Tag Archives: malaysia

THE BLESSING OF THE LIZARD KING by Peter Nolan Smith

February 12, 2024 – 3:44 am

Monitor lizards are native to Southeast Asia. These carnivorous predators are related to the famous Komodo Dragon and varanid lizards are cooperative hunters like raptors in JURASSIC PARK. According to the Bangkok Post monitor lizards are known to cluster in the city’s secluded water pipes and up to two hundred of the two-meter long beasts […]

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A Bigger Broom – Tioman Island 1993

January 30, 2024 – 12:59 pm

In 1993 I went to Tioman island in Malaysia. beautiful beach. remote. jungle. A Western woman came into the restaurant crying that a lizard was in her bathroom. I laughed thinking it was a gecko and grabbed a broom. I went to her bungalow and opened the bathroom to discover a giant monitor lizard over […]

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Penang Funicular

January 10, 2024 – 1:45 am

In 1994 I was stranded in Penang, Malaysia. The magazine for which I had been writing a series of stories about SE Asia had folded without buying my return ticket to the States. I had enough money to stay at the Swiss Hotel $3/night, eat at the Chinese and Indian restaurants on Chulia Street, and […]

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Drunk in Moscow, Not Idaho

July 13, 2023 – 1:23 am

In 1994 I traveled from Malaysia to Paris on Aeroflot. The Kuala Lumpur-Karachi-Dubai-Moscow-Paris flight time to Moscow totaled about 24 hours. None of them were comfortable in the flimsy chairs of the Soviet era jetliner. Disembarking at Moscow, I discovered that my connecting flight to Charles De Gaulle was delayed until the next morning. A […]

By Peter | Posted in 90s, semi-fiction, Travel | Also tagged , , | Comments (0)

Penang Gone

February 5, 2022 – 12:21 pm

Sumatra was a lost world in 1990. Tigers prowled the western jungles of Indonesia’s largest island, active volcanoes glowed in the night, and I drank Bintang beer with the ancestors of headhunters on the shore of Lake Toba 1500 meters above the sea and the night air was chilly after months along the equator . […]

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