The drive to Batang Ai is about 5 hours long, so we stopped along the way to check out one of the bigger produce street markets. Man, Berkeley Bowl has nothing on these guys… there was so much fruit and produce around, some familiar, some that we’d never seen before, and all of it beautiful.
Malaysia is truly blessed with some pretty amazing fruit. 
Thomas showed us this really interesting fruit called the snake fruit. It has a thin, dry outer skin that has a leathery, brown snake-like pattern. But peel away the shell and you get several distinct lobes with semi-fibrous, pale flesh. The fruit is not quite juicy, but close, and it has this fantastic tropical fruit, fresh citrus flavor. Delicious!
Fish is definitely a big deal in Malaysia. Here are several different types of dried anchovies.
The street vendors were also selling some hot foods. Here is La Verne with a street vendor who made us a crepe/pancake filled peanuts and a little sugar and butter. Even though the day was already getting quite warm, the hot crepe (right off the griddle) was so good! I think the food here is one of the things that I like the best; there is a real appreciation for ingredients, and freshness is so important because of the amount of heat in the area and the somewhat limited amount of refrigeration available in the rural areas. You get to see how people get by without the conveniences we take for granted.
About an hour later, our bus stopped along the side of the road so we could see a little patch of wild orchids. They were small, but really quite nice; a treat for orchid lovers.
They also had some funky/exotic other plants, like this one: the Pitcher Plant. It’s a carnivorous plant that traps insects in a sticky pool of fluid inside its “pitcher”, then slowly digests them for nutrition. Yum.
The third stop along the way was at a pepper farm. Peppercorns are an important export for Malaysia, although pepper farms are beginning to give way to palm oil plantations because of the higher profitability of palm oil. Malaysians are quite proud of their pepper, and feel it is the best in the world. The pepper berries are smaller than those grown in other countries, so the heat is really concentrated once the peppercorns are dried. Sounds kind of similar to grapes. La Verne took one and chewed on it... she looked like she needed a glass of water.
At long last, we arrived at the boat dock for the jetty that would take us to our hotel at Batang Ai. The Batang Ai is a river that feeds a huge man-made reservoir created by the installation of a large hydroelectric dam. The project, which was completed in the 1980s, flooded a lush valley and displaced about 40,000 people. The government has made efforts to compensate the people for their displacement (new housing, new educational infrastructure, etc.), but it’s hard to say how fair and/or successful those efforts were. Seeing the reservoir itself is striking; it is truly expansive, so it isn’t hard to see how that many people were displaced.
Somehow, Hilton got the exclusive rights to build a luxury resort on an island in this reservoir. The setting was pretty phenomenal… utterly peaceful. Here is a view of dusk over the reservoir from the hotel. We relaxed by the pool and called it a night fairly early… tomorrow will be a full day visiting an authentic longhouse! 
1 comment:
You crazy kids have all the fun! You'll definitely have to give Aadra and I recommendations for when we make our trek out there too.
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