Our flight from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, or "KL" as everybody seems to call it, took us over fields and fields of oil palms, an enormous cash crop in Malaysia, which as recently as the '90s produced more than half of the world's palm oil supply. (It has since been eclipsed by Indonesia.) Palm oil production is one of the developing world's most interesting and complex quandaries, a tangle of economic, social, and environmental issues that represents, in many ways, the larger debates that these countries and the international community must have as we struggle to reconcile the opportunities for dramatic socioeconomic improvement with the impacts that massive change in land-use have on the local and global environment. (MP wrote a paper on this junior year, which I secretly think is why she chose Malaysia as one of our destinations.)
Oil palms, which are not native to Southeast Asia, have many advantages. They are a major and relatively high-yield source of biofuel and a fairly inexpensive cooking ingredient for the local populations. They also can dramatically enrich the areas where they're cultivated, and allow many small landowners to participate in a profitable trade. At the same time, there's a history of land expropriation from natives in the quest of oil plantations to grow larger and larger.
And, while palm oil is a renewable biofuel, the manner in which it is cultivated can have dramatically negative environmental consequences, especially considering that the oil palm only grows naturally in the tropical regions that are the main location of Earth's rainforests. Clearing land for palm oil plantations usually involves slash-and-burn methods that release huge amounts of carbon and permanently destroy large tracts of rainforest. In addition, most of the land cleared for this purpose sits on top of peat bogs, which store up to 10,000 years' worth of carbon, much of which is released during the clearing and cultivation process. The drying of the bogs has also led to a massive increase in forest fires, which contributed to the famous 2005 Malaysian "haze crisis", when fires coming off of agricultural lands created pollution so dense and toxic that Kuala Lumpur was brought to a standstill with schools and offices closed and people urged to stay inside with their doors shut. A combination of wind patterns and cloud seeding eventually returned pollution to its usual, already high levels, but the experience reflects a much broader, less visible, and almost constant threat posed by agricultural practices in large part related to palm oil production.
What are these countries to do? Environmentally destructive economic activities like tin mining and palm oil production (both of which have been or are huge in Malaysia, as we saw) underwrite massive improvements in quality of life, and pay for the modernization and development programs that will one day allow these countries to hopefully transition to greener economies. There's no easy answer, and I'm not sure that governments could impose one even if they had it.
After arriving in KL, we took a bus from the airport to the city's main train station, and from there took a monorail (yes, a monorail) to Bukit Bintang, which is sort of KL's "Times Square" area: extremely busy, lots and lots of tourists drawn to the bright advertising, and clearly one of the most renovated parts of the city which still retains a distinct, seedy underbelly. We checked in at our hostel, where the nosy hostess asked many a prying question, and set about wandering the city. We grabbed lunch at an Indian place and then walked downtown, passing through KL's Chinatown area en route to the National Museum of Kuala Lumpur. While walking around Chinatown, the sky opened up for KL's daily 20 minutes of tropical rain, so we hopped in a cab for the rest of the way.
The National Museum follows a format typical of East Asian history museums, starting all the way back with the geologic history of the peninsula (room after room of 8th grade science involving tectonic plates), and moving swiftly through the most recent revolution / armed insurrection, ending with an extremely anti-Japanese section on World War II and a nationalistic exhibit on modernization efforts. Not much was worth taking pictures of; perhaps the most interesting part was the section on Melaka, its role in international trade, and the coming of the British. (More on that on my next post regarding Melaka.) The building itself was the standout, considered one of KL's architectural highlights.
After this museum we decided to try walking home, passing KL's beautiful if run-down old train station, which was designed by a Brit during the colonial period who had served in India and incorporated Mughal and "Saracenic" design elements. We also went over the Klang River, which flows right through the town. (We didn't learn until after we left that Kuala Lumpur literally means "muddy river junction", an extremely apt name as you can see below.)
We stopped by the hostel again and, at the hostess's (who was often referred to as "mom" due to her interfering and nosy nature -- sorry to both of the moms who are reading this) suggestion, grabbed dinner on a hawker street featuring Malay cuisine. We also got our first night views of the Petronas towers, which we visited later. And, as you might notice from this picture, I shaved! Actually, I shaved back in Kathmandu, where a few hours before my flight I paid about 60 cents to have a wonderful flat-razor hot shave that probably would have cost me $70 in the States. At any rate, my month-long travelbeard was gone, per MP's ultimatum.
The next day we spent in Malacca, which I'll deal with in a separate post, but then we returned to KL. The first night back we took pictures of Bukit Bintang. Do you see the similarity to Times Square?
Our last full day in Malaysia, however, we set out in the morning to see the Petronas Towers, built mainly for Malaysia's national oil company after which they're named. These incredible towers, often referred to as KL's "twin towers", were the tallest buildings in the world from their completion in 1998 until Taipei 101 was finished in 2004 (although they still haven't gotten around to changing the signs proclaiming it the tallest building in the world). We went up to the building's skybridge to get a view of KL. The towers are the center of an even larger complex, which includes a mall at its base as well as parks, museums, and a concert hall for KL's symphony orchestra. Architecturally, the buildings, designed by Cesar Pelli, are inspired by Islamic architecture from the shape of the foundations (the deepest in the world) up through the tops of the spires. The structure of the building is also dominated by reinforced concrete rather than steel, since steel is not domestically produced in Malaysia and is incredibly expensive to import.
After descending from the skybridge we grabbed lunch in the mall. We found a Chili's, at which point I caved and begged MP to let me eat there (which she did). It was a bit surreal to eat at a Chili's in Malaysia, but fun and probably the fanciest meal we had there. (Low-cost American brands translate to high-end imports in Asia, it seems.) We wandered around the grounds for a while longer taking pictures. It proved very difficult to get far enough away from the buildings to get them all into frame, but close enough to have an unobstructed view. Still, we managed it. Below are also some detail shots. Truly, this building is beautiful -- a great mix of classical Islamic architectural design with modern materials and a futuristic scale.
We wandered around the city for the rest of the day, seeing St. John's cathedral, various municipal buildings, Merdeka (Independence) Sqare, Masjid Negara (National Mosque), and a bunch of other mosques and things from KL's Indian district. Along with a famous hotel where some poets used to drink and Loke Mansion, a beautiful old house that had become derelict before being rescued by a law firm (see they're not all evil), that did it for Kuala Lumpur.
See my next post for information on Malacca, but after our last day in KL we flew north to Cambodia. From a place embodying globalization to a place it has barely touched.
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