One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish…what the #*@!?

After a stifling day, young people loitered on the cement wall alongside the coast enjoying the sea breeze and eating take away from the bustling outdoor market just a parking lot away. Down below, a mess of boulders formed a wave break.  Cats pounced between the rocks, unhindered by their strangely peculiar tails;  some were stumps, others crooked, and a few with ends like a lollipop.  I voiced my sad feelings about these cats a week earlier, happy to hear from a local that it was simply a “special Asian genetic defect”.

Past the boulders, the tide was way out, exposing a wasteland of inaccessible coast; puddles of water and sticky ankle deep mud.  Two Muslim tween-aged girls sat at the rocks edge, singing along to the streaming music on their phone. One girl casually passed a rock in her hands, finally tossing it in the mud.  They exploded in a fit of giggles as mud speckled their faces and silky hijabs.  We laughed along while our gazes shifted ahead.

“Look at the fish flopping in the mud!” Brad said.

It was truly horrible.  This rather ugly fish, grey like the mud was so far from the water that there was no chance it would survive its own stupidity.  Like staring into a Magic Eye painting, I was locked in a hypnotic spell, feeling saddened by this creature’s fate.  When my focus finally broke, I noticed I was actually staring out in a landscape of literally hundreds of fish flopping in the mud.  How could it be that they all seemingly failed their natural instinct to follow the shifting waters back out to the sea?

And then I noticed something even more surprising and unbelievable; using their pectoral fins, these fish were actually walking!  I had never heard, let alone seen anything like it.

I learned later after an obsessive internet search that this fish, the mudskipper, actually resisted being pulled back out to sea; hiding in seaweed and tidal pools until the coast was clear.  At this point, their double life began.  They are active creatures on land; walking in a series of skips (hence the name), feeding in the mud, interacting with others, defending their territory, and catapulting their muscular bodies up in the air.  Much like a reptile, this amphibious creature breathes outside of water by expanding and retaining an air bubble in their enlarged gill chambers.  It was really a sight to see.

Eventually the sky darkened and we were forced to leave our rocky outpost.  We wandered down the coast to the glowing canopy of a evening food market.

What did we expect to eat at this food market?  This in itself is the most exciting part about Malaysia: you never really know.  Depending on our location, options vary greatly based on the mix of the three main ethnic groups in Malaysia.  You may go to a market one day and find that it fully caters to the Chinese community, or head down another street and find it is halal food: acceptable for Muslim consumption, or perhaps entirely mamuk (also halal), a cuisine that has resulted from the intermarriage of migrating Indian Muslims and Malay women.

Our options seemed to be endless.  However most days we sought out the mamuk restaurants, and mostly consumed roti chanai and teh tarik; which are also two of the best known examples of mamuk cuisine.  Clearly Indian in flavors and technique, yet only found in Malaysia, the roti chanai (meaning “knead” in malay) is a flaky flatbread made by continuously kneading, folding, oiling, tossing and finally cooking the dough on a griddle.  Stretchy and flaky, it is served on a tholi, a circular metal tray, with a few sides of spicy chutney and perhaps lentils.  Our favorite variation was roti pisang, made by folding bananas in the center of the dough and cooking; reminiscent of a banana pancake.  While Brad loved the roti chanai, I opted for thosai, a bread made from a mixture of rice flour and black gram dhal, left to ferment overnight and then cooked on the griddle.  As for teh tarek, (literally, pulled tea) it is made with condensed milk (here’s the Southeast Asia influence) and is poured back and forth between two containers; the higher the “pull”, the thicker the froth.  It is an artist process, worth ordering the teh tarek if only to watch it being made.

Equally popular establishments are kopitiams, traditional Malaysian Chinese coffee shops serving a variety of local coffee brews and Chinese cuisine.  They range from upscale cafes to a small stand within a market place popping out sweet coffee drinks and juices.  We visited the most well-known chain, Hailam Kopitiam one morning, started by the Goh family and popular in colonial times by the British and Negri Sembilan royalty.   We ordered an iced coffee made with espresso, sweetened condensed milk and a traditional breakfast of soft boiled eggs and charcoal grilled toast served with butter and green kaya (jam made from coconut milk and eggs).  Hailam doesn’t just offer breakfast food, it is open all day and on another occasion I ordered tauhu goring, fried tofu served with a peanut sauce and bean sprouts.

As for our go-to Malay food, it was the nasi (rice) dishes.  Malay food is not Malay food without a healthy portion of noodles or rice.  Ordering food without them is like ordering a sandwich without the bread.  Seemingly boring, yet the combination of ingredients, flavors, and techniques make these dishes worth ordering time and time again.  One hot afternoon I stopped by a small cart and pointed to an egg.  It was all I wanted, yet before I could blink an eye, the vendor had made nasi lemak,  twirling a piece of parchment paper into a cone shape, filling it with rice, fried peanuts, dried anchovies, a cucumber slice, a dollop of sambal (spicy paste), and a hardboiled egg on top.  Like a lid, he folded the parchment down over the top.  It was genius.  Other nasi varieties we discovered through random finger pointing was nasi paprik and nasi USA.

Some dishes we were only able to find once.  These are the ones we savor over and over in our minds, appreciating their uniqueness and the luck in finding them.  One particular experience was our encounter with lychee kang, ordered for us by no one other than the dreamer, Hairi.    It was a drink meant to “cool the entire body”, and it was served in an oversized plastic cocktail glass; sugared water and crushed ice, which swam with fruit cocktail, lychee (a deliciously local translucent-white fleshy fruit) and peanuts.  It was so strangely good; a perfect mix of soft and crunchy, sweet and salty.

Another such experience was in Melaka, a beautiful city with a mix of intertwining cultures, heavy in Chinese and Dutch history and a former British territory.  In the evening we were befriended by a local who directed us to a row of Chinese vendor stalls alongside the river, in search of popiah.  In a game of hot and cold, we bounced between the various stalls until we found the infamous popiah, a raw spring roll, wrapped in paper thin crepe and filled with a green mix of jicama, bean sprouts, French beans, carrots, prawns and chopped peanuts, lettuce, and egg.

To drive through Malaysia is to blaze a trail from one great market stall meal to another. After sitting and watching the Muslim girls splash themselves with mud, observing the cats as they searched for lizards among boulder piles, and watching nature’s anomalous walking fish chasing each other across mud flats, it was time to discover yet another night market in search of dinner. So, at this particular market, what did we enjoy?  We relished in one of Malaysia’s most famous contributions to the culinary world: satay; pieces of meat skewered on wooden sticks and barbecued over a charcoal fire, then brushed with a mixture of oil, honey, and spices.  It was served alongside a spicy peanut dip, cucumber slices, and tightly packed cubes of sticky rice.  From the communal tea kettle, we washed our sticky fingers and continued on. We finished off the evening with more sampling:  pink fluffy muffins and apam balik; a crispy omelet style pancake oozing with crushed peanuts and chocolate.

When our bellies were full, we strolled along the waterfront toward Nacho, said good night to the cats and to the walking fish. We would need our rest, because tomorrow there are more stops to be discovered on Malaysia’s food trail.

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The Dreamer

The sound of jungle insects reverberated through the dense, humid night air. A slow loris crept along an overhead electrical wire strung between a tall wooden pole and a cinderblock structure where a woman cooked rice and noodles for the few people who lived around these parts. The loris stopped midway across the wire to give us a wide-eyed stare, and then continued on his way, grabbed a low hanging branch, and disappeared into the jungle.

“Anda selalu makan yang sama!” I had seen Hairi’s face turn serious just before he yelled the string of incomprehensible gibberish. He raised his hand and brought it down toward his son.

“Setiap kali, hamburger, hamburger, hamburger!” Hairi’s hand landed softly on his son’s head, and then gently ruffled his hair. His serious face turned soft and he let out a laugh. Hairi’s wife, Nora, grinned widely from beneath her headscarf.

“My son,” he said, “he always order the same thing. Hamburger, hamburger, hamburger!” He laughed, and his son smiled at us from beneath his mop of messed up hair. A dab of ketchup stuck to the corner of his mouth.

A couple of days prior, while heading up Malaysia’s East coast, I had studied a Google Map of the area to find a place to camp. In the low quality image I could make out a peninsula with what appeared to be a white beach. We decided to aim in the general direction of the peninsula and see if we could somehow drive there.

When we neared the supposed beach spot, we turned off of the main highway and started driving on small roads toward the ocean. Several times we came to dead ends, and several times I hopped out to ask for directions from non-English speaking shop keepers.

“Beach?” I would ask, to which they would confusedly say, “Beats? Beats! Beats?” and bobble their heads around. I took this as a positive sign, and continued driving. Eventually we found our way onto the peninsula and onto a rough dirt road that wound into the jungle. When we finally emerged from the dark undergrowth, we were on a white sandy beach in a hidden bay.

In the shade of a palm tree, a man sanded the side of a rundown fiberglass boat.

“I am Hairi,” he said, “this is my home.” He pointed to a behemoth of a canvas tent in a meadow at the edge of the jungle.  Behind the tent, the meadow curved up into steep embankments covered in tightly packed vines and trunks and leaves.  In front of his tent the dense foliage opened up to reveal a white sand beach with an unimpeded view of several small islands.

We positioned Nacho parallel to the beach so that out of our sliding door we would have a commanding view of the beach and the islands. The setting was beautiful, and as we settled in for the evening we saw a flashlight approaching our door.

“You eat dinner?” It was Hairi. “My family go to town, you come with us?” We jumped into his dilapidated car, squeezing into the backseat with his boys. From their CD player, Alvin and the Chipmunks’ rendition of “You Had a Bad Day” filled the car. Nora habitually smiled while their kids stared at us in silence. A rare cool breeze brushed my face through the open window as we wound through the jungle.

At the cinderblock restaurant we chose a table outside, and then a teenage girl came out and set a smoldering egg carton in the grass beside our table. “The smoke keep the mosquitoes away,” Hairi explained with a smile. He mimicked killing a mosquito on his arm by slapping it, and then he laughed. The smoke swirled around, Nora smiled, and the boys stared at us. Sheena asked Hairi how they were able to sleep when it was so hot and humid. “We open all windows in tent. ” he said.

That night while we slept in Nacho I drifted in and out of sleep. Suddenly my eyes snapped open and I gasped for air. It felt as though I were being waterboarded in some secret CIA prison camp. I rolled over and pressed my face against the window screen, gasping for a breath of fresh air. It never came, and I dizzily rolled onto my back, breathing belabored, hot breaths of thick water vapor. The mattress and my pillow were soaked with sweat. I laid on my back for what seemed like an eternity, our small oscillating fan pushing the watery air over our bodies. I hoped I would adapt quickly to the heat and humidity.

The next evening, over another meal of ramen noodles and rice at the cinder block restaurant, Hairi talked about life in the jungle and about Muslim traditions. I told him that I was jealous of the way Muslims got to wear comfortable silk pajamas to the mosque on Fridays.

“If I wear my pajamas in public, people just think I’m lost or homeless,” I said.

He told us about Mecca, and how every Muslim dreams of making a pilgrimage there. “Have you ever been to Mecca?” I asked.

“I haven’t been. Not yet,” he said, emphasizing the word yet, and then smiled broadly. “This my dream, so I will go one day. My dreams are coming true.”

“One day,” he said, “I was working on the beach. I see big yacht out near island, so I say, ‘okay, I go see.’ So I borrow small boat and I row. I row a long time, and I get to yacht. The man on yacht come out, and he from Scotland. He sail boat here, all way from Scotland!” His eyes glistened in the dim light from the restaurant’s bare light bulb.

“The man tell me to come onto boat, so I do,” he continued. “We talk, and I ask him how he able to come here on boat when it so far away. And he tell me, ‘Hairi, if you want to be like me, you can be like me.’ He tell me, ‘make a list of 100 dreams. Everybody have dreams, and if you write them down on a list, your dreams come true. And after your 100 dreams come true, you write a new list of 100 more dreams.’”

It seemed a little superstitious to me, but I listened on skeptically.

“So I go home and I think about what the Scottish man say. I say okay, I find a pencil and a paper, and I write down my dreams. One, two, three, four – I write down 100 dreams. I hang up my dreams by my bed, and I start to look at it every day.” Hairi paused, placed his hand on his knee, and lowered his head. He stared at us and continued, slowly.

“You know what happen?” he said. “I see that list every day and I start thinking about my dreams. This list make me think, to remember. My first dream is I want to have own boat. But we don’t have much money, so I go and I find old boat with hole in it. Owner don’t know how to fix boat, so I learn how to make fiberglass repair, and I fix boat! Now I have boat!”

He was visibly excited by this, and I suppose there was something exciting in this key he’d discovered. By thinking often about his goals he could more readily realize them with fewer resources when opportunities presented themselves. But it seemed like a small victory. Hairi continued.

“Next, I have dream of being a diver. But to become diver, it cost 3,000 Ringgit! I don’t have 3,000 Ringgit, so I look for other way. I find resort that have diving school, so I decide I try to get job there. I think, if I can work at resort, maybe I can learn to dive. I work hard, and they hire me to wash dishes. So I work, and I ask how I can learn to dive. They say for workers at resort they have dive class for 25 Ringgit. So I take class. I become diver, and resort hire me to bring clients diving!”

By now Hairi was beaming, and Nora smiled proudly at her husband for being so resourceful.

“Next, I have dream to swim with whale shark,” he said. He hummed the tune to Jaws, smiled, and continued. “So one day after we dive with our clients, we taking the boat back to resort and we see big whale sharks! So big! We all jump in water and we swim with them. I touch them, I touch the big sharks with my hand!” He mimicked the touch as though he were stroking a beautiful woman’s hair.

“My big dream,” Hairi continued, “was to touch Japanese battleship. Since I was a boy in school I like this battleship. But the ship is in Hawaii! How do I do it?” By now, Hairi’s eyebrows were raised, as though there was no possible way.

“So,” Hairi said, “I ask at resort, and I find out Star Cruise Lines hiring workers for the cruise ships. I ask for job, and they hire me to clean up on ship. My ship go from Kuala Lumpur to Manila in the Phillipines and back. One day in Manila, there a Star Lines ship that go to Hawaii, so I find someone who work on that ship, and I ask if he want to trade with me. He say yes! So I take ship that goes to Hawaii! When the ship get to Maui, they tell us, ‘Okay, you have two days before ship leave. You can go explore.’ So I get off ship, and I go to harbor where Japanese battleship is.” Hairi slowed down as if savoring every word. “I walk to battleship, and I go to the side. I place my hand on it, like this.” He placed his left hand on his right elbow, and pretended to touch the ship with his right hand. He touched the imaginary ship for a long time, as if reliving the moment.

“See? My dreams are coming true. I touch Japanese battleship.” He ended his story and sat there  with a big grin on his face next to his son, who had long since finished his hamburger. Nora looked at him admiringly, as if he had just saved his entire family from a burning bus. And Sheena and I looked at him admiringly too.

Here was a man with very little resources, who lived in a tent in the jungle, yet he had obtained his own boat, he became a scuba diver, he swam with whale sharks, and he traveled across the ocean to another country to see an icon that he’d only read about in books.

Hairi is the man.

That night, Sheena and I  decided that we needed to at least make an honest effort to drive through China, even though it was financially out of our reach, and thus had not been included in our original trip plans.

The next morning, Nora invited us over to the tent for a breakfast of traditional Malaysian pancakes with sprinkled sugar, and a plastic pitcher of black coffee. We all gathered around the outdoor wooden table and dug into the delicious food as the sounds of birds and insects echoed around the meadow. A dog bolted out of the jungle, followed closely by an angry monkey. Hairi yelled at the monkey and Sheena and I laughed.

“Wait here,” Hairi said, and then disappeared into his tent. He emerged carrying a comfortable-looking Malaysian shirt, or baju melayu, and a traditional plaid wraparound sarong. He smiled and handed them to me. “These are for you. So you can dress comfortably on Fridays like Muslims!” He asked me to stand, and then showed me how to wrap it.

He turned and went back into his tent. He emerged a minute later with a rose-print dress and blouse, and handed them to Sheena.

“Nora made these by hand. We want you to have them,” he said, and then handed them to Sheena. We had been humbled. We made a quick assessment of things we could offer them, and decided on a fresh jar of dulce de leche from Argentina.

For a moment I wondered what would happen if we changed our plan and drove Hairi to Mecca. It would be the ultimate gift, the realization of his wildest dreams, and an amazing experience. It would have really been something. But I have no doubt he’ll make it there one way or another.

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What to do, What to do

This update pertains to the blog post below, in which we questioned whether or not we should continue with our goal of driving through China to produce a book about driving the Silk Road. We want to thank all those who spoke up with supportive comments about our plan. The hundreds of you who provided us with motivational words and insight here and on our Facebook page helped us realize that our chosen method of making it happen is a just and worthy one. There’s a great story to be told, and we’re determined to tell it. So after having slept on it, read through each and every one of your comments, and pondered it throughout a long drive up Thailand’s East coast, we’ve come to a decision.

We’re going to push hard and try to make it happen. It’s the spirit we started with and it’s the spirit that we’ll maintain until we finish. If we’d done what the armchair experts said we should have done, we’d still be sitting at home.

So that leaves 23 days from today to reach our funding goal.

Thanks!

In our next blog post, you’ll read about a guy we met named Hairi. After spending a couple of days with this man, who lived in a tent in the jungle with his family, we were really inspired. His life has been a continuous string of achievements that didn’t seem possible for someone without any money who lives in a tent in the jungle. We were so inspired by Hairi that we decided to choose our biggest barrier – driving through China – and try whatever we could think of to make it a reality. We never intended to drive through China due to the high cost, but we figured, with enough determination, anything is possible.

As you saw in our last blog post, we decided to devote all of our energy over the coming months to driving the Silk Road through China and Central Asia, and then stopping in Turkey to write a book about it. We thought that crowd sourced funding would be a good way to do it, because it would allow lots of people to contribute in small amounts, and then benefit at the end.

On the first day of our project, we raised 10% of our goal. By day five we were at 25%. Now, going into day six, we’re nearing the 30% mark. The feedback we received from our friends and readers was 98% positive, but there were a couple of people who saw it as a way to get other people to fund our vacation. This caught us off guard, because we never even considered that point of view. The way we saw it, we decided to break from our trip, and do an actual “project”, complete with extensive planning, note taking, professionalism, a deadline, and deliverables.

What we didn’t expect was that, as the word spread beyond our friends and readers, there would be such a high degree of hatred aimed at us. No longer was our project seen as a “project”, but as a couple of spoiled kids trying to get strangers to pay for our vacation. This is the entirely wrong message. And being that we’re positive people who like to be surrounded by positive thoughts, people, and feelings, we’re feeling a little unnerved by the hate.

It’s evening here in Thailand, and Sheena and I are going to sleep on it for the next couple of nights. We’ll be thinking about whether driving through China and Central Asia is worth the negative baggage that will come along with it. In the morning, we’ll either decide to keep the project up, or can it and go back to our original plan of shipping to India, and then shipping around the Middle East.

We’ll let you know.

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