|
 |
THE BARUTI COLUMN PART 5: The Melaka Walk by baruti armstrong aka robotsex 
One of the things that I have learned about here in South East Asia, Malaysia, is perspective. Perspective, perspective. And as I sit here typing this out, it occurs to me that it may help you to know as you read this that for the moment I have been able to put things in perspective. For the moment I have been able to separate myself from the handle of events; I have been able to see the ridiculousness and absurdity of what I have done. As a result, if this is entertaining then it probably has something to do with the fact that sometimes the most interesting stories/the most entertaining stories are often those stories which spawn from some sort of awkwardness or danger or misery or heartbreak as the event(s) is (are) recollected in a safe and relaxed atmosphere. In fact, for all I know, this is on the hilarious side of the funny spectrum (or on the extremely dumb side of the same spectrum). When I think of it now, in this sense I understand how I have neutralized the event, how I have taken the helm and steered my memories clear of any horror. What? Oh, my day trip to Melaka? Right... when I walked 65 kilometers on pavement through rain forest in flip-flops, added a few shades and deeper hues to my skin due to sun exposure, missed the last bus back to civilization, and spent the night/the really early morning at a bus station in a lightning storm fighting off mosquitoes determined to give me Japanese encephalitis. Yeah. Ha ha. But perspective tells me that it was not that bad. With my time winding down, I decide that a trip into the country will be beneficial; it will help me purge my body of the Black Lung which still lingered in my system from my trip to Bangkok, Thailand. I start with a trip to the Pudaraya Bus Station on Jalan Pudu over near Little India and Chinatown in Kuala Lampur. That did not help my cause, as that bus station has never once been clean and in fact is eroded to its foundation by pollution. Still, I got there early and was able to catch a 10:30 am bus to Melaka. Melaka is a province below Selangor (where Kuala Lampur is) which is home to many "old town" type fixtures. I am convinced that the trip out into the country will be good for me. The ride is supposed to be two hours long, but I had already discovered that times are never accurate here in Malaysia. Which was a good thing for me, since I had absolutely no concept of time and date. It was just one of those things, I had a watch that told the time to some place in the United States, I think it told Mountain Standard time (if thats a time zone), and I had my computer which told me that it was 1970 and that the time was... well I don't know what it was, but it was never correct- at least not for 2002. Anyway, after sitting on the bus for what I had decided was a long enough time, I make a decision. Somehow I decide that it'll be a good idea for me to get off the bus early/before my pre-paid for destination and go from there. Move as the spirit tells you. My rationale being based on that, I promptly get off the bus at the next stop. Now this might've been a somewhat practical thing to do for someone who was in possession of maybe a map, or enough money to get them out of a scrape, or thorough knowledge of the area. But I've never been practical and didn't have a map or money or any sort of idea regarding anything about Melaka. So, off the bus I buy myself a return ticket for the last bus to leave that town- 8:15 pm. I figure out what time it is and realize that I have approximately 7 hours to do as I please before I have to be back. So I buy a 7-up and start walking. I don't know where I walking to, so I don't feel pressed or anything, but I walk along the highway and follow the signs to some destinations that appear to be along the way to where my whims have decided to take me. It's wonderful. I walk and I take pictures and I see kids who've seen a black person only on MTV or something and I wave and chat with locals and see all sorts of wildlife and get sweaty and sticky from the heat and the humidity and admire all the Dutch influenced housing and get myself an interesting little experience. I don't worry about the time, I just keep walking and soon find the beach which is great and I walk some more and some more, glancing at my watch to see what time it is, and letting it register but not really paying attention. At a point previous to what I've just described, I had passed the point of no return and decided that since the next large town was within my vision, that I'd just walk there and catch a bus back to KL from there. So, I'm still trekking forward and I reach the city and it turns out to be rather large, as it's the capital of the province. Enjoying myself thoroughly I continue on up streets and around corners and down paths that are all in a state of decay being so close to the ocean and in a relatively poor city. I see shrines, and houses that have long since fallen apart. At one corner, a t-intersection, there is a spiral staircase made out of cement that is just off the road. As I got closer I was able to see that there was, or rather that there had been a house in the vacant lot on that side of the road. The staircase had apparently been part of the home, but with the home's destruction however many umpteen years ago, the staircase had been orphaned on the side of the road, no longer with the shell of a house around it and masters of domain to climb its steps. In the city not much makes sense, as had been the case with most of South East Asia to me. I go from here to there and there to here. I follow directions and take advice, but it all gets me nowhere. I'm in search of the bus station when I'm rummaging around in a few thoughts and I think that In fact, the only thing that I truly trust is the map of the city I have in my head, and (as I look at my watch) that the bus from Masjid Tannah, where my journey had began, back to Kuala Lampur was going to leave in less than 30 minutes. Had I walked around the countryside for nearly 7 hours? Apparently I had. And not only that but I certainly hadn't found any hint of a bus station in the city I was in. So, in the spirit of Move as the spirit tells you I made another decision. As I mentioned before, I'm not practical in any way. I just go off and do things and whatever. Now, a practical person might hang out and get himself a hotel room, or get himself some rum at a bar or something. But I'm not practical so I didn't do any of that. I hailed a taxi and asked how much to get me to Masjid Tannah. At the reply of 25 Ringgit Malaysian I scoffed and said, "No thanks," not so much because of how expensive it was-and it was expensive-but because I realized then that I only had 18 RM in my pocket to go along with my maxed out credit card and a transit ticket with a few cents left on it. What to do? For me there was no question. I looked up into the horizon and saw traffic lined up for blocks. Then I looked to the ocean and was taken away by the beauty the sunset had left behind. Išll walk back I told myself. Sure, I realized that if it took me near 7 hours to get to where I was, then it'd take just as long if not longer to get back. And I realized, after I did the math, that that meant I'd be back in Masjid Tannah around 2 or 3 in the morning. So I went for it. An expedition unlike any other. I trooped back up the way I had come, and carefully went to sides and places I had skipped because I was on the opposite side or looking at a different place. I quickly escaped the drone of the traffic and was surprised by what I saw on the horizon. At just after 8 pm I was walking along a sea wall and I looked out to the ocean at a few islands and the coast, only to see in the new dark furious and vicious strikes of lightening brightening the sky and touching down at places out in the Andaman Sea. Looks like troubles a brewin' I joke to myself, donšt you know- my psychic advisor told me so. I continue up the sea wall avoiding the conspicuous individuals and taking note of the couples sitting on the side and watching the inclement offshore weather. Then I'm caught by the sight of lightning going off in front of me. In a short awkward curiosity I wonder what I've gotten myself into, and quickly figure out that there are actually three storms, one on my left over the ocean, another directly in front of me, and one to my right over the forests. No rain. No thunder. Just lightning, incessant, repetitive, harsh, demanding, and electric. Somehow, it doesn't bother me. I mean, its still 80 degrees Fahrenheit or so and I'm clad in shorts and an UCSB t-shirt, pockets full of things like my Ipod, my headphones, my 18 RM, a book, and my camera. No umbrella, no raincoat, no precautionary or safety items whatsoever. But I keep going, because you've always got to keep going. 
After a few more hours on the road, through a few sprinkles and a few conversations with bikers, I'm suddenly worried by something on my walk fro that I remember from my walk to. I thought to myself: At some point I'm going to come past a smaller town, and then a military sort of complex. After this military complex, it's going to be all forest. The road through the forest is narrow and two laned and without streetlights. Although, none of that is what bothered me. What bothered me was all the wildlife I had seen when I passed through the strait earlier. Birds, monkeys, water buffalo, snakes, spiders, bats, cats, dogs, turtles, pigs, frogs, really large insects (crickets the size of binders clips, and cockroaches the size of... binder clips), goats, chickens, roosters, hens, cows, and at least two animals that I had no idea what they were. Now, in the day time strolling along the side of a road was one thing. But doing the same in the middle of the night through the country felt more than a bit unsafe. In fact, what it felt like was a disappearance without a trace occasion. As I approached the darkness of the road the words from Death Of A Salesman rang in my ears, By gosh boys when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I came out I was twenty- one and I was rich, and I thought of all the cases where people disappeared off the face of the earth without a trace. Stories where one minute a person was doing something in all of normality's good graces and then the following minute that person was gone, abducted by aliens, evaporated, transported to a different time via a tear in the space time continuum, or whatever-that person was gone never to be heard from again. But what was I going to do? I kept going. I walked along the near deserted except for a few cars and even more motorbikes road. I kept morale up by singing Black Heart Procession songs to my favorite Madonna tunes; Release My Heart to Papa Don't Preach, Guess I'll Forget You to Like A Virgin, after I exhausted my memory of all the Os Mutantes and Norah Jones songs I knew. I concentrated on my task, to make it through safe and sound. I put my trust in my memory and the moon that guided my way as full as it could've possibly been, and gleaming through the clouds. The lightning flashed in the horizon and every now and again a rumble of thunder tuned my ears outside of my own rhythm. I saw bats fly over head in the wobbly wonder of flying that I had seen them use before in Trinidad. I saw families of water buffalo stumbling around and making lots of noise. I listened to the sounds of the forest and was convinced that some animal somewhere had that new J-lo tune programmed into the ringer of his or her cell phone and was playing it over and over. I felt like Pee Wee in his big adventure when he's walking in the middle of the night and he sees the whites of all the animals' eyes spying [on] him in the near pitch black. 
Still, I kept going. And it wasn't before too long that I was past the forest and didn't have that much farther to go. I reached the bus station well after 2 but just before 3 in the morning. I looked and saw that the first bus out was at 7 30 am. All right, only... 4 or 5 hours to go. But I had no idea what to do to pass the time. Mosquitoes were already trying to play succoyant with me and I was losing the battle. I sat down and once I sat down I didn't want to get back up. All that walking had given me a case of leg fatigue like I had just run a marathon. I didn't want to move for hours, which was exactly right, because I wanted to sleep. But I thought that sleeping would be a bad idea, I'd get eaten alive by mosquitoes and maybe robbed and how could I sleep at a bus station anyway. So I deferred and tried to pull the all nighter, which I did, although I may as well have been asleep because I certainly wasn't what I'd call awake for the hours in between when I got comfortable on the flat hard cement bench-from where I stared at the sky and watched the lightning set it aflame as I listened to a variety of play lists on my I pod and the latest Prefuse 73 ep-and then I got the bus to go back to Kuala Lampur. But the sunrise that morning was beautiful, like something out of a travel brochure for people seeking to go to paradise. I took more than an hour and went through so many different colors that I thought it might've been some kind of test run going through every color ever so that the optimum shades could be found for use by some omnipotent creator being at a later date. My Friday nights are unlike most peoples Friday nights. The Baruti Column Volume 4: Thailand The Baruti Column Volume 3: Singapore The Baruti Column Volume 2: Little India The Baruti Column Volume 1: From Trinidad to Malaysia |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| lunchboxing.com 2003 | all content © | all rights reserved | suck it so hard | feel the rhythm of the night |
