Kuala Lumpur

The heat here makes India feels like child’s play. I have a massive canker sore in the middle of my bottom lips, making it difficult even to speak. This sucks. I don’t know what to do, where to go. I can’t think. Things are a tiny bit more expensive, but manageable. I can keep living here without financial stress, but at what cost? Am I not miserable in this heat? Can I adapt and overcome? Or do I go to New Zealand and pay the heavy price for weather that makes me feel alive? I’m really going through it. I’m staying at a hostel in china town. Most of the nearby buildings don’t have AC. I’ve been working in the cafe downstairs, but it’s so hot I have difficulty concentrating on planning next steps. I put in the work to put my bike back together. I had a bit of false optimism when I arrived in Malaysia. I saw ducks roasting in the airport and thought “how wonderful, ducks!”. I love duck. That was enough to convince me to stay a while in KL and soak it up. Eat some cheap roast duck etc… Part of me had thought I could just book a flight right there and never even leave the airport, but a stronger part of me tugged me along. Asian food. Asian prices. You like that, don’t you Nick. But then the other Nick was there saying “remember why you wanted New Zealand in the first place. Remember the misery of Malabar, the relentless unforgiving heat, remember the saddle sores and rashes and rosacea turning your face into a cherry tomato. But I arrived in China Town and I saw ducks and noodles and prices that made me happy and it was raining so the air was cool and I took my bike up to the balcony and I said I’m committing and I put it back together right then and there in an act of both defiance and compliance with fickle fate. This airport incident really threw me off. I feel like I’m in another world now with new rules. KL has so many things that I wanted for so long, but it’s also just calling more to my hedonism and less to my spirit. I just want to write. I just want somewhere to be creative and write for some time, a place to plop myself down and live a little. That can’t be here. Can it? There is a rock climbing gym. The women here are pretty. But, again, it’s hot. 

I’ll adapt. I’ll stay. I’ll bide my time here until the shoulder season is through, then I’ll make the call whether to brave the humidity and rains of Thailand or island hop through Indonesia during its dry season . As I acclimated to Kuala Lumpur, I plotted a way that I could spend my time in Malaysia. I figured if I wanted to recover financially from the plane ticket I should find some volunteer positions through Workaway and hold onto my video editing gig for the Australians, I could easily do this for a month or so, and Malaysia would let me stay at least 3 months before I need to apply for any kind of extension. I switched to a toothpaste that didn’t have sodium laurel sulfate and that brought down the canker sores. I didn’t see much of Kuala Lumpur, but almost every night I ended up going out with a different group of people that I met by chance. I wasn’t drinking or partying, but the days were so brutal that it felt natural to stay out every night until the wee hours, just to make the most of the part of the day where you didn’t hate life. It was Ramadan so there were plenty of people out eating meals late at night anyway. I’m getting used to being social again. I met some Eritrean girls who lived in Germany but didn’t want to go back. I met a girl from Florida who was refreshingly cool and funny and made me happy to be American. I met a South African of Israeli heritage who had a mental health startup on Instagram. I met a British Indian girl and half heartedly flirted with her before changing my mind. My last night they moved me into a bigger dorm and I was stuck with horrible party people who kept me up all night talking about sex and other such things. I couldn’t be mad, and I kept quiet as I didn’t want to spoil their fun. I found a British family on Warm Showers that hosted me for a couple nights in another part of KL as I took my bike to the shop to make a couple of adjustments. The British guy was super hardcore at first and I was kind of intimidated by him. He had a real “we have to be the best” kind of vibe in his household and you could tell by how arrogant his kid was. Gloating was celebrated in this family, modesty be damned. I really don’t like this style of parenting. It reminded me of the worst parents that would show up to soccer games when I was younger, and made me appreciate the modesty that my parents instilled in me. This guy and his wife had been everywhere. They had made little booklets about all the different countries they’d cycled through. Even their origin story was beautiful, meeting on a trek in Nepal. And despite the winner winner attitude, the kid was adorable as well. The family grew on me pretty quickly and I saw past their initial arrogance. I think they felt kind of restless living in KL, but it’s where life took him. The patriarch was a physics teacher at an international school, and it was never really explained to me what the matriarch does, but she was intensely athletic, casually talking about how she might do a marathon in a couple weeks. The guy also loved talking with me about routing. He made me download maps dot me which I haven’t used since and sent me all sorts of routes for getting around KL. To be fair, KL is a horrible city to cycle in. There’s no unifying grid, it’s made up of a patchwork of closed in communities with an intimidating network of highways linking them together. Meaning I had to cycle on the highway a lot. The ride to the guys house was brutal. I had to carry my bike up several overpasses. It really made me appreciate New York, where no part of the city is cut off from my two wheels. On the second day in the house their kid was playing video games and his dad kept trying to impose this rule where the kid had to go out and “play”. The kid kept objecting saying there was no one out to play with but his dad didn’t care, just go out. God that seems brutal. Kids should just already want to go out and play, why force it? Guilt. That he’s raising his kid in a fenced suburban community. They go pretty frequently on trips out to waterfalls and such so I wouldn’t worry too much about the hardiness of this kid, who is a proper athlete in every sense. Let him play Zelda. I remember my dad actually delighted in seeing me enjoy playing computer games. But they had to be real time strategy games, the first player shooter games would turn my mind to mush. What a nerd. 

The man set me up on a route to get out of the city the next day and pass by Batu Caves on the way. He recommended a campsite for the first night, a big hill I could climb over if I wanted on the way to Cameron Highlands, and then macro scale suggested I continue to Thailand from Penang. He told me there’s no such thing as dry season wet season, and that he cycles in Southeast Asia whenever he wants to and it’s fine. He also said that when it rains, people get sick because they are sheltering together, not because getting caught in rain can weaken your immune system. This guy teaches physics. I don’t know what’s going on. Anyway, he was perfectly hospitable and I benefitted well from the info he gave.