Pulau Ketam

After several wrong turns in and around Klang (a port town), we find the jetty for the "speed" boat that takes you to an island off the mainland which is famous for crab fishing (hence the name - 'pulau' - island; 'ketam' - crab). The journey takes about half and hour and the entertainment was either watching a television screen showing Chinese karaoke, or the gruff boat seat organiser prodding people and telling them to sit where she wanted them to sit. The latter was far more interesting.

Anyway, we arrive on the island and there are no cars or motor vehicles of any sort here, which is amazing for Malaysia. We walk around the concrete platform walkways along the ‘High Street’ and stop for some egg fried lala – basically an omelette with oysters and some sticky flour that makes it look like egg fried spunk, which I tried not to think about as I ate it. We walked off our dinner by wandering around the island’s raised walkways, along the river, passed the school and the cinema and that’s about it really!

I guessed that one of the downsides of not having any transport on the island is that there are no rubbish collection trucks, and everything is just thrown on the floor, knocked down under the raised walkways, making the place stink a little and under some of the houses, loads of rats were playing in this garbage. I tried not to think back to my spunky egg too much.

It was certainly a different pace of life out here compared to KL, and it was nice to get away. A couple of hours here is enough and then it’s time to head home, on a better boat that we came out on – and I get a seat next to this old woman and we chat about the island, photography, living in KL etc – she’s Malaysian and has lived in Taiwan for the last 10 years or so, plus spent time in Singapore. She was nice.