SINGAPORE TO MALAYSIA - Posted MARCH 30, 2008
From our days in Washington DC, we remember the planned city of Reston, Virginia with houses, schools, businesses, parks, and everything you need for a complete living environment. Well, the Republic of Singapore is such a place, except on the scale of a major city of over 4 million people. We arrived at the dock on March 18th in the “City of Lions,” where we were greeted by two dancing “lions.” Our delightful guide, Elsie, showed us her sparkling clean and progressive island-city-state with infectious enthusiasm. We saw hundreds of impressive skyscrapers, a new convention center under construction with at least 40 building cranes, Little India, Chinatown, the Orchid and Ginger Gardens (gorgeous) and floated down the river to a delicious lunch at Cable Quay. We also toured the Housing Development Authority which subsidizes housing for all citizens who want to own their own condominiums. They had a display of the housing evolution from 1950 to the present which successfully lifted Singapore citizens out of slums into modern buildings, creating a contented and productive society. We ended our second visit to Singapore like our first one in 2000--with a Singapore Sling in the Long Bar at the famous Raffles Hotel.
Proceeding north through the Straits of Malacca, we docked on March 19th at the Port of Kelang, Malaysia, and embarked upon a 2-hour van ride into Kuala Lumpur-- a surprisingly small city of 500,000 people. Malaysia, like Singapore, is cosmopolitan, open, and tolerant of all religions and cultures which coexist peacefully. We visited the Palace of the Sultan (appointed by the people’s elected representatives) and happened to be there when his motorcade drove through the gates, as well as during the changing of the guards on horseback. We then toured a war memorial park with a monument created by the same artist who did the Iwo Jima memorial in Arlington Cemetery. Kuala Lumpur is home to the Petronas Towers—the tallest twin towers in the world, each 88 stories high. The first six floors of the towers comprise a very upscale shopping galleria where we shopped and had a delicious Malaysian lunch at the chaotic food court with a few thousand other people. At the end of the day, we stopped by the Royal Selanger pewter factory, trying our skill at hand-hammering drinking cups (they did not hire us on the spot), and browsed through the inevitable gift shop full of beautiful things. Don had to settle for a picture of the giant beer stein (15 feet tall) in the courtyard since, thankfully, it wasn’t for sale (shipping costs would have been a bit outrageous).
March 20th dawned with a beautiful sunrise as we sailed into the container port of Penang Island, Malaysia. (Some of the rickshaw drivers were still snoozing)! Our wonderful guide, Marco, drove us in his van through the main town of George Town with its charming colonial-style buildings harking back to the 19th century British era. Then we were off to the Wat Chayamankalaram Temple to view the 108-foot-long reclining Buddha, one of the largest in the world. Out in the countryside, we visited a beach, the Butterfly Farm, and a local fruit stand where Marco showed us unusual local produce like jack fruit and (smelly) duren. He also explained that if you eat a whole raw nutmeg before it is dried you’ll die!! We did buy some DRIED nutmeg and nutmeg oil. After lunch at a lovely resort, we proceeded to a Snake Temple where Susan volunteered for the classic boa-snake-around-your-neck picture.
After three container ports in a row, we dubbed the Queen Victoria the “Container Queen.” But we are always glad to get back to the “mother ship” (so named after tendering out to various ports in the smaller lifeboats) where we continue to enjoy elegant dinners accompanied by harpist or string quartet music.
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