Kuala Lumpur is an Amazing City

The food in KL is the best in Asia.  There is so much diversity or cuisines and food types.  The best is the street food you can pick up in Bukit Bintang, Chinatown, or in the sidewalk cafe's near the hotels in near the center of KL.  There is amazing Indian Food, of a variety that makes you realize that what we think of as Indian in the USA is Americanized-Indian food.  I had Northern and Southern Indian, for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Then there are food courts in every shopping mall with huge assortments of chinese, Malaysian, Thai, Indonesian, and Indian foods.  You can try four different cuisines in an evening and never spend more than $20.

The city is quite safe from street crime in as much as any city can be.  I'm sure it happens, but I didn't see any of it while I was there from 7 to 11 of May.  What I did see was an amazing city choked full of people, and cars, and buses.  I saw gleaming towers from the future...

Next to broken neighborhoods from the past...

There is a vibrancy and freedom about KL life that you don't feel in buttoned down Singapore.  Yes there is wide disparities in living standards, but you feel like people in KL have a more free and dignified life.  The government subsidizes everything - Fuel, cooking oil, rice, bus and subway fares.  It is so cheap to eat and travel in Malaysia.  

You can combine that with some of the most interesting urban vistas in the world and you have a city with style, heart, and soul.

In the streets at night, you have a completely different experience from Singapore.  Where Singapore is modern and convenient, KL is open, dirty, and real.  Hawkers stand in front of sidewalk restaurants and shove menus in your face to tempt you in.  Tatoo artists ply their trade on the street as live advertising.  And real artists sit in quiet corners and paint.  

And then across town, there are groups of young people sitting in front of the Petronas Towers talking and eating as if the towers themselves were a sidewalk attraction to congregate around and enjoy.

As a New Yorker, used to contrasting urban environments, KL is very familiar and fascinating.  

Singapore is Like a Painted Mask

Seven Days a week with self-funded sick days and no time off for 10 years.  That's the real life for taxi drivers and unskilled labor in Singapore.  They work 10-12 hours a day, seven days a week, and they have to pay their employers for the days off they take or the sick days they must take.  They get no vacation benefits, and no health benefits.  When they fall ill they must pay the hospital for each procedure.  If they can't afford treatment, the hospital will not provide it.  Its a darwinian existence in a society that worships work and shopping.

On the outside, Singapore appears to be an Asian city that works.  Subways, roadways, hotels, and offices glitter.  The service is superb, the food varied and inexpensive, and every convenience is available.  Income taxes are super low, attracting wealth from across the globe.  But it comes at a cost for the vast majority of the population who work tirelessly to support and subsidize the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

What you see on the outside is what Singapore wants you to see.  It takes social effort to peer beneath the painted mask to see the mean and cruel the economic and social structure.  I spent three days and nights in this city from 3 to 7 May, 2013.  I arrived after a 24 hour flight, JFK to Narita, Narita to Singapore, in economy class.  I didn't sleep on either leg and arrived in Singapore at 1:30am on Saturday night.  My taxi driver had already been working 6 hours and had another 5 to go.  We chatted about his life as we drove across town from Changi to my hotel, the Swiss Hotel Merchant Court.  I have interviewed cab drivers in Singapore on all of my 6 visits to this island nation and they all are the same.  The drivers relate the frustration of driving endless days, the powerlessness they feel in their lives, and the anger they feel towards their government which enacts policies designed to keep them where they are.

Singapore was founded in 1963, when the governor of the tiny malaysian outpost broke away from the newly independent Malaysian State six years after independence.  At the time no one was sure Singapore could survive on its own.  It was a small port, a colonial outpost, and many poor fishing villages.  But it created business friendly conditions that attracted trade and capital and is today a far wealthier and more successful nation than Malaysia, even thought the two states are interdependent and quite close politically.

But Singapore hasn't just thrived because of the attraction of capital and trade.  It has also thrived because of low wages, and exhaustive working conditions.  A state that provides high end shopping pleasures for the 1% of its inhabitants on the backs of the rest is not a successful nation state.

On the outside, this city looks amazing.  You can party here in an environment that is designed for convenience and pleasure.  The shopping malls and outdoor arcades are beyond anything I've seen in the West.

But underneath lies a huge social cost - mass homelessness, poverty, and despair.

Teufelskrallen

I wanted to stay at the Bagatelle Lodge but it was 40km on a sand road off the main B1 tar road and I had already driven 600km and was too tired to ply the sand road.  Sand roads take more concentration.  So next I opted for the Kalahari Red Dunes Lodge, which was just off the tar road near Kalkrand, but it was just too expensive.  They wanted N $1800 a night, which is about US $200.  Luckily, they recommended a sister property called Teufelskrallen, which was just 10km up the road.

Teufelskrallen turned out to be perfect.  It was a very small guest lodge with 6 tented challets in the Kalahari desert and a private water with a herd of springbok.  Each challet was made with tented fabric nailed to wooden beams.  The bathroom was outdoors, with solar heated water, and a great bush feeling.

The setting was peaceful.  It had huge vistas and wonderful sunrises, sunsets, starlight, a nice pool, and good cheap food.  And the rate was only N$ 760/night, or about US $ 80, including breakfast.  I stayed two nights and spent one day just relaxing at the pool.  The main building had a lovely restaurant that served very good food. 

The full day I spent at the pool was Namibian Independence Day so there were only two people on staff.  I was the only guest in the lodge and had the whole space to myself.  I sunned, swam, and lazed in the hammock.  It was a great down day after the long drive the day before and a perfect way to round out a perfect trip in Africa for a month.

I also walked around and did some macro photography.

I particularly hunted the red dragonflies that swarmed around the pool drinking sips of water between insect hunts.

At the end of the day, some clouds rolled in and we had some fantastic sunsets.

Sunrise on the last day, March 22nd, was also fantastic.

I took one last shot out my chalet window of the springbok at the water hold and one of me as a self portrait after 22 days in the hot Namibian Sun. 

I would say I feel completely satisfied with this trip.  I did more than I expected, learned a lot, and don't have any regrets.  It was enough time to get far away from normal life.  I travelled alone but never felt lonely.  I met wonderful people in every place I visited, made good new friends, and developed a deep love for this wonderful country Namibia. 

I will surely be back.

Wind is bad for sleep in Kooimanis

 March 19. 2013

Roger and Nadine wanted to drive South after Tsauchab River Camp.  I had no plans and thought about driving East over Maltehohe and spending a few days in the Kalahari.  But I also really enjoyed camping with Roger and Nadine.  They were fun and relaxed and we had a great time talking together.  Roger wanted to drive through the D707, a road renowned as the most scenic in Namibia.  It crosses through the Namib Rand, which is a spectacular green valley with salmon pink dunes and mountains on either side.

Checking out at Tsauchab, we asked Vicki for recommendations.  She said there was a camp on the D707 which was one of the most beautiful in Namibia, a place even more special than her own campsite.  It was about 120km on dirt and sand roads from where we were and driving that way would commit me to a Southern route back to Windhoek.  I looked at the map.  Driving East would be more gravel roads, but a trip South on the D707 would terminate in Aus and I could pick up a tar road there and blitz North to Windhoek.

Roger and Nadine wanted me to continue with them and I figured I still had three more nights with no plans on how to use them so it would be more fun to continue South.

The D707 did not disappoint.  It was a spectacular combination of tan and blue grasses, pink sand dunes, green trees, and red mountains.

I decided earlier in the day to shoot exclusively with the Pentax-M 100mm 2.8 I had brought with me and almost never used on the trip.  The lens is 40 years old, but looks new and it is normally quite a sharp lens for portraits.  100mm might seem too long for landscapes, but the distances in Namibia are so great and the air is so clean that one must use longer lenses in landscapes to fill the frame with a subject.  Using wide angle lenses what you get are vast amounts of sky, flat landscape details, and no subject.

In hindsight, I think I should have used a more modern lens.  I am disappointed with the color contrast of the Pentax.  It doesn't pop as much as the newer Olympus and Panasonic lenses I have been using on this trip with the OM-D.  Here are some examples of photos taken with those lenses for comparison.

I had the same polarizing filter on all the lenses that day, so the variation in color vibrance and pop is just the optical coatings.  The Pentax glass is great, but it suffers older coating formulas and I will probably sell it when I get back.

The Kooimanis Campsite was at the end of a 20km pink sand road, nestled in an alcove of red rock hills, with spectacular scenery.

 This was absolutely the best looking campsite I had seen in Namibia.  But boy was it hot.  It was 105F when we arrived at 3pm.  So hot that we couldn't sit in the campsite because the sun was too high for shade.  So we went to the adjacent Fest in Fells Lodge, which had a beautiful restaurant.  It was completely unexpected that a restaurant in American adobe style would sit at the end of a 20km pink sand road in the middle of a red rock mountain range in Namibia.  Unfortunately, the restaurant did not cater specifically to camping guests and only served lodge guests for major meals.  Dinner at the lodge was out, but we managed to persuade the staff to serve us some beers and cake, and we relaxed inside, away from the hot sun, for a couple of hours.

 With lodge dinner not an option, Roger and Nadine offered to cook pasta in the campsite and we unpacked our cooking equipment.  I had never even opened the cooking box in my 4x4 since I ate at lodge restaurants even when I camped.  And as I had no experience cooking outside I was so grateful that Roger and Nadine were experts.

We had a great meal together, with a few extra beers and a rose wine cooled down in my fridge.  After dinner, we lit a camp fire and told stories about what we were reading on the trip.  An unlucky locust came to visit near the end of the evening.  Locusts are huge (6 inches long) grasshoppers and I guess he was attracted by the light of the fire because he jumped right into it and killed himself.

Guess we could have had him for desert but didn't have any chocolate nearby...

That evening it was still really hot.  Normally, the temperature drops about 20 degrees after the sun sets and a wind comes about 9-10pm and by 12am it is 40 degrees cooler than the daytime high temperature.  But this evening it didn't get very cool and the wind that came was an intermitant fierce wind.  It would blow hard and shake the tent for 10 minutes, subside for 30 minutes, and return.

Bad for sleeping.  I slept 30 minutes, was awoken by the wind, then repeated the cycle, for maybe a total of 4 hours of lousy sleep which made me super tired and grumpy the next morning.  Just in time for a marathon 650km drive over 8 hours from Kooismanis to Kalkrand.

The drive had zero nice scenery.  It was all ugly brown hills, empty canyons, and barren landscape from Aus to Keetmanshoop to Marienthal on the tar road.  I consumed N$700 in diesel, 3 cans of Red Bull, 3 energy candy bars, a box of cookies, and 3 litres of water.