April I called him from a phone booth in Beirut at US$2 a minute and had a 30-second conversation with him about minced pork noodles. In May I called him from London and had a 30-second conversation with him about minced pork noodles. In June they called me 3 hours after I landed in Kuala Lumpur from London, on the brink of my new life not far from home. 12 hours later I was sitting by his hospital bed, in a hospital 5 minutes from where I have lived all 24 years of my life, feeling like the last 24 hours of travel was about to change everything I knew about those very 24 years. By the middle of the month he was dead, and I didn’t get to see it. All I know is that 3 different people woke me up at 6 in the morning that morning and told me in 3 different languages that my ah gong was gone.

In Chinese familial taxonomy, the standing of every person in your family is relative and also language-dependent. Depending on your relationship to that person, and which linguistic branch is dominant in that side of the family, you call him or her a different thing. So your father’s mother is ah ma, your mother’s mother is gwa ma — if both sides of the family more or less speak the southern Min languages like Hokkien or Teochew, like we do. Your father’s younger sister is one thing, older sister is another; depending on their position among the siblings, and your own relationship to that person, each person is called something else. Like knowing whether tables, ties, or street lamps are feminine or masculine in French, everybody inherently knows this. But ah gong was only ah gong. To all of us.

I lived with this man and his wife almost every second of my existence. Then I grew up, travelled madly, lived abroad, and came home expecting not very much to change but instead everything did: no old Chinese man berating me about cigarettes and alchohol, no grumpy old man coming into my room at 3am every morning to check if I was alive, no funny old man who was a head and 3 foot sizes smaller than me telling me his slew of so bad they’re funny jokes that weren’t really jokes.

Then bloody 2009 took him away from me. We found out he was born on the same day as Michael Jackson. (Chinese lunar calendars and their ever-changing dates; we only found out when the date went up on his tomb.) A week after that, Michael Jackson died. Sometimes when I think about it, I think it was cosmically timed so that my ah gong could shine his torch at MJ’s face, laugh at his nose, and tell him that in Singapore we’ve immortalized him in a soya bean milk and grass jelly drink, after the ambiguous colour of his skin (and his famous song).

The rest of it in a nutshell, because they just don’t seem as important: I lived in the United Arab Emirates. I went to a camel market. Some camel trader offered 20 camels for my hand in marriage. I said no. I went to Yemen. Missed two bombs. Called my parents to tell them I was alive, and they said “okay, good”, because they were asleep and thought I sounded too happy for someone who’d just had a bomb scare. Happened to be in Pattaya and Bangkok at the precise moment the Red Shirt/Yellow Shirt April demonstrations erupted. Swatted flies with a tennis racket electric mosquito swatter while watching Thaksin on TV, with all his evil. Did my ultimate roadtrip: Beirut, Bekaa Valley, Damascus, Palmyra, Homs, Aleppo, Adana, Antalya, Goreme, Istanbul, London. Messed around in London for a while. Went home. Ah gong died. Mourned for a long time. My friends say India is my Prozac, so I went to Chennai, Fort Cochin, and Mumbai for a while to, well, “find myself”. Moved to KL. Settled. Got a dog. Started a business. Spent the new year with my love without having to spend a thousand dollars flying to see her.

2009 was good; but I can’t wait for this one to really kick off.

Some friends from Turkey came to visit this past weekend. I had a great time hanging out with Melissa and Emirhan in Antalya when I stopped by en route to Istanbul (from Damascus), so I naturally returned the favour and put them up at my place. After three dinners (not at the same time, albeit the same night), Emirhan gave up at the sight of three relatively small Asian girls chomping away at their 20th meal of the day and said it must be that we all have two stomachs, the other one being the one that leads straight to refuse.

Kuala Lumpur is a funny place. It contains no immediately obvious tourist attractions (not to me anyway) and the lay of the land is hard to grasp. It’s a sprawling mess of cities, townships, and everything in between; the lack of acceptable public transportation makes it hard to get around. In other words it’s a city not for tourists, but for visitors who have the time and ability to stay, sit around, drink teh tarik, and make new friends.

Unless you’re here to eat and have both the ability and desire to match us locals on our tremendous stamina for eating.

To say “eating” is a national pastime and obsession is not merely stating the obvious, it also woefully understates the true extent of the obsessive nature of this common indulgence which is the mark of a born-and-bred Malaysian (and to an extent, but less so, Singaporean). It is neither a task nor a hobby — it is a way of life. Every aspect connected to the act of eating is performed with loving care and preponderance; the final act of eating is nowhere near a climax, for there is no start, nor finish. Evidence: have an awesome lunch or dinner with a group of Malaysians (or Singaporeans), the ones who are passionate about food (almost everyone is, but there are some who are far long gone). Say nothing. Listen to them speak, and make a mental note of what their conversations are about.

I’d wager that 90% of the conversation is about food. Not about the food they’re eating at that very moment, no, not at all (beyond the expected “this is good”, “this is fucking amazing”, or “this is awful”, which pervades in the first five minutes or so) — it’s more likely to turn into a rare moment of Malaysian/Singaporean introspection and cultural analysis. “This is far better/worse/comparable to/cheaper than/better value for money compared to…”, the connoisseur declares, not with the pomp or authority of a food critic, but with a heart of tender love, “but I’m afraid to say the hawker in (insert any other part of town) is better.” He is bound to be accosted with fierce interjections, because everyone’s a passionate food critic in this part of the world, and sometime cultural and culinary commentator too.

If you’re truly lucky, and understand the local vernacular well enough, you might be witness to a display of shocking real-time food gossip, one that knows neither state nor national boundaries. We all do this to some extent — we know exactly how many of the famous hawkers got started, how their families fell apart from intra-family bickering, how the secret recipe diverged into dozens of different locations and took on their own styles, which one remains true to the original secret, right down to the very last minutiae such as “the chilli in the 4th brother’s version is inferior to the one made by hand daily by his 2nd brother. However the cousin’s newly revised version (open from 10am to 8pm at this other location), is by far the best.”

We even plan our holidays around food. I know my family does, and so do many of my friends. In fact it was no big deal to find that so-and-so’s family had just driven 8 hours northwards to spend a night in northern Malaysia, in order to eat wanton mee at that location, nor was it surprising that they would choose to drive back down not on the expressway, but through the trunk roads that would take them through certain other locations where they could, you guessed it, eat some more (hard-to-find versions of food we love).

From the time I was 15, I developed a strange habit of stealing my passport and bringing it to school with me. I had the good luck to have gone to school in a fine educational establishment. It gave me many wonderful things: it developed my writing abilities, and my school-time activities in those days taught me how to multi-task like crazy and how to play truant, but above all its location on Bukit Timah Road, Singapore, featured one untapped resource — bus 170 to Johor, Malaysia. I hopped on it frequently to lunch (alone, for I was an introvert — and still am) in my school uniform. Then turned back around and went home to a suburban estate in Singapore like it was the most normal thing.

Because it was. At least where I came from.

Moving to Malaysia made this even more unavoidable. I am surrounded 24/7 by fantastic local food, much of it towering heads and shoulders above the Singaporean versions which, despite sharing the same characteristics, are now mostly inedible from a combination of neglect, lack of innovation and tradition (at the same time), rapid development killing our long heritage of ’street’ food, and other things like that. Say what you will about how the food is better here because it’s ‘unhealthier’ or ‘dirtier’ — I don’t care. (The free use of pork lard is a Malaysian Chinese habit I fully endorse, and begrudge our Singaporean hawkers for not indulging in.) I wake up most mornings in Malaysia thinking about eating noodles. I have travelled far and wide but I care for little in the world (with the sole exception of jamon iberico) than a good bowl of southern Chinese Southeast Asian noodles. bakchormee in Singapore; pork noodles, soup or kon lo in KL. And wanton mee, the northern Malaysian version of which I find far superior by far to our chilli and tomato-addled sickly versions down south. When I am not thinking of noodles, I am thinking of nasi lemak. The very idea of eating noodles and rice for breakfast is alien to many. No scene is more striking than one onboard any airline leaving or entering Malaysia or Singapore on a long-haul flight, when breakfast is served at 5.30am. Stewardesses, onboard Emirates, Malaysian Airlines, or Singapore Airlines flights, come by patting passengers on the shoulder with breakfast options, having to explain the only local option, nasi lemak, to those who don’t know. “Rice steamed in coconut milk… served with chicken curry… fried bits of little fish.. and… a big dollop of spicy sambal.” Of course, all the locals happily tuck into our spicy chicken curry coconut rice at 5.30 in the morning, while most other passengers think us insane.

So while we didn’t have very much time to re-educate Melissa and Emirhan on the wonders of local food, we tried our best. Since there are few pleasures greater than the delights of a superb Ramly burger, the sort that can only be found in Malaysia, we headed straight for one. Followed by satay Kajang. Followed by two rounds of lok-lok. (A lok-lok truck is a contraption of a truck that’s been pimped up to allow for the display and storage of fresh sticks of meat and seafood, to be dipped into communal vats on the rims of these trucks, each filled with boiling hot soup, into which one cooks your sticks of food in a DIY fashion. It went out of fashion (or was outlawed) in Singapore even before I was born, so I eat at one every other day in Malaysia and find great pleasure in it.)

By this time Melissa had already given up on the idea of eating anymore, but Emirhan tried his best. We had one round of lok-lok, rested for beer, and returned an hour later for more.

That’s when I realized how much of a stereotype we had all become. Scurrying to the truck at 2am, we noticed most of the sticks of food had been packed away for the night. Anxious, we all did a spontaneous mini-sprint to the steamboat — separately. In another moment of unplanned synchronized gluttony, we immediately took out our phones from our pocket… and laughed. We knew precisely why the other person was doing it.

We had to check the time the lok-lok truck stopped selling food… because… we just had to.

And then we ate. And ate some more. And went home and planned what to eat in 5 hours’ time.

That’s when I knew I am indeed native to this land. A gluttonous, perpetually hungry native.

(I’m going to Penang this weekend to, well, eat even more. Hokkien mee with pork knuckle? Crabs in Tanjung Tokong? Living in Malaysia should come with a weight-gain advisory warning!)