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Despite limited resources, Xian managed to survive her academic pursuit as an international student on PAMA (Papa & Mama) scholarship at Monash's Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences. She waited at restaurants and worked in healthcare centres to supplement her cost of living which saw the forex yoyo-ed from RM1.96 to RM2.93 throughout her 4-year course. I have a lot of respect and admiration for her because she paled badly compared with the luxuries showered on some MARA-sponsored students her housemates related to me.

AK Chan (left) and Alan Chan who brought their families out to host me at Jackie's Kitchen

I also cherish the camaraderie I shared with AK Chan and Alan Chan, and their respective families. The Serdang Agricultural College graduates migrated to Australia some 20 years ago with one mind -- to secure quality education for their children. They sacrificed their stable lifestyle during the initial years, but their labour of love has born fruits, and they now have time on their side to explore Mother Nature and the quality of life living in Australia. AK drove a roundtrip of 12,000km from Melbourne to Perth to attend the Wild Flower Festival 2003, that took him three weeks on the road. That's a facet of quality life I talk about.

AK and Alan, I believe, are people who have the foresight to discern what quality education had meant two decades ago -- did our higher education start to degrade that early? My good friend CY Leow took the same route and migrated to New Zealand in the 80s to see through the education for his two daughters, who have since graduated and started their career life.

Today, you find luminaries like Hishamuddin Hussein, Marina Mahathir, Kalimullah Masheerul Hassan, and many others, sending their forex to fund their kids' studies in Melbourne. For the sake of your kids, you can put aside patriotism and the faith in our national education system though it's these two political components through which you often hoodwinked the ignoramus. But you don't have to be hypocrite about the whole thing when your children's education is at stake, do you?

Both AK and Alan are folks I have never met before this trip, but they have been following this blog very attentively. There are minute details in my blog entries that I had forgotten but Alan could recall vividly at the snap of his fingers. I like the feeling that Internet has brought us closer together.

May 18, the day Xian formally graduated, I had the precious opportunity of meeting up with my mentor, Dr Harchand Singh Thandi, who supervised my MBA in international management some ten years ago. He was then with RMIT University Graduate School for Business Studies. Today, at 67, Harch still keeps his mind razor-sharp by lecturing at the graduate school at Swinburne's Hawthorn campus, consult and deliver papers around the world. His four kids, for whom he laboured relentlessly just like AK and Alan did, are now men and women on their own, career-wise.

At the backyard of Harch's house

In his house, as in AK and Alan's houses, I realised the warmth of loving parents, and understood that the family that stays together, grows together. That's the value of good life, and lessons for us, and I hope Xian will pick it up when she moves on to the next phase of her journey.

I'd like to thank Let Boonwaat of Gem Travel & Tours (Kuala Lumpur) and Jenny Na of the Victoria Tourism Board for drawing up my itinerary and ground support. Their kind arrangement has enabled me to collect some 4 gigabytes of images to produce a comprehensive travelogue which I had envisioned for this blog and LensaMalaysia.com -- this will unfold in the next few weeks when I finish post-processing the 600-odd images.

And there, Colin Charles (MySQL) had accompanied me for street photography at night, and Hardy Yu (RMIT University) for being my faithful navigator while I drove on the 1,500km trek. Many thanks folks.

There are so many things intrinsic that I would like to share as Malaysia evolves into a First World country, though we may be slightly too far off for now.

Ancora imparo.