Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ©2009 Skyler Burt
As a travel photographer you must perfect your “travel portraits.” This is something that I’ve been trying to do for a while, but I admit I just haven’t got to the sublime art of making people comfortable around me. Or maybe it’s making myself comfortable around people, or both, I’m not sure. Whatever it is, I know I must get over it and produce some stellar portraits or I ought to hang up my camera now. Or at least shut myself inside a well lit room with a stove and focus on food photography, which for me would be the same. Although, I wouldn’t pass up a good meal, especially after taking a nice picture of it.
For the last few days Heather and I have been trying to take pictures, and I’m going to stress the word “trying.” I told Heather that “I’m going to make portraits of people no matter what, I don’t care if I have to ask a hundred people and ninety-nine of them say no, as long as I get one!” After her eyes stopped rolling we cracked open our trusty guide book and after careful analysis we set out to find the Thean Hou Temple. A temple, which the guide book describes as a three storey
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ©2009 Skyler Burt
beautiful Buddhist temple, one of the largest in Kuala Lumpur. As travel photographers, fireworks shot from our eyes in a cartoon fashion and we immediately went to look for it on the map. Maps by the way can never be trusted in guide books, unless they’ve been printed yesterday, especially of countries growing as fast as Malaysia. It seems that in the six years since our guide book was printed Malaysia has not only changed all the street names but the directions of them as well. The three maps that we have been using to try and navigate around the city all had a convenient little arrow pointing off the map with the words Thean Hou Temple. Not too surprising. Well, we weren’t going to let some small, useless arrow stop us. At the bottom of the stairs in the lobby Heather remembers a stack of maps of the city that were different than ours. I quickly ran down to grab one, but again the dreadful arrow was pointing straight off the map into the void that was our lack of direction. “No worries” we say to each other,”we’ll just hop on the train and….” So that was our plan.
It was not that bad of a plan, it had certainly worked well for us in the past, and the trains here are very convenient. Among the plethora of trains that take you around the city we hopped on the MRT, or Monorail Transit. This is my favorite form of transportation around the city, mainly because you get really nice views and the train has no operator. That’s right, it’s completely automated with no driver,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ©2009 Skyler Burt
fantastic! Now, I don’t know if this is a regular thing, but it’s a first for me. No one else on the train seemed to be too surprised and I didn’t want to look foolish and start wildly gawking at this newfangled marvel of modern technology, shouting that no one is controlling the train, so I kept my cool. Once we exited the station in the area, which we suspected that little arrow on the map pointed, we were greeted by a short young man asking us “where ya from?” This is a regular occurrence for us if we stand in one place for more than thirty seconds. Usually the person asking, wants to sell us something or give us a overcharged taxi ride and out of sheer abundance of hearing this simple yet effective conversation starter, our most likely response is a shrug like we don’t speak English. This man didn’t look to be peddling anything, so we answered as we always do, “Los Angeles, and you?” This man, who’s name I can’t remember, seemed to be nice and informed us, in a whispering voice, that most tourists don’t usually venture into the area that we were in and that if we like taking pictures, we should go to, (insert name of district I can’t remember). We asked him if he knew of Thean Hou Temple, but he didn’t. So we walked for a while and he said he had nothing to do so he would guide us to the district of which he spoke of earlier.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ©2009 Skyler Burt
Right now in Malaysia, the people and government are really taking precautions over H1N1. Everyone gets handed a little white mask just about everywhere you go. Most people wear them, and our newly found man, the random protector of lost tourists, was following suit. It lead to a pretty funny walk. Every time we asked him a question, he would give us these really long responses, all I’m sure were quite informative, but nevertheless muffled by the mask like a Malaysian Darth Vader. At the end of each response he would pull down the mask and let out a great laugh and smile. We would nod and smile, blurting out a “Oh” and “Ah,” then our guide would pull up the mask and go on talking.
Soon we arrived at the district that he told us about, and we said our goodbyes. He turned around and headed in the direction from which we had just come and was gone. We never found the temple that day, but we saw it from the train heading back to our hotel. After lots of walking in the wrong direction we found the temple the following day. Like the guide book said Thean Hou is three stories and beautiful, but much newer than we had expected, and without the charm of some of it’s more ancient brothers.
Posted on September 22, 2009 by skylerburtphotos
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