Come In Rangoon

Come In Rangoon

I don’t remember where I first heard the expression, but like many good jokes, there are two guys sitting at a bar when a large-breasted woman walks in and draws their attention. The joke ends with a man with his hands on the woman’s breasts pretending to twist the dials of an old radio transmitter, saying, “Come in Rangoon…”. In some ways there are few places in American culture other than perhaps Xanadu, the mythical pleasure-dome idyll from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s imagination where Kubla Khan vacationed, that invoke exotic and unknown locales more than Rangoon. Rangoon was renamed in 1989 to Yangon when the military government there decided that the country should be renamed from its colonial days of being known as Rudyard Kipling’s Burma, an eastern province of Colonial India, to the more culturally appropriate Myanmar. That is when the mysterious Burma became the even more mysterious and repressive Myanmar. Rangoon is at the upper left armpit of the Malaysian Peninsula. Singapore is about 1,600 miles from Rangoon and it reminds us of how long the Malaysian Peninsula is. This morning, we are leaving Singapore after doing almost everything a tourist can do in Singapore in two days, which is about 95% of everything there IS to do in Singapore if you aren’t here to do business. We are being adventurous and leaving the country by ground transport in a van we have hired with driver to drive us up to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, a mere 220 miles north on the road towards Rangoon. We are told that what should be a four hour drive may be considerably longer since we are traveling on a Saturday and its during the Chinese Lunar New Year, the biggest cultural holiday in the region.

One of the side benefits of being here during Chinese Lunar New Year is just like being in New York City at Christmas, the locals decorate the place up with lots of huge Chinese Lunar New Year figures that are on display anywhere people gather to celebrate. Such was the case when we walked through the Marina Bay Gardens with all its SuperTree structures that look to be right out of Star Wars. We went up on the Skywalk (get it…we were being Skywalkers) and then up into the the SuperTree Observatory for the privilege of overpaying for a drink and to enjoy the view of the surrounding gardens and Marina. We capped that off with a stop in the Marina Bay Sands which are all part of one giant hotel and casino complex. We deferred from waiting on the long lines to go up to the observation deck, as special as it seemed, which was mostly a nod to the humidity gods in this tropical paradise.

We have already done our celebration of Chinese Lunar New Year by reprising our respective animal doppelgängers. I am a horse, Kim is a dog, Mike is a rat, Melisa is a rabbit, Faraj is a tiger and Yasuko is a dragon. Our tour guide for our evening food tour of the local Hawker Centers (where the old food cart vendors gather under one roof and under much stricter government control) told us that the cat got excluded as a lunar character due to losing a foot race with the rat. As a person not in synch with cats, I cannot say I am unhappy to see cats excluded form Chinese Lunar prosperity. It is interesting to note that food Hawkers not only cannot “tout” or solicit their wares, but are required to offer at least one healthy food option. Singapore is certainly nothing if not a welfare state, which reminds us that you can have that AND a prosperous financial/business center culture. It turns out that the horse among us (me), made it only through one Hawker Center before allowing the heat, humidity and strange food do me in for an early return to the air conditioning of the hotel while the rest carried on to two more Hawker Centers like champs. I’m not sure what that tells us except that it should be a fun trip north on the road to Rangoon.

I had originally wanted to ride the Malaysian Peninsula from Singapore to Bangkok on the Eastern & Oriental Express train through the jungles of Malaysia. The cost and three-day allocation knocked that out of contention for this trip, so instead, Mike booked us at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, so that is where we are headed. In the movie The Bridge over the River Kwai, the commando base from which they train for the assault by William Holden on the bridge construction was in the British stronghold of Singapore, specifically on the site of Fort Canning Park, which we visited yesterday in the rain. That is actually a fictional story about the building of the Burma rail by the Japanese in WWII, but the bridge, which is technically in Thailand, is just west of Bangkok. So, whether anyone want to allow me this fantasy or not, we are heading north along the path of the Burma railroad and will eventually, early next week, make our way to the infamous bridge.

The ride out of Singapore into Malaysia started with our driver in his Pidgeon English asking if we wanted to go the “jam” route or the route where you had to get out of the car and walk through the border crossing. It didn’t seem like much of a choice, so we went and zipped through the automated passport control…except for Kim, who’s eyes didn’t match her records, so she got bounced through several levels of Singapore border patrol management. I had visions of having to pull a Claire Danes from Broke Down Palace, throwing myself to the mercy of the court to have them incarcerate me instead of her. But it all worked out and our next and only stop was a rest stop that could have been on the New Jersey Turnpike…only with foodstuffs we couldn’t recognize. Our group likes to test local potato chips, but nothing too weird was to be found. Melisa enjoyed a Baskin Robbins ice cream cup, so nothing seemed too exotic on the road.

For all the modern conveniences of the road, the surrounding scenery was noticeably different to anything we were used to. It was decidedly Asian jungle. I know Amazonian and African jungle and this looks quite different and very….Asian. I don’t know how else to say that, but when I look at the hills along the roadway I keep seeing William Holden running wantonly down the jungle hillsides until he finally jumps off a cliff into a waterfall and river below, enabling his escape south to the comforts of the British base in Singapore. The lush green countryside looks almost exactly as we thought it would.

As we get closer to the city of Kuala Lumpur, a city of 1.8 million and thus much smaller than Singapore, it is hard not to notice the desire of the Malaysians to show off their prosperity and their engineering acumen. Where Singapore has the wherewithal to build anything as big or bigger than the folks in Dubai with their Burj Khalifa, which stands at 2,722 feet tall, the Malaysians can’t resist and first built Petronas Towers, which stand at 1,483 feet tall and were the tallest towers from 1998 to 2004, and now have built the Merdeka, which stands on its own with no other tall buildings around it and at 2,277 feet tall is the second tallest in the world, having been finished just last year. It seems that this was a nod to the power of Dubai, but still a desire to have the tallest building in SE Asia. It looks as though there is an antenna on top so I imagine there is someone attached to that building still saying “Come in Rangoon or Yangon, or whatever…”