PHOTO: Beach on Pulau Beshar
I have recently returned from a ten-day trip to Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore was mostly for business (debate training) and Malaysia was mostly for fun (tourism, beaches, etc.). I found the Southeast Asia experience to be interesting and very different. As I have previously done with Europe and Mexico, here are some of my observations and musings about the places I visited. These musings are in no particular order.
These are my perceptions. They may not be true, and I do not claim to be all knowing, but this is what I perceived on my trip.
HOT, HOT, HOT
I live in Vermont, which is about halfway between the Equator and the North Pole. Singapore and Malaysia, however, are very near the Equator. Thus, the weather is hot. I knew that when I came, but it did bother me a couple of times. I asked a Malaysian taxi driver if there was a cooler season, and he laughed and replied no. I am an
endomorph from the near Arctic, so it was a challenge and I believe I did quite well. Just had to mention it.
SINGAPORE – THE GARDEN CITY
Many may use the title, Singapore has the substance. It is a smallish island with 4,492,150 people, yet every possible open space has been saved for trees. Grass, shrubs, flowers and other greenery that is very well manicured are everywhere and never with any trash. The medians on the roads, the sides of all highways, and other transportation spaces are all green. Many open spaces amidst huge buildings are open and filled with greenery. Now, the fact that this is an equatorial zone makes this a bit easier, but it is, in fact, an amazing garden city.
HAVING A MAID
Most Singapore families seem to have a maid. They tend to come from nearby lower income countries like Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. They generally sign a two-year contract to serve the family, and they do have significant personal legal protections. I felt a little uncomfortable with this, but I recognize that this may be because if any Western traditions. It was not just a high-class phenomena, it also seemed to be common among middle class families, especially when both members of the couple have day jobs. I
didn’t have a chance to interview any of the maids, but they seemed happy and well treated, although this might just be a show for the employer.
RULES AND RULES AND RULES – N.U.T.S.
Singapore is known as the land of rules. One recalls that people can be caned (beaten with a wooden switch) for throwing bubblegum or spreading graffiti. They seem fairly serious about some of their rules, like the big red print on the incoming immigration document letting you know that the punishment for drug distribution is death. Henry
Cheong was telling me about this as regards the restrictions on u-turns. All u-turns are illegal unless there is a sign indicating that it is legal to engage in a u-turn at that point. He pointed about some signs that said, “No u-turn reminder” just to remind drivers. Even crossing the street at certain points became an issue. When crossing with Singapore citizens they openly recognized that they were “jaywalking” but even that recognition indicated that they do, in general, take rules seriously. Apparently there is a book that describes this kindest, entitled N.U.T.S. (no u-turns).
FABULOUS FOOD
Singapore and Malaysia have incredible food at very reasonable prices. There is an interaction between Chinese, Indian, Malay, English and Portuguese tastes that produces a new palette of tastes that are a lovely challenge. The food stalls in Singapore were excellent and very inexpensive. With so many 10 feet by 10 feet stalls together for you to select from, the odds of getting the best tasty octopus are very high. The food stalls we frequented on
Pulau Beshar Island (off the coast from
Maleka, Malaysia) had a limited menu but the food was very good, very clean and extremely reasonable. By the way, I commend everyone to go to
Pulau Beshar if you get a chance. I loved watching them make the
roti each morning.
“ALL IN THE MALL”
Yes, the mall seems to rule here. One person told me that there
isn’t much to do in Singapore, so people eat and shop. There are a large number of malls and they are huge. Instead of being places for large stores to set up, they seem mostly to be about smaller shops, some of them major international brands and others quite local. They teem with people, some with bags of procured goods and many not. Lunch? The mall. Supplies? The mall. Meeting people? The mall. They are gleaming and colorful and busy. I thought that this would be mostly a Singapore thing, but my journey to
Maleka showed a number of huge malls, and they looked a lot like the malls in Singapore but not quite as crowded. A special section of the Singapore Straights Times was entitled, “It’s all in the mall.”
SINGAPORE-MALAYSIA DIVIDE
Malaysia is a fairly prosperous and rapidly developing country, but there is still quite a divide between Malaysia and Singapore. Cars are flashier, trash is absent, infrastructure is perfect, the place looks like a garden and more. Just over the bridge from Singapore is
Johor, Malaysia, and it is a busy bustling city that one would expect to find in mainland Asia. Crowds, strange smells, and a certain ramshackle construction indicate that the nation is moving forward. Yet, once over the bridge into Singapore and you find a theme park atmosphere. The immigration officials were very low key entering Malaysia, but on going back into Singapore it was far stricter and luggage was screened. Work permits can be had for Singapore, but they are very valuable. I found Malaysia to be charming and friendly, but Singapore is like stepping into a future that we have only read about in science fiction books – everyone is well off, but the society is tightly controlled. I liked both, but they are very different.
NEW BEVERAGES
It is hot, hot and hotter in this part of the world, so there are lots of new beverages to try. There is a lot of sugarcane around and they grind it right in front of you to make a delicious sugar cane juice that I became quite fond of, even if I try and stay away from sugar. Something called “Bali” is made of a number of different fruits. There are lots of different kinds of milk teas as well, and a wide variety of
soymilk drinks. There are also chilled coconuts widely available, and they just chop the top off and drink away while a spoon allows you to scoop out some of the coconut meat. Yummy.
NEW CARS AND OLD CARS
One of the thinks I noticed in Singapore almost immediately was that all of the cars seemed shiny and new. In the beginning I took this to be a sign of a prosperous society where everyone had the money both for the car and for the gasoline. I got a ride at some point from a teacher who had an older
VW bus (almost
hippy style) and someone asked him how much the extra tax was. Extra tax? Yes, people explained, there are very low taxes on new cars but very high taxes on older cars, and this serves as an incentive to buy a new car, but it also creates a large supply of older (4+ years) cars that can be exported to places like Malaysia and Indonesia with a nice mark-up and a boost to the balance of trade. What with the strict controls on the maintenance of cars and the need to keep them in good shape makes these cars attractive to overseas buyers.
A SOCIETY OF DIVERSITY
Both Singapore and Malaysia seem to be societies with a huge amount of diversity. People are of very different backgrounds – Malay, Chinese, Tamil, Indian, English and many more. Especially in Singapore it seems like your identity
doesn’t seem to matter as much as your competence, although I did not have a chance to explore the marriage dimension of this. There is some tension in Malaysia between Muslims and non-Muslims, but I have garnered that more from news articles than from direct observation. The idea that so many different people can work together was inspiring and gives me a measure of hope for the world. In Singapore all of these different groups speak English, which gives an interesting taint to the whole thing.
THIRTY YEARS AND GONE
Singapore has limited land, so they do not want valuable property to be full of run-down structures. I was told that thirty years seems to be the rule, that properties as they reach thirty are either completely renovated so that they look quite new (a number of very nice housing complex blocks – lower class housing – were pointed our as examples of this) or torn down and a completely new structure created (as was the case with a major stadium I was shown). The result is an astonishingly beautiful city with immaculate buildings at every turn. Besides, the rubble can be shoveled into the ocean to create new land, as a huge section near the airport used to be sea but is now dry land.
TALE OF TWO NEWSPAPERS
Singapore has the Straits Times while Malaysia has the New Straits Times. They are very different newspapers. I am familiar with both of them because of articles I have seen through the Lexis-Nexis service, but that hardly gives the picture that reading them fir a few days can give you. The Singapore paper is very much hard news, as even the lifestyle and culture sections have substantial stories about substantial events. The Malaysia paper, however, seemed stuffed full of thing that were almost news as well as a huge amount of things that clearly are not news. The Malaysia paper had huge sections called “Advertorials” where there were stories touting some company or school or whatever. They looked like news stories, but they were very much promotional pieces. I much prefer the Singapore paper, even if it did have a section called “It’s all in the mall.”
PHOTO: Lobby of Hotel Puri
SAND EMBARGO
Indonesia has a tenuous relationship with Singapore. A number of those who are wanted in Indonesia for white-collar crimes have fled to Singapore, and there is no standing extradition agreement, so they live there rich and happy. In Singapore they say that Indonesia just wants to steal back part of the money. Indonesia is a little like Switzerland, in that they welcome money from abroad and ask very few questions about it. Indonesia often uses other methods to give Singapore a hard time, and the latest one is a sand embargo. Indonesia says they will stop supplying sand to Singapore because its extraction is causing environmental problems. This may be so, but environmental concerns do not stop Indonesia from looking the other way at illegal logging or toxic waste disposal, so it all sounds a bit insincere. You get a feeling for how dependent Singapore is on outside countries by the fact that they have to import sand for building projects.
PULAU BESHAR IS CALLING
We took a local ferry over to a small island we read about in the Lonely Planet Guide. We took a taxi ride to a dock, waited round and then got on a large motor boat (perhaps not really a ferry) that took us on a fifteen minute trip to the island of
Pulau Beshar, located in the Straits area but officially in the Indian Ocean. Everyone on the boat (forty or so) got off and some of them walked away, some got into a blue van that was there, and then some people got into the white van that was headed for the resort we were interested in. The van filled up but it was back in about ten minutes to take us to the resort. It was very nice but not very busy at this time of year. We rented a small cottage above the ocean that even had air conditioning. It was a good time with beaching and relaxing. The hotel had no restaurant open, so we went down to the beach vendors. Many Malaysians were camped out as families in tents and seemed to have brought everything with them for cooking and eating. Nevertheless, there were a few food stalls right above the beach that turned out to be excellent and unbelievably inexpensive. The beaches were wonderful resulting in my getting sunburn, but that only helped me to stay warm when I came back to frozen Vermont. It was a wonderful spot, but as with everywhere, hot.
BUS TRAVEL
The buses are new and comfortable, the fares and really cheap and travel by bus is a great way to see the countryside.
Bojana and I took a bus from Singapore up to
Maleka because we wanted to do some tourism and I have always wanted to visit that fabled city. The tickets were amazingly cheap, but for some reason you need to buy them a day in advance. The bus left Singapore on time and it was not very full. The immigration procedure was a little time consuming as we went into Malaysia, but it was civil and easy. The Malaysia side was a snap, and we were back in the bus and on our way. Every bus has two drivers, and the one not driving seems to sleep quite a bit in a special recliner seat in the front. It was beautiful and sunny and we drove by sections of orchards, forests and beautiful hills. We stopped at a major bus rest area that had lots of cheap and delicious food and we were only there for thirty minutes. Then it was back on our way. We got to
Maleka and took a taxi to the lovely Hotel
Puri, an old-style hotel in the heart of
Maleka’s Chinatown. We did some tourism in
Maleka before going to a small island called
Pulau Beshar for a couple of days before returning to the Hotel
Puri for more tourism and a bus back to Singapore. Once again, you need to buy bus tickets early. The
Maleka bus station was beautiful and also seemed to serve as a shopping mall. The first class buses were all sold out so we took a tourist class bus, and it was fine, even if the seats were a little narrower and they twice played some really bad music videos on the big TV screen inside, but eventually that stopped. We paused again at the same bus rest stop but only had twenty minutes. Then it was on to
Johor where Malaysia exit immigration is. At
Johor we were in a wild press of people all trying to do the same thing after unloading from many buses, but it did not take that long as we were on our way. The Singapore immigration took a bit longer but it was reasonable, and then we were dropped off at a strange bus station in town that our ride had a hard time finding, but they did. The bus tickets were very cheap and reasonable, taxis were also reasonable, so bus-taxi is the way I will travel next time.
UNTRIMMED TRAIN TRACKS
Everything in Singapore is neatly manicured, something that might be difficult to do near the Equator. However, there are stretches of train tracks that lead out of the center city that I saw and commented on. Here is the story. Singapore was once part of a larger Malaysia, but split away to become independent. In the negotiations that took place between Malaysia and the new Singapore, Malaysia demanded and received sovereignty over the mail lines leading in and out of the city. Thus, the train tracks are Malaysia territory, not Singapore. Thus, they do not belong to Singapore and so they are not trimmed.
THE MONEY GRABBER
Cars in Singapore have a device in the dashboard that you put an electronic debit or credit card into. This device then communicates with various charge mechanisms that exist around the city. Government, well of course, for tolls and congestion charges … but also in private parking lots the money is also automatically deducted. Wow. I think I remember reading a Robert Heinlein story like this when I was a kid.
CYBER TAXIS
Taxis in Singapore are very digital. Besides having a nice meter system they also have GPS
locators and online call service so they know what calls are in front of them. Very snazzy. They were not fancy in any other additional way, but they were very efficient and very reasonably priced.
NIGHT MARKET IN
MALEKA CHINATOWN
It is a fairly big neighborhood to begin with, so I thought that the Friday night market would be of modest proportions, perhaps to please the tourists. I was wrong. The entire area had, within about 90 minutes, developed stalls and tables along both sides of the two major streets and many of the smaller streets that connected them. There were a lot of tourists there, but they were almost all tourists from
Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Thailand. They were really enjoying themselves. There were lots of goods, between wonderful and exceedingly tacky, there were magicians and artists, there was plenty of delicious and very inexpensive food AND there were lots and lots of people walking around, talking and laughing. It was an ideal time to do some gift shopping. It was an ideal time to walk those streets and feel the vibes … good vibes.
I love these two countries. I am anxious to return, which I am told I will be invited to do. I just wish there was a cool season.
