Entering Malaysia...

It's 9:30 pm., Malaysian time. I arrived in Kuala Lumper just over two hours ago, after a train and bus journey that began yesterday afternoon in Bangkok. I took the train from the Thai capital to the northern Malaysian town of Butterworth, where I arrived this afternoon and immediatetely boarded a welcomely luxurius coach to take me further down the Peninsula, to the prosperous capital city from where I now write. The night before my journey, I guaranteed a good night's sleep for myself by swallowing the remainder of the morphine I had purchased in Cambodia. I didn't even really need to take it, but it was a nuisance carrying it around and I just wanted to get rid of it, but as it had set me back $3 a pill, I didn't want to chuck it in the bin. Anyway, I took a little too much, with the result that what would have been a long day of travelling anyway, was made furtherly difficult by a continual struggle with severe grogginess and feelings of unreality. If I am arousing anybody's concern by coming across as a hopeless pill-popper, rest assured that those morphine tablets are to be my last dalliance with over-the-counter sedatives and artificial sleep enablers. Mere experimentation, that's all. It's the natural route from here on in...

I'm currently hiding out in a large internet cafe beneath my Lonely Planet-recommended youth hostel. I checked into a dorm room, my first on this trip. I ventured out directly after checking in to fill my belly in the Chinatown night-market, but the city was too loud and overwhelming for me to try to make any real sense out of it tonight, so I retreated here instead. I'll just write for a while and then do a little more reading before getting a reasonably early night. Tomorrow I'll begin my explorations of the city. There are plenty of mosques I want to visit, as well as a museum of Islamic Art. When I first got to southeast Asia, I ran about from Wat to Wat, drinking in the novelty of seeing buildings erected to serve an exotic faith. It will be the same here, only the Muslim mosques will supplant the Buddhist Wats as the objects of my curiosity. Actually, while looking for an economical place to dine around the market, I was slightly surprised to see a Buddhist monk walking past, smiling benignly at me. I had just begun to grow accustomed to seeing men in turbans and women with their faces covered by the traditional Islamic dress, and so the monk's day-glo orange robes were a little unexpected. I had thought that I had left all that behind in Thailand, but then I had been told that Malaysia is a pleasingly multi-cultural society, in which various religions and traditions coexist peacefully.

I just got an email from my trusted ally Dylan, who is now searching for employment in Taiwan. After reading my previous journal entry, he was stimulated to expand on my argument in defence of prostitution, with comical yet sound results, from which I now quote:


"When I go to a massage therapist they rub my body giving me a sense of comfort and enjoyment.
I am not alarmed in any way at the thought of paying a skilled professional to rub my back, arms, chest, legs, feet etc. Thus I feel it is a small step to say that my genetalia has no special status, as it is merely another of the organs that constitutes my body. From here I would cliam that since paying someone to rub my back is prima facie alright, it is hard to understand why rubbing of my member for a fee would be wrong. Similarly, it doesn't really seem to make any real difference what part of the masseur's body the masseur uses. Does it matter if they use their hands to massage you, or their elbows, or their mouth or their own genetalia? When you break it down, what is sex but a really enjoyable convoluted massage?"

Dylan entitled his morally subversive essay, 'The Slippery Slope of Sin'. I can only imagine what kind of a time he's having in Taiwan. And to think, I thought he was such a charming, upright young man...