Monday, October 22, 2007
Malaysia - Penang - where we was robbed!
It's not a case of work & no play for us during our time in Malaysia - we had a long weekend off, mainly due to local celebrations for the end of the month of Ramadan (Aidil Fitri). We set off for the island of Pulau Penang on a Friday morning & returned to Taiping on a Monday evening. We stayed in the main town of Georgetown & found plenty to do.
Our 1st visit was to the Cheong Fatt Tze mansion, built in the 19th C by a Chinese merchant who was originally from Guandong & known as the Rockefeller of the East. It has 38 rooms, 5 courtyards, 7 staircases & 220 windows. It's truly a work of art & a fine example of Straits Settlement architecture, incorporating features of European & Chinese style such as Art Nouveau stained glass, Chinese cut-and paste porcelain, Stoke on Trent floor tiles & cast iron work manufactured by MacFarlanes of Glasgow. The serene & elegant atmosphere was no small testament to the success of the principles of Fen Shui which had been applied at every stage of its construction.
During the rest of our weekend, we managed to visit Little India, the Botanic Gardens (where a water treatment works had been established in 1804 by some far-sighted British engineer), the beach town of Batu Ferengi, the State Museum, Fort Cornwallis (begun in 1786 by Francis Light, the 1st British settler whose son went on to found Adelaide) & the Eastern & Oriental Hotel (built by the Sarkie brothers who were responsible for Raffles Hotel in Singapore which we hope to patronise in a couple of weeks time).
We travelled along Scotland Street, MacAllister Street, downing Street & Farquar Street, witnessed a Chinese lantern parade & ate at a fantastic vegetarian restaurant in Dickens Street where our plates were piled high with a fantastic selection of fresh food for the amazing sum of a pound each.
Penang is well known for its cosmopolitan ethnic mix of residents & we were impressed with the harmony that seemed to exist between the races - Indians, Chinese & Malays are the majority cultures but there have been historical communities, Achinese, Arabs, Armenians, Buginese, Burmese, Japanese, Javanese, Minangkabaus, Siamese, Singhalese, Europeans, Eurasians & also Jews. There is no longer a functioning synagogue but there is a Jewish cemetery & Jewish plots in other cemeteries. Most of the Jewish community was evacuated to Singapore at the time of the Japanese invasion of Malaysia in WWII & the few Jews that still live in Pulau Penang have to travel to Singapore nowadays for all their festival & life event celebrations.
We really loved Penang, enjoying our few days there immensely but we did experience 1 or 2 problems! Due to the public holidays, our attempts to get to the top of Penang Hill aboard its historical funicular railway, were thwarted by the huge crowds. We didn't fancy waiting 4 hours. Another major problem was being robbed!! Howard's rucksack was snatched from his lap by a passing motor cyclist while we travelled on a trishaw. We lost some jewellery, our IPod (& all its precious store of music which took so many hours to download......), Fiona's spare glasses, our Lonely Planet Guide, Fiona's hat & much, much more! The items lost which caused the most immediate problem were the keys to our apartment in Taiping. All in all, it was a complete pain compounded by the 2 hours which we had to spend in a police station. Just another taste of local culture, we suppose!
Our 1st visit was to the Cheong Fatt Tze mansion, built in the 19th C by a Chinese merchant who was originally from Guandong & known as the Rockefeller of the East. It has 38 rooms, 5 courtyards, 7 staircases & 220 windows. It's truly a work of art & a fine example of Straits Settlement architecture, incorporating features of European & Chinese style such as Art Nouveau stained glass, Chinese cut-and paste porcelain, Stoke on Trent floor tiles & cast iron work manufactured by MacFarlanes of Glasgow. The serene & elegant atmosphere was no small testament to the success of the principles of Fen Shui which had been applied at every stage of its construction.
During the rest of our weekend, we managed to visit Little India, the Botanic Gardens (where a water treatment works had been established in 1804 by some far-sighted British engineer), the beach town of Batu Ferengi, the State Museum, Fort Cornwallis (begun in 1786 by Francis Light, the 1st British settler whose son went on to found Adelaide) & the Eastern & Oriental Hotel (built by the Sarkie brothers who were responsible for Raffles Hotel in Singapore which we hope to patronise in a couple of weeks time).
We travelled along Scotland Street, MacAllister Street, downing Street & Farquar Street, witnessed a Chinese lantern parade & ate at a fantastic vegetarian restaurant in Dickens Street where our plates were piled high with a fantastic selection of fresh food for the amazing sum of a pound each.
Penang is well known for its cosmopolitan ethnic mix of residents & we were impressed with the harmony that seemed to exist between the races - Indians, Chinese & Malays are the majority cultures but there have been historical communities, Achinese, Arabs, Armenians, Buginese, Burmese, Japanese, Javanese, Minangkabaus, Siamese, Singhalese, Europeans, Eurasians & also Jews. There is no longer a functioning synagogue but there is a Jewish cemetery & Jewish plots in other cemeteries. Most of the Jewish community was evacuated to Singapore at the time of the Japanese invasion of Malaysia in WWII & the few Jews that still live in Pulau Penang have to travel to Singapore nowadays for all their festival & life event celebrations.
We really loved Penang, enjoying our few days there immensely but we did experience 1 or 2 problems! Due to the public holidays, our attempts to get to the top of Penang Hill aboard its historical funicular railway, were thwarted by the huge crowds. We didn't fancy waiting 4 hours. Another major problem was being robbed!! Howard's rucksack was snatched from his lap by a passing motor cyclist while we travelled on a trishaw. We lost some jewellery, our IPod (& all its precious store of music which took so many hours to download......), Fiona's spare glasses, our Lonely Planet Guide, Fiona's hat & much, much more! The items lost which caused the most immediate problem were the keys to our apartment in Taiping. All in all, it was a complete pain compounded by the 2 hours which we had to spend in a police station. Just another taste of local culture, we suppose!
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Friday, October 19, 2007
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Taiping - Zoo
For our 1st two weeks in Malaysia our volunteer placement, organised through Way Out Experiences (http://wayoutexperiences.com/about.html) has been at Taiping Zoo. It's the oldest public zoo in the country, run by the local municipality. Founded 80 years ago, it has more than 1300 animals, representing 200 species of birds, reptiles & mammals occupying 24 acres of the Lake Park.
As zoos go, it is one of the pleasantest that we've ever seen, set as it is in such a lush landscape. The zoo's director is Dr Kevin Lazarus, a vet by training. He & all his staff were warm & welcoming. We were introduced to them by Aida Ghani, a lovely young Muslim Malaysian who looked after us uncomplainingly & cheerfully throughout our stay. She ensured that we knew where to be & what to do! She ensured that we had all the necessary equipment for the tasks in hand - rakes, brushes, bin bags, boards, ropes, disinfectant, palm leaves, plasters, keys, food & wellies! She worked tirelessly alongside us as we raked , swept, cleaned & sweated. She warned us about the leeches - not that it helped us to avoid their attentions! It wasn't so awful, though - entirely painless if messy. We weren't aware of having been bitten until we noticed our clothes seeping blood!
We worked mainly around the area of the orang utan enclosure, but we also had the opportunity of coming into close contact with lions, tigers, black panthers, gibbons, tamarins, bearded pigs, otters, storks, leopard cats, elephants, civets, chimpanzees & a lemur. We spent a lot of time with a young female orang utan named Wasabi who is 4 years old. Sadly, her mother had not known how to look after her. She has had to be raised in isolation by the keepers although they are hopeful that she will be able to be introduced into the company of the zoo's 3 adult orang utans when she is 6 years old. In the meantime, she is reliant on the company of humans to enrich her life (enrichment seems to be the buzz word in zoo circles). We played with her, hid her food to encourage foraging & provided treats like sugar cane, raisins (hidden in Howard's pockets) & palm leaves to be chewed & fashioned into a nest. She was charming, intelligent & occasionally petulant, capable of throwing some fine toddler tantrums! Orang utans share 98% of their DNA with humans & we certainly were profoundly aware of how striking the similarities in their behaviour are.
The animals that filled us with the most awe, as they had in Africa, were the big cats. We found the lions, the panthers &, in particular, the tigers just amazing. Their power & ferocity are endlessly fascinating & terrifying.
We do have a slight unease about zoos. Obviously, the ideal place for wildlife is in the wild, but for most of the animals in Taipeng Zoo there would be no hope of survival without the security of the zoo and the care of the keepers. Two of the orang utans came to the zoo because they were in private hands & became too powerful to look after. A male adult is ten times as strong as a human. They are an extremely endangered species and it is not unlikely that, if the deforestation in this part of the world is not halted, then they will be extinct in the wild within 10 years.
As for the big cats, there are more lions in USA zoos than there are in the wild in Africa. Tigers are being constantly hunted and killed for their skins and also for their bones to be ground up for Chinese medicines. The big cats are even being killed for their meat. We read a story in the newspaper here that smugglers escaped being caught, as they tried to take a black panther into Thailand for exotic meat eaters.
The debate amounts to whether it's better to preserve the animals in captivity - or lose them altogether. We are on the side of the zoos as long as conditions are available to make the animals as comfortable as possible.
As zoos go, it is one of the pleasantest that we've ever seen, set as it is in such a lush landscape. The zoo's director is Dr Kevin Lazarus, a vet by training. He & all his staff were warm & welcoming. We were introduced to them by Aida Ghani, a lovely young Muslim Malaysian who looked after us uncomplainingly & cheerfully throughout our stay. She ensured that we knew where to be & what to do! She ensured that we had all the necessary equipment for the tasks in hand - rakes, brushes, bin bags, boards, ropes, disinfectant, palm leaves, plasters, keys, food & wellies! She worked tirelessly alongside us as we raked , swept, cleaned & sweated. She warned us about the leeches - not that it helped us to avoid their attentions! It wasn't so awful, though - entirely painless if messy. We weren't aware of having been bitten until we noticed our clothes seeping blood!
We worked mainly around the area of the orang utan enclosure, but we also had the opportunity of coming into close contact with lions, tigers, black panthers, gibbons, tamarins, bearded pigs, otters, storks, leopard cats, elephants, civets, chimpanzees & a lemur. We spent a lot of time with a young female orang utan named Wasabi who is 4 years old. Sadly, her mother had not known how to look after her. She has had to be raised in isolation by the keepers although they are hopeful that she will be able to be introduced into the company of the zoo's 3 adult orang utans when she is 6 years old. In the meantime, she is reliant on the company of humans to enrich her life (enrichment seems to be the buzz word in zoo circles). We played with her, hid her food to encourage foraging & provided treats like sugar cane, raisins (hidden in Howard's pockets) & palm leaves to be chewed & fashioned into a nest. She was charming, intelligent & occasionally petulant, capable of throwing some fine toddler tantrums! Orang utans share 98% of their DNA with humans & we certainly were profoundly aware of how striking the similarities in their behaviour are.
The animals that filled us with the most awe, as they had in Africa, were the big cats. We found the lions, the panthers &, in particular, the tigers just amazing. Their power & ferocity are endlessly fascinating & terrifying.
We do have a slight unease about zoos. Obviously, the ideal place for wildlife is in the wild, but for most of the animals in Taipeng Zoo there would be no hope of survival without the security of the zoo and the care of the keepers. Two of the orang utans came to the zoo because they were in private hands & became too powerful to look after. A male adult is ten times as strong as a human. They are an extremely endangered species and it is not unlikely that, if the deforestation in this part of the world is not halted, then they will be extinct in the wild within 10 years.
As for the big cats, there are more lions in USA zoos than there are in the wild in Africa. Tigers are being constantly hunted and killed for their skins and also for their bones to be ground up for Chinese medicines. The big cats are even being killed for their meat. We read a story in the newspaper here that smugglers escaped being caught, as they tried to take a black panther into Thailand for exotic meat eaters.
The debate amounts to whether it's better to preserve the animals in captivity - or lose them altogether. We are on the side of the zoos as long as conditions are available to make the animals as comfortable as possible.
Taiping - Pearl Apartments - A Misnomer
The photos don't do justice to the shabbiness of the real thing!
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