NYLON - February 2009 - (Page 112) en route: THE PETRONAS TOWERS, IN KUALA LUMPUR there is no good reason not to go to malaysia (it shares a border with thailand, after all), so why are people staying away? by diane vadino alternative route CROSS INTO MALAYSIA from Thailand by land and the first thing you notice is the quality of the highway. The palm trees and the tropical light fi ltering through them are the same, but the road—which runs along the country’s western coast, south from the Thai border to Johor Bahru, which sits across the Johor Straits from Singapore—evens out. Signage indicating exits to the Cameron Highlands is prominent, uniform, and, notably, in English—another reminder, like the tea plantations on the Highlands themselves, of Malaysia’s pan-European colonial past, during which the English, Dutch, and Portuguese all laid the future-relics of their time here. Malaysia is a country with a PR problem. Its beaches have long been touted as superior to Thailand’s overrun equivalents; its diving off Borneo is some of the world’s best, and it has religious sites and natural attractions to rival its regional neighbors. Nonetheless, the country has persistently failed to draw visitors, in particular, Americans: We make up only a small percentage of those entering the country, either by land or by air, fl ying into the thoroughly modern international airport in the capital of Kuala Lumpur and taking a train into the city that matches the Heathrow Express in efficiency and cleanliness—and costs about 40 percent of the London version. Whatever its benefi ts, though, a sound infrastructure is a difficult sell in a tourism brochure. Unlike its Buddhist neighbors to the north, the country is predominantly Muslim, a fact that many Malaysians blame for the lack of tourists. “They think we’re all terrorists,” one cab driver tells me, and in Kuala Lumpur—or “KL,” as it’s known to visitors and residents alike—we spot a man wandering through a temple on a Sunday morning in a white T-shirt on which the words FUCK TERRORIST are written in oversized black lettering. Whether fuck is being used as an adjective or a verb goes unknown. In any case, Malaysia’s religiosity is a curious one: Native Malays, who are Muslims by constitutional definition, dominate, but there are also substantial Indian and Chinese populations, most of whose histories here extend several generations. The trinity is ubiquitous. What might feel like tokenism in the States is a mainstay of advertising and communications: From cell-phone ads to public notices celebrating Deepavali, the local name for the Hindu festival Diwali, viewers can count on a representative from each group on billboards and in print ads. Conflict 112 malaysia photographed by diane vadino
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