“Have you been to the fish spa?” asked Sara, our guide. “Oh you’ve got to try it, I tell everyone.” she said brightly. “In fact I am going there after I drop you off at the hotel!” The fish spa, we learned, is a place called Kenko, on an upper […]
In a drenching rain we’ve arrived in Kuala Lumpur, a city of 4.5 million with a pulsing, oil-fueled heart. What’s new since I was last here in 2006? More shopping. The names that rich Asians love, like Hugo Boss, Cartier, and Juicy Couture, all lined up here in the famous […]
This stunning building is almost finished on the banks of the muddy Sarawak River in downtown Kuching. It’s the new parliament building, as grand as a palace and something unlike anything you’d see in the US. We prefer our edifi to be blocky, and big, this one is grand, tall […]
The streets are crowded with cars, small trucks and motorbikes. The sidewalks are porticos, stuffed with vendors, sellers of all manner of goods. The interiors of the shops are dark, inhabited by Chinese men and young girls, silently waiting there for customers. You walk beneath the ceilings of the stores […]
The South China sea is extraordinarily warm. It’s gentle and feels like a bath, and I floated out and put my ears beneath the waves and exalted in that splendor of nothing, of not hearing anything for just a few brief moments. Sony also loved being on the beach and […]
The nicest thing about this big Rainforest World Music Festival are the people we’ve met. We got to the Sarawac Cultural Village early, and we sat on bamboo matts and drank mojitos. While lounging on big pillows we met a couple from Singapore with two young boys. He is an […]
We took our friend Bidari up on his kind offer to drive us over to the Sarawak Plaza to his friend’s record store in a hotel van. He picked out a bunch of CDs and a kind young lady unwrapped each of them and played cuts for us to choose. […]
These guys called Akasha from Malaysia rocked the rainforest with their blues number played on a sitar plus twangy Indian drums, guitar and bongos. They also played Jimi Hendrix’ Voodoo Child, with that unforgettable riff from the beginning repeated over and over. It was a fantastic performance and the most […]
The Rainforest Music festival is held in the shadow of a great mountain called Santobong, which means coffee in Iban. There were thousands of people there, and they were all wet and muddy, since from before the first note rain poured down. This is the rainforest after all. Sony and […]
The Rainforest World Music Festival starts tonight, it takes place at the base of a mountain about forty five minutes from our hotel in Kuching. So far they’ve sold about 24,000 tickets, at a cost of about $77 for three days of music. It’s a big, big deal in Sarawak, […]
The last time I visited Malaysia, I remember the music was one of the highlights of the trip. It was in a market, the tunes blared out and just caught me. On TV early one morning, watching thousands of men circling the Ka’aba at the great mosque in Mecca–a ritual […]
