Month: February 2016

After our serpentine adventures we returned to the concrete jungle. Selva de cemento (concrete jungle in Spanish) was my first encounter with a soap opera by the way, set in Brazil and dubbed in Spanish. Back in the 80’s, when we lived in Uruguay, it was all the rage.

There is something soap opera-ish about the constellation and expressions of these mannequins. 

Miami Vice? End of cineastic references. This art deco building reminds me a lot of Miami though; I never really craved for Miami but was amazed by its beauty when we visited. I like places that look like other places and paintings that look like other paintings.

Little India. Obviously looking a bit like India, at least regarding its colour scale and residents. Most Indian immigrants (75% Tamil) came here during the British colonisation.

Helpful advise given back in the colonial days.

Speaking of colonial, I thought this was a catchword against Portuguese colonisation in 1515 (it was actually in 1511) but after some extensive googling I realised it had to do with a protest against increased taxes on 1st of May 2015, far less romantic. Bersatulah kaum pekerja means “Workers of the world, unite”, I found it a bit surprising with communists protesting against taxes, but then again maybe not so much, considering Malaysia has a corruption index of 50.

Less political subject?

We then left Kuala Lumpur for the city of Singapore.

I momentarily morphed into my alter ego Lady Caroline (missing my Queen Sari), having afternoon tea at Raffles, pearls and everything.

Joen graced its corridors.

We ruined ourselves at several roof top bars, this is the highest in the world at 282 meters. Stunning view but dreadful music, some lounge-house hybrid shit, imagine if they played opera instead!

Singapore feels a bit like a gigantic shopping mall, very put together, but we managed to find us some Gotham.

Some drinks later, Joen was very eager to show me how the interior designer visualized the hotel carpet.

After 20,500 kilometers by land, all the way from Stockholm to Singapore, we had to succumb to flying. Very unromantic, but we needed to be in time for a very important date in Bali. The longest we have traveled by land previous to this was from Hanoi to Kiev at 12,500 km.

We arrived afloat to our next jungle destination, Taman Negara. It is one of the oldest rainforests in the world, estimated to be 130 million years old.

It is a national park with minimal settlement, mainly consisting of floating houses which gives it a little bit of a verdant  “Wild West” (wild east?) atmosphere.

River cowboys playing chess.

We stayed in a cabin by the edge of the jungle and woke up to this view in the morning. One morning I was astonished to see a small hand withdrawing our window curtains, followed by a thievish bearded face… startled I screamed and woke up Joen, who immediately thought a snake was in the room and made a hell of a debacle of terrified shouts and rumbles. I took him hours to recover and calm down.

The simian culprit to the right, we called him Fagin. Monkeys are such little muggers and apparently do not hesitate from breaking and entering.

We went for a hike but were sadly stopped by the abundance of leeches, I have never experienced anything like it. There are not many things that will drive me out of the jungle but we would have become anaemic had we continued. To my deep distress, I had to admit that I am not much of a Mungo Park after all.

Luckily, the leeches were out of reach in the boat that we chartered to go up the river.

It was such a “Heart of Darkness” kind of setting, and I could safely go back pretending I was an 18th century explorer again.

They dropped us off at a leech free area (!!!) and we hiked to some beautiful rapids where I, very bravely I might add, jumped into very dark waters.

Joen always walks with a large stick, not for support but for snake protection. I tend to tease him about this, but we actually ran into a very poisonous looking snake, winding across our path.

We didn’t have the presence of mind to photograph it, but I thought it looked like the green/black one in the top right corner, whereas Joen thought it looked like the more fluorescent green one to the left. This probably demonstrates the difficulty for witnesses to identify criminals in police lineups pretty well.