Travel Journal Entry 008 — Cheap Tables, Low Chairs & The Truth in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Entry 008 | 7.11.24

I’m inclined to believe that the best conversations happen over the cheapest tables. Those four in-the-morning sessions when you’re caught in the early hours with your schoolhood mates. Maybe you’re all back in town for Christmas. Maybe it’s a chance reunion. But soon, a couple beers turn to dawn fast approaching, work rising from behind the horizon. It’s those final fleeting hours that flush out the truth. I’m inclined to believe that.

But I’m now convinced the best meals feature furniture of a similar pedigree. The lowest chairs, for instance, herald the best noodle broth. The most modest of cups harbour the most refreshing of beers to compliment. The more honest the decor, the more honest food. Simple, clean ingredients you can count on one hand, a variety of condiments you save fingers for on the other. Single-digit prices, large plates and big deep bowls.

Simple ingredients, big deep bowls.
Surat Thani, Thailand.

Back of house, it’s much the same.
Surat Thani, Thailand

If you’re wondering what chairs I mean, they’re those blue and red plastic chairs never meant for The West. Those square four-legged stools that line sidewalks and fill alleyways across all of Southeast Asia. Built for children, teddy bears and dolls and intended for playing tea party. Sat in by adults sinking iced beer till sunrise, then switching to herbal brews or sweet coffee shortly after.

If you’re wondering what cups I speak of, they’re those small glasses, bigger than a shot glass, smaller than a tumbler, and constantly clinking against a few blocks of ice doused with a local lager. Iced beer is something I’m growing vaguely fond of, like a pop song I don’t quite know the lyrics to, but I’m happy to let play out so I can hum along. Something you hate to love. A bit of a dirty secret, a guilty pleasure. A Tate McRae — ‘Greedy’. After a while, I break more into a ballad of sorts, and then, as the night inks out and stars sharpen above me, I feel as if I’m hiding under a great blanket in my bedroom, my lamp light shinning through thousands of tiny gaps in the stitching. Off-key karaoke blares from across the road, and I’m now taking a leak beneath a palm tree. I fall gracefully into some shrubbery, then lean over to throw up. I wonder, will anyone notice if I power nap in the sand? Now, I’m strapped to the back of a very familiar scooter and swept away by a very familiar woman. My better half, evidently.

The Philippino Pastime, karaoke.
General Luna, Siargao Island, Philippines

Rounded stools, although, I prefer square.
Chinatown, Bangkok, Thailand

But where was I? Oh yes, The Truth — a matter no longer of inclination — nay, conviction! I'm convinced the more Spartan a premise, the more electrifying the palette. Like lightning against grey sky, yes! And the more wholesome the experience! Earthy, like the smell of wet mud after the crackle of thunder. I’m convinced that if the divine is imbued within our world, then surely the lower the stool, the closer you are to God.

Because I’ve now learnt, you can wander in off just about any laneless Asian bedlam, seeking shelter from the heat, something cheap to eat and cold to drink, and what you will find never strays too far from perfection. Yet, I have also learnt that when time is limited in such magical places, it’s wise to maximise your chances — to take certain steps to stack the odds and that there are specific precursors it’s helpful to look out for.

It’s the cool glance of stainless steel, the trance of fluorescently lit linoleum. Its menus slipped into plastic-sleeved school folios where spelling is seen more as an art form open to interpretation. Most certainly, it’s superimposed images of a great variety of cuisines, screen printed on yellow vinyl with red block writing and stuck like wallpaper to cement masonry or bamboo carpentry. It’s the small stools and chairs, short beers and small sweet coffees and the friendly old men holding them, lounging way back with one leg hanging lazily over the other. It’s all those omens, those indicators, like blue lines on the horizon, powerful premonitions that what you’re about to experience will be breathtaking, oxy-cotin-inducing, depression-alleviating, even soul-liberating. Yes, you are here, and yes, you are right; the ancient rivers of Babylon are overflowing with millennia-old chicken stock. Your outrigger is two chopsticks flanking a brown bottle, and on this sacred vessel, you will float to the Promised Land.

And if there's no menu at all… not a lick of English spoken or written anywhere in the premise, if sauces and tissues are abundant and you can smell the fish sauce from the sidewalk, if a jug of complimentary cold tea sits atop the table in beautiful cylindrical glory, covered in condensation, like a candle dripping wax at the entry of a monastery, if there are white plastic plates buried under meadows of fresh garden greens and boulders of lime, then fasten your seatbelt and just point at something, anything. Better yet, yield your spirit to the mumma, madame or monsieur, aunty, uncle or nine-year-old boy helping his folks fill bahn mis; they’ll point at something for you, and it doesn’t matter what. In any and all cases, you’re anywhere from five to fifteen minutes from Nirvana.

The great bountiful sidewalks of Asia (walking not included).
Jalan Ahor, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

So understand this when I say it was our last morning in Kuala Lumpur, and we had a bus to catch. Only, instead of finding ourselves at the station, we stood twenty minutes in the other direction, at the entrance of what looked like a laundromat.

We had walked twenty minutes to this laundromat, one step after another under the oppressive and specific Lumpurian heat, like walking under a damp knitted blanket in the middle of summer. It’s a prickly blockade against any lucidity, for the city is an expansive, dense urbanscape that seems to breathe in and out. There is a humidity of air and mind as throngs of traffic and people heave under an immense skyline that blocks the wind, high-rises dripping with sweat, gleaming in the sun.

And it’s far weirder beyond the nucleus, where colossal limestone outcrops of apartment complexes are circled by arterial highways servicing the city. Many tens of thousands of apartments, and each unit with its own A/C. Many tens of thousands of A/C units, scattered like barancles on the side or back of the buildings and before all that, before you get to the outskirts, you must first evade the plantations. Many tens of thousands of green men standing to attention — rows upon rows and rows and many more rows of neatly lined palm oil trees.

Very hot, very bright, old meets new.
Chinatown, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

We first noticed the green dotted expanse when our captain banked left and began descending toward the magnificent KUL Airport complex — each tree sitting far below us, each a single plastic blade in a tremendous artificial turf. And we couldn’t help but notice anything else as we sped along the four lanes connecting KUL to downtown. It must’ve been twenty minutes before the lines of trees either side broke for a smokey vision of the city. Its massive sprawl and apartment suburbia sitting before the cluster of beautiful highrises, like the tallest of forests encircled by shrublands, all blue against the humming heat of the horizon. Then, as we neared the city, we made out their forms much better, the twisted blade-running cubism of Mederak 118, the pre-millennia twin Petronas holding hands, standing together as old giants witnessing the emergence of a new world, and the Exchange 108 — a giant cigarette butt balancing on its end. smouldering in the sky. Suddenly, we were below and among them all, wandering around the forest floor. Three days later, we were two tourists taking one step after another, through the thickness, the cars and bikes, underneath the monorail slithering through the city, the many-windowed hotels and apartments like giant termite mounds and the hawkers, roadside stalls, restaurants and all the rest of the colourful leaf litter at the bottom. All hot and sticky as if still living in the ancient rainforest. A drop of sweat rolled down my back, cool against my skin. I felt itchy behind the knees and wiped the dampness from my cheekbones. Is this a fucking laundromat?

It looked like a laundromat but, indeed, was a very well-regarded establishment.

Medereka 118, as seen from our $60 hotel room — we splashed out for Memphis’ 25th.
Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Another angle of said view.
Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Meadows of green and boulders of lime.
Pakse, Laos

Links & EXTRAS

Memphis Book Club: Kristin Hannah - The Woman. ‘An insight into the Vietnam War through a captivating narrative.’ Now somewhere well past 40 books for the year.

Essential travel purchase(s): Perhaps an obvious one, but hand sanitiser is one of our greatest allies. Always lathering up before and after every meal, plus many public restrooms/washrooms, leave you with more questions than answers. I usually skip the communal bars of soap.

Some resources I used: Again, this entry was a lot of unevidenced malarky, but Entry 009 will be diving into some of the historical intricacies of Malaysia and Malaysians — much research required.

Cheap Tables, Low Chairs & The Truth

Links & EXTRAS

Eggs, Soldiers & Opium

Blue Mountains: Ekas, Masculinity & a Quickfire Guide to Surf Equipment