The landscape of coastal Kedah is unerringly flat; a fluid place existing at the juncture of land and sky and sea, a place where the earth is more liquid than soil and stretches out in every direction until it is lost in the not-so-distant horizon’s humid haze. This is one of Malaysia’s main rice growing regions, where the high water table spirit-levels the landscape flat. Alor Star, the principal town of Kedah, is easily passed through. Like every other town in Kedah it is a sleepy uneventful place. The K1 cuts a narrow two-laned straight line south across the sunlit landscape like an exercise in perspective, the vanishing point blurred by the hot and shimmering air. Traffic was light. My car moved over the tabletop flatness of this water-world where cauliflower cumulous clouds are reflected in the perfect mirrors of canals and flooded fields. The dark mud of newly ploughed padi fields shone and sparkled wetly under the sun. Other fields were filled with the vibran...
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Marc