This Town is coming like a ghost town...

 Travelling during a Pandemic

The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur

So we’re on our first tour of Malaysia, packing in 3 venues across 6 days; Kuala Lumpur, Johor Baru and Melaka.

This post isn’t going to be about the travels in detail. That will be in a following one. This is going to be a reflection on the impact covid has had, at least from my point of view, on Malaysia.

Now I will caveat this by saying that these are no more than surface observations and extrapolations of reading I have done and conversations I have had with others who have been observing the situation first hand. I don’t profess to be an expert in economics or politics, but I will say what I have seen.

On Penang the impact of the lockdown was clear. We arrived and everything was closed, even the private pool on the estate we were living on was shut. This didn’t last too long, but it was clear that things were not normal - there was no traffic and we could park easily in any of the malls and shopping centres we went to. Not that there was anything open and we couldn't take Thomas into any of the shops as they weren't letting children under twelve into any venues.

All tourist attractions in Penang at the end of the lockdown - none of them are as quiet as this now!

However Penang bounced back - ish. There are now crowds in the hawker centres, the malls have filled with shoppers, the beaches are being used again, tourist attractions are open and being visited, the restaurants and bars are doing brisk trade most weekends. There are SOPs in place and people check in using the MySejahtera app (like the UK NHS Covid app, only good and it was about 32 times cheaper to develop and distribute) and there are limits on numbers in certain venues, but generally speaking life has come back and people are beginning to 'get by'. Only just, but they are getting by. I was chatting to the owners of a local frozen food and imported goods shop not far from where we live - it's by far the best place to score cheese (something not commonly or cheaply available here) - and they were saying that they were just about managing now lockdown had lifted, but that the lack of international tourism was still affecting them. Fortunately Penang has benefited immensely thanks to an increase in domestic tourism, but this is not true of everywhere on the island, let alone the wider state and certainly not universally the case across the wider country.

Kuala Lumpur felt like a busy capital city in places, but in other places it seemed to lack the tourists that would presumably have been around at this time of year. The city centre was busy, but then it is where a huge majority of the population is concentrated, so that comes as no surprise.

A fairly busy mall just next to the Petronas Towers - here life felt a little more like 'normal', whatever that means these days.

However some of the key tourist areas, such as the historic walk along the River of Life, were practically deserted. This is also explained by the fact that Kuala Lumpur is (or at least was) the 6th most visited city in the world in terms of tourism - domestic tourism could only make up for this loss to a limited extent. The effect was... interesting. There was a clear buzz and returning confidence, but all around the city the degradation that comes with two years of strict lockdown were clear and some businesses had clearly closed on a permanent basis.

This is part of an historic tourist walk that was practically deserted - we had the place to ourselves with the exception of a couple doing a photoshoot.

A little interlude for some human geography: 

Malaysia has a population of about 32 million people. 6.5 million live in the states of Sarawak and Sabah on the island of Borneo (they are the second and fourth most populous states in the Malaysian Federation).

This leaves 25.5 million (I'm rounding and approximating heavily) for the remainder of West Malaysia. Let's take of 1.5 million for the state of Penang (again I'm rounding) and this leaves 24 million people. The wider metropolitan area of Kuala Lumpur is home to an estimated 8 million people - That is one in every three people in the population of peninsular Malaysia. Small wonder Kuala Lumpur felt busy even without foreign tourists! (All statistic were sourced from https://www.statista.com/.) - Okay, technically only 1.5 million people actually live in KL city limits, but that is defined as the city centre itself, but like London, KL has expanded to take over existing suburbs and towns and whole new ones were created to accommodate the expanding urban population. 

Just looking at a simple road map of Malaysia shows how concentrated the population is around the KL area.

The fact is that Malaysia is not a densely populated country in comparison to the UK - most of the population of peninsular Malaysia is concentrated around the western and southern coasts with the interior being sparsely populated and the eastern coasts having few large population centres. 

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Population-density-map-of-Malaysia_fig7_269571033

However the third part of Malaysia we visited was different. Now again I have to preface this by saying that what we got, what we can only get for the (comparatively) short time we are living here, is a snapshot. That said I will still relay what I observed and my take on it.

The second part of our road trip took us to Johor Baru, a city of about 800,000 people on the very southern tip of peninsular Malaysia. This is where Legoland is and this was the reason for our visit, although on further investigation it turns out that there are a number of other good reasons to visit the place, so the chances are good that we'll be back.

Traffic all across the trip was heavy, the roads are big, but the junctions are not always well designed and this occasionally produced frustrating blocks along the highways, but the further South we travelled the less frequent this became. 

The traffic around Johor was steady, but as we approached where we were staying, around some of the newer developments in the Puteri Harbour area, the traffic all but disappeared. This is, or rather should have been, an up and coming area outside the main city centre. The development was centred around the new international ferry terminal, which was meant to provided access to Singapore. The condos, hotels, bars, restaurants were developed to service incoming travelers and weekend visitors from Singapore and the expanding economy and population of the special economic zone that has been created in Johor as part of the Malaysian government's overall economic strategy. This was a plan that looked like it would work, until covid. 

The area we arrived in looked amazing, but the three lane highways were by now practically deserted. The harbour area itself clearly had some activity, but away from this part of the town it felt a lot like lockdown pt1 did in the UK.

A nicely designed waterfront development that was, if not exactly deserted, only at about 25% capacity in terms of the usual level of visitor numbers.

On our first evening we got talking to an expat UK contractor who lived in Johor and used the harbour as his habitual hangout. According to him the run of at least a dozen restaurants and bars had been whittled down to three and the condo blocks were on average at no more than 10-12% capacity. How accurate this was is difficult to verify, but what was clear is that the area was in no way fully occupied and it felt weird. It was the height of a holiday season and it felt like a UK seaside resort in the depths of winter (visitor wise, clearly not in terms of the weather). Further evidence was available at night when it was clear that most of the units had no lights on beyond the public areas.

Here is part of an award winning development that, as you can see, is only partly occupied. There is a supermarket (a very good one actually) and a coffee shop, and a restaurant behind us out of shot. However, only about 20% of the retail spaces were being used and if you look in the background you can see an entire residential tower where there are few, if any, lights indicating units with people actually in them.

This sort of played into our hands a bit when we visited Legoland - there were plenty of visitors, but again it didn't get to much more than about 25% capacity and queuing was at a minimum. It made for a very pleasant visit, but I was left with an unsettled feeling.

This feeling was intensified when we went through the mall just outside of the park and it was clear that there were empty shop lots in at least equal number to those that were occupied.

All this was nothing compared to what we later found though. 

But a quick aside - at the end of the day we drove to a mall closer to the main part of Johor Baru, this was situated where there were more mature developments and where there was clearly a more established population. This part of town felt and looked much more alive. People lived and worked here, economic activity was clearly not dependent on tourism to the extent that it was in the Puteri, Iskandar, Medini areas.

Before this though we visited one of the world's great megaprojects - Forest City. A development on a series of artificial islands built into the Straits of Johor, directly across from Singapore. Unfortunately it now appears on YouTube in videos such as 'World's Most Useless Megaprojects'...

There are lots of reasons why this place went wrong; partly poor financial planning, partly overambition on the part of the designers, partly the change in the political winds that saw Malaysian politics make moves against the mainly Chinese investors and the Chinese government put caps on how much Chinese citizens could spend on foreign real-estate . Yet aside from this it is also clear that the pandemic took a toll, even investors who could buy there couldn't access the properties as they couldn't get into the country. There are no visitors using the the hotels that exist on the island as the development is quite a distance away from most of the attractions in the area and there are plenty of other options available.

Current estimates suggest that less than 500 people live on this part of the development. The entire place was supposed to offer accommodation for over 700,000 residents and even at 25% complete (how much of the master plan that has been finished to date) that means that there is room for 174,500 more people!

Frankly visiting this place was one of the weirdest experiences I've had. 

There was a fantastic hibiscus maze - it was empty, we had the place to ourselves.

At the centre of the maze there were some fascinating pieces of artwork (note - those tower blocks in the background are completely empty).

Just imagine it - every one of these fully completed and ready to occupy apartments (and there are houses with rooftop pools available too) are empty - all of them...

The only place there was any activity was around the commercial centre 'Fisherman's Wharf' - an ironic name as the very construction of the islands resulted in a disruption to the local currents and a substantial reduction in the catches of local fishermen...

Here a handful of tourists who were staying in the very under occupied hotel were doing some duty free shopping.

At various times it felt like we were either trespassing on a property that wasn't open for business or had just dropped into a dystopian science fiction movie. The experience is one I will not soon forget.

My final thoughts aren't about the politics or economics, as mad as they may have been and as much of a folly as this mega project may turn out to be, but instead I was left musing on the fact that we seem able to conjure up high specification investment projects from the very seas themselves, but there were still people sleeping on street corners in the capital city. That behind the investors and massive companies are people who will have lost savings, been laid off and now be struggling as a result of this project's failures.

It was a fun break and an interesting trip - I enjoyed it, but this last experience was... well I'm still processing what it was, but I suspect it will stay with me for a while to come!