In Kuala Lumpur, an Undoing: Part I
My first trip without in-the-moment documenting since...Actually, I don't know when.
June 9, 2024
It’s not long after eight and I wake alone, but just barely. Body heavy with fatigue, muscles tight from sleeping (or trying to) in seat 12A. I know it’s the jet lag, and it would be better for me to stay put. But I find the warm rays of the sun gliding up my bed irresistible. The coffee shop in the downstairs of our little hotel in Chinatown has fired up the espresso machine, and the aromas waft up the corridor that runs just outside our room. If the sun didn’t already decide for me, the caffeine certainly would.
I grab my copy of Suite Française and a couple hundred ringgit, pad downstairs, and greet the morning in Country 31.
Malaysia.
Malaysia was a surprise. In my mind, these two weeks back in Southeast Asia for the first time since early 2020 were meant to complete The Loop. Backpackers call the route that starts and ends in Bangkok ‘The Loop’ because it roughly looks like a cowboy’s lasso. This map shows the stops people often take:
Going counter-clockwise, it’s Bangkok > Siem Reap, Cambodia1 > Saigon, Vietnam > Hoi An > Hanoi > Luang Prabang, Laos > Chiang Mai, Thailand > Back to Bangkok. It’s common to visit the islands in the south of Thailand as well, which was Phi Phi for me. That place changed my life forever.
I was about halfway through that loop on a next-to-shoestring budget, eating street food and taking buses across borders to save money, when Covid-19 became a global concern. I was in Hoi An, Vietnam in early March 2020 when I found out the next stop on my itinerary, Hanoi, was on lockdown because a Vietnamese socialite got Covid in Italy and the virus spread to all of business class on her flight.
I was already planning to go home soon, but the decision was officially made for me.2 If things were going to get tense in Vietnam, I wasn’t sticking around to find out, and I wasn’t going to be some foreigner in the way while their government did what they needed to deal with this virus. Back to the US of A I went after buying a one-way to Music City while on the airport shuttle bus.
A few hours later, I was on the tarmac and one step away from leaving Asia for four years. In the meantime, I would try and fail to ‘make it’ as a blogger, launch and later have to quit a small food business after getting into my dream grad school, hit tons of dead ends in my freelance writing career before getting the one ‘yes’ that kept me at the keyboard, add a newsletter to that same blog and continue to write, and ultimately decide I want to attempt to see every country in the world before I die.3
Safe to say those six weeks in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam were the impetus to a life I didn’t even know to want. <3
Four years later, my heart yearned to return. Of course, it truly depended on the money first, and Val, my lifelong friend and travel companion, second. Each year, we hit the road, just the two of us. January 2020 was Thailand, May 2022 was Mexico, April 2023 was Panama and Ecuador, and 2024 brought us back to the land that changed both our lives forever.
Coming back to The Loop, my original idea was to start in Hanoi, Vietnam and complete it, with stops in Luang Prabang, Chiang Mai, and end on a high note in Bangkok. But our bank accounts had another idea, especially when Hanoi flights more than tripled.
It was long past time to return to Asia if it we could make it happen, so we weren’t giving up on this dream just yet. Frequent flyer miles and a deal that fell into our laps made a one-way to Kuala Lumpur possible. A few minutes of math, and the decision was made: Malaysia was the answer.
When we first landed in-country, we were like a couple of wrung out limp rags, sweat-stained tee shirts and dirty leggings after two overnight flights in a row. The amount of hours I survived on pure adrenaline and dark chocolate mochas was only surpassed by the travel day4 we’d have returning to New York two weeks later.
I was truly in my element. I am deeply grateful for my life and how it’s changed since I moved for Yale, but I missed the road so much. I missed these ridiculous, insane days, the country-chasing, the flight tracking and points hacking and whatever else it takes to make it to a new place, the splitting hairs over 2 dollars because that 30,000 VND is a good bowl of pho.
By all intents and purposes I should have felt like a dead woman walking, but all I felt was alive. Vibrantly, brilliantly, beautifully alive as we walked all over the train station in search of an ATM because of course we forgot to get out some ringgit in the million airport ATMs and of course we walked right past the neon yellow CASH sign in the main train station and of course we walked another 10 minutes loaded down like pack mules to retrace our steps so we could finally pay for a damn metro ticket to Chinatown after the attendant smiled and said ‘No credit card.’ If we weren’t, well, us, I’d have just hailed a cab. But that’s too easy. That’s not the dream, at least not this one. That’s someone else’s style entirely.
In the unforgiving Malaysian sun, we walked past god-awful smelling trash around a corner, passed the world-famous Petaling street I’ve seen on too many blogs, and found a cute little up and coming boutique hotel. One look up at the sign, and turned out it was ours, the same one we just booked in the arrivals hall after passing immigration. (I have this habit of booking things like this at the last minute if I think I can get away with it, or if I’m worried the airline will make us too late to check in and we’ll be out the money. It’s either genius or idiotic. Depends on who you ask. ;-))
Surrounded by hundreds of suitcases wrapped in layers of clear wrap with tags from Colombo, HND, and London Heathrow, I showed Val the room I found two nights earlier (or was it one? or three?) while parked on the tarmac for an hour as Qatar dealt with some electrical issue. I’m usually so buried under grad school work that sitting on the plane was the first moment I had to look at hotels. And this is part of the beauty of being at one with travel—I looked at four other places, saw this one, and knew this was the room. If it was still available after we landed, then it was truly ours.
Of course, arriving on a red eye and landing just after rush hour in Kuala Lumpur, we had six hours before we could check in. The lobby was a cute coffee shop with a desk in the corner where we left our carry-ons and sat at a café table. While I ordered a mocha, Val got to work with our favorite Google search at home but especially afar: vegan near me. I’m not one to stay in a tourist-y area if it can be avoided, partly due to budget and also due to crowds—but this time, it worked majorly in our favor. Some restaurant a five-minute walk away had just what we craved: Malaysian food with some veggie options for me and normal people food for her. I’d say bon appetit in Malay but God knows we didn’t wait to look up the translation before digging in, ravenous and liable to fall asleep into our plates from the jet lag.
When the waiter came out with our wide-rimmed bowls, mine was a yellow lo mein noodle, with that little something extra in the taste from the egg dough. On top was a warm, spiced curry that pricked my throat with its zest as the mock meat went down. A fusion of Chinese and Indian cuisines, this Malay recipe bore witness to the history of a land and a subcontinent—before the British and French made their callous mark on the land encompassing Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, the Indians and Chinese fought over it for centuries. To this day, many old history textbooks call it ‘Indochina,’ and the French-colonized nations within it ‘French Indochina.’ I take out my phone for a photo to save later, because it’s Lent and I’ve given up social media for the Lord until Easter. Turns out I gave it up for me, because it’s been two months since and I still haven’t posted a thing.
Somehow, someway, we rallied. I changed into a bright blue midi dress, the picture of Girl on Vacation. Even though it was a travel day, this was still technically Day 1 of our relatively fast-paced trip. Before long, the cute blue dress would be drenched at the hemlines with my sweat from walking in the near-100 degree heat, but at least my skin could breathe.
With only one surefire thing we had to do before leaving Malaysia (which will feature in Part II), we took the metro above the city across town to the world-famous Petronas Towers and a cultural institution of Southeast Asia: the glamorous shopping mall. After dinner at some hipster little vegan shack in the basement of another mall across the street, which we ate while listening to some guy with a portable microphone setup butcher, and I mean absolutely butcher Kenny Chesney, we packed up our trinkets and tchotchkes, then walked down even farther underground to the Metro.
Our walk home from Pasar Seni transformed—hawkers were out peddling their goods, their sales pitches trailing behind us. ‘Very good price!’ ‘Two bag for one!’ And the one I’d never heard before Malaysia: “Tattoo?”
We ducked back into our room with the bathroom on the balcony5 and slept for two nights we missed somewhere over the Atlantic and Saudi Arabia, the Bay of Bengal and Sri Lanka. Adventure on our minds, fatigue resting on our bodies, we bade Asia goodnight with that warm, humming anticipation of the journey unfolding before us.
Until next time,
Sarah
P.s. Summer Reading is next! I thank every one of you that spends time here. <3
This is where Angkor Wat is, which you’ve probably seen on Lonely Planet or National Geographic. It’s a stunning ancient kingdom, well-maintained and the Cambodian government still allows people to walk in/on and touch the temples. It is an experience. Many of my favorite photos from traveling ever came from that week in Siem Reap. <3
I can fly solo for about a month, so by this point, my mental health was in the crapper from way too much alone time. Lesson learned. :-)
Not necessarily in that order, though. ;-)
Truly, “day” should be in quotes because it was 41 hours door-to-door, from the moment we picked up our carry-ons at the hotel in Bangkok to the minute our Uber dropped us off at my apartment in New Haven at 2 in the morning. Whew!!
Yes, really. But no one could see anything, so it was kind of cool! At least until the mosquitos emerged from hell and bit me halfway there, but we won’t talk about that…