Fruits and Flies:

So, I believe we were off to Kualar Selangor to see fireflies when last I parted a computer. I'll bore you, the reader, with details of this leg of my steamy-hot malaysian extravagansa, but first I'll make mention of something that happened prior to my leaving KL. I first tried Durian whilst on my way home from my Malaysian gambling friends. The KL smell isn't great, so the overpowering stench of this grotesque cheesefruit wasn't much of a shock to the system when I passed the stalls selling it. I bought a pack of durian segments, which for those of you who wish to know look like cheap safeway chicken breasts painted yellow, and began my feast. After 3 segments (which in terms of flavour is 4 mangos mashed into a swiss-cheese, placed in a tub and left in the sun for 12 days) I gave in. It was too much. Perhaps it would be good if diluted. Vastly. Right, now onto the post KL part of the tale. I was accompanied by an Brisbanite couple who were staying in a very posh hotel in KL, and by a chinese man who neither spoke nor read any chinese. Marvelous. He was a roman catholic too. First off, he took us to see some monkeys, which due to the delays caused by the KL traffic were fast asleep when we arrived. We stared briefly up darkened trees, hoping to spot a simian silhouette. Ho Hum. I watched the branches move from time to time, possibly under their weight, possibly with the wind. The more wonderful part of the experience was the view across the bay. God knows what I was looking at over the water. Onward we very quickly went, to a restaurant that discovered my suffering the disease of vegetarianism, that grave social disorder that only manifests at mealtimes, and tried to fill me with prawns as a cure. No worries, though (No worries! Well, I am in Australia!), I ate too much in KL that day. And some of that was durian. Onward, to the main attraction, to the fireflies! The queues for this were quite extensive, and mainly made up of school children. This gave me a fleeting glimpse of the fireflies, nothing more than giant plastic theme-park insects with big, friendly eyes and lights on their arses. But only for a moment. We were soon in safety jackets and floating up a river. The banks of the river are foliated with a plant that fireflies thrive on. Perhaps its phosphorous rich, or some such thing. The banks glowed with new, forever shifting constellations. When I wet my hand in the river (probably unhealthy, but I didn't come down with anything) and brushed an infested bush, fireflies stuck to my palm. As my hand dried out they rose like sparks and flew away. I spent half an hour watching stars dance their courtship dance on the trees, accompanied by the sound of subdued voices and the gentle rhythm of the sculling.

The next day I moved on to the ancient Malaysian capital, Melaka, once an Islamic trading giant, now a small town with a rich colonial heratage. But that's for the next post.