Living on the wild side in Batu Arang - Batu Arang, Malaysia
Batu Arang, Malaysia
The lofty ceilings and *********e walls of the old Kuala Lumpur railway station echoed as we walked through its cavernous, near-deserted interior. So empty was this place that the hollow sounds of our footsteps clapping against the polished stone floor were all that filled it. We were heading for a commuter train at the other end of this shadowy structure that would take us to the suburban town of Rawang, the first stop on the way to our first farm since Tom and Kitty’s place in northern Thailand.
The train rumbled through the grey-brown sprawl of the Malaysian capital, past a seemingly endless tangle of concrete and telegraph wire. But soon the city became less dense, and hopeful patches of green became increasingly apparent between the buildings and roads. When we arrived at Rawang station, we jumped down from the train and strode purposefully towards the bus stops outside. It was a pleasant but nondescript place, with its fair share of concrete but also broad streets punctuated with palms and fleshy succulents.
“Hello!” came a voice from behind us, as we scaled the steps out of the station, “can I help you?”
We turned around and a slender, 40-something ethnic Chinese man stared back at us with a warm smile. Robert was a local of Rawang who had recently returned from a backpacking trip around the USA. Full to the brim with excitement for any stray Anglophone wandering through his obscure little town, he insisted that he take us to his favourite local café.
The loud clatter of china in the dim café meant that we couldn’t quite hear what he was ordering from the smiley owner. Our conversation continued – about our travels, and about his own – and as three coffees arrived, we thanked him earnestly. An engineer by trade, he had saved up a little money and pursued his dream of travelling around the US for a month. When he first saw us, he may well have hoped that we were American, but nonetheless, his hospitality was unwavering.
The coffees were soon followed by several pieces of dry toast for which, although a little confused, we thanked Robert again and tucked in, assuming that free toast with coffee was some kind of strange local custom. Just as we were finishing our toast, a plate arrived for each of us, around which a half-cooked egg sloshed and glooped. We were obviously visibly confused, because he felt he had to explain.
“This is a local dish, everyone loves it!”
It transpired that one dipped one’s (now-eaten) toast into the egg, and once the toast was finished, one picked up the plate and the remainder would slip merrily down the throat. The problem was that, having already finished our toast, we basically had to ‘down it in one’ as you might drunkenly polish off a double tequila on a big night out. As good guests, we downed the slimy, near-raw eggs and pretended to find it a delicious and fascinating cultural experience. Needless to say, it wasn’t, but Robert seemed happy with our performance.
Soon, he was packing us onto the relevant onward bus, and we were fondly waving goodbye to our unexpected friend, whose company we had very much enjoyed, despite his peculiar taste in coffee accompaniments. Our final destination awaited us along near-deserted roads in the town of Batu Arang further west. Squeezed up alongside a battalion of old ladies and their heaving shopping bags, we sat in the rickety old bus as the driver argued passionately with another man sat at the front about where we should be dropped off. Luckily, by the time we got to Batu Arang they had come to a consensus and dumped us at a nondescript junction just outside the centre of the town.
We had little time to admire the surroundings, as we were already very late and now had the fun task of working out which way to walk in order to find our new home for the next fortnight. We had written instructions but clearly the bus driver had dropped us in the wrong place, rendering the instructions completely useless. Eventually, we gave up on the idea of finding our own way and called Elgin, the female half of our hosts. To our shame, it transpired that we were in fact only a relatively short distance from their house.
Elgin pulled up a few minutes later in her ‘well-loved’ white van. She jumped out and strode towards us in a loose summer dress with a loud and brightly-coloured African print. She and her partner Carsten had moved to Malaysia two years previously in order to set up a self-sustainable, low-impact life for themselves and their children. We bundled ourselves into the back of the van and were silently greeted by three pairs of impish, wide eyes. The three children were being home-schooled here – a practice that was illegal in their native Germany. Clearly, they had been doing a lot of ‘hands-on’ learning, liberally covered in various grubby marks from exploring in the family’s permaculture garden.
“You don’t mind dogs, do you?” asked Elgin in her near-perfect English.
Assuming that she was referring to two or three pet dogs, we replied cheerily that we didn’t mind at all. Helen for a long time had a fear of dogs, but our experience on various farms had warmed her slightly to regular doggy company. But as we drew into the driveway of their house and it quickly dawned on us exactly what Elgin meant. A dozen or more waist-high beasts streamed out of the house, barking and jumping at the windows of the van, surrounding it completely.
Spotting our surprised expressions, Elgin leapt into action, shouting and waving her arms in order to make space for our exit from the van. As a dog-lover, I went first, but the sight of an entire pack of candidates for the next Hound of the Baskervilles film still made me decidedly wary. Helen followed, gingerly picking her way through the mass of excitable, barking, sloppy-tongued dogs.
Elgin and Carsten’s house had recently been a wrecked shell, but they had got well along the way of making it a home. With three young children, not only was there debris and dust from their ongoing DIY construction work but also there were pieces of toys, splatters of paint, and other child-related objects like hair bands, scattered liberally across the floor. The ********crete floors, although far from pretty, were cooling relief on the feet, as we lugged our bags into what would be our room for the next couple of weeks. A pair of sturdy home-made bunk beds awaited us, build by Carsten, a former carpenter.
Elgin beckoned us into their kitchen and dining room area, where we met Carsten for the first time and sat at their table for some food. Elgin was taking a course in macrobiotic cookery, which she explained with excitement over our tasty vegan lunch with bread, dips and curry. A careful regimen of eating certain foods at certain times of the day, ensuring all meals are cooked from scratch, and eating only local grains and produce, the macrobiotic diet is designed to promote not only healthy eating through good home-cooked food, but also healthy ways of eating that fit with the body’s natural rhythms. But whatever it was, we were hungry and it tasted good.
We were also keen to find out more about the work that we would be doing on the farm, its wild-looking deep greenery draping itself tantalisingly outside the kitchen window.
“Oh,” said Elgin, “there isn’t so much work to do there. We have a no-dig policy.”
“A ‘no-dig’ policy?” Helen parroted back, intrigued by the idea of a farm where you do not dig.
It transpired that disturbance of the soil was generally avoided in order for the natural balance of the plants to develop in its own way. Looking out at the many different plants and trees entangled amongst one another outside, it did indeed seem to be doing pretty well without human intervention – although perhaps a little too well.
“As we are quite new here, there’s not a lot to eat from outside yet,” noted Carsten, his long mousey-brown locks dangling perilously close to the dollop of houmous on the side of his plate. “But there are always other things to do!”
After lunch, we negotiated our way out past the dogs and back into the van for a short drive around the town, as our hosts wanted to show us around the area. Batu Arang was a small town with a mining history, sprawling sparsely into the surrounding palm oil plantations. Now, aside from intensive and ecologically destructive palm oil production, the main employer in the town was a bullet factory. It was a peculiar place for a pair of earth-loving hippies, but they seemed quite happy here nonetheless.
Carsten and Elgin drove us through the Malay, Indian and Chinese neighbourhoods, while the oldest two children, aged five and three, became increasingly curious about us. Even though they had been brought up in Germany and Malaysia, the two oldest children spoke incredibly good English. The youngest of the three was barely crawling, spending most of his time staring, wide-eyed and fascinated at the world around him. Elgin and Carsten’s daughter, as we soon realised, quickly turned from a shy little five-year-old to a rampaging animal, while her younger brother would follow her into all kinds of trouble. By the time we all piled out of the car from our mini-tour, the kids were all over us and we had cemented some kind of raucous friendship that would keep us very much occupied until our final moments there.
It became quickly apparent that the work regime here would be probably the most relaxed that we had so far experienced. The pace of life was slow, even when the children were tearing around the house, chasing us, or getting into mischief. We would wake up naturally with the morning and go to bed when we felt tired. Carsten earned enough for them to live on doing part-time consultancy for various engineering projects, and the farm was very much a project of sustainability, as opposed to a commercial outfit with targets to meet. In many ways it was a hard change of work ethic to get used to, and we struggled to become accustomed to what at first felt like being lazy.
Soon, a daily rhythm developed. The open slats in our windows were perfect perches for the flocks of tiny birds which would swoop into the rafters and wake us gently with their dawn song. Then came the sounds of the dogs rising, occasionally barking and snarling at one another in the other room, and the mumbles of the children awaking, followed by shrieks and the patter of feet on the ********crete floor. Carsten’s ethereal waking-up music that he played every morning would then drift into the soundscape, its tones gently washing over us and lifting us out of bed like a snake charmer.
At breakfast times we learned a few words German through a funny little song that the parents would sometimes sing with their children. It seemed strange, but also incredibly fun, full of cheer and togetherness. It went something like this:
Guten appetit (Bon appétit,)
Wir hab’n uns alle lieb, (we all love each other,)
Hunger hab’n vir auch, (we’re hungry as well,)
So schaufelt’s in den Bauch! (so shovel it in your stomach!)
Juhuu! (Yoohoo!)
The slow breakfast would then be followed by some work around mid-morning. Helen’s damaged finger made any work that she did especially difficult, but there was no pressure to speed up. A great deal of work was needed around the house, making it more liveable and comfortable. From scraping old layers of paint from the gate, to fixing and painting the window frames, there was always something to do.
For several days, Carsten patiently mentored me through building a free-standing shelf unit – the first piece of real carpentry that I had ever done – and despite various frustrations and silly mistakes, it slowly took shape. Helen, meanwhile, had her own frustrations with re-upholstering an old deck chair, sewing and re-sewing it in different ways to try and bring it back to life, but ultimately to no avail.
If, for us, this house was a bit messy, grubby and chaotic, for the children it was a wondrous playground of infinite possibilities. In one instance, while we took a break from removing paint from the gateway to prepare it for re-painting, the children decided to take up our tools and have a go at doing the same on the interior walls of the house. Panicked, we rushed to avert a bigger disaster, but Elgin’s typically relaxed response was “don’t worry, that wall needs re-painting anyway.”
Another memorable time, the scampish three year-old son was spotted grinning as he scuttled past us with a large meat cleaver clutched in his hands, and they would regularly ‘liberate’ tools from under our noses in order to instigate frantic games of catch-me-if-you-can. The children had incredible freedom here, and although they may not have been highly proficient in reading and writing, their English language skills and knowledge of edible plants and herbs was incredible; indeed, we were taken on several foraging missions by them, where we were amazed to see them seek out and gather all sorts of tasty morsels from the garden that to our eyes looked like any other straggly weed.
Our first foray into the local culture of Batu Arang took place a few days into our stay there. Our Chinese neighbours were holding a celebration for the Mid-Autumn Festival, and we were all invited. Elgin cooked up some dishes to share and the children were cleaned up a little, before we all strolled up the road to meet the neighbours. As soon as our hosts had welcomed us in, we began happily conversing with the guests, who were mostly extended family, in their near-perfect English interspersed with the few Mandarin words and phrases we could remember.
Sat around a large table, the various guests piled their plates high with food and chatted loudly, while the children played with paper lanterns glowing a dim red in the black night skies. Elgin and Carsten’s children, not entirely used to the company of other children, were extremely wary at first – quite a difference from their usual boisterous selves back home – but slowly grew to relax and join in the fun.
This festival is based around the end of the harvest time, and also commemorates the story of Chang’e, the wife of a tyrannical mythical king, who fled to the moon after she stole his elixir of eternal life to liberate the people. In Georgetown, Ang had also told this story, although very differently, and we were not quite sure which one was correct.
However, our particular interest in this festival was the celebratory ‘mooncake’ that is shared at this time to celebrate the courage of Chang’e. These little disk shaped pastries are packed full of sweet lotus beans, adzuki beans, fruit and nuts, and can be extremely expensive. At this party, as with many others across the Chinese diaspora, they were cut by the most senior member of the family, and then the pieces were distributed to the partygoers to symbolise unity and togetherness.
The evening drew on and after many warm farewells we parted, dragging the children away from the fun and games that they had fully immersed themselves in. While there was a lot to be said about the ‘free learning’ that the children were doing, since most of their social contact was with each other or adults it was not surprising that they relished the contact of other children. We spent much of our time during the day with the kids, playing, reading to them and telling them about interesting things, and Elgin said quite frankly that one of the joys of taking on WWOOF volunteers was diversifying the social interactions that the kids could have.
Work continued in the days that followed the antics at the festival. Carsten, despite my catalogue of mistakes, was gently mentoring this novice wannabe-carpenter through the process of building the shelving unit, which was looking increasingly like something you could actually put things on and it not collapse immediately. The children had taken a particular liking to Helen, and were incessant in their efforts at engineering games and pranks at every possible moment. They stayed up relatively late for their age, and children and parents alike would slump into bed together, a good couple of hours before we felt tired.
One of the great joys of life here, from my perspective, was a mysterious red-mud conical tower outside the house. It sat there, looming over the garden about three metres high, with a black tank perching at its summit. This was their outdoor shower that they had built from compacted bags of mud and sand, and which collected water from the rain. As dusk fell behind the fronds of the banana trees, I took enormous pleasure in braving the mosquitoes and diving in several times during our stay, for an open-air shower in cool, fresh rainwater.
Another highlight, for the children at least, was their weekly visit to Kuala Lumpur for a Capoeira lesson. The long car journey into the city felt like it was engulfing us, as we drove into its knot of concrete and wire once again. Entering the rather fancy gym, with its whitewashed walls and glass doors, felt like a world away from Batu Arang. As we arrived in the small dance studio, we adults sat up against the wall while the children tore around the room with excitement.
The incredibly patient instructor, a tall and beefy dreadlocked Brazilian, shepherded the seven or eight under-fives together and the lesson began. Cartwheeling, kicking and jumping their way across the sprung wooden floor, the children were clearly in their element, and we sat and watched. An hour passed quickly, with the children worn out and the rest of us sufficiently entertained by their antics. Afterwards it transpired that the instructor knew the instructor under whom I studied, for a few years in Liverpool, UK. There we were, a couple of Brits living with a German family, talking to a Brazilian in Kuala Lumpur about his friend who I knew in Liverpool – a small world indeed.
All but Carsten, the driver for our return journey, dozed happily on our return to Batu Arang, interspersed with some book reading with the children as we sat in the back of the van. As we arrived in Batu Arang, Carsten parked on the side of the road and turned around to look at us.
“Do you want to try the best naan bread in the whole of Malaysia?”
How could we possibly say no? Carsten swung the van around and drove a few minutes across town to their favourite Indian eatery. We all sat outside in the muggy night air, and tucked into perhaps not the very best, but certainly some of the tastiest naan breads and dhal that we’d tried in a very long time.
“It’s really sad,” said Carsten, his expression turning downward a little, “the guy who makes these is moving away soon. We have to make the most of him before he goes.”
Quite happy to being party to making the most of the chef’s talent, we all continued scooping and gobbling until every last crumb of bread was gone. And by the time we made it home, everyone was ready to slump straight into our beds in a naan-induced coma.
In our last few days, the shelving unit that had become the bane of my life was finally finished with a little painting help from the children, who appeared to be more interested in painting themselves than the shelves. We were also finally let loose in the garden, cutting back overgrown grasses and planting sweet potatoes and papayas. Elgin had been highly critical of the industrial monocropping and excessive use of pesticides and herbicides in the palm oil plantations that had caused havoc with ecosystems throughout Malaysia. Hearing her talk with such worrying detail about the many ways in which this, combined with massive, heavy-impact suburban housing developments, really made us look differently at the superficially lush and healthy-looking landscape all around.
It also made us look more favourably on their quirky efforts to produce food for themselves – the lack of weed killer and unkempt appearance of their garden seemed to have very little bearing on the health of their plants. Their crops of guavas and papayas were edging ever closer to ripeness and their banana trees were happily reaching maturity. Their main problem was trying to stop the children from picking the fruit before they were ripe, and perhaps it was inappropriate to use pesticides against one’s own offspring.
A trip to the local outdoor hot spring near the end of our time here gave us a chance to plunge into healthy, sulphurous waters under the shade of high leafy trees, their canopy bathing us in hazy, dappled light. The fact that this outdoor pool was lined with grubby, cracked tiles, and the presence of a gaggle of surly youths grunting at one another right next to us, only partially served to devalue our lovely long soak. On our return, we braved swarms of huge, thirsty mosquitoes to scavenge some old bamboo on the roadside, dragging the long poles out of the thick jungle and trying to somehow fit them into the van. It was tough work, but bamboo is excellent construction material and Carsten and Elgin were not ones to ignore the prospect of free materials.
In our final day or so, we finished off our work as best we could, and began the familiar process of preparing to move on. Initially, this household – with its grubby surfaces, chaotic atmosphere, huge pack of rowdy dogs and laid-back existence – had been quite difficult to get used to. But now, we too had settled into this rhythm and it was daunting to imagine going back to the rushed, timed, quantified existence that we were used to, even the relatively carefree one on the road.