Tawau & Singapore

I'm going through some diving withdrawal. The past week under the sea was great, and yesterday I had to give it all up to spend an evening in a hotel in Tawau for a flight this morning.

Tawau rhymes with "bow-wow;" after walking around for an hour or so yesterday, I can also say that it rhymes with "bithole." The seafood was pretty good but not all that. The restaurant had a nice surreal vibe, with waitresses wearing the Muslim head shawl, Malaysia flags flapping all over the place in preparation for national day, Filipino beggar children, and some music channel blasting the latest Beyonce and Jay-Z video. After dinner I watched a terrible movie on HBO ("Manticore") and terribly repetitive CNN.

I left Tawau 2+ hours before my flight because the new airport is far from the city center in the middle of a palm oil plantation. With the 30 minute journey, Tawau has become one of the newest members of the taxi driver employment association.

Anyway, my flight from Tawau to Johor Bahru was fine and I arrived in peninsular Malaysia around 1:30. I took two buses to the border with Singapore and was in my hotel room by 4:30. I walked around the Bugis Street area and the colonial district this afternoon and headed down to the river. Singapore seems very clean, efficient, friendly, British, and also boring and sanitized. Tomorrow I will go in search of beggar children trying to get me to pet their donkey in the ethnic neighborhoods of Little India (where I'm staying), the Arab quarter, and Chinatown.

So Singapore got a little exciting for a minute. Some guy walked into the internet cafe and the owner started to scream at him in Hindi. I think he was banished.