I arrived at my Kota Kinabalu hostel at 7pm after paying too
much for a taxi. Nobody from the hostel was around for a while but being
quickly recognized as a traveler I was let in immediately. Which brings me to
one of the big worries people have when travelling alone (besides safety), isn’t
it lonely? How are you gonna make friends?
Literally within an hour I was playing Settlers of Catan and
had made new friends. People travelling are all in the same boat. They wanna
hang out, they want to swap stories, they want to meet new people. Hostel
people are generally pretty friendly. That doesn’t mean that you’ll be bffs, but
as soon as I arrived I felt like I had a group to hang with. I’ve also been
invited to play in an ultimate Frisbee tournament where you dress as Harry
Potter characters. It was unclear if this was some sort of international
championship and they were down a player and I just looked like I could handle
a Frisbee. Like some kind of underdog sports movie that I haven’t seen. Or if
this was just your regular pickup game of
dress-as-a-harry-potter-character-ultimate-Frisbee game.
The hostel was never advertised as a Christian hostel, but
not so subtle clues like the room names all being apostles and the wifi
password being john316 (a little obvious, could’ve gone for a deeper cut
frankly), tipped me off pretty quick.
Religion is expected in Malaysia, it doesn’t matter which
one, but having a religion seems to be important. I was hanging out in some
water off of Manukan Island, and a Chinese man was talking to my new hostel
friend. Malaysia has a large Chinese population, so he may have been from here
or from China, maybe not the best sample, but! He asked her about her religion,
(which is also less taboo than it is in the US), assuming she was Christian
(because she’s white) and when she answered that she didn’t really have one, he
was shocked and suggested that maybe she could get a religion and that would
help her “be a better person”. This was way less rude than it sounds, we were
all smiling the whole time.
And dang it Malaysians are friendly. A mixture of curious
and friendly at least. Walking down the street, my friend and I got dozens of
Hellos from strangers, and stares from almost everyone. Literally interrupting a
conversation to say hello to us. At first I thought that maybe it was because
one of us was a woman (no hints as to which one of us that was) and that she
was wearing shorts in a predominately Islam country. And I’m sure that’s still
part of it, but she explained that a lot of it has to do with being white and tall. Like I don’t think I can buy
clothes here, cuz I’d be a XXXL. So yea, I can see being fascinated by
strangely colored giants walking through your town.
I was asking two women where to buy sunblock, and I was half
speaking Malay and half English (which all the locals seem to do too) and they
were loooosing it. Giggling and blushing and laughing as we tried to
communicate. It was great. Another time I was paying for my dinner and the man
at the counter asked where I was from. And when I said the US he literally
gasped and said “Wow”. I felt like a Beatle.
And not one of the species of beetle that inhabit the
islands of Manukan and Sapi (Great transition Taylor).
My new hostel friend and I took a ferry to Manukan and Sapi
Islands which are just off of KK (Kota Kinabalu, KK is a totally normal abbrev
for the city, and not one I just made up). When I say ferry, I mean I had to
wear a life jacket. Which does make it safer, but also implies that you might
need a life jacket. It was more of a speed boat than a ferry.
I love island and I love jungles, so when we arrived at
Manukan I was very happy. We were greeted by a large monitor lizard, about 3
foot. Which I always thought were pretty dangerous, but this one seemed chill. A quick wiki check
revealed that nobody is certain if they’re venomous. Get on it science!
Regardless, a bite seems bad due to the bacteria in their mouths. I did not
pet.
We saw about five more as we jungle trekked through the
ridge of the island. We misinterpreted a sign, so what was supposed to be a 1.5
km walk, turning into a several km hike. Which was fine, since I would’ve preferred
the jungle trek to the jolly saunter on a brick path.
When I was in Ecuador studying abroad in the Amazon, we were
told to always wear long pants, long sleeves and socks, despite the intense
heat and humidity. This was to prevent the small, barely visible biting bugs
from chewing up our skin. Apparently one guy, even with the extra clothing, was
covered in bug bites and was crying ever night because of the pain. Brutal. So that’s
what I remembered when I took off my shirt to hike the island. It was just too
hot and humid.
And I used to think that that was an “exotic” thing. The
locals in Ecuador could run around in shorts and no shirt and never have a
problem. Most people from the US would get plenty of ankle bites. Apparently
the local people either “got used to the bites” because they had lived there
their whole lives and the bites wouldn’t cause a reaction in their body. Or
because the bugs “didn’t like the taste” of them, because they had lived there
their whole lives.
I call this “Grandma Science” because it sounds like something
my grandma would say and seems generally right. This however, was told to me by
an ASU professor; so roughly, one grandma is equal to one ASU professor.
But this biting
phenomenon is not exotic. In PA there’s dozens of insects that bite, but I
still lay down in the grass, and I never seem to have a problem. There’s
mosquitos, spiders, flies, fire ants, ticks, the common name of immature mites
of the Trombiculidae family which sounds waaaaaaay too close to a racial slur
for me to type. And I wonder if you took people from far away and plopped them
in PA, would they have equally bad reactions to bites? Or maybe the density of
insects is also higher just because the tropics tend to support a larger
ecosystem?
Anyway, I did not get bitten.
