"Malaysia, Truly Asia," the tourism advertisements that we saw on television kept telling us.  So we got sucked in; we went.  Heck, we had to go somewhere for Christmas vacation, or go crazy in Quetta. :)

Flew through Sri Lanka for a night, the old British colony of Ceylon, famous for tea.  Found a cafe we loved so much - housed in a perfectly-proportioned porch and verandah (with a perfect little pool) of a house that used to belong to an architect named Bawa - that we'd go back to Colombo just to sit and eat there again.  Enjoyed a drink in the evening in a fadedly fancy colonial hotel, watching the sea spray in the spotlights and listening to the wedding band at a stylish reception under a tent on the lawn.  A good beginning of relaxation after what had been a decidedly trying month or two in Pakistan.

You see, a medium-strength earthquake hit Quetta in late October.  Jules and I were both out of town at the time, and thankfully there was no real damage in the big city.  But, just outside in a place called Ziarat, tremors caused significant damage to houses, and some deaths, in the scattered villages of this mountainous desert region.  While immediate aid flowed in from political parties, the government, and concerned citizens, Jules' organization set about providing local families with something more substantial than a tent in which to spend the coming snowy winter.

Here's some photos of the damage: a partially-collapsed mosque...

...and a mud house where the heavy mud-and-timber roof crashed down on the sleeping occupants.

For more of my coverage of the earthquake, click here.

As it turns out, Jules and her team did a pretty darn good job getting winter shelter to affected families, but at the expense of long hours in the office and the field doing damage assessments, writing reports, making plans, preparing designs, buying and counting materials, and then finally distributing shelter kits to needy families and providing them with technical assistance to make a strong, warm, tremor-proof temporary home.  A lot of work.  Suddenly Jules was spending long days in the office coordinating these efforts, then long evenings, and sometimes nights, putting reports and proposals together at home...

But I promised tales of modern cities and beaches and vacation happiness, so let's just say we were rather ready for this end-of-December vacation!

We flew into the capital, Kuala Lumpur, and immediately started relaxing back into modernity.  Shoot, there was a sparkling and swift express train from the way-out-of-the-city airport into the town center (why can't we get this in DC?) and, in the city, a monorail, even!

After the conservativity (I love it when I get to make up words!) of Pakistani society and the relatively low state of the country's infrastructure development, it was quite nice to be in a well-built city with the usual landscape of tall buildings and smooth sidewalks.  And, it was very freeing to be in a modern Muslim country where no one seemed to mind showing a little skin (or a lot).  I pulled my one pair of shorts from my closet into my luggage and wore those regularly.  Jules exposed her arms and even a bit of leg, and almost forgot about the existence of the dupatta, the shawl that she wraps around her shoulders just about every time she walks out the door in Pakistan.  Plus, we could do romantic things like hold hands in public (and maybe steal a kiss now and then...).  But seriously folks, you just can't find a scene like the one below anywhere in Pakistan.

(Here's a pic of a Quetta city market, just for comparison...

...and how the few women who venture into its streets usually dress.)

In Kuala Lumpur there was Illy coffee (a sign that always makes Jules smile and give a little ooh of delight) and proper coffee shops, two other things that you really can't find in Pakistan. 

And there were fancy indoor shopping malls (can you guess whether those are available in Pakistan?) with all the familiar American brands plus all the unfamiliar European and Asian ones.  There were so many malls, in fact, that it was dizzying - we gawked through one or two and, exhausted, left the other six or seven for another trip.

We confess, we spent all day in one of these malls, window-shopping, doing a little buying too, going to a movie, and eating in the restaurants and food courts whose quality and selection was far beyond anything we've seen in the States.  Jules especially loved that, in the food courts, they segregated all the fast food joints in a little corner in a completely different section from the 'real' food stands.  There were so many options we, who both love chocolate, didn't even bother to get anything at this luscious-looking Godiva shop.

Then it was on to the north of the country to a beach-ringed, mountain-clad island called Langkawi, just in time for Christmas Eve and day.  We found it a bit like paradise (and neither of us are very beach-y people, really!).  We loved it so much we scrapped tentative plans to go to some mountain highlands or to Singapore and just stayed put for a whole week of eating, sleeping, relaxing, and island fun-ing.

We stayed our first few nights in a nice little place (the island was already packed for Christmas and we were lucky to snag a nice room even for a few nights) called the Beach Garden Resort.

It had a beach, as advertised...

...and a garden-y restaurant on the sand that served us baskets of house-made bread for breakfast and imported drinks for the sunset hour.

We rented a motor scooter our first day, and loved it so much we kept the thing all week.  It was really quite romantic, not to mention some of the best fun I've ever had, scooting all over the large island with Jules clinging tightly and the sea breeze taking away our cares.

When not on the motorbike, we spent our days under umbrellas on the beach...

... and island hopping on local tour boats,...

...dangling our newly pedicured feet (well, not mine) in a legendary freshwater lake on one island...

...and enjoying a hard-to-reach beach on another.

Back on Langkawi proper we savored the island's mountains by hiking up to a high peak.

Though we were sore for days from pulling ourselves up through the steep forest with ropes that some kind soul had affixed on the trail, we were so glad to be in a green place!  (Below, remember, is the dry mountain landscape we were taking a break from - trust us, these Quetta hills don't even look green after the winter wet season.)

On a different day we relaxed our way onto a majestic peak, riding in mechanized gondola style to the top of another mountain... 

...where there was a really cool, award winning bridge curving out over jungle between two peaks, with an amazing ocean-and-island view up into Thailand.

We loved that the island was big enough to have very local towns, both big and small, in addition to the main tourist beaches, with rice paddies spread all over the interior.

This local roadside stand...

... served us fried banana and sweet potato pieces with peanut sauce and home-made, sugary iced tea.  At under a dollar for a plate, this and other 'street' food that we had nearly rivaled anything we ate for our excellent Christmas dinner in a fancy, middle-of-the-rainforest restaurant at an upscale, cheapest-room-is-800-bucks-a-night resort (though Jules does swear her Christmas carrot soup was one of the most sublime things she's ever tasted - hey, if you can't afford to stay in the place you can at least try the food!).

On top of all this, the sunsets were lovely.

Oh, yes, there was adversity, too, as there will be in the international traveling life.  Like the island was chock-full of people for Christmas, I mean really stuffed, and despite our wanting to stay longer we thought we might have to leave Langkawi just because we couldn't find a place to sleep.  After two mornings of fruitless searching, on the day after Christmas we lucked out and got a flea-bag of a room at the last place we checked before grabbing our bags and heading for the ferry...  But at that point we weren't complaining.  Thankfully, we got to move to a better place after a couple of nights.

The other bit of adversity was that I had left Pakistan without a valid visa to reenter the country.  We planned to get one for me in Kuala Lumpur, but that didn't work out.  The uncertainty of being visa-less added some stress to our travel, but thankfully Jules organization stepped in and arranged for me to go to Nepal to get a visa - but that's a story for a different post (to follow this one on the website).

I'll just say that, once we settled down on Langkawi, we truly enjoyed ourselves, soaking in the warmth and the green forests against our return to cold, brown, forest-less Quetta.

All too soon it was time to leave Langkawi and spend New Years eve and day in Kuala Lumpur, where we walked the city with celebrating crowds and caught the midnight fireworks at the Petronas Towers (nearly the tallest buildings in the world) from a delightfully uncrowded lounge cafe.

Then it was goodbye to Kuala Lumpur, too (we were sad, it had been good to us)...

...as Jules flew off to Pakistan by herself and I made my way to Nepal.

We're both back in Quetta, now, where memories of our holiday keep us warm on winter nights that dip below freezing in a concrete-walled house with drafty windows where the only source of heat is small, fumey gas heaters in each room that must be turned off when one goes to sleep to ward off possible suffocation.  But Jules is finding successes both large and small at work, I am getting back into the personal writing that I abandoned for some more formal (and paying) work this past fall, and we are both enjoying each other's company.

Recently we stayed up late to watch Obama's inauguration, and while we were sad not to be there for this historic occasion, still enjoyed feeling connected to and newly hopeful about our home country despite being so far away. 

Happy New Year! (and President...)