batu caves

The day after the "canopy walk," we went to see the Batu Caves, one of the most important sites of Hindu worship in the world. Every year, during the end of January/beginning of February, thousands of devotees make a pilgrimage to the caves for the Thaipusam festival, where they engage in various acts of devotion, notably, carrying/enduring various types of kavadi or burdens. As good ol' wikipedia explains, "at its simplest this may entail carrying a pot of milk, but mortification of the flesh by piercing the skin, tongue or cheeks with vel skewers is also common. The most spectacular practice is the vel kavadi, essentially a portable altar up to two meters tall, decorated with peacock feathers and attached to the devotee through 108 vels pierced into the skin on the chest and back. Fire walking and flagellation may also be practiced. It is claimed that devotees are able to enter a trance, feel no pain, do not bleed from their wounds and have no scars left behind."

Unfortunately, we were a month too early for the fest, but the caves site was pretty fucking spectacular nonetheless. Here's Maya outside the main gate - you can see the stairway of 272 steps leading up into the darkness of the main cave, the Temple Cave... as well, of course, as the 120-foot-plus gold-painted statue of the Hindu diety Lord Murugan.

As you walk up the 272 steps, there are wild monkeys everywhere, playing in the nearby trees; leaping, sitting, and sliding down the stairway railing; and some, even crawling around the steps themselves.

We saw this one enjoying a flower garland left as an offering inside the cave.

And we saw another monkey taking a completely unprovoked and unexpected swipe at an Indian dude walking down the steps not far from us. So yeah, they may be cute but are not to be trusted.

The temple cave, as you can see, is fucking huge, and - as you can't see - is full of colorful tableaus depicting a variety of bizarre dieties in a variety of equally bizarre interactions (blue multi-armed women standing on little baby-sized men with handlebar moustaches; cows with the heads, and boobs, of beautiful women, etc.).

Me, below some of temple cave's many drippy stalactites.

After the temple cave, Maya and I took a personal tour of another Batu cave, the accurately-but-not-so-creatively-named "Dark Cave." Here we are before the tour in our spiffy spelunker's helmets. The highlight of the tour was probably when, about 10 minutes into the cavern, the walkway came to life with all sorts of creepy-crawlies - it was like something out of an Indiana Jones movie - most of which turned out to be cockroaches that live off of all the guano (bat excrement) dropped on the cave floor.


Finally, here I am standing in front of a big statue of an insane-looking green monkey-faced dude at the bottom of the temple cave. Can't pretend to know much more than that (Maya says that she read that he is the most rarely worshipped diety from the Hindu pantheon - can't imagine why).

Our visit has only made us want to come back during Thaipusam and see all the insanity for ourselves - if not actually "mortify our flesh."

welcome to the jungle

Malaysia boasts some of the most spectacular rainforests in the world, and remarkably, some of it lies not far outside of KL. In fact, even right from inside the city, you can see deep green forest-covered moutains brushing up against the sky. In between visiting metal stores and rocking out at hardcore shows, Maya and I went to FRIM (Forest Research Institute Malaysia), a scientific jungle-study center that was only recently opened to tourists and which is still off the beaten track (though I can't imagine that this will remain the case for long). There we tackled the "canopy walk," a precarious 600-foot-long rope-and-wooden-plank trail hanging from the trees some 90 feet above the ground, right in the midst of the jungle canopy, where it's used by researchers. The walk was ridiculously bouncy and the structure seemed ready to snap apart at any second, and the views were amazing - we saw families of monkeys leaping from tree top to tree top, and, through occasional breaks in the tangled foliage, we saw the KL skyline, with its famous Petronas Towers, in the distance. Indeed, civilization as we know it seemed fantastically far away.

kl rock city (part 2)

Unlike Beijing, where there are tons of metal bands playing live on a regular basis but almost none of them bother to put out albums, in Malaysia, there are tons of local bands writing, recording, and releasing albums, but there are very few live metal shows. Blame this on the government's last banning of "black metal" a little over a year ago and the subsequent raid of a metal fest in Kuala Lumpur and the detainment of over 300 of the fans and musicians there. Oddly, however, while Malaysian metal bands may be keeping to the studio and to the practice space for the time being, local and international hardcore bands seem to play out in KL almost every month.

In fact, during Maya's and my one week in the city, there was a big annual hardcore fest called Bridging Oceans 3, featuring Southeast Asian hardcore bands from Malaysia, Singapore (or "Spore," as the kids call it), the Philipines, and Indonesia, going down. I found out about it through this cool site, Malaysian Gigs, that I stumbled on while looking to see if there were any shows in KL while we were in town, and Maya and I showed up at the venue, the MCPA Theatre upstairs in the Chinese Assembly Hall - a rather official-looking convention center right by KL's Chinatown - bright and early at 1:30 in the afternoon this past Sunday, when the gig was set to go down. There was some kind of Chinese book fair taking place on the ground floor, which made for many awkward interactions between the black-clad and tattooed hardcore kids coming through to the fest and the very straightlaced book fair attendees. And on the second floor, right outside the MCPA theatre, there was a little exhibition in honor of Sun Yat-Sen, the first president of the Republic of China; all the hardcore kids seemed to find this hilarious, and many took photos of themselves giggling in front of a large photo of the communist leader.

In true DIY fashion, the gig didn't start until after 2:30, over an hour late, but other than that, there wasn't much that Maya and I could complain about - the show was pretty fucking awesome. The crowd was an amazing assortment of Malaysian, Indian, and Arab hardcore kids, including at least two girls in Muslim headscarves(!), many wearing shirts with "MYHC" (an acronym for "Malaysian hardcore" and a play off of "NYHC,"New York hardcore") emblazoned on them. As soon as the first band, a cool Malaysian quartet called Back on Track with an adorably nerdy-looking singer, hit the stage, the crowd went apeshit, moshing, circle-pitting, and skanking, sometimes with a weird synchronicity that suggested the violent choreographed dance routine of some bizarro hardcore boyband. Even more remarkable, however, was just how fucking friendly everyone was - kids smiled at us, said hello or welcome, some shook our hands, one complimented my Pantera T-shirt. And almost as soon as we showed up, a skinheaded Singaporean dude (named Yus) in a Madball basketball jersey came up to us, asked us where we were from (he was very impressed that we were from NYC since most of his favorite bands were NYHC groups like Sick of It All, Cro-Mags, and, well, Madball), and started introducing us to other people (turned out, Yus knew just about everyone there), telling us about the MYHC scene, and just generally shooting the shit. Later, in between sets, a random kid noticed that while everyone else in our general area, including Maya, had a chair to sit on, I was just squatting down on the floor, and in a truly unprecedented act of thoughtfulness, he lifted a chair from the stack behind him and placed it by me, gesturing for me to sit. He then chatted with Maya for about half an hour before excusing himself - "I have to go mosh," he said simply - and disppearing into the crowd.

As for the bands, they were totally solid, ranging from old school to new school, the more punk-inflected and the more metal-influenced. And some even cranked out a number of highly entertaining covers of songs that we actually knew, by bands including Hatebreed, Sick of It All, and Black Flag. The most popular act of the night had to be the Malaysian group xELEVENx, who had almost the entire audience piling on top of each other, trying to get to the mic to sing/shout along to every song which they clearly all knew by heart.



I ended up buying a CD of theirs (and a T-shirt of this "Spore" moshcore band, Overthrown), and Maya and I ended up hanging out at the show for nearly 7 hours, leaving only right before the final band, and only because we were absolutely starving. It turned out that My Chemical Romance were playing that night at the stadium almost exactly across the highway from the Chinese Assembly Hall, and when we walked to the nearby skytrain station after getting dinner in Chinatown, the My Chem show was just getting out. As we pushed disdainfully through the throngs of Malaysian emo kids (who were sopping wet because it had started raining midway through their outdoor concert - and probably because they'd been weeping along to every song), one of the kids, a young dude, looked at Maya and said as we passed, "So beautiful," followed by what sounded to both of us like, "Jew-bol," which Maya and I joked must be Malay for "Jewess" or something. I decided that while, yes, Maya is "so beautiful," she must seem extra-hot - like the forbidden fruit or something - as a Jewess in a Muslim land. Not to mention as a newly minted member of the MYHC scene among a sea of emo kids.

kl rock city (part 1)

When Maya and I first started telling people at home about the trip we were about to embark on, some of our friends, family, and random acquaintances thought it sounded fucking cool; others thought we were fucking crazy; most probably thought the trip sounded fucking cool and we're fucking crazy. One of those who thought we were just crazy was Maya's cousin Felix. Felix is a few years older than we are, and he's a security guard for one of the building complexes down in our 'hood in Coney Island. He thought we were nuts, and in particular, he thought we were nuts to go to Malaysia, mostly because it's an officially Muslim country. "Be very careful," he warned us, adding to Maya: "And don't let anyone know that you're Jewish," advice seconded by Maya's mother.

So, right now we're in Kuala Lumpur, where we've been for the last 5 days or so, and as shit turns out, KL (as the locals refer to their hometown) definitely is Muslim - there are gorgeous mosques all over the city; women in headscarves and even full-on burkas walking everywhere, sitting in cafes, strolling through the malls; there are restuarants advertising things that no restuarant in the States would wisely advertise, like "Iraqi food" and "Iranian cuisine" - but it's also, well, not. For instance, Christmas is fucking huge here - there are decorations everywhere, carols playing in the shopping centers; it's fucking bizarre. And most of the men that we see walking with the women in burkas are dressed like total wiggers (or "miggers," or whatever the term would be). And the city is actually insanely multicultural, full of Southeast Asians, Chinese, Indians, Arabs, and even the occasional whitey.

If anyone thought we had reason to watch our backs in Malaysia (and they did), it has turned out to be quite the contrary: Kuala Lumpur has proven to be the friendliest city we've visited yet (and the safest and cleanest after Tokyo and Kyoto). Everyone smiles at us, random people say hello (almost everyone speaks really good English, which is the country's second offical language), and we've had almost absurdly congenial conversations with Malay taxi drivers, Bangladeshi waiters, the Iraqi dude at the internet cafe...

And we've eaten the best food - hummus and kabobs, grilled lamb chops, dim sum, "chicken rice" (which, as the name suggests is just chicken and rice but so perfectly prepared that we've eaten it almost everyday for lunch at a restuarant where we've become quick regulars) - and even more impressively, have yet to get sick (a first for any Southeast Asian country).

But maybe best of all, Kuala Lumpur is rock 'n' roll as all fuck. This is actually a very big surprise, not only because Malaysia is Muslim but because the country's Muslim government's National Fatwa Council has gone out of its way in recent years to ban "black metal" - by which they actually meant any heavy music listened to or played by people in black T-shirts, not just the church-burning, corpse-painted brand of metal commonly called by that name - in the country (for more on the bannings, click here). And yet, on our second day in KL, Maya and I went off to find this metal record store, Nebiula HM Shop, which is listed on the metaltravelguide website; we ended up at this shopping center, Campbell Complex, off the beaten tourist track, and on the 1st floor, which had not just the one, but four metal-oriented stores. Nebiula is the best of these, and it's run by this awesome dude Jaei, who's the vocalist of one of Malaysia's leading bands, Sil Khannaz. Maya and I talked to him for an hour or so, as he played us music by his band and a variety of other Malaysian bands (he had a good two shelves full of albums by local bands, way more than we've seen anywhere else on this trip, except Japan) and told us about the scene. He said that the Malaysian government has been "very difficult," and that after the ban on "black metal" (strangely, most of the local bands, even now, seem to play in that actual style), much of the scene had to be rebuilt from the ground up. I ended up buying almost 10 CDs, and he ended up giving me another 4 or so as "free gifts."

After Nebiula, we stopped by the other stores, and in one, we had the most hilarious interaction with the totally adorable middle-aged proprietress, who walked us through her shop's metal section, describing various products with the sweetest little voice: "Ooh, this band, they play death/grind. Very nice." "Slayer, 'Live Undead' T-shirt. Very old-school vibe." We were giggling almost uncontrollably the whole time, and Maya eventually asked the woman if she actually listens to metal, and she explained that metal is very popular and her customers always ask for that kind of music so she has to stock it, and she started listening so she would know about it and that she did like a lot of it. "Some people think it is just noise, but I think some is actually very nice," she said. Maya told her that she was a great saleswoman, but that the whole experience was very crazy, Maya said, like "having my mother trying to sell me metal," which is pretty much how I felt about it, too. (To be continued)

boy oh ladyboy

Returning from Ko Chang and swinging through Bangkok for one final night before our flight out to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the next day, we went to the world-famous kathoey cabaret, Calypso, at the luxury Asia Hotel - where we definitely were not staying, by the way; our home for the night was a way more budget joint, coincidentally called the Malaysia Hotel. The Malaysia had been recommended to us by our old friend Max from Vietnam - he told us that it's a place with a dark past, the onetime hangout of serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who preyed on Western tourists in the Seventies, luring them to their deaths with promises of cheap drugs. Now, Max told us, the Malaysia was a gay hotel and the best budget place to stay in Bangkok - as long as you didn't mind all the "poofs mincing about," as he put it. We didn't.

In fact, staying at this notorious hotel with its blood-spattered history and going to see the Calypso cabaret seemed like the perfect way to bid farewell to Thailand - and to celebrate the eve of the 3-month mark (Dec. 5) of our trip.

The cabaret, in particular, was fittingly insane. The theater was exactly what you'd expect of a cabaret - all plush red-satin seats, little round tables with small, dim lamps on them, and overpriced drinks. And the show was a kitschy, flamboyant, sometimes hilarious mix of dancing and lipsyncing to classic showtunes, frenetic flamenco, cheesy Asian ballads, really cheesy techno, etc., performed by a cast of, I'm guessing, 50, at least 30 of whom were ladyboys. And not just any ladyboys, but the most convincing, glamorous, and, in some cases, dropdead gorgeous transvestites and/or transsexuals probably anywhere in the world (definitely click the link above for a look). As a straight man, I can say that it was truly a night of mixed emotions - attraction, dismay, disbelief, confusion, more attraction... Maya and I had read in BK magazine (which is kind of like Bangkok's Village Voice), that while, in the States, the average age that people have sex-change operations is in their 50s, the average age in Thailand is the mid-to-late 20s; this made me think that probably most of the ladyboys in the show were post-op and, for all intents and purposes, women, and so I didn't feel quite so conflicted admiring their voluptuous forms and sultry moves. As for Maya, this was one of the few times when she had no absolutely problem with me ogling scantily-clad "ladies." And she found my "issues" to be hilarious.

It was with similarly mixed emotions that we left Thailand the next morning. It definitely hadn't been our favorite country so far, and it wouldn't be our first to visit again, or our first to ever call home, but it had provided us with some of our greatest challenges and strangest - and gayest - memories.

the beach

Leaving Bangkok once again, we spent 4-and-a-half days on the island of Ko Chang for a little "vacation from our vacation," as I called it. We took a 5-hour-plus bus ride from Bangkok to the town of Trat, then a 15-minute-plus sawgtheow ride out of town through the jungle to the dock, a 20-plus-minute ferry from the mainland shore to the island, and a brief rumble along Ko Chang's one and only road before we finally arrived at the Paradise Palms bungalows, where we somehow lucked out and landed their "penthouse," a cozy little beachfront cabin...

...with a postcard-perfect palmtree-framed view of the ocean. The sun literally set over the lapping waves, right in front of our porch, bathing us and our room in orange warmth every dusk.

We came as close to doing nothing as possible for us. We swam in the warm, crystal water...

... (suffering through the occasional little jellyfish sting along the way), ate (lots of fruit, meat, and French fries), drank (Singha beer, and pineapple juice with a splash of rum), watched the sunset each day, and read. I had just finished reading an amazing book, Welcome to Hell, this Irish dude's absolutely gripping, harrowing memoir about his 8 years of wrongful incarceration in a Bangkok prison (while in Bangkok ourselves, Maya and I literally traded off reading chapters, we were so hooked); now on the island, I read another thought-provokingly relevant book, The Beach, the novel-cum-Leonardo DiCaprio flick (which I haven't seen, by the way - I can't stand DiCaprio) about backpackers seeking untouched utopia on a Thai island and finding much more than they bargained for. It's a derivative work - there's a little Heart of Darkness, a little Lord of the Flies - but a good read, nonetheless, and the author really nails backpackers in Southeast Asia: how they talk, brag, and dream, and how ultimately silly and deluded they often are - myself included, perhaps. That said, Maya and I weren't seeking any sort of utopia on Ko Chang, just a place to relax, to catch our breath, to get away from all the craziness of our trip so far. And in that, (despite Maya having to overcome her fear of canines by facing a few of the island's energetic beach dogs, and me getting some nasty coral cuts on my right foot and maybe even nastier sunburn on my back) I think we succeeded.

and then there was redlight (warning: sexual content - not for the faint of heart)

After our adventures setting/dodging shit on fire in Chiang Mai, Maya and I headed back to Bangkok for a few days on our way to the island of Ko Chang. Instead of staying in the northwestern tourist center of town, we decided to find a guesthouse in the center of the actual city where we'd have access to more public transportation options, like the skytrain and the subway, instead of having to rely on assholic taxi and tuk-tuk drivers, as we'd had to during our first time in Bangkok. We also decided that maybe one of the reasons we hadn't enjoyed that first visit so much was because we hadn't embraced the city...in all its depravity. Seeking to remedy that this time, we jumped onto the skytrain and headed off to Bangkok's world-famous/infamous Patpong redlight district.

Exiting the Sala Daeng skytrain station, we first had to navigate through a narrow, sweaty, crowded gauntlet of street-vendor stands hawking bootleg clothing, bootleg music, and very real-looking military, police, and martial-arts weaponry. Then we hit the first of the two Patpong streets. Almost immediately, a Thai dude shouted out to us from the front of a dark club, "Sir, come in! bondage show!" Only then did I notice the mannequin in a ball-gag and leather S&M gear hanging above the entrance. Maya and I shook our heads politely, passed another club, where three scantily-clad Thai women were gyrating on the stoop while techno pounded from the venue behind them. And then the first of a seemingly endless line of solicitors approached us with the following totally insane pitch: "Want to see [insert 'Pingpong' or 'Patpong'] show?" He then shoved in our faces what looked like a laminated index card, on it printed a long list of mindblowing acts to be included in this show: "Pussy writing, pussy smoking, pussy horn, pussy bottle-opening, razorblades in pussy, fish in pussy," and so on and on... "You can see first - no pay," he continued. "If you like, then pay. Come, follow me."

These solicitors would then lead us, sometimes physically, with a loose grip on the arm, to the sketchiest-looking of the numerous clubs stacked on top of each other along the streets - dark, dirty doorways up narrow metal staircases on the second floor of whatever building (the one venue name that sticks in my head is "Super Pussy" in big neon lights). First-floor spaces mostly seemed to be your basic go-go and strip clubs, their open doors revealing stages jampacked with fairly attractive young Thai girls in bikinis or topless, rocking back and forth listlessly (it couldn't really be called "dancing" due both to the girls' lack of enthusiasm and the lack of space) to the thumping 4/4 beat. The more outre performances are religated to the upper floors, apparently.

The streets outside, meanwhile, bustled with a strange motley crew, due, in no small part to the fact that Patpong Street Number 1 not only hosts redlight fare but also a market full of stands selling T-shirts, watches, CDs, and souvenirs; so, while there are plenty of the expected types - aged sexpats, drunken fratboys, sleazy Europeans, glamorous kathoeys (on Soi Jaruwan, the gay strip), Japanese salarymen (on Soi Thaniya, the Japanese strip), and fast-talking solicitors - milling about, there are also plenty of everyday tourists and even families brushing uncomfortable shoulders with the rest. As we pushed through the throngs, Maya and I saw a cute little white kid, maybe 3 years old, cradled in her mother's arm; a Thai woman was pinching the child's cheeks: "Pingpong show, pingpong show," the woman was babytalking to the kid till the mom, understandably disturbed, pulled away into the crowd. We also noted a teenage boy, maybe 15, staring at the index card of a solicitor eager to whip him into a nearby den of iniquity; the boy's gray-haired mother tapped him on his shoulder: "I'll be across the street in the internet place," she said, as if sending him off to see the pussies at work and setting up their post-show rendevous.

As for us, after a few false starts (we followed a solicitor into one place, only to run into a white couple on their way out who told us not to go in (("It sucks - the girls just stand around and try to get your money," they said)), then we walked into another club to find that exact scenario being played out), we ended up seeing something of a Pingpong or Patpong show (still not sure which is the correct terminology). Attracted by the fact that no one was trying drag us into the place, by the fact that there were only matronly-looking women working the door, and by the cardboard sign promising that we wouldn't have to pay more than the price of a beer, we ended up sitting on a padded bench in the corner of a dark, dingy stripclub. The white dude next to us had two strippers - one topless; the other, completely naked - draped over him, giggling. In the section to our right, a whole crew of wrinkled, older white men was laughing and drinking with - and fondling - a number of strippers in various levels of undress. And on the stage in the middle of the room, 5 or 6 strippers were gyrating lethargically, with bored and/or pissed-off expressions on their faces. Except for the two girls with both their bras and panties on, the women were not hot at all.

Maya and I sat, sipping our beers, trying to touch as little of the walls, seat, and table around us as possible, and watched, barely keeping our jaws from hitting the floor. During our maybe half-hour there, we saw a woman blow a horn with her pussy, another woman pull a good 8 feet of rainbow streamers out of her pussy, yet another woman pour some clear liquid from a bottle into her pussy and pour it back out whereupon it had mysteriously turned purple, and then a final woman pull maybe 6 feet of thread out of her pussy - the thread had sewing needles hung from it every couple inches, and as she tugged the string out, she pinned paper flowers through alternating needles till she had a garland hanging from between her legs!

Now, I'm not really a stripclub kind of guy - as far as I'm concerned, a stripclub, at its best, is just an exercise in sexual frustration, and one that I'm paying for. That said, there was nothing sexually frustrating about this place because the whole thing was so profoundly un-erotic. And, perhaps, a little bit unsanitary. At some point, a middle-aged Thai woman (strangely, in her clothes) stopped in front of our table, and put out a hand for shaking. Not knowing what else to do, Maya and I reluctantly shook her hand. We all stared at each other for a few moments, then the woman pointed to her own teeth and smiled, then walked away. "Do I have something stuck between my teeth?" Maya asked me, completely confused by the interaction, as was I. (We later observed this woman giving apparently platonic massages to some of the other clientele.) Soon after, two chubby strippers, who had been "dancing" on the stage, came up to us, and put our their hands for shaking; again, not sure what else to do and not wanting to insult them, we shook their hands. They then awkwardly - though sweetly - tried to chat us up with what limited English they had, clearly campaigning for us to buy them drinks. It was definitely time for us to go.

As we dashed back out into the relatively fresh air, the matronly women outside thanked us for attending. And as we walked away up the street, the solicitors swarmed on us again, as they did every foreigner, tried to angle us into their clubs. "Want to see show?" Maya shook her head, proudly telling them, no thanks, that she already had.

When we finally turned the corner off of Patpong and onto the main strip, Maya suggested that we try to find a pharmacy where we could buy some hand sanitizer. Not a bad idea, considering the disturbing number of hands we had ended up shaking. We stopped in a few places, but no luck. Riding the skytrain back to our hotel, resisting the urge to scratch our noses or bite our nails until we'd had a chance to wash, we felt oddly content knowing that while Bangkok may have kicked our collective ass during our first stay, now we'd seen her naked.