Scenes from the Road to Kota Bhuru

On this our last full day in Malaysia, we took the ferry back to Terrengamu and then a long bus ride up the coast to Kota Bhuru, “The Islamic City.” On the way we glimpsed scenes that tell the story about this country, I jotted them down as we drove.

Naked little boy sitting in a plastic chair in front of his house, men pulling a huge dumptruck that had gotten stuck in the orange mud, a water buffalo grazing lazily on a soccer field, a man with a large hoe opening a channel in a rice paddy to let the water flow, young girls getting out of school with white headscarves, chasing the little boys with navy blue pants and white shirt uniforms, beauty saloons with Chinese proprietors, cellphone repair shops and men who fix shoes on the street (they sewed up my Tevas splendidly for $1.00), vast swaths of open rice fields, neatly ordered long rows of rubber trees, tapped this morning, shining huge yellow domed mosques, ‘polis’ stations always with a navy blue fence, huge new schools painted in orange and grey, standing way back from the road, various new buildings built of concrete, road workers in sarongs wielding weed wackers, trimming cutting and buffing the countryside, monuments to Islam, with much arabic script and a combination of so many signs in Malay, English and Chinese, by the side of the road a bicycle with a connected carraige to take passengers, a man riding one of these with a sack of plants sticking sideways out the back, and ‘Selamet Datang’ everywhere, which means welcome.

I was faced with a four hour wait at Kota Bharu airport so i went outside and flagged down a cab. The three men inside were happy to transport me to town, where I found this bustling no-name internet cafe. This is the second cafe where they have no card no name, nothing to bring back for my internet cafe collection.

I took off my shoes to enter this cool second floor cyber cafe, and began, joyfully, to share my trip with my faithful readers. Thank you for being among them!