Suzu Blogs: Pulau Ketam; Crab Island

This island blew my mind. Sam and I went there on a whim; a..hey let's leave the city and see what we find. one hour by train to the port Kland on the Western sea, then a tootin' rustic ferry ride (we caught the slow ferry there 1.5 hours; and the fast one back--30 freaking minutes!) on the sea and we had reached Pulau Ketam; in English it is Crab island. We expected to maybe lie on the beach, see a small town, but neither of us expected this: an island built on stilts. the WHOLE thing. nothing touched the ground, and it resembled to me a residential representation of the game; swamp monster that my siblings and I would play on the slide at the park. you can't touch the ground, or you're out. the swamp monster tries to tag you but can't get on land...

Ketam is the Malaysians weekend vaca spot. We were two of maybe eight white people there, and I was certainly the only American. The town seemed to speak very little English, its residents were neither thrilled nor ingenous toward their visitors.

At the entrance to the town there is a white-sea-whithered old hotel renting bikes for 5 ringgit each. they're old and too big with giant baskets on the front, and the seats don't adjust due to salt-air rustage, but we get them nonetheless. We notice then that the roads are also on stilts. The concrete slabs that was roughly the width of a neighborhood sidewalk come up off the ground, and a rider who is not careful could find themselves kareening one way or another off the edge of an un-fenced edge, and in who knows how many inches of mud???

We visited every temple and I took pics at each one; the markings looks like the dharma initiative stations on LOST...

I did many headstands...

We met some fishermen. After seeing my headstand they invited us to their bbq at one of the local shrines. It seemed they had gotten up so early, fished, and started bbqing and drinking as the sun rose. they had a bottle of brandy that was the length of my arm--like a gag prop from an improv show--and it was almost empty at 230 in the afternoon.

We visited a restaurant boasted "We speak English," on a sign--surprise!they didn't--one of their guys did. We got all types of seafood, and I ate my first prawns, sweet-and-sour crabs, and some other things. AMAZING. everything was so fresh.