Motosikal = Motorcycle

   Today's musing will be on motorcycles, 

Malaysians and me.  In one of the first weeks we were here, I got heat prostration from walking around in the hot sun, running errands.  (Mad dogs, Englishmen and me--we all go out in the noonday sun!)  I was pretty pleased with all this walking everywhere because I could feel my long-unused muscles toning up and I thought I 'd lost a pound or two as well.  But my loving spouse decided all that benefit wasn't worth having a wife with heatstroke, so he hustled me out to get a motorbike.  We've decided (for now, anyway) not to get a car.  You can get about 2,000 taxi rides for the cost of a new, cheap Malaysian car--that's the reasoning behind that decision!  But often I need to go out and do something quickly.  I was accustomed to riding a motorbike in Japan, so that seemed to be the way to go.  This one even lets me take a passenger--hooray!


    So, we got one and then came the challenge of learning to ride in a traffic scenario that is nightmarish.  I won't go into that except to say that it was a steep learning curve--learn or die was the gist of it.  So, I learned.  You have to be extremely vigilant in traffic because the Malaysians are just nuts when it comes to traffic and driving!  

St. Nick's Protected Walkway

   Just the other day, I saw a motorcyclist become impatient at a traffic signal.  He was unwilling to break the law by turning left without having the left-turn arrow illuminated.  So, what did he do?  He drove his motorbike for quite a few meters up on the protected walkway for the visually impaired, which blind people from St. Nicholas Home use to get to the nearby shopping mall!  What if a blind person had been using the walkway and had been out of sight around the corner?   He'd have hit them and could have thrown them into one of the busiest intersections in this part of the island.
I'd have let him have it if I just could have caught him.  (Not that it would have changed his driving habits even a little bit.)

     But, back to learning motorcycle skills in Penang. . . . To my amazement, one of the hardest things was learning how and where to park one's "motosikal."  In Japan, you just stuck the thing wherever you liked.  But here, since so many people use them--not ex-pat wives, mind you, but regular people--they have whole systems set up to deal with the sheer volume.  At the shopping mall you can park in the private parking area pictured here.  They just cram those cycles in and there are hundreds.  So, it's kind of hard to find your own and even harder to get it out.  But it's cheap and it's covered parking, so I won't complain. 


    Alternatively, you can park in the mall's cycle parking area for half the cost and I did do that once.  I was so proud of myself for having arrived early and gotten a good spot in the covered parking area.  However, I didn't realize until I came out later that there would be three rows of bikes parked behind my own.  I thought, "Oh, gee--am I going to have to wait until the mall closes at 10:00 to retrieve my trapped motorbike?  But determination--no, desperation--empowered me to move three other people's locked motorbikes and extricate my own.  Lesson learned!


   Next episode -- the motorbike ride from hell!