The Law of the Jungle

The rolling English drunkard who built the rolling English road got utterly rat-arsed before going up to Bukit Fraser; there are more twists and turns than Agatha Christie could ever imagine and at the top could be Miss Marple’s village. Except of course for the monkeys. We stayed in an olde worlde English inn but lost the contents of the fruit bowl by leaving the window in our room open.

While we were enjoying the climate at an altitude a bit higher than anywhere in Britain, others dressed in yellow T shirts which the government banned the day before, were sweating it out in Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka Square where they were demonstrating their unhappiness about reports that the Prime Minister had trousered $700 million he had found lying around (see blog Cracking Malaysia 30^th July). This action, although totally peaceful, has backfired as the police are now using all their resources to track down the uncouth protesters who stood on a picture of the PM, which according to The Star seems to be far more serious than worrying about that odd bit of money that has been mislaid.

We continued our holiday week-end with a trip to the jungle and read in The Star (which is majority owned by one of the political parties in the government alliance), that a woman had been arrested on suspicion of releasing yellow balloons from the upper floors of a building where the PM and his wife were attending an event. The charge is intentional insult with intent to provoke a breach of the peace. In the Taman Negara they know how to breach the peace. We tried out a blow pipe that the locals use to hunt monkeys once they have added the poison from one of the rain forest trees. The law of the jungle applies to some but not to all in Malaysia.