Zookeeper quorum issue with external hbase client when running hbase on Amzon EMR

I am running HBase on Amazon EMR.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="configuration.xsl"?>
<configuration>
  <property><name>fs.hdfs.impl</name><value>emr.hbase.fs.BlockableFileSystem</value></property>
  <property><name>hbase.regionserver.handler.count</name><value>100</value></property>
  <property><name>hbase.zookeeper.quorum</name><value>ip-xx-xxx-aa-aa.us-west-1.compute.internal</value></property>
  <property><name>hbase.rootdir</name><value>hdfs://xx.xxx.aa.aa:9000/hbase</value></property>
  <property><name>hbase.cluster.distributed</name><value>true</value></property>
  <property><name>hbase.tmp.dir</name><value>/mnt/var/lib/hbase/tmp-data</value></property>
  <property><name>hbase.master.wait.for.log.splitting</name><value>true</value></property>
</configuration>

The above is the configuration. Now I am trying to start a new hbase client using:

val zk_quoroum = "xx.xxx.aa.aa"
val hBaseClient = new HBaseClient(zk_quoroum)

I am not able to get a connection to the zookeeper somehow:

6:04:54.238 [main-SendThread()] INFO  org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn - Opening socket connection to server /xx.xxx.aa.aa:2181
16:04:59.264 [main-SendThread(xx.xxx.aa.aa:2181)] INFO  org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn - Client session timed out, have not heard from server in 5026ms for sessionid 0x0, closing socket connection and attempting reconnect

The reconnect keeps on trying but never gets a connection. Has that something to do with the fact that the quorum is an internal url ? The client doesnt live in AWS. Anyone encountered this before ?