By Lucy

Sunday, one of my days off. I find it funny, the mental effect of “my days off” when most days I don’t even reach 2 hours of “work”. It is, admittedly, still a drain on my time, especially since it prevents me from doing anything early in the morning, and by 9 o’clock it is already unbearably hot in the Malaysian sun.

Vlad has no days off because he did not negotiate for any, although he has less work than me in a sense, and more of a drive to “earn” his stay. I think it’s also safe to say that he is enjoying this more than I am, and no wonder. I ended up here both to save money and to destim from the constant mental effort required to plan travel, but of course the political refugee has definitely struggled more from a sense of not feeling at home. Many of the hostels, especially in Vietnam, do not have anything in the way of cooking facilities, and the bamboo hut, small and wretched as it is, at least offers a sense of privacy and being our own. We have full run of the fridge, and the coconuts are free.

I spent the morning writing while Vlad slept in.

A white van showed up that, according to the sticker on the side, was from the mosque. Was this the imam? The man always chanting through the loudspeaker? He chatted with Ismail for a bit, then he helped Ismail with some welding. How curious.

Vlad got up at the usual time, I made him a coffee, then he sweated under the Malaysian sun painting the welded gate.

Around lunchtime, I needed a break from writing. I started planning out things for Korea, which is hard to do because Kim replies weekly to her emails. I knocked some ideas back and forth with Vlad, who has been to Korea as sort of a poor man’s Japan; Russian’s have to have a letter of invitation from the embassy, so he can’t visit. At this point, I discovered Vlad has never even heard of Kpop Demon Hunters, so I put it on while we ate lunch. I wonder if eating sundried shrimp with fresh shrimp is bad for our kidneys.

At 3, we went for a walk to Trekk. I figured Vlad would appreciate their coffee and long walkability, and he did. It was raining the whole time, but the rain is always a welcome respite from the sun and the heat.

The guy from Trekk was surprised to see us. Not one, but two white tourists! He even had one of the other staff take pictures of the three of us together, like we are celebrities and not two random broke itinerants.

As we walked back, the rain finally stopped.

At one point, as I was walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I ran into Vlad, who was shirtless. Some days I feel like I am the only woman who gets flustered by a shirtless man (maybe I am). It doesn’t help that he’s got like 6% body fat from living on a shoestring budget. Still, I find it annoying that Vlad and Ismail can wander around topless, but women are expected to cover even their hair!

The next day we had big plans.

It’s funny how much smaller the world is here. It’s about 130 kilometers to the tip of Borneo; barely an hour’s drive in Canada. In Malaysia, with the scooters and the 80 kilometers an hour speed limit, not to mention random roads blocked by construction and cows? At least two hours. Our little 100cc 80-kilometers-an-hour scooter means this isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon.

I walked to the breakfast stall and bought a bunch of food. I couldn’t think of a cheaper way to pack a lunch, and to be fair, 12 ringgit of food lasted us all day, so it worked out well. The ladies are still all giggly whenever I come by. When am I going to stop being an oddity?

The man said he would deliver the scooter around 10AM. I kind of wondered how I would get the scooter; makes sense for him to drop it off. That’s late for a start, but it gives Vlad some time to wake up, get caffeinated, and do some chores.

As I contemplated to drive the scooter or not drive the scooter, I suddenly realized I could take the M test and have my full M this year. Which isn’t critical or urgent – I have 5 years after my M2 to get it – but it would be nice to say I do have a full M. Part of me has been debating buying a motorcycle instead of a car. It’s cheaper, I can ask Paul or Kevin for a ride if I need a car, and since I’ll be back in PA, everything will be walking distance, anyway.

Meh, I won’t bother driving the scooter. It’s easier for Vlad to do it, and I’m not convinced I won’t be hassled by the cops for being a woman.

The man who dropped off the bike seemed confused when a woman greeted him. He was also uncomfortable with the idea of us taking it “so far”, and after some deliberation, requested another 50 ringgit. Sure, fine.

Ismail had left early in the morning, so we packed up and hit the road. First to Kota Belud, to fill up with gas, and then northwards.

The drive for the first part is really nice, weaving through the Borneo jungle and hills. The seabreeze comes through the trees as well. This is one of the few ‘wild’ areas of Borneo left, presumably because of the hills; much of the ancient jungle has been cut down for palm oil plantations.

Which started appearing within half an hour. Gross.

Finally, we’d made it.

Vlad did a silly here. There’s a gate saying “no driving to the tip”, with the expectation that you’ll park at the adjacent cafe and walk up. Vlad decided they’d want us to pay to park and he wasn’t having it, so he took off on a maintenance trail that was nothing but a giant pothole. Eventually I convinced him to go back to the gate and we parked and walked through with no trouble. Absolutely no one on Google had mentioned paying, he was just being a silly goose.

Up and over we walked. There is a parking area here, curiously. There were quite a few Malaysians hanging around, but I assume they are locals who use this as a public beach. We’re the only white people.

The walk to the tip is nice. They have a large brass globe there, dedicated some 20 years ago. Past it, there is a walking path down to the sign, which says “danger!”

Of course, we ignored it, like every tourist does. It was midday and the tide was out, no storms in sight. We were safe.

We clambered down the rocks. Vlad offered me a hand and I waved him away.

Somewhere over there is the Philippines. Palawan is closer to us now than Kota Kinabalu is, but I still have to backtrack and fly to Manilla!

This is the Sulu sea, former site of the thalassocracy of Sulu, which existed basically until the English and Spanish showed up and called dibs. This is why the ferry crossing to the Philippines from Sandakan is fraught for white tourists; there are still separatists who want to reform the old country, and rely on ransoms to fund their efforts. Which is annoying, because I am not wealthy and I can’t think of a single person who could afford to pay a ransom for me, but like Vlad always says, the people of SEA have a tendency to assume white skin means wealth.

After we played around on the rocks for a while, we walked back up into the shade and had some lunch. Then we snapped some more photos and headed out.

We got here faster than I thought, so I requested stopping at a bathroom and changing into my swimsuit for a swim. Vlad doesn’t swim, but he didn’t mind hanging out on the beach. He wrestled my backpack into the boot of the bike and told me to go ahead.

I jogged down and threw myself into the water, which was as clear as glass. Oh, happy day!

I’d made it out to where the water is waist-high before I noticed them. These clear blobs with 2 black dots in them.

Are they… jellyfish?

One bumped into my arm. I didn’t feel pain or itchiness.

Weird.

Vlad came down to the beach, wading in the water a bit.

I swam for about 20 minutes before the number of weird clear blobs started freaking me out. I went back to shore.

“Too many jellyfish?” Vlad asked.

“What, you know they are jellyfish?”

He nodded.

“Why didn’t you yell at me or something?”

He shrugged, “You seemed like you were ok?”

I glanced down my arms and legs. I didn’t seem like I got stung.

Then I noticed some red spots on my arms.

Maybe I got stung (I never decided. Maybe they were just mosquitoe bites I hadn’t noticed).

Vlad wanted to go for a walk along the waterfront. I watched him walk for a bit, air drying, then I turned to the bike to grab out my clothes.

Oh, wait. It’s locked.

I waited a full 20 minutes for him to come back so I could get changed.

Then I discovered my second problem. In my panic to escape the jellyfish, I had washed a bunch of sand into my swimsuit, which was now stuck to me, no matter how much I tried to brush it off with the towel.

The ride back is going to suck.

Actually, it wasn’t too bad. My butt was mostly numb from the ride anyway. Vlad stopped at a store to buy an ice cream, but I declined. I don’t like cold ice cream.

Once we got back, I ran for the shower. Get the salt and the sand off me, pronto!

I had planned to go to bed, but when I got out of the shower, Vlad had walked to the store, bought some ice cream, and then put it in a bowl to melt for me to consume, which was both adorable and a waste of time. I stayed out to eat it, and then there was lightning clouds around Mount Kinabalu. Me and Vlad stayed up until 8, watching the lightning flash against the mountain.

Wake up. Do chores. Write. I got annoyed; the conference emailed me a dress code. A dress code! Mostly fine, except they want me to wear a “flora and fauna” themed outfit to the friendship dinner. Holy Met Gala, Batman! I wonder if I could get away with wearing just what I have packed.

Hm… no. It won’t look good on the group photo.

Bollocks.

The painters came back. Both times they have stayed here, their car left an oily patch on the courtyard. Must be expensive, having to top up the oil all the time. So many of these people live one day at a time, never planning. It’s extra annoying for me; I have to clean up the spill with tissue.

I walked down to the store to buy some more bread and other things so I wasn’t paying for a takeout breakfast every day. I got distracted because I noticed some instant coffee latte things that were caramel, which is Vlad’s new obsession. There was also some instant iced tea calling my name. I caved and bought them. Vlad paid me back later.

Vlad out there painting in the midday Malay sun, again.

I sent him a clip of Gloria misquoting things in English after we had a conversation about sayings and slang in English.

A bunch of local kids wandered by, playing. They apparently found me interesting, because they kept stopping and peering around the gate at me. Never have I ever felt more like an animal in a zoo.

The mother dog is getting tired of being a mother. I frequently spot her sprinting away from the puppies trying to feed. The papa dog has been gone for at least a week and the other female seems to be helping her raise the puppies. Is that normal stray dog behaviour?

The gate still isn’t back on yet, since today was the last coat of paint. A herd of cows wanders by and when I yelp, Vlad immediately grabs the nearest available weapon – a mop – and chases them away from the yard.

Vlad’s discovered that the local store sells 2 litre Coca Cola’s, so he’s been drinking one each afternoon, and then he can’t sleep. The heat and the lack of sleep finally wore him out, and in the afternoon he went for a nap.

Leaving me alone with my thoughts.

You know, one thing that bothers me, perhaps irrationally, is the idea of having to go back to work and see one of the handful of people who knows about me and Kyle. Especially if they try to talk to me about it. Because then I have to decide whether I want to be honest about being heartbroken, or just play it off as drunk and horny.

The instinct is to play it off. Part of that is me being cynical and closed off from decades of abuse, but part of that is practical and logical. My ability to command respect at the hall is damaged when people like Draper could go around and say I was being a soft girlie-girl. And that really is the part that upsets me the most. Sure, be a stupid f*ckboi and toy around with me and pretend you care, whatever. But if you try to take my power away, I will gut you like a pig, without a second thought.

I want to be strong

I want to be powerful

I want to be feared

I shouldn’t have gone to Draper’s house. I knew it the minute he cracked that beer. I should have just left.

I’ve started singing “No Scrubs” to myself. I think I’m done with casually dating; no boyfriends unless they can match me for ambition. Anyone else is just wasting my time.

“Want to walk to Trekk tonight?” Vlad interrupts my melancholy.

“You are such a bad influence.” I declare, “You and your sugary drinks are going to make me fat.”

He smiles, “You know, when I first got to Da Nang, there was an all-you-can-eat buffet. I went there every night.” He puts his hands on his stomach and laughs.

“Did we have chubby Vlad?”

“Da!”

“Still,” I say, “That doesn’t mean I want to be chubby.”

“I took a picture of you.” He says, sending it to me. “Since you can’t.”

“Oh, that’s sweet.”

“Tell me about this thing you are writing.” He says, sitting down next to me, bringing me a coconut. He brings me a coconut almost every day. Vlad is living his best life here.

I explain to him about the book. He asks if I can send it to him. After I tease him about his English skills, I make a PDF out of the first 40 pages and email it to him. He goes off to read it.

It occurred to me that the Venom movie had a couple of scenes filmed in Malaysia. I was curious if they actually filmed here, and they did. In Sarawak, though.

The next day, even less happens. I finish my chores early and go for a bike ride. I’ve gotten pretty good at filming with one hand, so I get some good shots of the mountain as it rises majestically from the landscape.

Actually, there was some excitement. For the next two days, there were some military jets doing exercises overhead, including firing flares. It was very noisy – they were flying slightly lower than the height of Kinabalu. Ismail didn’t seem bothered by it, so maybe it’s normal since this area is so out of the way.

For lunch, I make congee. For those who don’t know, congee is like a savoury rice pudding, like risotto, made by adding two or three times the normal amount of water to the rice and cooking it until it all soaks in and becomes a mush. It’s a simple but effective meal, especially when I have my sun-dried anchovies. Throw an onion in, a bouillon cube… I also soft-boil some eggs so I can cut one of those open into it. Yum!

Vlad sits down at the table, “Ok, what is the audience for your book?”

“Wait, you actually read it?” I expected him to get about 5 pages in and give up because there were too many English words.

“Yes, I read 10 pages a day. It’s a lot of new words. So.” He taps the table.

We talk about the book for a bit. I’m surprised he’s so invested in it.

Some weird guests check in. They appear to be Chinese Christian missionaries. They try to convert me and Vlad to Christianity.

In the afternoon, we walk to Trekk again. The owner insists we take free waterbottles with us as well.

On the way back, we interrupt a group filming what appears to be a music video. A bunch of film assistants pile out of a mini van and start filming the location and unpack a drone. But no one yells at us, so we keep walking.

“You know,” He says after a minute, “I look back at how my life has changed, and I marvel at it.”

“How so?”

“Well, I used to… you know, me and my friends used to hang out around the table, drinking coffee and gossiping. And in University, we’d go to karaoke every Saturday -“

“Wait, I thought you didn’t drink.” I cut him off.

“I don’t. I didn’t.”

“You went to karaoke sober?”

“Yes?”

I stare at him, amazed. Not to say that you can’t – I only ever really go to karaoke at Howl – but it has such a close connection to drinking culture. And from the man who finds most social interaction exhausting.

“You see how I’ve changed.” He says.

“Indeed.”

My heart seizes. In a few days, Vlad will leave again and who knows when I will see him next? Probably not for a year. Not this calendar year, at least.

Basically nothing happened Friday, and if you are starting to lose track of the days you are not alone. The Chinese guests checked out. Vlad asked if I was going to use the citrus fruit that Ismail called limes but were definitely not our limes, and when I said no he made some kind of cold fruit tea out of them. It was criminally good, difficult not to drink the entire 2 litres in one go. I’m pretty sure it was Vlad’s beloved kalamansi, but neither of us are 100%.

The final episode of season 2 of the Pitt is out, which means I officially have no shows I am currently watching again. Youtube keeps taunting me with ‘official’ season 3 Hazbin Hotel trailers that are definitely not official.

Vlad gets the bug and decides he wants to BBQ that night, since Ismail does have a charcoal BBQ pit. He takes the bike down to Kota Belud and buys things to grill and a package of charcoal, before spending 3 hours babysitting the BBQ. I’m not sure it was worth it, but I also recognize a large part of this is his pent-up lack of agency expending itself. Almost no hostel will have a BBQ pit that you can freely use. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

“Are you excited to see your parents again?” I ask. He has to go back to Vietnam because his parents are coming to visit them.

“Sure.”

I snort, “Come on, Russia stoic.”

“I mean, yes, yes I am.” He pokes at the food on the grill. “I think this will be the last time I see them while Putin is in power.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, the government is starting to keep track of people travelling. They’ve started to track people using VPN’s as well. I might not be able to contact them.”

“That’s shitty.”

“It is what it is.” He says.

Not for the first time, he makes me grateful for what I’ve got. I can’t imagine being a refugee like him. And to a certain extent, he’s got it worse than most, because he’s choosing to do this. It’s not like his hometown was bombed to smithereens – it’s still there, but he doesn’t feel like he can breathe there. The temptation must cut him.

After the food is cooked up, we watched the Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki’s ‘last’ movie (his fourth ‘last’ movie), which I’ve never watched. We watched it in English because I wanted to hear Patterson’s voice acting, but me and Vlad have the same level of Japanese fluency and we could probably have muddled through the original Japanese. Vlad loves anime, but he can’t visit Japan because he needs a letter of invitation from a Japanese embassy in Russia, which sucks.

Ah, Miyazaki! Still emotionally working his way through his trauma about World War 2 in weird, abstract, Japanese myth/anime form. The first half an hour follows a standard “boy adjusts to being displaced by war”, before descending into abstract, alternate dimension timey wimey metaphor nonsense. You’ll definitely get more out of it if you know a basic amount about Japanese myth, like what a tengu is.

I called all the story beats before they happened, even though it in no way follows a consistent narrative, and Vlad paused the movie at one point.

“It’s always like this for you, isn’t it? Being a writer means you can always tell what happens in movies?”

“Oh, yeah. It gets kind of painful after a while. I’m always delighted whenever I find a movie that I can’t call the plot and themes on.”

He pats the top of my head in sympathy. We’re cognizant that PDA’s are forbidden here, or I suspect we would be cuddled up watching TV.

Some guests show up after I’ve gone to bed. I first realized they were here when I stumbled into the bathroom in the middle of the night and a cloud of cigarette smoke wafted out the door. Gross!

It did not get better; they kept smoking in the bathroom, which makes no sense to me on multiple levels. First and foremost; this isn’t a hotel. They’re renting a room that opens out onto a courtyard where you can smoke anywhere. And secondly, if they are trying to hide their smoking from someone (who?) smoking inside the bathroom is the worst option, because it is a concrete box with no ventilation beyond opening the door, and we all share it. Unless they are just so addicted to smoking that they can’t even go to the bathroom without a cigarette? At one point I found a cigarette that had clearly been lit, had a drag or two, and then been dropped into the toilet. What?

I text the guy about renting the bike again. This time, I lie to him about where we are going. It’s fine. I ask him to drop it off tonight so we have it first thing Sunday morning.

In the afternoon, I call Paul to chat with him since he’s on night shift. When Vlad brings me the daily coconut, he also bring a small fruit that has the texture of an apple, but the taste of a lime. He says Ismail has a tree out back and offered him some.

I tried signing up for the volunteer corps. The training is boring with a capital B, but what really annoyed me is that it requests a criminal background check from every country you’ve been to if you’ve left the country for more than 6 months.

Gah!

Did I technically stay in New Zealand for 6 calendar months? I get the concern, but I don’t want to have to go through that rigmarole for what is essentially an unpaid job…

In the afternoon, we get new guests, 3 Italian people and a baby. I guess Ismail was chatting with them a bit, because he comes over to me and is aghast at the idea of having a baby without being married.

In the afternoon, we ended up binging Babish, my foodie Youtuber. I meant to just show Vlad the episode about poutine (because he has never heard of it!) but he loved the show so we just kept watching.

At like 8PM Ismail comes over, “Come have dinner with us! Come, come!”

Vlad tries to decline by pointing out that we had dinner already, but I recognize that this is intended to be a photo shoot. I run back inside the hut to change into clothes I want to be filmed in, and go to the main house.

The table is laden with food, including 2 entire stingrays, several whole fish, and a platter of fried chicken. I wish they had invited me earlier! I made an effort to try a bit of everything; there was one dish that they said was cow lung, which I actually didn’t mind except that it was too spicy.

There was quite the crowd; Ismail, his wife and son, but also his 2 brother in laws and another man who’s relation I didn’t catch. That man in particular was quite chatty, grilling me and Vlad about our travels while cameras were shoved in our faces to elicit a happy reaction about the free food.

He made a few comments about how happy it makes people to travel and Vlad can’t even shed his Russian stoicism to pretend to be happy, so I crack some jokes about them Russians to lighten the mood.

No one seemed to believe me and Vlad aren’t dating. At one point, chatty man gave us Islam-appropriate nicknames; Vlad got Mohammed, but I was dubbed “Amina”. He asked what our religions are, and then joked about converting us. To which I shake my head. You won’t get me to wear a headscarf, although I admit, it is tempting in a practical sense. No more bad hair days, just a variety of elegant scarves. But I hate them for the same reason I don’t want to grow my hair long; it just seems like a lot of effort.

“Ismail, how long have you lived here?” I asked. I’m really curious; I wanted a story about how his family has been here since the English took over and stuff.

I did not get it. What he told me was that they built the house in 2004 (very old, he says) and before that, they lived in ‘government housing’. Well, that just raises more questions than it answers, but I’m too tired to grill him. I do know his brother and sister in law only moved here within the last ten years, which implies that, as a family, they were homeless in the sense of having no ancestral land to stay on.

Eventually we managed to escape back to hut and go to bed.