Going Tiomanic, Melaka the Cracker, KL sweaty hell

ARIE'S BEACH FESTIVAL

Arie is one of the wonderful friendly locals on the magnificent Tioman Island. He is tiny, Chinese looking with a manky mullet, and can only be described as two acid tabs short of a brush with God. He invited us to his beach party. When we arrived it was only full of people we had invited. Arie was thrilled by our efforts, also by our barnstorming guitar jam which claimed 5 hours and 6 strings. Arie had a flashback at one point, I held him and it was okay. We met a deliriously wonderful Kuala Lumpur couple Jack and Anya - look out for them later.


SATAY CELUP WITH EXTRA CHRIST

A Melaka speciality is Satay Celup. You choose a variety of raw, dead life forms on wooden skewers and cook them by dipping them into a bubbling pot of satay in the centre of your table. By pushing in the massive queue of Chinese people, Dan and I got talking to a bunch of Chinese Christians who were so excited to meet Jews that they bought us dinner in exchange for a lecture on Judaism. Highlights of the lecture were Kabbalah, circumcision and why I was eating pigs' ears and squid testicles while Dan only ate cabbage. All our Creationist friends had bizarrely English names like Cynthia. I argued with Willard about Creation.

WILLARD: The reason why the story of Eden is true is because when you have a hypothesis that you can't disprove then it must be the Truth.
DAVE: But you can't disprove the Big Bang either.
WILLARD: Sometimes you just have to have faith.

What a cop out.


THE GIRL WITH THE HEARTBREAKING FACE

Emilia, 8, and what a feisty one. Don't get on her wrong side. Sitting at a table in her mother's cafe with Clarence (below) I drew a dog for her. She snatched the cardboard and held it right up to her face writing furiously then slammed it face down on the table. I picked it up and she smirked secretly while I turned it over, about to read when it was gone - snatched out of my hand by Emilia so she could scribble again before violently slamming it down once more. Next to my dog she'd written

'not good. not innif good'

So I drew a duck. Again the snatch, scribble and slam and 'not good'. There was only one thing for it - I drew a crocodile in a three piece suit. This provoked a secret snigger. She wrote 'not good' again but quickly snatched it back and wrote:

'Please can you draw a cow because I am a cow thank you Emilia Lee Chen'

What could I do? I started to draw the cow, getting no further than the face before the cardboard was yanked out of my hands again.

'And a rat and a rabbit'

Fine. I resumed. Yank.

'2 cows'

When I had finished this menagerie she labelled each one after her family members. The rat was 'my agry brother'. Ugly or angry, it's all the same to me.


CLARENCE THE OCTAGENARIAN SINGAPOREAN CALIFORNIAN

Clarence was the only other occupant of our ten person dorm in Melaka infested with rodents and bedbugs. He is indescribably tiny, 80 years old and invited us to a Chinese cafe so we could listen to him play the piano. He played Liszt, Chopin in C#minor and some old Italian songs. The Italian songs awakened something in me, a summer night thick with romance and nostalgia as the traffic roared out the open front and Emilia darted around with her heartbreaking face. Clarence was so little, with such feeling and experience in his fingertips that cast me to a summer Italian night and I am my father and mother and their love and opera and their music of love. Have you ever had your soul scalpelled open and left quivering in the humidity? Now I feel I have started - I can write and be sincere again. What is this for if not an odyssey of inspiration? These days are so packed with new cocktails of the old and something different.

You have tasted mango and tasted milk, and perhaps you have tasted a mango milkshake, but you have not sipped it at the bar of a Melaka Chinatown juicebar under a grateful fan with a wall of heat humming at the open front and the Chinese juice lady smiling at my attempts to speak Malay, and the Chinese twentysomethings in their chinos and polo shirts and the Scottish man at the doorway buying an apple juice for his child who seems older than he is and the man on my right who wakes me from my book to give me a glass of sky juice and my confusion until they explain that it's water and my disappointment because I love to try new juice and their laughter how can I record and absorb and communicate all these details of delicate life?


KL POST APOCALYPTIC HELL

Malaysia is wonderful. Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur is a dirty smelly noisy smog laden trap of churning people. We stayed in a shit hostel, ate shit Chinese food, and then abandoned all high ideas of sightseeing and went to a multiscreen where we thoroughly enjoyed Triple X 2. We scoured the city for booze and ended up paying over the odds for a miniscule bottle of whiskey so bad it would cause a Scotsman to commit hari kiri.

I know you remember Jack and Anya from Arie's psychadelic beach party. We phoned Jack who as luck would have it is marketing manager for a chain of beautiful bars and restaurants around Malaysia. In Bar Savanh we chinwagged with lovely Jack and drank oodles of free beer, before lovely Anya turned up and we progressed to a shiny club filled with drunken Chinese people. Dan was a hit with the Indian girls and I was a hit with the Chinese men.