Observations of Malaysia

This is my first trip to this particular country, and as it is a tropical part of the world I was expecting something akin to Costa Rica, tropical rainforest, beaches, a nice paradise to work in, I was sadly mistaken. It is a tropical country for sure but the government has deemed it necessary to completely deforest the entire country and turn it into a giant Palm oil plantation. The figure I saw on the internet was 14 million hectares and is growing by tens of thousands of hectares every year, this is a really sad picture to paint as the only beneficiaries are the top elite of this institutionally racist country. It is run by a small group of ultra rich malay muslims, the whole ethos of this country is to keep everything for the muslims and for them. The population is divided into Malays and non malays, that means Chinese and Indian and indigenous peoples, they actively keep jobs and university places for muslims even if they are useless, they are given extra help and money to achieve these aims, this is a shocking system to survive slavery. I was told by some non malays that they are desperate to emigrate to get away from this appalling state of affairs, plus the rotten corruption amongst the top elite is also far worse than I had expected. The island where I was working was Sarawak, it is run as a personal fiefdom of the Sarawak minister who has been in charge for about 25 years, he owns all the big companies here and has all the logging concessions and anything that makes money he has to take a cut of the proceeds, he is unofficially the richest man in Malaysia, he should be arrested and jailed for life for how he has exploited this island. It is being despoilt at an alarming rate, it is the centre of the forest destruction in the far east and when I arrived the whole region was under the smog of the burning forest and this is government approved. How can this be allowed to continue, the palm plantations are built on indigenous land, the people are just herded off and then it is cleared, they get no compensation and are left totally poverty stricken, this is a crime against humanity, but as it is part of the so called democratic world it is allowed to continue, shame on the rest of the world for allowing them to do this.

Observation of the people, the Malays are a pretty average sort of folks, short dark skinned and with a large head, but one thing I did see is an unimaginable amount of Acne, some of the worst cases I have ever seen. I have also seen some shocking cases of facial warts that a wicked witch of the west would be proud of, the police woman who was running the scanning machine at the airport had the biggest wart on the end of her nose I have ever seen, the size of a small birds egg, it really was directly on the end of her nose, most unfortunate for her as it made her already unattractive face quite hideous, this should be a case of enforced plastic surgery to save the public from such horrors.

The food which I though was good is actually just the Chinese food, the Malaysian style is pretty average and non-descript but the Chinese stuff is like Thai style and spicey and tasty and delicious, the Tom Yam Soup I had at a local bar was just unbelievable and exotic. I went back 5 times for the same soup and my last night there was only prevented by the job having a few problems. I love fried rice but after eating it every lunch for 40 days I am just about done for a year or two. Maybe the plain stuff in Australia will give me an appetite again, but the town of Karratha has a great Thai restaurant.