Hitching in Malaysia is awesome.
I landed in KL and hitched north to Thailand. My average wait time was about 1 minute. Cultural curiosity was probably part of it, but also, being a culturally Moslem country theres a common creed of helping out travellers.
One lady stopped in a bright pink 70’s datsun, covered in bumper stickers. She took me on a tour of her district, showing me proudly the shops she owned, and introducing me to her employees.
We also made stops at local historical sites, including a river bank monument that had been erected to commemorate a battle between local farmers and a party of colonial militia who had been attempting to crush a rebellion. It was a strange feeling, being a Caucasian Aussie in a foreign land and witnessing the pride the Malaysians had in their independence. A lot of times since then ive been around other aussies making racist comments about indigenous Australians, and reminded them that colonial Australia only persisted because the native population here is so much smaller than in SE Asia.
The following day I got a ride with a Malaysian Chinese man, who took me to his parents home to meet his extended family and have a shower. The house was tiny, and occupied by a (by Aussie standards) amazing number of people, but the sense of harmony and relaxed domesticity was beautiful. My ride was a relatively wealthy man. He worked for a car manufacturer as a component designer, and I got the feeling he was supporting a lot of his extended family.
After I’d freshened up with a Malaysian style bucket shower, he drove us down to the river and hired a tiny boat with an outboard motor so we could do some fishing. The river was supposedly full of fish, but we still managed not to catch any. Ive always been bad luck with a rod in my hand, and it was no different in Asia than at home.
The old man who ran the boat hire was living on the poverty line. His house was a metal and bamboo shack on the river bank, and his many kids were his business partners. He was his own boss though, and I admired his ingenuity and obvious mechanical skill as he quickly repaired the outboard motor of our boat before sending us off in it.
It was a typically hot and humid afternoon, and after an hour or so of catching no fish, I couldn’t resist jumping in the river for a swim. We were anchored near a river bank bar, and I swam to the pier, climbed up and bought some bagged fruit cocktails and beers for myself and my host. The local people stared at me as if I’d just jumped off the gangplank of a UFO. I put there disbelieving stares down to racial curiosity until I noticed the toilets. From the vantage point of the pier I could see that dotted along the river bank upstream were a series of crude bamboo toilet platforms poised above the water, and the mystery of why the locals weren’t big recreational swimmers was solved. I got my companion to bring the boat alongside the pier so I could step aboard with our drinks without getting my feet wet.
