Green Desserts – Theo’s Malay blog

One of the really interesting things about travelling through the world at ground level is seeing the land and the people change through gradual over-lapping distinctions. When you cross a man-made border there’s still elements of the previous place and people in the new place and people, and by the time you’ve travelled through to the next border, some of the next country is already in the air. That means that when I look back along our journey there’s a continuum all the way through, even though by the time we’ve reached Malaysia, there’s not really anything recognisable left of Castle Cary, except the android phones in peoples hands and the Walls Magnums in the gas station where I can go to get free hot water for my Liptons yellow teabag and my noodles.

So when we walked across into Malaysia, it felt and looked a lot like Thailand did south of Bangkok. The men were in south Asian Muslim dress, and the women mainly in “tudung” (hijab).  The language of course was different but to our ears had the same singsong pattern.  But this was a much more strictly observant Muslim country, although thankfully, during our long wait for the next train it turned out not to be as strict as we’d been warned, and it wasn’t necessary to wear socks with sandals after all!

( It’s also worth mentioning, for anyone following in our overland footsteps from Thailand, that although Malaysia is theoretically very strict about travellers coming from Thailand not having cannabis in their systems, at the Sungay Kolak crossing at least there was no evidence of random urine tests or luggage checks. I mention this because 2 years ago, some travellers were detained who had inadvertently consumed canned energy drinks with added cannabinoids in Bangkok! )

For all that Malaysia is less socially liberal than it’s neighbour, our brief experience, which was literally a long wait on a hot platform followed by a long ride on a sleeper train, was one of pleasant, kind, tidy, respectable and respectful people – our usual experience of Muslim countries on this journey, for all the toxic trash being spoken about them by some at the moment.

Nonetheless, my overall impression, gazing out the train window as we travelled down the eastern side of the country, was one of quiet horror that took my expectations by surprise.  Just as we did in Britain many decades earlier, Malaysia has reduced its countryside to a green desert.  The tropical jungle I read about in my childhood, where young British conscripts chased chinese trade unionists, raided villages, and shot at Communist guerilla fighters in the 1950s “Malayan Emergency“ is no more.  Back then lads from Tyneside and Liverpool, alongside mercenary head-hunters, were defending the UK’s post-colonial interests in Malaya’s rubber plantations and Tin mines.

Today that exploitation is dwarfed, in every direction and as far as the eye can see, by row upon row of palm oil plantation, erasing the irreplaceable mosaic of rural life and forest ecology with the cash crop that’s now become indispensable to the worlds food-processing industry.  I look at those ranks of palms and the near dead lanes of dry soil between them, and I see all my mouthfuls of peanut butter, biscuits, cake and ice cream.

So I’m not judging Malaysia, anymore than the rest of the world – the soya farmers and ranchers of Amazonia, the British farmers wiping out our biodiversity for industrial quantities of milk and wheat, the Scottish forestry plantations of acidic conifer ranks.  It’s the world that the globalisation of consumption has created, and all of us want a piece of it I guess.

But it’s just such a shame we couldn’t have paused and found more rational ways of meeting our needs without eating everything and everyone else.  A system that shuts down alternative paths, rewards greed, and effectively enforces it, is the reason.

And of course, a lot of mouths to feed, each of them equally deserving. I just pray that enough of our true nature can be protected long enough that when we no longer want palm oil from Malaysia for margarine factories in Hull, the wildness where the wild things are can dwarf us once more.

Malaysia, November 2023