We alighted in the country town of Temerloh, about halfway to our eventual destination - a national park in the remote center of the country. It was quite a change from Malacca - the nearly cosmopolitan (comparatively) coastal city we'd left that morning.
After the usual confusion (due to our ignorance of the language when it came to anything more complicated than "chicken," "beer" and "inn"), we ended up on the road to a tiny village known as Tembeling, our day's destination. It was rather late in the afternoon. We were sure that hitch-hiking in Malaysia was easy, especially if you were western, but we'd been waiting an hour when we began to worry just a bit.
"Hmmm, do you suppose that the last bus to Tembeling would actually stop if we waved it down?" I wondered.
"Well," Peter replied, "considering that they stop on a dime for every old lady with a backpack full of chicken, I don't see why not."
"How could we be any different!?"
"Indeed."
Just then, a white minivan stopped a few yards up the road. We clambered in to find a Moslem couple, the wife dressed in her brightly-colored head-to-toe silk batik tunic and matching long, loose ankle-length skirt. The Moslems and the Americans shared little in the way of common words, but we all smiled alot and within an hour or so we arrived at the Tembeling dock, even farther than we'd hoped to reach that evening. Our plan was to catch a longtail boat from this point the following morning at 9:00 am for a three-hour ride to Taman Negara (literally, "National Park," Malaysia's only).
It was 7:30 pm and there were no "real" places to stay within 150 miles. We had attempted to communicate our plans to our fellow passengers while still on the road but, as usual, we had no idea if they truly knew what we were trying to say. The tendency while traveling in Asia is to assume people understand you, primarily because you want to believe they've understood. So when we pulled up to the dock, with it's empty vendor stalls, its row of slender, roofed longtails in the swift muddy river and it's rather deserted-visitor-center-in-the-middle-of-fucking-nowhere look, well, we were just a bit curious about what would happen next.
