This is a non-chronological update from the very start of my trip, a one week stopover in Malaysia on my way over to Europe, before Vietnam with Michelle. For reasons that will soon be obvious 👇 I didn’t want to post this before Laura had all her ducks in a row. I am currently publishing this curled up in my tent at a campground in Køge, Denmark (am very behind on synchronous updates). Tomorrow I’ll bike to Copenhagen!

Laura and I had planned to hang out in Penang, Malaysia for a one week stopover. She would be on her way back from Europe, and I would be on my way there. A few days before my flight out, Laura called to talk trip admin. She said that our week in Malaysia might look a bit different because of a semi-major health-related diagnosis she had received while travelling in Europe:

After some joyful sobbing while collapsed on the kitchen floor, we ironed out how we might adapt our plans. Namely, less national parks and hikes, less moving around different towns (we had considered popping over to Ipoh to see the lush mountains and caves), less indiscriminate consumption of street food, more poolside chilling. I was fine with this plan; I was still zonked from my sprint finish at work, and happy to ease into my holiday with a bit of proper blobbing.

Ambling around the Old town

We arrived from Singapore into George Town, the capital of the state of Penang. The day to day reality of the pregnancy became abundantly clear. Deep into the first trimester, Laura was nauseous and sensitive to smells and strong flavours, which is kind of what Penang is known for. I couldn’t help but think, “My 30 year old baby sister can NOT be going through this!!! This is TEEN PREGNANCY”.

Our first two nights were in the heart of the Old Town. George Town’s city centre architecture, the very diverse mix of cultures and religions, and its culinary scene has contributed to it becoming a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The architecture here was mostly two-storey colonial building with rounded archways and fading paint. While there were some tourist shops, there weren’t that many visibly foreign tourists. Many folks who looked like locals went their day among the heritage buildings. In general, Penang seemed to have less tourists overall, and more domestic and regional tourists, East Asians, South Asians, and South-East Asians, as opposed to the Aussie/British crowds you might see in places like Bali or Vietnam.

Heated, not in the sexy way

Unfortunately, there were two major challenges to our time in Penang. Firstly, the temperature was around 30-35 C, and with the humidity it had a real feel of 40+. I had forgotten how bad I am in hot climates; after being in Korea during summer a few years back, I had vowed that I would rather simply not travel and save myself the money and emissions, than be in Korea during peak summer. I was feeling silly for having forgotten this, as I found myself unable to think from the beating heat, especially coming straight from Christchurch where it had been -1 C.

Laura, who runs considerably hotter than me especially with an incubation chamber in her belly, had an even harder time outdoors, with the added combo of ripe street smells. There weren’t many options for indoor spaces other than shops and malls; not many museums or art galleries that seemed to be open, no public libraries nearby (and from the photos, didn’t seem the kind of place where you tuck up with a book for ages). Instead of my usual M.O. around malls (screwing my eyes shut and performing soliloquies on consumerism; fun for all involved), I let 2000s-Christchurch-Bogan-Jenny emerge from the brain-dungeon where she is kept, and we shuffled around the giant malls in a trance-like state.

To top it off, I was horrified to see that Hanoi, my cycling destination the next week, was going through a heatwave of 40-45 C (real feel of 49 C), with actual public health warnings to stay indoors. This resulted in me obsessively checking the current temperature while in George Town and comparing it to Hanoi’s next week forecast, asking myself “if it was 5C hotter than this, how many minutes could I cycle for before getting heatstroke?” My estimates were not optimistic.

Asian normies being way better at talking about climate change

I was chatting to some locals in a shop, talking about the weather as you do, when they mentioned that this heat was a recent and abnormal change due to global warming (their words, not mine).

I noticed that climate change is a much more everyday topic of conversation both here and in Singapore. You could see it everywhere in signage, public notices, marketing campaigns, and more. Same in South Korea, where even the previous very conservative government were at least not going backwards on climate policy (the bar is low when you come from New Zealand, unfortunately). As an anecdotal example, my slightly conservative grandmother has farmed all her life in Korea and can grow anything in a patch of soil. She will often talk about the distortions to yearly weather cycles, explicitly attributing it to climate change, despite usually watching the equivalent of Fox News.

Is climate change and climate action less politicised in Asia than NZ? I’m always pleasantly surprised when someone other than me links a current event with climate change, even when it should be top of mind in virtually all domains as its impacts are so far-reaching. Even the NZ media fails to do this nowadays when reporting on extreme weather events. Since the initial enthusiasm (or perhaps favourable sociopolitical funding environment) in climate journalism around 2019ish where climate news was given front page emphasis, I’ve noticed a quiet sidelining of the “climate change” sections on Stuff and RNZ. It has somehow (through expensive skepticism campaigns by the fossil fuel lobby) become a political football, like in America. The result is that laypeople in NZ are less skilled at talking about climate change and don’t seem to bring it up as matter-of-factly as this Malaysian shopkeeper or my octogenarian Korean grandmother.

Being so unbearably hot and sticky in Malaysia, I felt so acutely the urgency of climate action and mitigation, including loss & damage. This is where the wealthy countries that have contributed the most to global emissions pay reparations for the harm caused to Global South countries, who have contributed the least but will be the worst affected by our high-emitting lifestyles. In a place like South and South-East Asia where many millions, billions, are directly at the mercy of the changing climate, the already-baked-in consequences of our consumption and inaction are terrifying to consider. These are the people we see in the news getting hit with floods and heatwaves that kill thousands each time.

However, the short conversation in the shop reminded me that the people in these countries are not only victims in man-made climate change. They are also thought leaders and knowledgeable veterans of how we survive and build towards a better, safer future, both emotionally/socially as individuals and communities, and physically/mentally in the form of policies and behaviour change. To start with, from my small sample observations they seem more skilled than in the west at talking publicly about climate change. This means facing that difficult reality while continuing to live their lives. That takes real resilience, which takes practice and community. Then there’s the raw numbers: look at Pakistan with their solar rollout, Ethiopia streaking ahead on EV policies, and to say nothing of China’s speed of action enabling it all.

Perhaps it’s easier for laypeople in the Global South to connect a warming climate with the warmer weather, whereas the connection to extreme (not necessarily warmer) weather events in NZ takes a bit more nuance. But not that much; we would be more than capable if we prioritised it. Is a liveable planet not high priority enough?

I long for a general public that is as comfortable with the basics of climate change and practiced in how to talk about it constructively. That starts with science/evidence-based leadership and clear public education & communication, which seem to be sorely lacking in NZ at the moment (plug: NZ general election is this November!!)

Cravings, or lack thereof

The second challenge after the heat was the very thing we had come to Penang for: food. Laura’s pregnancy cravings aside (or anti-cravings, which seemed to make up the majority of Laura’s food preferences - things she vehemently did not want to eat), it appeared my stomach also had some adjusting to do. Gone were the halcyon days of my early 20s, wandering foreign market stalls eating anything and everything (who knew there were advantages to subsisting off fried rice and questionable leftovers throughout uni?). This time however, no matter what we ate, we had indigestion after every meal. My belly was so bloated that I also looked to be in the early stages of pregnancy, except with gas rather than a baby.

My stomach was also screaming for some fresh vegetables and fruit, having essentially gone cold turkey after eating 20 feijoas a day in NZ. However, the travel vaccines doctor had strongly advised not to eat anything uncooked or things you hadn’t peeled or rinsed in filtered water yourself due to HepA and typhoid risks, no matter how fancy the establishment. This seemed over the top, but after corroborating this with other data (Reddit), and all the indigestion going on, and the added risks of listeria and god knows what else during pregnancy, we decided to play it very safe.

Basically, this meant we ended up eating:

• overpriced hipster cafe food, such as one might find in Melbourne

• Korean restaurants (comforting but universally disappointing, but such is life having grown up with Mum’s cooking)

• supermarket breakfasts of australian oats, australian oat milk, australian granola, and bananas

• Cup noodles from the convenience store

• Three mangoes and two cucumbers, washed with filtered water and peeled with my pocket knife in the bathroom sink

• Din Tai Fung, twice, from a mall food court

• One (1) actual authentic-looking Malaysian place that had thousands of 5 star reviews, but turned out to bribe its customers with a free dessert in return for said reviews

I did fear what this diet might be doing for the little foetus’s development, a far cry from Laura & Will’s usual ultra healthy 30-vegetable-varieties home-cooked fare. Laura reassured me that at this stage the foetus is only feeding from the pre-existing amniotic sac, or some such (don’t quote me on this). She’d also heard “the first trimester’s just about doing whatever you can to survive”, which didn’t reassure me at all.

Going up in the world (physically, but not mentally)

Our budget accommodation in the Old Town smelled of mildew, had a bed that seemed to be made entirely of springs, and one of those toilet layouts where you have to perform contortionist moves to reach the toilet paper from sitting position. Therefore, we moved to a hotel in a more central part of town that was remarkably a similar price.

After a couple of hot and sweaty nights, the consistently air conditioned room was a relief. Even more exciting was (I never thought I would say this) the giant flatscreen TV. Here, we spent two days lying in bed, watching YouTube. We would venture out into the heat for food like nervous hunter gatherers, picking out a safe-looking food option like incompetent hyenas picking out a weak foal, then returning to our (very comfortable) cave to nurse our inevitably upset stomachs with tiny desk concerts and k-pop compilations.

Hotel final boss

For the final two nights, we had pre-booked a fancy place with a pool and a WATER FILTER IN THE ROOM ITSELF!!! No more shuttling between the public water filter and our room, filling up my drink bottle so we could brush our teeth. It also had windows.

The hotel was along Gurney Beach, probably straight out of White Lotus if I watched White Lotus. Like the mall, I shut up that part of my brain and enjoyed my white terrycloth bathrobe and poolside recliner.

I also made use of the yoga room and air conditioned gym. I was concerned that doing and eating very little was an unsuitable prelude to cycling through Vietnam with Michelle, who in my mind is Fitness Queen.

Laura had many naps, being very poorly most of this time. I was also quite feeble by this point, having not really had a satisfying meal in a week. Also, as someone with the thermal inertia of a sheet of aluminium, all the to-ing and fro-ing between blast furnace heat and air conditioned chill was doing a number on me. The best day was the last day when I was just the same temperature all afternoon, either sitting in the pool or sitting damp beside the pool under a shade.

A small highlight was watching the crows by the pool. Little twos and threes of them would fly up to the edge of the pool, peck at the (unchlorinated?) water, have a flappy wee bath, before swooping off again. I couldn’t bring myself to be grossed out that I was sharing a pool with them, they were so cute and it must have been so hot out in this heat with their glossy little heads. I think I identified three varieties, the Large-Billed Crow, the Sunda (slender-billed) Crow, and the invasive (but still cute) House Crow. In the board game Wingspan, where you collect bird species, crows always have the best powers because they’re resourceful, hardy, and adaptable in real life, which made me even more fond of seeing them.

We ended our time in Penang with an unfortunate incident. On the last night at 2am, the aircon suddenly turned off with a loud click, and a cold white light flicked on in the room entrance. The power had gone out, and this seemed to be an emergency exit light. I looked out the window and saw that other buildings and streetlights were on, so it was only our building.

We were considering going back to sleep with eye masks on to block the white light (which couldn’t be turned off) when worst case scenarios started up in my head. Why would power in only our building go off? Why is the emergency exit light on, if there are no instructions to exit? What if the power cut was caused by a fire, and the building doesn’t have a good backup power system so the fire alarm has failed? Being on the 23rd floor, isn’t it better to be safe than sorry?

We got changed and went out into the hallway, where we smelt a hint of smoke. I walked calmly over to the stairwell fire exit only to find it locked. The two other exits on the floor were also locked. Gulping, we got into the lift (which obviously we have all learnt is not what you should do in a fire), which also smelt faintly of smoke, and had a horrible 20 seconds gripping Laura’s hand down to ground floor with my heart slamming in my throat.

Fortunately, the doors did not open onto the fires of hell, but instead a calm lobby with a couple of other confused sleepy tourists. It turned out one of the lifts had broken down. To repair it they had to cut off electricity above a certain level (ours included). The smoke smell was unexplained but probably just a heavy smoker repairman who had taken the lift before us. And apparently the stairwell can be unlocked by smashing the “break glass in event of fire” thingy next to it. Anyway, we went back to our room, the power blinked on and off 3 more times over the next two hours, and instead of getting a wink of sleep I typed this blog post out on my phone.

I apologise for all the whinging; it seems all the more acute since I’ve been reading some excellent travel memoirs. The experiences in these seem so much more extreme that I wonder if in contrast I have developed into some kind of purebred hamster that twitches at everything.

Anyway, I’m finishing editing this on my flight out. I’ll be publishing this much later, after Laura is okay with announcing her pregnancy more widely. So long, Penang, sorry that circumstances meant we were not a match this time. Thanks for the poolside R&R and inoculation to extreme heat as I head to Hanoi!