I will begin today's entry with yesterday evening. Because that was when the magic started. And Malaysia really is magic. At least the way we are experiencing it. Without westerners, without internet, with Gemmy.
And one of the most wonderful things? The best things are the ones that are free.
Yesterday we visited a beach which is more natural and local than those on the more touristy parts of the island. Sure enough it was full of local people cooking up amazing smelling barbecues and just having fun in the sea. We had forgotten to bring a mat or a towel to sit on, which for some reason was really bothering M. I have also lost my sunglasses somewhere. This, also was bothering M. Talking about this, we concluded both things were inconsequential and perhaps were a problem more because of a more generalised concern over money. We have enough and are not overspending to any worrying extent, but when you are draining rather than earning it, it can feel, on occasion, a little as though there isn't solid ground under your feet.
We followed Gemmy's instructions and climbed some unpromising looking steps, the tide being in so far as to nearly drown the bottom of them, to go up and over and find the deserted pebble beach we proceeded to sit on and discuss motorbikes as per yesterdays post. And what did we find there? An abandoned mat! A little the worse for wear perhaps, but perfectly usable - and lo. Now we had a mat to sit on.
"Gemmy," said M, "would be proud of us."
Gemmy is a great proponent of recycling. Not just in terms of separating your rubbish, but in considering whether it actually is. One man's poison is another man's cake. Or however the expression goes. One man's rubbish is another man's new beach mat.
We then walked to the Temurun waterfall, not too far from the beach. It's wholly uncommercialised and therefore still free. We climbed up, admired, and then climbed down and bathed in one of the natural pools half way up. More refreshing, more natural and more beautiful than any swimming pool.
The theme continued. Gemmy was coming past in his car on his way back from giving massages at a nearby hotel and so he was kind enough to give us a lift. Because we needed to wait a little longer than we might otherwise have chosen to stay at the beach, as Gemmy was slightly later finishing than expected, we had the opportunity to see the moment when, as darkness started to fall, and the people move away, macaque monkeys gradually but steadily clambered down from the surrounding trees and claimed the beach for themselves. It was a surreal but fascinating moment as hundreds of monkeys made their way onto the sand. I was reminded of Kipling's story in which the Elephants meet in the jungle to dance. The reality is rather more prosaic. The monkeys have, responding to the human habit of leaving rubbish, become scavengers. They come onto the beach to raid the bins. It isn't that people drop litter, in fact Malaysia seems more aware and more environmentally friendly than the other South East Asian places we have been, though it is in its early stages and so there is a fair amount of legacy mess from less enlightened times. People are using the bins. But the tourist habit of feeding the monkeys is giving them a taste for human food. And they're intelligent. So they raid the bins. What was I saying about one man's rubbish being another man's treasure?
We joined Gemmy, who was as impressed as we had predicted with our 'recycling' of the beach mat. (He is proud to point out the recycled furniture around his home. We drank our welcome drink on recycled chairs, rescued from a hotel who was about to throw them out. )
We had planned to go to the Sunday Night Market for food, but are delighted when Gemmy says he will join us. We spent a very enjoyable hour or so while Gemmy took us around every food store explaining what was vegetarian, how it was made and even where it was from. Malay culture is hugely influenced by both India and China. In keeping with my original point, it was learning about the food that was even more fun than buying and eating it. We discover, among the market stalls, a fresh fruit and vegetable store, and Gemmy is delighted with today's selection,
"Look at this!" He says, holding up a bunch of long white stems with pale pink tinged buds at the end, "ginger flower! You can hardly ever find this. Now I can cook my favourite. I will make lunch for you tomorrow. You won't find this lunch anywhere else. It is old fashioned nyonya cooking. No one makes it anymore. But my mother and grandmother used to." He pauses, "it is an acquired taste."
I am hugely excited by this prospect, partly because I am rather proud of my ability to tend to rather like things which people tell me, doubtfully, are acquired tastes. I tend to acquire them quite quickly. Its an odd attribute to be proud of but there you are. I have to have something.
I am also excited because what we are getting, aside from the meal itself, is an invitation to join Gemmy, to share a part of his childhood and to be his guests at a meal which is special to him. It means a lot more than just a lunch, not normally provided in Gemmy's breakfast only lodgings unless ordered, and paid for, ahead. It means, I hope, that maybe Gemmy likes us, if only a fraction of how much we like him. I don't know if anyone else does this, but if I really like someone I have an overwhelming desire to sort of pant around them like an eager puppy, trying to get them to like me too.
We buy our dinner and eat outside our room with Gemmy, serenaded by the chicadas in the jungle and the deep 'chek-ow' made by a Tokay, a large gekko about the size of your hand and upper arm and more colourful than the usual green and brown versions. When we ask Gemmy about it, he tells us it is 'Georgina', a pink tokay who lives between the ceiling and his roof and who can be seen only rarely, when she ventures out. He shows us a picture of her.
It is when we have finished eating and are preparing to go to bed that the real highlight happens. M is already in our room, getting ready, and I am in the outdoor kitchen, refilling our water jug from the kettle when Gemmy rushes in.
"Quick!" He says, "come! I have to show you something!" He is rushing about turning off lights and there us so much urgency and excitement in him that my main theories are either that monkeys are raiding us again, that there is a Monitor Lizard in the garden (very large lizards the size of crocodiles which live on Langkawi and which I am hoping to catch sight of), or that there is a tiger.
It is none of those things. It is even better. I follow Gemmy out of the kitchen and he points up into the sky.
"Full moon!" He says, "I can't believe I forgot! We have to turn all the lights off to see it better!"
I am full of Gemmys excitement and my own. The moon really is amazing. The humidity means it us a bright silver orb amid a series of rainbow rings caused by the light refraction. The stars around it are very bright. It genuinely sends a shiver through me. I rush to our room to alert M, flicking off light switches as I go. Behind me Gemmy is hauling three thin outdoor mats out onto the grass.
Soon we are all lying next to each other on the grass in the darkness, staring up at the sky. We point out star patterns to each other and, because there is cloud, the way the moon looks is constantly changing,
"Ooh it's got a red ring now," we say to each other excitedly, or "ahh it's lost it's rainbow. Look how clear it is."
The cats, Halia and Lada (Ginger and Pepper in Malaysian), come to join us. I lie on a mat looking up at the moon with a cat on my stomach and I think it just can't get better than this and then Gemmy, who has disappeared, suddenly reappears carrying a box of red wine and three glasses,
"This is a celebration!" He says happily, "who wants wine?"
When M and I talk about this, one of our favourite moments, later, the part we mist enjoyed was the fact that before he asked the question he had already collected all three glasses. Already, Gemmy knew the answer.
We lie on our backs and toast the moon. It is one of the most perfect moments I have lived through. This, I know, is what life is all about. Money, power, career, all that just fades into nothing in the light of the moon.
This, the total pointlessness of money against nature, is underlined again today.
We begin with a walk in the jungle. We are going in a bit further this time so Gemmy furnishes us with a stick to beat the ground to warn any snakes to get away to avoid a bite from a startled cobra.
"Oh, and if you go into long grass," he says, "look for leeches on you. You know how to get them off, yes?"
He says this with such confidence, (obviously we know how to get leeches off, who wouldn't know that?) that I nearly just nod (see the eager puppy reference above) until it occurs to me that this is stupid.
"Do you burn them off?" I venture, though I don't much like the thought. It seems a little bloodthirsty. No pun intended.
"Salt." announces Gemmy, "you put salt on them. They will just drop off."
We set off, armed with a small bag of salt and a stick. The walk is amazing though the animals are too shy so we only really see plant life, which is lush and green. Its quite something to walk among the jungle hoots and screeches in the heat, but perhaps what really made it were those preparations. We feel truly intrepid.
No leeches or snakes to be seen, to my slight disappointment, but we are rewarded, on the way back, by the sight of a hornbill peering at us over his distinctive beak, just for a moment, before taking flight and disappearing among the trees.
Arriving home, we find the taxi driver who took us to the beach the previous day has made a special trip to see us because he found my sun glasses left in his car.
When Gemmy emerges from the spa where he has been giving treatments to some clients we cook together. Gemmy has lived all his life in Malaysia but his parents, like many Malaysians, are Chinese descended. They are Baba Nyonya - the name for the original culture created when the Malay and Chinese settlers began to intermarry. He speaks Cantonese as well as Malay and perfect English. He gets busy in the kitchen and passes us a bunch of what look like very large, round broad beans in their pods.
"Stink beans!" He says with a grin, "they will make even your urine smell really bad. But they taste good."
He shows us how to peel and pod the beans, which, to our disappointment, do not, in the end, have the effect he describes. Their less colloquial name is Patai beans and I was rather looking forward to trying Gemmy's magic trick in the bathroom afterwards, an aubergine cut into quarters and placed at the corners to absorb the smell. This disappointment is muted though, by Gemmy's hypothesis that the reason the stink beans do not make us stink, is that we just don't have that many impurities to get rid of, due to our healthy vegetarian diet.
Oh yes. We are so pure. And our poo smells of roses. Our halos gleam in triumph.
When we eventually sit down to eat lunch it tastes incredible. Its a yellow soupy concoction, full of delicate, complimentary flavours and we eat it with a side dish of the patai beans in sambal. We have impressed Gemmy by being chilli lovers, so he hasn't skimped on the spice. It's fantastic.
In the afternoon, continuing our theme of money being worthless in comparison to experiences, weather visit an Orchid Farm and as soon as we arrive the owner comes rushing out to greet us.
"These are my orchids," he says proudly, "see how beautiful!"
We agree that they are. Immediately he looks slightly concerned,
"Not for sale though" he says hastily, "only some are for sale." He cups his hand protectively around a Spider Orchid he is showing us, "this one? No sell. Can't buy. Can only look."
He goes on to explain that selling the orchids is his very bottom priority. The most important thing is to show them. To have people see and admire them. In a comically growing list, resonant of the Monty Python 'Spanish Inquisition' sketch in which the list of 'weapons' keeps growing ever longer, he tells us that priority one is to simply allow people to see the orchids, priority two is to breed them, priority three is to hire them on a weekly basis to hotels. Oh and if people really want to buy them...well then maybe. But only some. Only those ones over there. Well just that one. Actually no. Forget it. None of them. They are too beautiful to be sold.
OK, so the last was a little exaggeration. But you get the gist. The love of the orchids far and above outweighed the urge to make money out of them. Our fee to enter the farm was 3 ringgits each. That's cheap even in ringgits. In sterling it's about 60p.
"Where are you going next?" Asks the farm owner as we thank him and prepare to leave.
"Kuah" we tell him. We are going to meet Gemmy after his ukeleke class there, "is it far?"
We are intending to walk it. We think it will take around an hour.
"Kuah?" Says the owner, "I am just going there. You want a lift?"
Did I mention that I love Malaysia?
When we get to Kuah it seems a little frayed round the edges. We wander around some shops for a while and admire some toblerones before ending up in Starbucks because it's the only place we can find and we need a sugar hit. It's a blazing hot day.
But Starbucks is exactly the opposite of what we want to experience on our travels, and so we have no sooner bought our icey caffeine and sugar loaded confections than we decide to take them with us and leave.
We decide to walk back towards where we will meet Gemmy through Legends Park. I have heard about this before, a park in which all the many rich and colourful legends of Langkawi are represented by sculptures. TripAdvisor has characterised it as run down and poorly maintained but what we find, walking through it as dusk descends around us - is that the deserted nature of it, the need to spend time carefully translating the worn engravings which explain the stories behind the sculptures and the sculptures themselves, frayed around the edges, lit by a blinking light or a failed bulb - makes it all the more magical and atmospheric. It is like discovering another world, hidden inside reality and viewable only by those with the imagination and the patience to see it.
And maybe that's not so far from the truth.
I will describe the rich tapestry of legends which weave together the islands of Langkawi in another post, so that I can give them proper treatment. But suffice to say the sculptures rise up, full of colour in the fading light and captivate us, depicting battling phoenixes, broken gravy pots, fighting giants and misplaced angelic instruments. We spend hours in there, trying to read the faded captions by torchlight, and getting bitten to death by mosquitoes.
It doesn't matter. The itching is worth it.
By the time we go to meet Gemmy and experience more magic in the form of Chinese vegetarian mock meat and strange and sweet herbal tea, we have, in the past day and a half, experienced some 40% of the moments I will later describe as being my top most unforgettable memories in Langkawi.
And all of it together, though utterly priceless, was worth less than the price of one Starbucks beverage.
Money is not real life. This, the moon, the wildlife, the stories with which we captivate generations of our children - this is real life. And as for the ubiquitous full moon, jungle moon, orange moon and many other moon related parties on the beach in Thailand - does anyone actually look at the moon in them?
It seems to me, looking back on this sort of experience, that there is some huge play being put on in front of a carefully crafted and rather dingy facade and, behind it, backstage, is real life. The trouble is most of us are leading our lives in pre set scripts in front of the facade, believing that to be real life. Because actual reality, in the brighter spaces behind the worn out cityscape scenery, seems simply too good to be true.
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