A New Year Trip in Malaysia
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Around new year’s eve 2018, my parents, brother, grandmother, and I went to Malaysia to escape from the noisy celebration in our hometown. The purpose of this trip was not anything much but the desire to explore our neighbor country. Malaysia is right below Thailand, and we had a direct flight from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur, so it was easy enough for my grandmother. We spent around 3-4 days in Malaysia just to see what the country was like. To my surprise, Malaysia was such a good blend of nature and people’s faith.
We noticed a lot of mosques as the bus passed by, but we went down the bus and visited only two of them. I don’t remember the exact names of these two mosques, but the guide told us that these are the blue mosque and the pink mosque, which was not surprising. For the blue one, we did have a chance to change our cloth to the one you see in the picture (that was my grandma, and she looked just like the Casper ghost). We went inside to see the architecture of the mosque. It was pretty breezy and serene inside.
The next one that we went to is the Batu caves which are 12 km to the north of Kuala Lumpur. We were excited to climb up the stairs and see what was inside the caves. I knew that Hindus constructed the place, but I didn’t know much about the religion, so that I couldn’t tell you much of the story of the caves. However, the caves were stunning, and it was perfectly blended with the nature inside the caves. When we reached the heart of the caves where all the crucial statues are, we could see the sunlight shining on the figures through the natural hole of the caves. The enormous golden statue that you see in the picture is Lord Murugan. Well, I wish my grandmother could go inside with us, but she didn’t want to risk her knees and was sitting outside enjoying fresh coconut water.
There were actually many places in the capital that we went to, but all I could recall were these two places: the Royal Palace Istana Negara and the Petronas Towers. We didn’t go inside the palace (more like we couldn’t go inside for some security reason), but it was surely huge. We could observe a couple of soldiers marching and riding a horse which was interesting! Then, we went to the Petronas tower, the twin towers that I had seen for so long on the documentary and news. I wasn’t quite elegant as I thought, and partly because it was already 2018 when there were thousands of skyscrapers much taller than it.
The buildings/town aspects of Malaysia were not as touching as their nature. I actually enjoyed the beautiful sceneries of Malaysia’s highlands much more. There were two highlands that we went to, the Cameron Highlands and the Genting Highlands. The Cameron Highlands are famous for their tea and flowers. We were fortunate enough that it wasn’t pouring when we went to see the tea plantation on the hills and the lavender gardens. My Brother, P, seemed to enjoy taking pictures of the flowers and tea field so much!
The second highlands we went to is the Genting highlands which we had to ride on the cable car up to the hills. We stayed in the huge hotel on the hills and had dinner at Din Tai Fung, a Chinese dim sum restaurant. There were many entertainments up there, including casinos and movie theaters. We didn’t do any of those, but we kind of enjoyed ourselves in our comfortable rooms.
Well, I would say Malaysia is not the best place I have been to, but it did give me a refreshing moment from the school. I love the nature of Malaysia. Although the climate there is a lot like that of Thailand, all the highlands did give a different vibe. I would recommend you to visit Malaysia once. It’s very affordable and beautiful.
After we found out that there are some flights from Willard (a regional airport in Champaign) that are inexpensive, we started flying out from here instaead of Chicago. We got a really good price of plane tickets to Seattle, so we decided to go to more national parks! The two parks that we visited were Mount Rainier and Olympic National Parks. We thought about going to North Cascade as well, but the time was limited so we planned to visit there next time. Visiting these two popular national parks in the fall was such a good choice–less crowd, nice weather, and fall foliage!
Midwest surprisingly offers us many national parks to visit all year round. One of the national parks near Illinois is the Mammoth Cave National Park in Cave City, Kentucky. We rented a car from Champaign and drove around 5 hours, excluding small stops in Indiana. We had never been to Kentucky before, and we believe that not many international students had been there. Plus, this was the first time we visited a cave in the US, and we start with the world’s longest known cave system!
We’d been thinking of visiting South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore and Badlands national park for almost a year. Then an opportunity came when one of our friends gave us a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Delta. We did not hestitate even a bit in buying two tickets for a round trip from Chicago to Rapid City, SD. Although it was an impulsive trip, we had a lot of fun observing the wildlife in the great plains of South Dakota and North Dakota.
Although Poy graduated from the Scripps-Oxford joint Ph.D. program in Biochemistry for half a year and already started working at UIUC as a post-doctoral researcher, his graduation ceremony was held way later in May 2024. His family also came from Thailand to attend his graduation ceremony in San Diego. We then spent over a week afterward traveling around the west coast, including California, Arizona, and Nevada. It was my first time (and his family’s first time) doing a road trip in the west coast. We enjoyed a huge variety of natural wonders that the west coast has to offer.