Arrived in Langkawi via Taipet and Kualla Lumpur. Taipei airport was very spare and practical,
decorated with bright colors, orchid displays and lots of Japanese-inspired
advertising. "Hello Kitty" persists as a
theme, 30 years after I first saw it in Japan, which is very interesting coming
from the land of planned obsolescence and short attention spans.
It was interesting to see ‘prayer rooms’ located on each
terminal, three small rooms designated for Christian, Muslim and Eastern. I peeked into each one…the Christian one had
an icon that was more eastern orthodox than Anglican; the eastern one had three
images the looked vaguely Buddhist, hindu or Taoist. And the Mulsim one had a big W on one wall,
and a screen in the middle of the prayer carpeted floors with “women” stenciled
into the floor on the side away from the door and ‘men’ stenciled on the near
side floor.
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| View from Langkawi |
On to Kuala Lumpur, where the only prayer room was Muslim,
the dominant religen in Malaysia (also referred to by local westerners as
‘muslim lite.’ The Malysian women don’t
wear the black burkas that sweep the floor and hide all but their eyes…those
you see here belong to Saudis on vacation.
They wear bright head scarves secured with sparkling pins, and dress in
jeans and long sleeves. Even the swim
garb covers all but hands, feet and face.
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| Local fishermen in a "longtail" skiff |
Bill picked me up at the airport in a car he had rented for
the week, and we spent the next day touring the island as we did reconnaissance
of the various shops where we could do provisioning. The next couple of days have been spent going
from shop to shop, buying and stowing provisions and generally preparing the
boat for the trip.
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| Monkeys all along the side of the road |
Milliebella is a 43 foot Beneteau, owned by an Australian
couple who is taking it out of charter and having us deliver it to Cairns. Having checked out of immigration yesterday,
we plan to move the boat to anchor tomorrow where we will practice hoisting
sails and carrying out other sailing activities together to get our teamwork
synchronized. Then we plan to leave on
Sunday, heading down the Strait of Malacca to check in at Nongsa Point in
Indonesia. We’ll sail down the
Indonesian archipelago and check out at Bali before we transit the Torres
Strait and turn right for the trip down the Australian coast to Cairns.
The major challenges on this trip are not wind and wave (as in
an ocean passage) but rather the shipping traffic (which we can see on AIS) and
fishing boats (most of which are unlit).
As we will generally be going against the prevailing winds, we will be
doing a lot of motoring, although we do hope to be able to sail a good portion
of the time.
Otherwise, I am acclimating to the heat, which is 20 degrees
higher than what I left, and the humidity (about double). I’m looking forward to being out of the
marina, where we will have a bit more air over us, even as we cross the
equator.
