When I was nineteen, my uncle Eddie took me to Walt Disney World for a fortnight.
You have to understand what Florida meant to a kid from London in the eighties. It wasn’t a holiday. It was a rumour. It was the thing that happened to families on the telly, and to one boy at school whose dad had a van business and never let anyone forget it. A millionaire’s holiday, that’s how we talked about it. Not for us.
By nineteen I was working for myself and could just about cover it, in the way you can just about cover something at nineteen, which is to say I covered it and then ate very cheaply for a while afterwards.
Before we went, I asked him what it was actually like. Was it as good as everyone said?
He thought about it for a second, and said:
“Imagine the best it could ever be. And then times that by ten.”
Which is an outrageous thing to say to a nineteen-year-old, because it removes any possibility of the place living up to it. He said it anyway. And the annoying thing — the thing I’ve never quite got over — is that he was right.
Thirty-five years later, somebody asked me if Malaysia is paradise
Uncle Eddie’s gone now. My cousins, who were about ten and mostly interested in whether the hotel had a pool, have got children of their own. Disney has changed and isn’t that place any more. Or I’m not that person. Probably both, and I know which one I’d rather blame.
But somebody asked me the paradise question a while back, and I heard his line come straight out of my mouth without asking my permission first.
Imagine the best paradise can be. And then times it by ten.
Then I had to go away and think about whether I’d just told a lie.
The English idea of paradise
Ask a British person to picture paradise and you get the same postcard every single time. White sand. Palm trees leaning over at that specific angle. Sea you can see your own feet through. Sun all day, no negotiation. A drink served in a coconut by somebody inexplicably pleased to see you.
The picture isn’t the interesting part. Everyone’s got the same picture — we’ve been sold it since we were small, usually in February, usually by a travel agent’s window on a wet high street.
The interesting part is that we all assume it’s somewhere else. Somewhere you save for. Somewhere with a booking reference and a flight home attached to it.
It’s a bit over an hour’s flight from my flat. About the same as London to Edinburgh, and considerably better organised.
The weather, honestly, with numbers
My rough reckoning, and I’ll stand by it: England gets about six weeks of nice weather in an average year, and then talks about those six weeks for the other forty-six.
Here’s what it’s actually like out here, and I’ve gone and looked it up rather than guessed, because “it’s hot” is not information.
Kuala Lumpur sits at a daytime high of somewhere between 30 and 33°C essentially all year round, and drops to about 24 or 25°C at night. Not in summer. All year. December looks like June with slightly different rainfall. The humidity runs somewhere around 73 to 82 per cent, which is the number that actually matters and the one nobody mentions on the postcard.
And it rains. Properly. About 2,500mm a year, with November the wettest month — that’s roughly four times what London gets, arriving in about a tenth of the time. British rain is a mood. Malaysian rain is an event, and it’s over in an hour, and then everything steams.
So: eternal summer, yes. Eternal June, more accurately. Nobody’s ever had to cancel anything here because of the season, and I haven’t scraped ice off anything in years.
Now the bit that ruins it
I’m not selling you a timeshare, so here’s the part the brochure leaves out, and it’s the single most useful thing on this page.
It doesn’t matter what country you live in. You still go to work. You come home, you eat your tea, you have a bath, you go to bed, and you get up and do it again. You still pay bills. You still wash your clothes, and they still sit in the machine long enough to need doing twice.
I don’t care if you lived in the clouds on a rainbow. You’d still have a washing basket. You’d still be standing at the sink at half nine on a Wednesday wondering where the evening went.
The palm trees do not do your admin.
And the money is relative too
Same principle, and people get this one badly wrong before they come.
You earn Malaysian money, you pay Malaysian prices. You earn English money, you pay English prices. Stand anywhere on earth and the two numbers are holding hands. In a perfect world you’d earn English money and pay Malaysian prices — and if you ever work out how to do that legally, come and tell me before you tell anyone else.
Some of it genuinely is cheaper, and I’ve written the actual figures up rather than waving at them: what a month in a condo really costs. Some of it is a great deal worse — a bottle of gin is about five times what you’d pay at home, which is either a disaster or a health scheme depending on your outlook.
The honeymoon runs out, and later than you think
Worth knowing if you’re planning this: the first couple of months genuinely do feel like a long holiday. Everything’s a novelty, including the supermarket. Especially the supermarket.
Real life didn’t land on me for about eighteen months. That’s much later than anyone warns you, and it’s the timeline I’d give anybody asking. You don’t get homesick in week three. You get it somewhere around month fifteen, on an ordinary afternoon, for no reason you can name.
That’s not an argument against coming. It’s an argument against expecting the novelty to do the heavy lifting forever. If you want the properly unvarnished version, I’ve written who should not move to Malaysia, and I meant every word of it.
So — is it paradise?
The beaches are real. They’re all genuinely there, and Langkawi is an hour away rather than a fortnight and a remortgage. The sun turns up every day without being asked. It costs less than you think and it’s warmer than you can quite believe, and eighteen months in I still occasionally stop on the walkway and think: hang on, I live here.
But my uncle wasn’t being accurate when he said that to me. He was talking about a theme park in Florida with a queue for everything and chips that cost a fortune. He knew that. He said it anyway, because he was telling a nineteen-year-old to walk in expecting the world — on the grounds that expecting the world is the only way you ever get anything close to it.
So I’ll pass it on, with one edit.
Imagine the best paradise can be, and times it by ten. Then remember you’ll be doing it on a Tuesday, with a wash on.
Cheers, Eddie.
