snapshots
a thousand or so miles later, I'm home. things composed in my head over the past few days. caution: entirely non sequitur.
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the drive from Gerik to Butterworth took us through an impossible landscape. endless sunny green-gold slopes, the road like ribbon unfurled over the hilly terrain. then we swung around a corner, and everything fell away into a sudden emptiness; far below, a sea of blue mountains, paling to white, spoke silently of stillness and untouched millenna. we edged around the rim of the valley, and at the wheel, I felt briefly as though I had brushed my trembling fingertips against something sacred.
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the penumbra of dawn over the South China Sea
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dust billowed off the road as we pulled to a stop somewhere outside Terengganu. sun, heat and humidity so raw, so potent that the air had the consistency of molasses. the stalls selling keropok losong were dubiously constructed: tottering piles of wood and corroded tin. but the platters of pale golden fish crackers, crisp-fried and glistening with oil, offered their savoury recompense. we stopped, and we didn't regret it. (perhaps the waistline or the arteries might, in time).
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a glimpse of rusted tin roof between the palm fronds
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on accidental encounters with road wildlife:
ran over a gecko;
ran over a piece of tyre and thought I'd run over a dog;
ran over an (already-dead) dog;
almost ran over something which scuttled out of the way too fast for me to see what it was;
tried to run down a flock of pigeons and unfortunately failed;
braked sharply to let two emaciated bovines plod across the road.
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dinner with relatives in Kuantan involved two rieslings, a pert-tasting chablis, canadian ice wine and a future promise of champagne. did you know that some wines are purified using milk? my woeful dairy-intolerant body realized that soon after the second riesling.
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bumper-to-bumper traffic into Georgetown
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nature is wonderful with colour in a storm. along the road from Penang to Ipoh, I could see rain coming over the mountains in thick sheets of blue-grey. deep viridian peaks shading into stormclouds, the sky purpling in anticipation, and a pale horizon shimmering with the promise of lightning.
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wide sweeping, wind-swept highways. a thousand, or so, miles of them.