Lire en francais I booked myself a plane ticket to Amsterdam. I had been working for almost two months non-stop and needed a break from the mountain refuge. As the departure date drew closer, I felt less and less like returning to “civilization.” I didn’t want to see cars and bars. I wanted to stay in the mountains. So that’s what I did. The plane left without me. I filled my backpack with all the essentials for a trek across the mountains and walked towards the Breche, the weight on my back making my ascent slower than usual. Sparse tufts of grass grew on the frontal face of the moraine. The wind carried the roar of the waterfall from across the cirque, sounding like ever-crashing wave as it flailed and splashed its way down the face of the Marbore. I passed the widening gap in the glacier and veered away from the route, following the water that trickled over the smooth rocks to join a pool in a glacier-gouged limestone hollow. I stripped off and waded into the...
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...
I moved to France in 1995 after 5 years in Brussels. I left for Malaysia in 2007, but a certain virus and an editing job I did on a certain politically charged book made a future there untenable. So I moved back to France and found a place quite different to the one I had left. I wrote a short piece for The Irish Times about some of the changes I have noticed since I moved back, but unfortunately it is paywalled.
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Marc