Sketching Malaysia: Through the island of Pulau Ketam on two wheels.

I arrive on the Malaysian island of Pulau Ketam exactly four hours after I’d intended to.

The station attendants in Kuala Lumpur had certainly been helpful, directing me to Platform 3 to catch my train to Port Klang, where the Klang River meets the Strait of Malacca and from where I planned to catch a local boat to Pulau Ketam.

But what the attendants failed to mention – and, more importantly, what I failed to ascertain myself – was that all trains departing from Platform 3 are not bound for the same destination.

And so it is that I quite confidently board the first train to arrive and settle in for the journey, due to take just one hour and ten minutes. For whatever reason, one and a half hours go by before I think to check the route map displayed above the train’s sliding doors. It doesn’t take long to realize there are two branches of this particular line, and – naturally – I’m on the wrong one.

While I curse my mistake (i.e. berate myself with you-should-know-better-by-now’s) and spend the next three hours re-tracing my steps back into Kuala Lumpur, ultimately catching the second-to-last boat for the night, I can’t help thinking of my writer friend Mike Sowden, for whom hapless travel is next to godliness.

“Mike would be proud of me,” I tell myself. “You got lost, you messed up, there’s a reason it happened.”

And the reason, I discover nearly as soon as the boat reaches Pulau Ketam, is that I’ve arrived on the island during rush hour.

I know, I know…it doesn’t really look like the kind of place to have rush hour, now does it?

But when I walk up the pier to my home for the night, the Sea Lion Inn, I am indeed dodging a steady stream of bicycles the entire way. Their shrill silver bells ring without apology, piercing the twilight air – everyone, it seems, is out right now: grandfathers and grandsons, schoolgirls and fishermen and someone who appears to be a mechanic in greasy yellow rainboots, the blue bucket fashioned to the front of his bicycle in lieu of a basket overflowing with tools.

As soon as I check in, it’s clear there is only way for me to see this island: on two wheels. I rent a bike from the manager of my hotel for 5 ringgit – or about $1.50. It’s old and yellow, the seat so rusted I even can’t raise it. I follow one road as far as it leads me – and by road I mean the cement walkways connecting all the houses, which perch above the trash-ridden marsh on stilts – to where I’d need to exchange my bike for a boat to go any farther.

Another path proves more fruitful and I ride until the sun goes down, the houses in this old Chinese fishing village moving past me in a blur of bold and daring color combinations: teal clapboard siding with cornflower blue trim, purple siding with a shamrock green roof. And the boats knocking against the wooden docks are no less flamboyant, swaying in saucy tones of turquoise and gold.

And it’s then that it hits me – I don’t want to leave this place.

I want to cancel my flight to Tokyo the next day, I want to call off the rest of the trip, I want to keep riding this rusting yellow bicycle forever. I want to go fishing on a bright red trawler. I want to live in a purple house with a green roof.

Sometimes, when I think about all these little pockets of existence around the world – of which this place is one, existing with only bicycles for cars and docks for roads, existing without us ever knowing it – it’s almost too much to comprehend.

How will we see them all? How will we know how strongly they smell of the sea at night when the women sit out front their homes and devein shrimp? How will we know how steep the bridges connecting their villages are, so steep you have to walk your bicycle up them – and, in many cases, down too.

How will we know?

That’s the thing, though – we can’t know; not for everywhere, of course – but I’m grateful for each little world that is revealed to me the more I see of the globe.

On Wednesday, I awake to rain falling down fast and hard over the island. It’s still falling as I board the boat, have a quick breakfast of kopi (coffee) and nasi lemak (steamed rice wrapped in banana leafs) on the mainland, and catch the train to Kuala Lumpur, where I finally have the chance to begin a travel sketch from the island.

And it’s as the scene is taking shape on the page that I come to understand – I arrived on Pulau Ketam thinking I was four hours late.

As it turned out, I was right on time.