Travel blog

Malaysia, truly Asia

george — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:35:00 GMT

I started off in Kuala Lumpur, and headed up to the Traders Skybar opposite the Petronas Towers, armed with camera and tripod, but I only managed to fire off a few snaps before a friendly waitress came over and told me that the use of a tripod up there was forbidden. So I opted to have some (expensive) drinks instead, and ended up having a good time, meeting some great Malaysian and Indonesian locals.

From KL I headed to Taman Negara on buses, via a night in Temerloh.

Floating restaurants on the river opposite the national park entrance

Taman Negara is a national park about twice the size of Luxembourg. Walking in the jungle was very hot and humid, and home to all sorts of wildlife, lots of butterflies, monkeys...

...Unbelievably big ants...

...And apparently some nasty hunting spiders. This sign was near the start of some walking trails, and I reckon that it was meant as a suggestion to do the walks with a guide! The park also has tigers, leopards, rhinos and elephants, but I think you have to venture quite far into the jungle for a chance to see any of those!

They have a long and excellent series of walkways, high up in the trees. You can walk along and spy lots of wildlife and jungle below.

The view from Bukit Terisek.

Having got to Taman Negara by bus, I left by boat, on a journey down the river that took a bit longer than planned. After about an hour, the heavens opened and we had half an hour of monsoon-style rain. As we were drying off, the boat's motor spluttered and cut out. It wouldn't restart, so we drifted down the river for a while, wondering if we were going to need to use the little paddle that was tied to the roof. But we didn't need it in the end, because a boat eventually came upriver to tow us down the final bit to Kuala Tembeling.

Finally the clouds lifted, but it was still pouring

From there it was a short bus ride to Jerantut (right in the middle of the peninsular part of Malaysia), where I stayed for a night before catching a mail train on the 'Jungle Railway'. It took over nine hours on the train to get to Kota Bharu, which is up on the north east cost, a few miles south of the Thai border. We passed hours of thick jungle, with occasional tiny villages, and gigantic, hot-chocolate-coloured rivers.

The train went fairly slowly a lot of the time, and stopped in dozens of villages. Some of the stops were for ages (time for a few creepy-crawlies to have a poke around the carriages), but that turned out to be because there's only one physical train track on the railway. Use of the track is controlled by a token, which is passed between the drivers and controllers at some of the stations, so a fair bit of time was spent waiting for other trains to clear the tracks and pass over the token.

I stayed in Kota Bharu, which feels very different from Kuala Lumpur, partly because its population is almost completely Muslim and ethnically Malaysian, compared to Malaysia overall, which is a mixture of Malaysian, Indian and Chinese people (thanks to the British Empire).

From there I headed south down the coast, and out to the Perhentian Islands, which were a lovely mixture of clear water, sand, sunshine, and friendly people.

'Romantic Beach' on Perhentian Kecil

Long Beach, the main backpacker one

At 9am, there were thousands of these termites crossing the path on the ten minute walk through the jungle between Coral Bay and Long Beach, and when I came back at midday, there were still tonnes of them crossing...

Also on the path I saw some monitor lizards... the first one was massive, about the size of a child! Honestly!! This one was a lot smaller, but at least it did pause for a while for photos...

Pasir Petani beach

At the second place I stayed, the Watercolours Impiani (which was very good) on Perhentian Kecil's Pasir Petani beach, there seemed to be wildlife everywhere. When I first went into my wooden hut, I was greeted by a brightly spotted frog which was living in the half open cistern of the loo. Outside the hut (not at the same time, though!) I spotted a snake, the monitor lizard below, several big Golden Silk Orb-Weaver (thanks Wikipedia) spiders, which seem to be all over the jungly bits of Malaysia, funny little squirrels, little ghost crabs on the beach, lots of different butterflies and other insects of all descriptions - including the ones that start up about an hour before sunset, and make a very loud, high pitched screaming sound.

I wasn't using a telephoto lens, but since this spider was staying very still in the middle of its web, I managed to get brave enough to go really close to it. The spider didn't seem bothered, but then suddenly it jolted into action and moved like a flash out of the viewfinder. I jumped back quickly (obviously), much to the amusement of one of the guys who worked there...

... but thankfully it turned out that the spider hadn't jumped onto my head or shoulder or anything. A bee had flown into the web, and the spider killed it quickly before wrapping it up in silk to eat later.

Perhentian Kecil, the smaller of the two main islands, is classed as the 'backpacker' one, and having spent five nights there, I went across the water to Besar for the last two nights, and was surprised to find that Mama's Chalets (which were excellent) were cheaper than either of the places I'd stayed on Kecil - 60 Ringgit, about £12 per night. Having said that, on Kecil there were some very cheap huts available, from 20 Ringgit.

It wasn't all blue skies in the Perhentians - most mornings started off overcast, and then the cloud burned off in the afternoon. But on the day before I was planning to leave, we had proper thunder and lightening, and torrential rain for several hours.

The rain didn't stop on the next day, and having got packed up and ready to take a motorboat back to the mainland at noon, it turned out that the boat wasn't coming, so I stayed for an extra night. The huts were great, but they weren't posh enough to have aircon, so all of my stuff got damp and heavy - even things in the bottom of my bag. But the hut was still a lot more dry than the jungle around it, and being in a corner plot, I got a good amount of animal visitors seeking refuge from the weather. Some of them weren't very welcome, but I liked these geckos, which had made a home on the bathroom ceiling. Those four things at the top left are their eggs that had been there for ages, two of them already hatched!

The next morning it was still raining, but the motorboat did come, so we all got completely soaked on the hour long crossing back to the mainland, especially the Swedish couple next to me, who were sitting in the direct line of the sea spray. That was the start of an eleven hour journey down the coast to Kuantan. After the boat and a short taxi ride to a town with a bus terminal, I had a two hour plus wait for a late bus, then a seven hour bus journey.

The bus stopped at a roadside cafe for us to get some food, maybe some designer clothing!

Arriving in Kuantan, getting out of my still-wet clothes and into a hot shower - for the last six days on the Perhentian Islands I'd only had cold running water - seemed like a dream about to come true! But unfortunately the water in the Kuantan hotel was cold too! It wasn't until I'd had the shower and was getting dressed that I realised there was a switch in the room to turn on the hot water - Duh!!

Kuantan

The next day I got a bus to Kuala Lumpur and had a stroke of luck. I was quite late checking into a hotel, and the receptionists had a long discussion about which room to put me in, before asking if I wanted to pay 40USD to upgrade to a superior, twin towers view room. I said no, but clearly there were no other rooms available, so they had to give me the upgrade for free! So I had a room with an obscenely big bed, marble everywhere and all the other trimmings. I celebrated with a beer from the minibar in the massive bath! It was my first beer since leaving Kuala Lumpur over two weeks ago. Alcohol isn't widely available in NE Malaysia, though you can it find fairly easily if you make the effort. Also, it seems to be about the only thing in Malaysia that's heavily taxed, so after a fortnight of detox, a cold can of Carlsberg in a hot bath was very welcome!

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All photos © George Clerk. All rights reserved. Licenses available at www.istockphoto.com/resonants or please contact me at photos@foogaloo.com

If anybody wants a proper, full resolution copy of one of the pictures in this blog, email me at photos@foogaloo.com, and I'll send you a code for iStockphoto which will give you ten free credits when you sign up. You may well find better pictures among the 4.5 million there, and decide to download them for free instead! Not all the pictures here are on the site yet, but when I'm home I'll be (eventually) uploading most of the ones that aren't.

New Zealand (...a-gain!)

george — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:22:00 GMT

It's been a while since I updated this blog, but I've been back in New Zealand since I last updated it (just before Christmas)...

Emily and Billy on boxing day, playing in a cardboard box!

This is a fantail. They're very friendly, and confidently come into houses to fly around and catch insects. This one kept coming into the spare room at Jules and Steve's, always carefully flying through an open window or door, and never seeming bothered if someone was in the room at the time. It loved the mirror, and - after gobbling a few flies - would fly around the mirror, chirping away at its reflection. They also sometimes hang around parked cars, so they can fly around the wing mirrors and check their reflections.

Christmas and New Year with Jules, Steve, Emily and Billy were brilliant, then I met Mildred and we decided to go off and set up a supermarket...

But as well as that, I went down to Queenstown where I bought an el-cheapo tent and gas cooker (both only £9 each) and rented a car.

Milford Sound from Sandfly Point (which really lived up to its name - there was literally a black cloud of bloodsuckers at times!)

The obligatory sheep photo

Mt Cook, the tallest in Australasia

There's no shortage of ferns in NZ!

Getting some forestry photos near Hanmer Springs involved walking up through tonnes of bone-dry and ultra-sharp discarded pine branches, which involved me - wearing shorts and woefully inadequate shoes - getting cuts all over my legs. A week later, one of them was still a huge infected bump on my leg, so I did my best Rambo impression, and removed the scab to find and extract a chunk of wood... the infection went away eventually, but I don't think the photos were really worth the pain!

It can be hard to contain your excitement upon entrance to the Grey District!

Ten minutes after driving carefully through roadworks with light traffic, over a few KMs of newly chipped surface, I used the water squirter to get the dust off the windscreen. As I was driving along, I saw a diagonal line spreading steadily across the windscreen. It looked very strange, and at first I hoped it was just a droplet of water at a bizarre angle, but it turned out to be (as feared) a crack in the windscreen. Since I hadn't taken the (expensive) insurance, I was worried that it was going to cost me a fortune, but it didn't turn out to be too bad - in the end paying to replace the windscreen cost me less than a third of what the insurance for the whole time would have cost!

Kaikoura

The walk through bush up to here (just south of Kaikoura) also involved plenty lacerations to the legs!

In the Marlborough wine district, near Blenheim, you have to overtake lots of these slow-moving vine harvesters, but it's not hard, since you can see straight through them!

Part of the Marlborough Sounds

Unlike the car, my tent made it in one piece all the way up to Picton, but unfortunately no further... on my final night on the South Island, one of the poles snapped, so that was the end of that!

This is Mt Taranaki, which from most angles (not so much this one) looks just like Mount Fuji. So much so that it was used as Mt Fuji in the film 'The Last Samurai'

On the 'Forbidden Highway' inland from Mt Taranaki is an unexpected whole different country... the republic of Whangamomona. It's an area - including a small town and a fair bit of countryside - that decided to opt out of the country of New Zealand. Apparently it started with a council boundary dispute which ended up with the people of Whangamomona saying, "Bugger this, we'll look after ourselves!" I doubt that any bloodshed was involved in the Whangamomona Revolution!

I thought I was keeping a respectful distance from these bee hives, but quite a few of the bees seemed to disagree. It was very hot, so they were full of energy, and flew into me at top speed. Two managed to get down the neck of my t shirt and went berserk, buzzing around crazily as I did my best to get them out. Incredibly, I didn't get stung, and lived to see another day!

They still can't fly, but some kiwis have learned to ski!

The middle of the North Island is full of volcanoes... this is the boss of them all, Mt Ruapehu

The 'Craters of the Moon' geothermal area, which unexpectedly got much more active in the 1950s when a nearby geothermal power station was built

Heading east from Taupo, I was on the quiet and narrow residential streets of a small town called Murupara, when a big guy on a Harley Davidson went roaring past me at very high speed, skidding around the corner in front as children who were playing by the street scrambled to get out of the way. He was followed a few seconds later by a police car, struggling to keep up. Around the corner was another police car was coming fast the other way, but the biker had vanished up a side street. By the time I'd left the town, I'd seen five police cars, all in hot pursuit with sirens and lights blazing, but I don't know if any of them managed to catch him.

A silver fern (that's the underside - the top is green!)

East Cape, NZ's most easterly point

The most easterly, ahem, cinema in the world!

A Tsunami warning sign at Te Araroa

Coming south on the Pacific Coast Highway, I came very close to hitting a dog at speed. The road was winding, but you could see that it was clear for miles, so I was going quite fast. Approaching a house, I saw a collie dog lying in the grass, a few meters from the road, so I slowed down a bit. But just as I was about to pass the house, it turned out that the dog wasn't lying down, it was crouching watching me, poised to leap at the car. I've never seen a dog doing it before with cars (I suppose dogs that do don't last very long) but it pounced out playfully onto the road right in front of me, so I slammed on the brakes and swerved, and - only by a matter of centimetres - managed to miss it. Thankfully the car had ABS, which did a good job of stopping me from skidding off the road!

This was my second tent and my third hire car (it's cheaper to get a different car on the North Island than to pay to take one over the Cook straight from the South Island)

With my little gas burner, a small frying pan and no fridge, culinary options were severely limited, but that didn't stop me coming up with (I think) a new way to cook eggs, which I might try to patent: behold the mighty Scromlette©™ - a cross between scrambled eggs and an omelette...

Pan fry a medley of seasonal vegetables, season to taste, then crack in two eggs. Quickly stir until the eggs are cooked. Drizzle brown sauce according to taste; Serve.

The result doesn't look very appetising, but tastes delicious!

The (second) obligatory sheep photo!

Captain Cook's ship first landed near Gisbourne on the North Island. This statue at a lookout over the town was put up in 1969, but it wasn't long before people started asking questions about it... mainly because the statue man (apparently) bears no resemblance to Cook, and the uniform is nothing like what they wore in the British navy in 1769. Under the statue is a long spiel about all that, followed by 'WHO WAS HE? WE HAVE NO IDEA!'

After Hawkes Bay, I drove back towards Taupo, where I met Mum, Dad, Jules, Steve, Emily and Billy. We rented a bach (Kiwi holiday home) in Pukawa for a week, then I had a lovely fortnight staying back with them on the farm, before flying to Kuala Lumpur, where I am now.

This campsite had a nautical theme throughout!

Hong Kong Stopover

george — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:36:00 GMT

I'm only in Hong Kong for four days, and haven't got round to writing anything, so here's a bunch of pictures instead:

Tough food choices

Louis Vuitton was so busy in the run up to Christmas that they'd started a nightclub style one-in/one-out policy on the door. I decided not to bother about getting the £7,000 replacement for my rucksack!

Another Hong Kong shop

Central

Central again

From the Peak on Hong Kong Island

A cruise ship docked by Kowloon

The nightly light show from the Avenue of Stars

Girls promoting an online game in Mong Kok

A Dim Sum brunch that I was really looking forward to.

Un-PC food is abundant in Hong Kong... It took me about ten minutes to walk past all the shops specialising in shark fins and bird nests on the way to the nearest MTR station.

I really want one of these pianos! On top of the lid it was completed by a big golden prancing horse.

I'm leaving tonight, so about to check out of where I'm staying and head to the Airport Express train station where I can check in for my flight that leaves tonight. Then I'm off to try and get a bit of culture at exhibitions by Vivienne Westwood and Damien Hirst.

Hualien to Taipei the long way

george — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:17:00 GMT

Since the weather was still rubbish, I decided to stay in Hualien for a second night. While there, I used a couple of the city's massive, ultra-cheap and high speed web cafes. I felt old and square as I sat writing emails and booking flights while hordes of young chain smoking gamers annihilated zombies at maximum volume!

Having never tried it, I chose 'goosemeat' with a side order of shiitake mushrooms at a restaurant. That arrived, and was delicious - the goose tasted just like beef...

... but that turned out to be because it was beef! Once I'd finished the first dish, it became clear that I'd only eaten the side order!

Then the goose arrived...

...and I waited a few minutes, not wanting to make an arse of myself by being the only foreigner, _and_ trying to eat raw goose! Some of the other tables had burner sets on them, so I thought I might be getting one too.

A few minutes later I tried to convey my 'should I eat it like this?' question to a waitress, but she went away and eventually came back with a cardboard box for me to take the goosemeat home in!

So I decided to eat it, and it was also delicious - I think it must have been marinaded or cured or something.

The next day I headed down to Yuli, and stayed for a couple of nights outside the town at an excellent B&B called Wisdom Garden. May and her husband, who ran the B&B, were incredibly generous and took me out for all sorts of meals at the markets in Yuli. We also went to see some friends of theirs who are bee-keepers. They had dozens of hives, and seemed to produce about as much royal jelly from their bees as honey.

Extracting royal jelly... I'd never tried it before, and fresh out of the hive it was extremely strong stuff!

When I left Yuli, May and her husband gave me a lift down to Tawu, since they were heading to the south of Taiwan. From there I got a train to Kaohsiung on the south west coast. It's Taiwan's second largest city, and one of the busiest ports in the world.

From Kaohsiung it took me about eight hours to get up to Ruelli, which isn't all that far away, but public transport in Taiwan outside the big cities isn't always great.

Bamboo forests

After a couple of nights in Ruelli, it took the best part of a day on buses and trains to get up to Sun Moon Lake...

Very tranquil, but for completeness here's a picture taken looking in the other direction...

Although the weather was mainly good, the haze was unbelievable... having trekked for hours to get a good view of the lake, it was barely visible!

Part of a huge tea plantation

At Sun Moon Lake I also saw what has to be one of the world's thinnest hotels!

From there it took a couple of coach journeys to get to Taipei, where I had a day to see a few more things.

I thought this was some amazing temple, but it turned out to be an expensive hotel!

Since there was hardly anybody else around, this man gave me an amazing private recital of several traditional Taiwanese and Japanese tunes at the Confucius temple (which is in the picture at the top).

My last Taiwanese hotpot meal... can anybody really eat that much for lunch?!

Taiwan - Taipei to Hualien

george — Sat, 6 Dec 2008 01:08:00 GMT

From Fukuoka in Japan I flew to Taiwan with China Air, which is the national airline of The Republic of China (Taiwan). China Air is not to be confused with Air China, which is the national airline for The Peoples' Republic of China (China). Confused? I was fairly confused at the airport, until I realised that I had to check in for my China Air flight at the Japan Airlines counter!

This is the controversially named Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall in central Taipei - a massive building, even though it looks quite small here.

Taipei 101 is currently the world's tallest completed skyscraper. Next year it'll be trumped by Dubai's new mega building, though. It's over half a kilometre tall, but despite the fact that it towers over Taipei, you don't actually see it very much in the city, because most of Taipei is fairly built up. From the top it feels like you're looking down on the city from an aeroplane though. Despite the miles and miles of mountainous countryside, Taiwan is only second to Bangladesh in the world for population density.

Mopeds are very popular in Taipei.

The English used in Taiwan is very modern!

After four nights in Taipei I headed south east on a train down towards Taroko Gorge, which was much more impressive than I expected. That was helped by fantastic weather, which I was assured wouldn't last.

These pictures don't do Taroko Gorge any justice.

The pagoda in the top right of the photo above this one was like the Tardis!

A temple in Hsincheng

From Tienhshiang in Taroko Gorge, I got a bus to Hsincheng, then had a short train journey down to Hualien. By that time the weather was back to normal - an overcast white sky.

I'd been in Taiwan for a week before I met any foreign tourists, but before that I did meet several people who were working or studying here, especially in Taipei. Taiwan doesn't seem to be very popular with foreign tourists, despite the fact that travelling here is relatively cheap and easy. I reckon that it'll soon become a popular place to come.

Hualien

Coming from Japan, there was a definite cultural change in many ways, but most clearly in the way that people deal with you. In Japan, everyone you speak to, especially in shops and accommodation, is unbelievably friendly and helpful, often rushing around at high speed to make sure that you don't have to wait more than a moment for anything. Not so in Taiwan - people on the whole are still friendly, but that's mixed in with a healthy dose of 'Yes... And now what do you want?' gruff attitude, which is actually quite refreshing a lot of the time! You still get the occasional 'Ni Hao... I Love You!' from a cleaning lady, which is always nice!

I had brunch at a cheap place on the street, and having had a look at their display after eating, I was glad that I'd just gone for 'beef'. Is that a heart?

But I splashed out 230TWD (5 pounds) for a delicious supper - as well as the fish, I had all sorts to pop into my boiling water... tofu, a sausage, a prawn, spinach, cabbage, a samosa etc etc.

Thankfully two locals next to me kindly helped me out, and one of them took me over to the sauce area, and custom mixed me a sauce (you can choose from an array of soy sauces and oils, chilli, garlic, spices etc). After we returned to the table, he showed me what to do with the egg - separate out and discard the egg white, then mix the yolk into the freshly made sauce. When they left, the other chap gave me his business card (common practise in Taiwan - now I can finally get rid of some of my freebie cards from iStockphoto!). The card had children's pictures of aeroplanes on it, together with his name and number, under a 'Jet Fighter Pilot' title. Not sure whether I believe that he was one!

Make up your own caption for this one!

Like Japan, Taiwan is way ahead of the West in many ways. A kettle with a thermometer built in - genius!

Hiroshima to Fukuoka

george — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 05:10:00 GMT

Arriving in Hiroshima by a super fast shinkansen, the first surprise was the size of the city. It's quite big - the population's over a million. Otherwise, on the surface it seems very much like any other city in Japan. You see this type of tall and very thin car park (not much more than two cars widths) all over Japan. That cars are parked by machine - you drive your car in, then leave it to be automatically slotted into a space. When you collect your car, you drive onto the turntable, spin around, and you're all ready to drive back onto the street...

The petrol stations are brilliant too - no need to waste space with hefty pumps on the forecourt, they're in the ceiling, so you just pull down a hose and fill up...

But of course, Hiroshima is different. Towards the end of the war, a few large cities in Japan were spared from the conventional bombing which went on for months, as they were possible targets for the atomic bomb. The allies wanted to determine the impact that an atomic bomb would have on an untouched city. Out of the possible targets identified, Hiroshima and then Nagasaki were selected not long before the bombs were dropped.

This photo was taken from the rebuilt bridge that was the target for the bomb, which was dropped on the 6th August 1945. The bomb exploded about 600m above the ground, just beyond the ruined building on the left. The building is now called the A-Bomb Dome, and is world heritage listed, so it's been kept in the same state since after the war. The picture below shows the city not long after the explosion.

The nearby Peace Memorial Museum has lots of information about the bomb and the impact that it had, but seems to make a point of avoiding presenting a view as to whether using it on the city was right or wrong. Inside are old clocks and watches, stopped at 8.15am when the explosion happened, plus badly damaged clothing that belonged to children who were working at demolition sites in the city centre. It also has a section of a stone staircase which was bleached white by the explosion, except for the outline of a person who was sat on the stairs at the time, waiting for the office to open. The museum is presented for maximum impact, with the aim being to suggest that nuclear weapons around the world should be destroyed.

The museum is surrounded by a park, which was full of children playing football and kicking the leaves. Schoolchildren from all over Japan go to visit the city, and were doing a project of some sort, which involved interviewing and taking photos of other visitors. So being a tourist, I was asked the same set of questions at least ten times!

I was there for two nights, then headed on for a night in the town of Beppu in Kyushu, down in the south west of the country.

Slightly bizarre statue in Beppu

Beppu

The day after that, on the way between Beppu and Aso I had to wait for a train connection in a small town called Taketa. I wasn't bothering about breaking the odd bit of spider web as I snapped away taking pictures of the autumn leaves like this one...

...but then I remembered that Japan has its fair share of decent sized spiders, and that maybe I should check around me. It was a good thing that I did - just above my head in the little maple tree was this stripey monster, slowly moving closer as he kept a beady eye on me...

Aso town is inside the gigantic caldera of the still active volcano Aso-san.

The caldera of the volcano is so big that from Aso it still takes almost half an hour by bus and cable car to get to the crater of Mt Naka (above), which is one of the volcano's five peaks.

The view from Mt Naka

But before I did all that, I had to find somewhere to stay in Aso. Getting accommodation as I've been going along has been so easy that in a lot of places I've just turned up at the train station, found a place that looks OK, and asked if they had a bed spare. But knowing that Aso's quite small, I tried ringing a few places ahead. They were all either full or didn't answer, so I decided to just find somewhere when I arrived. That was a mistake!

I walked for about an hour and a half in the fading light, and the few places that I did find were fully booked. But then finally I saw a colourful sign for a hotel, and eventually found it tucked away up a road through the woods. Couldn't find reception anywhere. I had another look at the sign, and realised that I was at a 'love hotel', where you can rent a room for three hours, with the option to extend your stay in 30 minute blocks. Love hotels are basically discrete and places where couples go for a 'rest'. Contact with any staff is kept to a minimum to avoid embarrassment.

But they did also have a price for the night... not the most ideal accommodation, but by this time I was seriously running out of options, so I phoned the number. I got a lady who spoke no English, and seemed to be extremely unimpressed that I was calling. The Japanese words that I could understand were 'excuse me' and 'goodbye'!

So I headed back to the main road and kept on going, until I found myself at the next train station down from Aso, where I waited for ages in the freezing cold for a train. But thankfully I then did manage to get an answer out of a hostel and they still had a dorm bed free. I'd seriously been thinking that I might have to try to spend the night in one of the laundrettes that I passed - could have even washed my clothes at the same time!

This sign was in the hostel in Aso...

After a bit of volcano spotting there, I continued east across Kyushu to Kumamoto, where I stayed for one night before getting the train up to Fukuoka.

In Kumamoto I decided not to have food in this Thai restaurant, for some reason!

Fukuoka's Naka-gawa river in the rain.

Fukuoka tower

Then I headed up to Fukuoka (where I am now) on the North coast of Kyushu. Near Fukuoka Tower, I found 'Robosquare', a robot museum / shop. Being the only customer there, I was shown all sorts of robots, some for fun and some for home security or industry.

This mini-dinosaur was very lifelike in its movements, and responds when patted and stroked. When the picture was taken, it was half way through singing a Christmas song.

This one was having a rest.

The slightly embarrassing bit came when I was encouraged to wait another 15 minutes, until the 'robot dancers' were performing. So I did wait, and was still the only customer there to watch. Five decorated robot dogs did synchronised dancing and lip-sync to Mariah Carey's 'All I want for Christmas is you'. It was pretty clever, but a little bit cheesy! The staff clapped along through the song, and we all had to applaud the robots at the end!

After that, a gymnastic robot quite like this one did some warm-ups before doing lots of impressive tricks on the horizontal bar.

Nagoya to Osaka

george — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:51:00 GMT

My robotic hopes in Nagoya were sadly dashed by the fact that the museum closed recently due to lack of interest. I can't believe that anyone would not be interested in a building full of walking and probably talking robots, but there we are.

I tried out my new little camera's video mode to make the above, in a hotel in Kanazawa. On TV is an English language program for Japanese learners, it just happened to be about robots! Unfortunately I forgot to demonstrate the loo's lid closing - when you let them go at the top, rather than slap down quickly, the seat and lid separate, then slowly close like the eject on an expensive cassette player!

Next up was a train journey north to Takayama, where I'd planned to arrive on the first of a two day town festival, apparently timed to coincide with the best of the autumn colours.

The train journey was very pretty, despite the continuing dull weather. For the price of a GNER sandwich, I got a box full of delicious local specialities as we sped past mountain villages.

Having arrived though, it was soon clear that no festival was happening in the town - it turned out that the couple who told me about it had got the wrong month - the festival had already happened on 9th-10th October! The town was fairly quiet and very cold, but still very impressive, with amazing autumn colours. Some trees had the whole spectrum from fresh green to bright red on the same branch.

Thanks to a German tour group booking, I had to move from one ryokan (traditional inn) to another after the first night, but was glad - the Rickshaw Inn where I moved to was superb, and they also did a great breakfast.

I tried something local for lunch, and splashed out ¥2,100 for this spread, which included miso soup, raw beef, miso paste (I think) bubbling away on a leaf atop a burner, and lots of vegs etc. Very good.

It wasn't until the evening that I heard about a local speciality, basashi, which is basically horse sashimi. 'Ah', I thought! Casting my mind back to lunch, I didn't remember actually seeing the words 'raw beef', on the menu. I think the menu was in Japanese as usual, and I just pointed at the picture of the one I wanted. It looked like beef, and hadn't crossed my mind that it wasn't! Oh well, I'll probably never know!

Anywhere, after two nights there I had a couple of train journeys to get up north to Kanazawa. I was a bit confused about which of these trains went there at the connecting station, but the answer turned out to be the 13.23. Normally you can just match up the destinations with the English translation at the top, but I had to find some help with this one.

In Kanazawa I'd booked a room in a 'business hotel'. I normally mix dorms with single rooms as I go, and at $65 a night, which is way cheaper than a single room in the scummiest Aussie hostel, this one was a bargain (it's the one in the video at the top.)

As well as unlimited free internet use, aircon etc. in the room, the hotel featured the ubiquitous vending machines, selling drinks, food, beer and toiletries; a kind of onsen on the roof, with indoor and outdoor pools and a sauna; plus a small reading library which was exclusively stocked with manga. This is not just for kids - it's very common to see adults on trains riveted by manga 'comics', and even Japan's Prime Minister apparently says that he's proud to devote some time every day to reading manga.

Smoking laws here are almost the exact reverse of most European ones, you're welcome to smoke in bars, restaurants, cafes, hotels and trains, but outside on the street you get an on-the-spot fine, unless you're at a designated smoking station. Sometimes these are enclosed glass cabins with aircon! I can sort of see what is meant by the sign above, but am still bemused by the one below... is the ant drawn for scale, or is it also at risk from passive smoking?!

As well as a castle (a tiny part of it is above), Kanazawa has famous gardens, and I was lucky that finally the weather improved while I was there...

These contraptions in the gardens are not just there to look nice - they're to stop the branches from snapping when the city gets its annual heavy snowfall.

The new and very plush modern art gallery was filled with the work of Damien Hirst and others, but the best 'installation' seemed more like a magic trick than modern art:

Anything strange about this little swimming pool?...

...What about now?! (I don't have an underwater camera)...

...or now...

After Kanazawa I headed for three nights in and around Kyoto...

... then on to Osaka, which looked more Blade Runner-ish than anywhere I've been so far. It looked even more like 'Blade Runner' than this when it rained!...

After a dorm in Kyoto, I stayed in a very cheap hotel (about 25USD per night) in Osaka. That night I realised why it was so cheap - roughly every three minutes, 24 hours a day, a train passed close by and shook the whole room!

This is the Umeda Sky building in Osaka from the bottom...

...one of the two escalators in the middle...

... and the top...

Vending machines everywhere. Here you find what you want on the screen, pay for it and get a ticket, then take that into the restaurant...

Rather than handing out leaflets which people throw away without looking at, people advertising things on the street hand you some branded tissues!...

Tokyo and Nikko

george — Sat, 8 Nov 2008 12:11:00 GMT

Konnichiwa! I foolishly arrived in Japan knowing only one word in Japanese, and since that was 'sayonara' ('goodbye'), it wasn't exactly the most useful starting point for a conversation! But though English isn't very confidently spoken here, people are generally very willing to try and communicate using sign language and pointing etc., and generally are very helpful and patient with gaijins ('outside people') like me.

I had a week in Tokyo before starting the clock ticking on my three week Japan rail pass. For the first three nights I stayed at the excellent "K's House" hostel in Asakusa, sleeping in the smallest bedroom I've ever been in - the room was exactly the same size as the little bed, plus just a slither of carpet to step on to. Because I hadn't realised that my first weekend in Tokyo was a Japanese national holiday, my next accommodation options after that were limited to four nights in a capsule hotel, or a bed in a dorm further out in Ikebukuro, which I went for.

The distance from central Tokyo didn't really matter, since the city's rail network is so good - Ikebukuro is the second busiest train station in the world (second to Shinjuku, one overland stop down), and once I had the hang of the Tokyo underground, getting around the city was very easy and quick.

Shinjuku station at rush hour is a sight to behold, and trying to buy a ticket and find the right platform seemed an impossible task at first, but somehow was actually pretty easy, and there was never even any queuing. Incredibly, even at rush hour there's a lot less hassle and shunting than somewhere like Kings Cross at the best of times. It must be a marvel of planning and people-flow design with an average 3.64 million people passing through every day (thanks to Wikipedia for the stats!).

Tokyo's underground has some great signs, including a picture of people partying and drinking on the train, with the stern caption 'Do it in the pub.' But my favourite was this one - no translation needed!

A shinkansen (bullet train) leaving Tokyo

While in Tokyo I went to Ginza, the ultra-posh shopping district full of flagship skyscraper shops for Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton etc, plus trendy galleries and art 'spaces'. On the last night me and Aussie 'KD' went into one and found ourselves at the opening do of an arty film poster exhibition, complete with the chic French artist, plus glasses of champagne being thrust into our hands!

On the same night we managed to find the GoldenGai area near Shinjuku, where a network of narrow streets are crammed full with tonnes of miniature bars - most with space for only three or four customers. We ended the night in Rappongi, the expat 'playground' of Tokyo, which was a disappointment, the only place where you get hassled on the street - by pushy club promoters and prostitutes.

Harajuku's an area full of indie shops and restaurants, and is where the hip Tokyo kids hang out. It's now famous for the 'Cosplay-zoku' girls, mainly troubled adolescents who get glammed up to the max and parade about at the weekends. Gwen Stefani brought them to international attention with her song 'Harajuku Girls'.

Harajuku's also home to a troupe of 50s american style dancers, the Takenokozoku (I think), who spend their time gyrating around like the Fonz, and slicking back their quiffs.

iStockphoto sales have been going well recently - October was the first month when I earned more from photos than I took home in a month's salary from my old 'proper' job at HSBC, but unfortunately the tax still has to be paid on the photo royalties. But I knew it would be hard keeping my wallet in my pocket in one of Tokyo's eight story camera shops (they sell everything techie - a lot more than cameras)... I managed to only buy what I came for - a tiny pocket camera for taking snapshots of things, which I've often missed out on when it involves wielding a heavy and conspicuous SLR.

Suntory - 'The boss of them all since 1992'

One thing that you're never far away from in Tokyo is a vending machine. The Japanese take them to another level, with hot coffee or soup in a can being available, as well as food, disposable cameras and all sorts of other things.

Tokyo International Forum

As close as KD and I got to the Imperial Palace in the centre of Tokyo

My first foray outside Tokyo was to Nikko, where I stayed in the spartan but excellent Daiyagawa hostel, run by a very friendly old woman with an excellent sense of humour. Here I met a German chap called Klaus who lives in Osaka, and has an unbelievably apocalyptic view of world future. For instance, on China... "No, no there is absolutely no doubt. Of course, the streets of Beijing will be a bloodbath within a few years... China will become a barren desert, nothing more. No question" Most other countries had similar, grim futures! But otherwise he was a very nice guy, and good company.

The path wasn't very well trodden!

We spent a day escaping the bus-tour crowds by hiking in the hills above Nikko, eventually making it up to the Yashio-no-yu Onsen. We stopped for lunch at Chuzenji-ko where a wonderful old lady served us udon noodles, and told us - with Klaus translating - "I like to give good service; I am happy when my customers are happy; I like to drink milk."

For somewhere that's famous for being expensive, travelling in Japan is not actually that bad, though apparently ten years ago it was. Even in Tokyo, hostels cost roughly the same as Australia or NZ, and food isn't much more. The Tokyo underground is a fraction of the cost of London's, but I did get a shock when having to pay for the half-hour local bus ride down from the onsen back to Nikko - it was ¥1650 - over £10!

The next day we joined the multitude of schoolchildren and retirees and looked around the impressive ancient Shinto and Buddhist shrines and temples of Nikko.

One shrine is covered with carvings of monkeys in poses supposedly designed to teach children about life's lessons. This one is thought to be the origin of the phrase 'See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil'. Incidentally, inside the shrine was a sacred white pony, donated by someone in New Zealand!

From Nikko I was on the way to Kawaguchi-ko near Mt Fuji this morning, the plan being to photograph Fuji-san complete with its trademark hat of snow and all the autumn trees. But the already bad weather got worse as I went west from my connection in Shinjuku, so with the forecast looking worse still, I decided to cut my losses and spend the day travelling on to Nagoya. The consolation is that Nagoya has a futuristic Robot Museum, so watch this space for (hopefully) stories of amazing robotic inventions!

This was by far the best laundry I've yet used, complete with washing machines and super-fast dryers that talk to you, a 'sneaker washer and dryer', a selection of magazines to read, trolleys to cart the laundry around, and even a loo with a heated toilet seat!

Mr Average Salaryman, from a Japan Tourist Board introductory booklet to Japan

Bula! from Fiji (and NZ)

george — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:52:00 GMT

I hadn't planned to go to Fiji after Australia, but when Mum and Dad decided to go there with my sister Julia and family for a holiday, a 'free' week in the sun sounded like a great idea.

I got there a week before them, and was quite pleased with myself when I waited until a day before a swanky 'Blue Lagoon' cruise set off to the Yasawa Islands (where 'The Blue Lagoon' was made) departed, phoned them up and got a bottom cabin deal at half price. Quite pleased, until I found out that as long as you book the cruise in Fiji you always get 50% off, so if anyone reading this is going to Fiji, have a look at their website and then you can get half that price. It was still the most expensive four days of my travels so far, but really good.

The crew were a laugh, and we had a diverse group of passengers, including a Russian couple about to get married, and an Aussie couple who had just got married. The 'cruise director' (yes, it was that posh!) broke the ice, and seriously embarrassed Emma the Aussie bride, by saying "If you find that the boat is rocking, please don't blame the captain's skills or the weather - these two lovebirds are here on honeymoon!"

We motored up through the Yasawas, catching the odd Spanish Mackerel as we went, and stopped on several islands for Fiji vs the rest of the world volleyball, snorkelling, cava ceremonies and to visit a traditional village on Malakati, where we were expertly entertained by Fijian style missionary music, conga dancing and a spot of football with the kids, then got the chance to buy shells and necklaces from the local women.

The major embarrassment for me was a competition on the last night, where we had to represent our countries with some form of entertainment. Several people were there from each country represented with the exception of Scotland, so I had to go it alone and borrow a guitar to murder '500 miles' by The Proclaimers, but at least most people knew it, and had drunk enough cava and beer to sing along!

The small but brilliant infinity pool at the house we rented

After a week on Fiji the family cavalry arrived, and we were off to our rented house for the week on Vuda Point, near Nadi on Vitu Levu, the biggest of the Fiji's 330 islands. It was great to see everyone again, but unfortunately Billy, my nine month old nephew and godson kept staring at me with wide open eyes, then bursting out crying, unusual for someone who spends most of his time smiling and cooing.

It was trimmed and tidy, but still scared him!

It was decided that the problem was my beard, and once I shaved that off, he was nothing but sweetness and light, just like his big sister Emily.

After every time Emily was thrown in the air she shouted 'Throw me again, up up up HIGHER!!'

We spent most of the time messing around by the pool and watching the sugar cane trains rumble slowly by, but did take a boat trip to nearby Bounty Island, which was great.

Apparently it was the location for the UK's Celebrity Love Island, but when we were there it was just us and some backpackers.

Emily told me she'd found some 'sparkly bugs' in a corner of the garden, and sure enough, there were loads of them on one particular plant.

I got to sit next to 3 year old Emily on the flight to NZ. She's full of surprises, and had baggsied the window seat to watch as we took off. Rising over the clouds, I told her that when we were little, Jules and I used to think they were made of cotton wool. She looked wisely at me and said, "Yes, uncle George, it's true that some clouds are made of cotton wool, but the others are made of aeroplane shit!". You can take the girl out of the farm...!!

Because I couldn't fly direct from Fiji to Japan, I then came to stay with Jules and Steve in New Zealand for a week of wholesome things like home cooked food, making Jules a birthday cake with Emily, wearing jeans which I haven't got space for in my rucksack, and getting a golden shower from Billy! Tomorrow I'm heading to Japan - after ten great months in the Southern Hemisphere, don't know why I thought the end of October would be a good time to head up to the Northern one!

'Brisneyland' to Sydney

george — Sat, 4 Oct 2008 05:48:00 GMT

After Nicole arrived in Brisbane, we went for a few adventures in the city. One involved heading to Mount Coot-tha, which we eventually found, then went for a walk to some waterfalls, which we either managed to miss completely, or they were dried up due to the lack of water in the area.

It was pretty muggy during the days, and for two nights in a row, fierce thunderstorms rolled over, but it barely rained at all - just a few spots.

It was cool to meet up with Mandy who I'd met in WA, and she took us out in the West End.

Leaving Brisbane we headed up the Sunshine coast to Noosa, a prim but pleasant seaside town, and then down to Caloundra before driving south of Brissie and onto the Brisbane <-> Sydney road, which is very well trodden by tourists and backpackers.

We decided to start in at the deep end by heading to Surfers Paradise, where a thin strip of sandy & sunny beach is met by a band of huge skyscrapers. Just like the opening titles for Miami Vice!

At the suggestion of a chap standing next to me by the aquarium, I was going to say that we'd encountered these beasts while snorkelling, but don't think I'd get away with it. They were in SeaWorld, where they also did a 50's style intentionally cringeworthy water skiing expo, plus lots of impressive dolphin cavorting...

Further south, Byron Bay was very different from 'Surfers' - a more chilled out place on the coast, but still full of trendy restaurants, bars and people.

From down again, at Nelson Bay we went out on a dolphin watch boat, then headed inland to the Hunter Valley to sample some wine.

Then we had a few days in Sydney before Nicole flew up to Cairns, and I spent the couple of extra days checking out Coogee, Bronte and Bondi Beaches before sadly leaving Australia.

As expected, they were full of bold and beautiful Aussies. Have to admit that it would be quite nice to have one of these beaches just outside Edinburgh's city centre... Portobello beach is lovely, but it doesn't quite seem to match up!

Among the Banana Benders

george — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:03:00 GMT

'Banana Benders' sounds dodgy, but people from Queensland are just given the nickname because they grow (and apparently put the bends in) so many bananas.

A few days after arriving up in Cairns, I picked up my hire car. Having booked the smallest and cheapest car available, I was a bit surprised when I realised how tiny a Hyundai Getz really is, having thought that it'd be about as big as my old Peugeot 106. Driving north and starting to climb the hills towards Cape Tribulation, I realised that they must put lawnmower engines in them!

Getting across the swampy Daintree river involved a short cable ferry journey, then I was driving through full on rainforest, and stayed in a kind of permanent tent near the beach - the area is supposedly one of the few places in the world where a proper rainforest meets the sea.

The weather was pretty bad, warm but overcast all the time and drizzling quite a lot. I suppose you can't have a rainforest without the rain! I couldn't really see the Cape of Cape Tribulation, so went for a few rainforest walks instead. These were great, but I didn't escape without a few hangers-on - bloodsuckers in the form of a tick and a leech, both of which took a bit of getting off, but I think I got them before they started properly gorging on my blood.

I was later quite pleased that I'd noticed the tick, when I was told that a common tick in the area is the Paralysis Tick, which does exactly what it says on the tin - paralysing and killing mammals in a few hours, occasionally killing people. It seems as though Australia has at least one of every type of living thing that's capable of killing people, except as far as I know they don't (YET) have any plants which can kill you. There were quite a few gympie gympies or 'stinging trees' though, which will apparently cause 'severe prickling and then intense pain'. The pain then lasts for several days, but can recur for up to two months!

On getting to Port Douglas, a posh tourist town up the coast from Cairns, there were warnings of the deadliest of all Australia's deadly things - the box jellyfish. Fortunately I didn't encounter any of those (I did see a washed up jellyfish, but decided not to give it a prod to find out if it was a nasty one).

While I'm (still!) on the subject, a bird that can kill is the Southern Cassowary (apparently listed in the Guiness Book of Records as the world's most dangerous bird, and one of the most dangerous animals to have in a zoo, based on zookeeper injuries [thanks wikipedia]), but despite my best efforts and carefully reading this sign in a park, I didn't manage to find one in the wild. This one was in a sanctuary, but it still looked like it was about to go for me a few times.

But despite all the fuss, most animals in Australia are not deadly, and people certainly don't seem to live in constant fear of animal ambush!

So heading South in the 'Tropical Far North' of Queensland, I went inland to the Atherton Tablelands, and stayed at the brilliant 'On the Wallaby' hostel, definitely one of the best I've stayed at so far. Here, after being very surprised that it wasn't all that difficult to see a Platypus in the wild, I made it my mission to try and photograph one at a nearby creek, but had mixed results since they're pretty much only visible at dawn and dusk, are smaller than I thought (about the size of a small rabbit), and move quite quickly. Being Australian, obviously the even the platypus has a poisonous bit - males have a sharp retractable spike, but they're so shy that there didn't seem to be much chance of them using it against people.

Getting up ridiculously early for a few mornings of platypus spotting also gave me the chance to see hundreds of Brolgas - huge cranes with 2+ metre wingspans which came onto the fields at dawn, making incredible prehistoric sounding shrieks as they flew in.

At a big swamp called Hasties, I thought this kingfisher was cautiously watching what I was doing as it sat on a branch nearby, but then suddenly it dropped like a stone into the water, then came out and gobbled up the fish.

After another walk in a forest, I was driving along a winding road when I felt something on my leg, and looked down to see another pesky leech busily getting into position for some bloodsucking! I somehow managed to remove it without crashing!

Another hazard on the roads are the quite frequent 'oversize loads'. They're always escorted by cars up ahead with flashing lights, but normally they're not too wide and you can keep on driving. But sometimes you definitely can't!... This time, a police car with lights blazing came careering round a corner on my side of the road, and made it very clear that I should get my car off the road immediately, then this monster came tumbling along at high speed!

Going south along the Queensland coast, I did pass lots of banana plantations, but also an unbelievable amount of sugar cane - hundreds and hundreds of miles and days of driving through it.

This is one of Mission Beach's Beaches... I stayed up in the rainforest in this permanent tent / cage thing, which was cool as the rainforest sounds really were all around...

This is Wallaman falls - the longest drop (permenant) waterfall in Australia at 268 metres.

...This is Whitehaven beach on Whitsunday Island...

Further on down the coast in Hervey Bay there was a huge fruit bat (or flying fox) colony. They were fun to watch in the morning as they mostly slept, but occasionally squabbled and rearranged their impressive wings.

If you've ever wondered how bats take a poo (since they're normally upside down), here's how ...

This one then decided to fly off and find somewhere else to hang!

As I'm sure you know, much of Australia has severe water shortage problems, and this was one of many roadside protests to the proposed Traveston dam which will/would flood a large area, apparently larger than Sydney Harbour.

This is Mount Beerwah, part of the Glasshouse range a bit north of Brisbane. Captain Cook gave them the name when he sailed past and thought they looked like greenhouses.

Some of the many tributes to Steve Irwin at Australia Zoo, just north of Brisbane.

So after clocking up thousands of Kms and doubling the mileage on my little Getz, I arrived in Brisbane (Aka Brisvegas or Brisneyland) where I'm being joined in a couple of days by Nicole (who's on holiday from the UK) and also hopefully meeting up with Mandy (who lives here), who I travelled with in the Kimberly and in the Wicked vans on the West Coast.

NB. To purchase a license to use any of the pictures here, please go to www.istockphoto.com/resonants or contact me: georgeblog (at) foogaloo.com

Sydney and Canberra

george — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 03:45:00 GMT

After Bali, arriving in the slick, ordered, affluent and surprisingly chilly world of Sydney's CBD was quite a contrast. I stayed in a rickety old pub/hotel right in the middle of the business district, just a few minutes from the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge (locally aka The Coathanger!)

My flight arrived early in the morning, so I'd already had a look around before I was able to check in. Straight away, it was pretty clear that Sydney has tonnes going for it, most strikingly the sparkling blue waters of the huge harbour itself.

A few days later I went out on a whale watching boat, and - hardly any distance outside the busy harbour - we saw a couple of humpback whales, happy to frolic about near to the boat for ages.

Billy Elliot's had a long run in Sydney. Went to see that, and it was quite good, but the best bit was hearing the actors and dancers doing their best to pronounce words like 'frustrated' in a grim Northern miner accent!

Being a victim of all the hype over here (since it was Heath Ledger's last film), I also went to see 'Dark Knight', but didn't think much of that... can't see what makes it any different from all the other superhero films, not sure why it got such high reviews.

I left Sydney on the day that Team GBR overtook the Aussies in the Olympic medal tally, which didn't go down very well at all here. The media was full of references to the 'whinging pommies' somehow 'not doing as crap as we've come to expect'. The wisdom of the pundits all put it down to 'Money, money, money mate - they're so worried about 2012 that they've been throwing heaps of cash at sports development. And good on 'em I say.' The Aussies are a sporting lot to be fair.

But that doesn't stop their papers suddenly starting to publish new medal tables which show medals per capita of population, where Australia currently comes 4th in the world compared to GB at 20th. The article kept quiet about the fact that NZ come in ahead of them, but pointed out that 'The UK would be a gold medal certainty if gloating about beating Australia was an Olympic sport'. Ouch!

But despite their bravado, I reckon they're really a bunch of jessies. In their 'winter', all the New South Welshmen (yes, that's really what they're called) wrap themselves up in thick jackets and scarves, while the sun blazes down from a clear blue sky. Fair enough, it's not warm at the moment, but it's not that cold!

Anyway, after just over a week in Sydney, I ignored advice from 'Sydneysiders'... 'Seriously, mate, don't go there, it's shithouse. Nothing but massive roundabouts and bloody politicians' and headed to Australia's capital, Canberra.

Still a bit of a national joke, the site of Canberra - at that time a sheep station - was selected in 1908 as a good place for Australia's capital city, being between Sydney and Melbourne.

At first it seems a bit like a Simpsons episode, with massive public buildings and statues dotted everywhere, a hands-on science place called 'Questacon' and a village of miniature buildings from all over the world.

It's also a bit like Beijing in it's massive layout and the fact that it takes absolutely ages to walk from one place to anywhere else, which seems a little over the top for Canberra's 325,000 people, compared to Beijing's 16 million plus.

Canberra seems to have a 'national' everything, including this National Carillon. I didn't even know what a carillon was (turns out it's a bell tower)

Anyway, though Sydney was only quite cold, Canberra really was baltic, below freezing and windy at night.

After a few days there I could see why it got it's dull reputation, and lots of boring looking offices for companies like EDS, Ernst & Young and SAP, presumably working on endless government contracts, didn't help. But apart from that, there were some top notch art galleries and exhibitions, and apparently there's quality skiing and boarding not far away in the snowy mountains, so it's not that bad!

Four Weeks in Bali

george — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 05:25:00 GMT

Kuta / Legian

My first impressions of Bali weren't the best - on arriving at 10pm at the hotel, security guards used mirrors to check under the taxi for bombs. Then, after checking in I went for a walk to get something to eat, and in the two minute walk there and back was hassled six times by people on mopeds trying to sell things, including two drugs dealers and two prostitutes. One of whom was very persistent, driving along slowly next to me, trying to make me change my mind!

Absolut petrol for all the mopeds!

Unfortunately, 'sex tourism' seems to be fairly common here, and as a man walking alone, being hassled by prostitutes happened a lot, plus there was the occasional hushed offer of 'young girls... young girls' from some of the the men, who first loudly offer transport.

Site of the 2002 bomb, which killed 202 people from lots countries, but mainly Australia and Indonesia.

Day or night, pretty much everywhere you walk in Legian/Kuta, every three or four paces people are trying to get you to buy something, thankfully mostly in a friendly way. Most use loud and convincing Aussie accents to get your attention first - 'Oi, mate, how you goin?'. But the occasional scam attempt reminded me of all the fun and games I'd been missing while travelling in NZ and Australia.

After that moaning, everything else about Bali was all good! Kuta/Legian had cheap accommodation, an enormous beach with surf constantly rolling in, plus great restaurants dotted all over the place.

All the waves encouraged me to continue my faltering attempts to learn to surf, and I enrolled in a short course on Kuta beach. After that I was able to stand up most times, and even steer my board sometimes, but I also managed to cut open the bridge of my nose when I stupidly smacked it against the back of the board!

A cheeky monkey being groomed in the Sacred Monkey Forest by Ubud

Ubud

After a week near the beach, I headed inland to Ubud, a town nestled among rice paddies, which is traditionally full of arty types. Here I had a bit of trouble finding a room anywhere recommended, and was initially a bit skeptical about a guy called Blondy, who was hanging out on the street. He insisted that I had a look at his place, the Swan Inn, and after the place I was on the way to try was also full, I agreed. But he turned out to be a star, and if anybody reading this is going to Ubud, I can definitely recommend staying there - well located near the top of Monkey Forest Road, rooms are spacious and clean, and include hot water and a good breakfast for about 10 USD per night, which is way cheaper than anything of similar quality in the Lonely Planet. In Ubud at least, being in the Lonely Planet seems to mean that prices quickly treble and quality drops.

I ended up staying at the Swan Inn for 8 nights - longer than anywhere since leaving home last August, apart from when I stayed in NZ with Jules and Steve.

Ubud had plenty of noises in the night - cockerels seemed to start at around 4am (and there's lots of them - cockfighting's very big in Bali), plus frogs and insects, and - loudest of all - street dogs. These trot along the pavements and sleep under cars by day, then vigorously defend their territory from all comers by night, and once one starts barking and howling, all the others join in. Balinese people believe that all the racket is because the dogs are frightening away evil spirits.

Daily offerings with flowers, food and incense are put out everywhere for a blessing on the day's activities (Bali is mostly Hindu, unlike most of the rest of Indonesia). Every day they're put on car windscreens, on the street in front of shops, on rice terraces, house steps etc.

I went for several walks, plus an organised bike ride in the countryside around Ubud. The best thing about the bike ride was all the smiling children shouting, waving and giving high-fives as we passed villages and houses. Passing a school playground, we got 'Hellooooo, Where Are You From???' pretty much in unison!

We stopped briefly in a village at this cremation ceremony for a local priest. It looks a bit quiet from this photo, but there were actually tonnes of people there!

Lots of rice is grown on the island. Seedlings are grown in a special area of the rice paddy, then they're gathered up and planted in rows, at lightning speed...

...The rice grows, with lots of fresh water (this picture was actually taken at Jatiluwih further north)...

...

...Almost ready to be harvested. After harvest it's laid out in the sun to dry, with the grains still in their husks...

After harvest the paddy is ploughed with the help of cows, then soaked and churned up using a machine.

These are coffee beans, which are surprisingly tasty straight off the plant.

As well as eating lots of rice, I drank a fair bit of Bali and Java coffee, but also tried an unusual, and normally expensive (it goes for £50 a cup in the UK) type. The coffee beans are harvested from the poo of civet cats, who must really know their coffee, and supposedly eat all the best and most inaccessible beans, which are retrieved, then (I hope) cleaned before being roasted.

It tasted very good, but comments such as 'This is shit coffee' etc etc were inevitable!

At the Swan Inn, I finally met some people in Ubud who were neither hemp wearing, 'alternative thinking' wannabe-hippies (who always complete their uniform look with an Apple laptop), nor French (for some reason there's a huge population of French people in and around Ubud). Caitlin and Liz from San Francisco moved into the next door bungalow, and were a good laugh.

Small part of the market in Ubud

I joined them for a Balinese cooking class - first we went to the market to check out all the stuff, then made lots of dishes, including our tutor's secret-recipe signature dish of Simbal Goreng Uding (prawns in hot sauce)...

Bedugul / Candikuning

After Ubud, we were all heading further North towards Bedugul, and Blondy very kindly invited us to go to his Grandfather's cremation ceremony on the way. Unlike the ceremony for the priest above (which was done a few days after he died), this was a mass cremation, where the deceased are buried first for several months, then for the ceremony parts of their remains are taken and cremated. It's believed that the person can't be re-incarnated until the cremation has been done. There were over twenty people being cremated at the ceremony, so there were several hundred people there.

Although we were in sarongs (I got one specially!), we still stuck as the only westerners at the huge ceremony, but didn't feel at all unwelcome, unless you count the children pulling faces at us! All the carefully constructed structures for the ceremony (including the one above) were tossed to the side once they'd been used, then set alight with the help of petrol later on.

Spot the difference (wasn't intentional)!

At 6am on the morning after arriving at Lake Bratan, we canoed across the lake to see Para Ulun Danu Bratan at sunrise, then headed for a trek near the town of Munduk with local guide Udin.

Liz, Udin (with a cacao pod - the cocoa beans and gunk inside were sweet) and Caitlin

It was his 30th birthday, but (amazingly) he'd got the date wrong, and had celebrated it with his friends the day before, which made the driver laugh at him a lot. As well as several waterfalls, we walked through lush hills, planted with with cocoa, jackfruits, Java and Balinese coffee, cloves (which are used to flavour cigarettes as for spices), bananas, vanilla and (of course) rice.

Cloves

After that we headed to Permutan, which is on the North West coast, only a few miles from the island of Java (the volcanoes in the picture at the top are on Java). Here we stayed in luxury but at very good prices, at a great new hotel by the beach called the Adi Assri which Liz had found on the web. Here we went snorkelling over the coral reefs in a national park off a tiny island.

After a few days there, Liz and Caitlin headed across to Java, and I headed South down to Jimbalan where I stayed for a couple of nights at a very pleasant university 'eco lodge' before flying to Sydney.

To use pictures from here please go to www.istockphoto.com/resonants or contact me.

South by South West

george — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:15:00 GMT

I spent several days in Perth, mainly taking and uploading photos for iStock, sorting out tickets etc for my next travels, and going out with the guys from the 'Wicked' journey a couple of times.

Then had a few days left to quickly see some of the bottom part of Western Australia, so I hired a car from Hertz (for some reason their daily price - about £15 - is a quarter of their Darwin price), and took a risk by not paying their excess waiver fee, which would have more than doubled the price. The catch was that if I had an accident, it would cost me either $3000 or $5000, depending on whether other cars were involved. Also, with some trepidation, I 'bought' the full tank of fuel at a very low price, on the agreement that I'd return the car to the airport, empty. Uh oh!

So I left Perth, driving extra carefully, and headed south.

This jetty (Aussies don't like to use 'Pier') in Busselton was the second one I'd seen that was claimed to be the longest the Southern Hemisphere. The first one was in Port Augusta in SA. At well over a mile, this one is pretty long, but I've stopped believing these 'biggest ... in the Southern Hemisphere' claims, which seem to be made about something in every part of Australia.

The weather got worse after that picture, and eventually I arrived in the small town of Pemberton. It was dark, cold, windy, and pouring with rain, but fair enough, it is mid-winter over here! I found a dorm for the night, and got some sleep while the town took a battering from the increasingly stormy weather.

The next morning I was up early, with lots to try and see in a short space of time. But the roads were littered with big branches, and the heavy downpours still hadn't stopped. I managed to negotiate around this in my little car...

... but not this!...

Rather than going far back on the main road, then having to take a long way round, I found a forest lane, and meandered through a maze of soaked forest tracks, which also had plenty tree debris from the storm.

I kept reminding myself that I was driving a base model Corolla, far outwith phone reception, that an accident would cost me $5000, and managed to resist the urge to treat the deserted tracks as the forest stage of a rally! But it was very tempting! I was glad to eventually find the main highway again about forty minutes later.

Having stopped on the way to walk through some amazing Karri forests, I arrived at Walpole before it got dark, which was lucky as the whole town had a power cut. I checked into a hostel and the lady explained about the power cut before taking my cash. She then seemed almost as forgetful as me as she showed me around: "Right. This is the kitchen, and here are the fridges - oops, we've got no power, so they don't work. OK, there's a TV room in here, and we've got Foxtel. But there's no power, so the TV doesn't actually work either tonight. The washing machines and dryers are just here. Come to think of it, they won't be working either." She then opened the door to room 8 where I was staying and flicked the light switch. "Ah yeah, there's a power cut! Sorry - the lights in the room aren't working at the moment."

Quite British looking countryside in places

One of the big attractions of the area is the tree top walk through the Valley of the Giants, where you can walk around high up in the canopy of Tingle trees. Unfortunately I didn't get there, as it was closed for safety reasons following the storm.

But the weather was great for this wind farm near Albany, which obviously claimed to be the largest in the Southern Hemisphere!

The city of Freemantle, or 'Freo', prides itself as being a boho place of culture. It's not far by ferry from 'dull as' Perth, but feels very different. I only stayed there for one night, before going to the airport. Unfortunately the hostel I stayed at seemed like a drugs rehab centre that wasn't doing very well at the rehab part!

So 1,500kms later, I washed the forest off the car and returned it to Hertz at the airport, managing not to run out of petrol on the way. That would have been a nightmare since as well as missing my flight, I'd have been in trouble with immigration, as I was flying out of Australia on the last valid day of my visa.

For you pedants out there (I know there's at least two of you what read this), the misuse of the apostrophe in Australia seems to be even worse than in the UK, and is often seen on printed signs - an airport example...

Down the West Coast

george — Wed, 9 Jul 2008 06:22:00 GMT

After a few days in Broome, Caroline, Mandy, Becky, Steve and I rented a couple of 'Wicked' camper vans for the journey South towards Perth.

Unfortunately, you don't get to choose your van. We were quite happy with ours - swirly patterns and a clean joke, "Man who walks through airport turnstile sideways is going to Bangkok". Very clean compared to what you see written on the back of some of the Wicked vans. Mandy and Caroline weren't quite as lucky - one side of their van had teddy bears in various sexual positions, the other side had dogs. The back of theirs said 'Sex is the most pure, wholesome and natural experience... [then below the number plate] ...that money can buy!'

Our first night was interesting... Wicked screwed up, meaning that we were five hours late getting the vans. We'd planned to head down the coast straight away but couldn't, and hadn't booked a caravan park in Broome. Nothing was available, and plan B to stay in a nice car park next to Cable Beach was foiled when we found out that it was illegal, and that the police turn up every night to hand out on-the-spot fines.

So we ended up sleeping in the car park of a local backpackers, always slightly worried that we were about to be found out. We also discovered that sleeping three (Becky, Steve and me) in the van was technically possible using a top/tail/top arrangement, but the constant danger of being kicked in the face made sleep quite difficult!

After that, Steve and I decided to invest in a supermarket-cheapo budget tent each, and they were worth every penny despite the fact that they almost flew away several times!

Steve and Becky on Eighty Mile Beach, where we spent our first night on the road.

Mangrove near Port Hedland

Our timing was lucky for the 'Stairway to the Moon'. Only a few places on the West Coast have beaches which face East, towards the rising moon. For about twenty minutes there was a growing eery orange glow on the horizon over the sea, then the full moon rose very quickly, looking very yellow and egg shaped at first.

We broke convoy with 'the girls' (Caroline and Mandy) in The Pilbara when they continued down the coast while we headed inland to Karijini National Park.

Spinifex - it's all over the dry bits of Australia. It's AKA 'kerosine bush' because one match and the whole thing goes up in a flash. Most types are extremely spiky, and if you brush your feet by it when you walk past, you know all about it. Some species have silica tipped spikes, which break off then go septic in your leg!

A Road Train carrying livestock. They get bigger - the max size is 52 metres long - 4 trailers. Overtaking four huge trailers full of livestock or petrol or whatever can take some doing, especially in a 20 year old van!

After Karijini we took a couple of days to get back to the coast, then met the girls and stayed a night near Exmouth, after discovering that getting a place to camp in the Cape Ranges National Park was difficult. The next morning we were up at 4.45am and dodged kangaroos (which are worse than rabbits at panicking and deciding to cross the road right at the last minute) and joined a queue at the park entrance to be allocated a place to camp when the ranger turned up at 8am.

A tiny ghost crab scuttling along

The early morning was well worth it, we got a place at a tiny campsite right on the beach, looking over the calm water above Ningaloo Reef, with huge ocean waves roaring as they crashed into the start of the reef about a kilometre out to sea, sending up plumes of spray. We stayed for three nights, and spent the time exploring the national park, which included quality snorkeling over the coral. One of the beaches had a strong sideways rip, so that you could walk a few hundred metres down the beach, swim out a bit, then drift across the coral and get the chance to be entertained by rays, reef sharks, turtles and hundreds of colourful fish.

On the last day there Steve, Becky and I shelled out considerable cash to go off on a boat to the other side of the reef in search of whale sharks, which are filter feeding friendly monsters - the biggest fish of the lot. This is quite a big industry around Exmouth, as Ningaloo Reef is one of very few places where whale sharks reliably turn up every year. It's expensive because it's heavily eco-regulated, plus they use planes to fly overhead and spot the sharks, which come up from the deep to feed for a while, then dive back down. Our boat of twenty punters was divided into two 'teams', and on demand we had to don our snorkelling kit, get ready on the back of the boat as the skipper positioned it ahead of the big shark, then jump in, and find a safe position without getting in the way of it.

After that, we swam along around the beast, which seemed completely unfazed about the fact that ten tourists were doing their best to keep up as it lazily swished its tail from side to side. Through the day we swam with five different whale sharks, some going at a reasonable speed (when swimming with good flippers), but one motoring along at an exhausting pace. After those five everyone was knackered - some people gave up after two or three. The whale sharks weren't the biggest that they can get, but at up to ten metres long, they still seemed pretty huge in the water.

As well as flippered people, most of the whale sharks had several other hangers-on - smaller fish that were slipstreaming under their belly and fins. We also swum in some deeper areas within the coral reef, and saw some big sting rays (I was careful not to bother these too much!), turtles and big shoals of fish from tiny brightly-coloured ones to salmon-sized ocean pike.

One thing that we didn't make time for, was to take up the advice of the free tourist guide, and go 'Dogging Around Exmouth'!

Then south again, to a disappointing Coral Bay (it may have seemed worse than it really is due to the driving wind and rain), then on to several nights on a big peninsula which is part of Shark Bay National Park. The first night in an (unusual) free campsite was the cue for us to be eaten alive by sandflies, and was the start of overnight heavy rain which continued for about a week. Didn't cause any problems except that the inside of the tents were pretty damp every morning.

It was difficult to tell where the sea stopped and the sky began!

Monkey Mia is an oddly named place, as the one thing it's famous for is not monkeys, but dolphins. Since the sixties, people have been hand-feeding a few of them from the beach - this still happens but is very strictly controlled, and dolphins which don't already rely on being given fish aren't allowed any. As well as seeing them come in for scheduled feedings, we saw several coming right into the shallow water, chasing fish into the beach to trap them. The local Pelicans used this as an opportunity for an easy meal...

"What are you looking at?!"

Shell Beach - miles of beach made up of billions of little shells..

I hate having my picture taken!

Leaving Shark Bay, we went to have a look at some stromatolites. These tiny primeval things (sometimes called 'living rocks') were among the first living things on Earth, and were very abundant all over the planet for about 3.5 billion years, until creatures came along which started to feed on them, and almost ate the lot! It was thought that stromatolites had been extinct for millennia, until they were discovered living happily in Shark Bay and a few other places round the world. But it's hard to get extremely excited while watching them in action - the only hint that you're not just looking at slimy rocks is that little bubbles of oxygen occasionally rise to the surface!

Steve was driving when we started hitting big clouds full of juicy bugs, which splatted on the windscreen like machine gun fire until we couldn't see anything!

By the time we were getting this far south, it was only really warm when the sun was out during the daytime, and the girls very kindly shelled out a whole $1 to get me a leather jacket which they found in a charity shop. As well as being very stylish, it was extremely warm. They said I should give it to a tramp when I got to Perth, but I want to keep it!

Nature's window in Kalbarri National Park

The Pinnacles, a huge area of eroded limestone spikes. Apparently this is where Billy Connolly chose to run around naked on his TV tour of Oz. It was a bit chilly for that when we were there!

Once we were within a day or so of Perth, everything suddenly became much more agricultural...

Emu Downs wind farm.

By the time that we got to Perth, I'd been wearing thongs every day for over a month, so it was a bit odd having to wear shoes again. In case you're wondering, Australian for 'flip- flops' is 'thongs'. Posh restaurants sometimes have discreet signs saying 'No thongs to be worn'!

A pod of dolphins in the water below

We'd covered 4,300kms (almost 2,700 miles) in our camper, over two weeks of trouble-free driving, except for once, when we had to push-start the van in a lay-by.

It all seemed too easy...

...

For some reason, Wicked policy is that campers are taken and returned with an empty fuel tank. We felt quite smug about how well we'd calculated this, driving our last few kilometres through Perth's city centre to get to the Wicked depot with the fuel gauge showing empty.

Then, with not far to go, I felt a worse than usual lack of acceleration, and knew that we could be in trouble.

We were in trouble, and quite quickly - about 100m up the road we had to stop for lights, and the van spluttered and stalled. Unfortunately the lights meant we were stopped on a hill, in the right filter lane of a busy intersection in the centre of the city. The van wouldn't start, I stuck the hazards on and Becky and I did our best to direct traffic away from using the filter lane while Steve managed to accost some policemen, who gave him a lift to a petrol station, but then bizarrely left him to make his own way back.

Directing traffic to change lanes wasn't always successful, but we got a lot less abuse than expected. About the worst came from a distinguished looking elderly man driving a convertible. He stopped his car next to me, and behaved as if he was conducting an interview...
"What happened here?"
I decided to omit the running-out-of-petrol detail, "Our van up by the lights has broken down"
"What's wrong with it?"
"It stalled and we can't get it to start"
That was enough for him - he looked ahead, said "Bloody pommie tourist bastards", then drove off at speed! I think he was being friendly!

Steve came back and we poured the petrol in, but then we were confronted with another problem - having the hazard lights on for 25 minutes had run the (pathetic) battery down, so much that the engine wouldn't even turn over. We couldn't really try a reverse push start in heavy traffic.

But help came in the form of a friendly Perth resident who'd run out of petrol recently herself. Once we found the battery (well hidden underneath the driver seat), we joined up her jump leads with ours to make the distance to her car behind us, and like magic the campervan roared back into action. We even managed to get it back to Wicked without getting charged a late fee (though we were quite late!)

Across The Kimberly

george — Wed, 9 Jul 2008 05:02:00 GMT

From Darwin, I joined another Landcruiser based outback tour, this time going to Broome, with an international cast of nine - Becky (England), Caroline (La France), Mandy (Australia), Ruby (Taiwan), Steve (England), Tanam (Switzerland) and Wouter (Holland). Andrew, our guide came from Derby in Western Australia, which is pronounced like 'D-urr-by' instead of the original 'D-arh-by'. Why? 'Because that's how it's f###ing spelled'!

Room for one by the (saltwater crocodile infested) Victoria River

We had an excellent time, mainly driving the Gibb River Road through The Kimberly. Unfortunately we had some stormy rain right at the start, so couldn't get into the improbably-named Bungle Bungle ranges. The Bungle Bungles - a huge area of massive beehive rock formations - were only 'discovered' in the mid-1980s. The fact that a huge national park was sitting there unknown to anyone except a very few locals shows the size of Australia's wilderness areas - it's now a World Heritage Site and is massively visited by tourists. But not us, though we did go to another national park which is nicknamed 'the mini-bungles', which had otherworldly rock formations in layers of red.

We swam in countless billabongs, hot springs and waterfall pools along the way, some of them like something out of the Timotei advert. Also, we camped under the stars every night, again getting the chance to watch a nightly shooting star show.

A Rock Wallaby showing off

One night we camped on an island on Lake Argyle, supposedly the largest volume of freshwater in the Southern Hemisphere. A massive area of plains surrounded by hills and mountains was flooded in 1969 to make the lake, which is used for irrigation and a bit of hydro electricity for the tiny local towns. It's also home to tens of thousands of freshwater crocodiles. We managed to spot quite a few, plus had fun jumping into the warm water from high rock ledges.

But the best thing there was when - stopped in our little boat on the lake - Andrew suggested we try holding some bits of bread out over the water. Held about a meter from the surface, it was only a moment before the bread was squirted with water as if someone was firing a water pistol. It soon turned out this was the work of a crafty fish called a seven spotted archer. About 30 cms long, these normal looking fish poke their lips just above the surface, and fire a jet of water up at possible food. They normally do this to knock insects off branches or stones into the water, but seem to have a go with most things. Once the bread was dropped into the water, often the archer fish stayed hungry, as there was a sudden feeding frenzy from the much larger (and uglier) catfish, which were circling around.

Once we were out of bread and sat chatting in the boat, some hungry archer fish decided to have a go at me instead, and twice almost knocked a contact lens clean out of my eye - amazingly accurate firing from a fair distance!

Caroline and Tanam

Our guide Andrew was the owner of the small company, Kimberly Adventure Tours, that we were with, and had everything, including the cooking of a full roast using a campfire and two pots, down to a fine art. The only things that gave him grief were animals - he chased several smaller crocodiles, but couldn't catch one to wrestle with. He did manage to creep up on a big water monitor and grab it by the tail, then hold on tight as it went berserk and tried hard to take chunks out of his hands and arms.

While swimming near this waterfall, Steve noticed a snake peering from a rock by where we were having lunch. This turned out to be a small king mulga snake, even at that size another one of Australia's deadly beasts which can kill several people without much trouble!

I read somewhere that of the ten most deadly species of living thing in the world, all ten come from Australia, but I'm not sure if that's true. Statistics & damn lies etc... the hippo has killed more people than any other animal, and I don't think Australia has any of them, yet the Australian inland taipan is thought to be the most poisonous thing on dry land. But there's no recorded cases of anyone ever actually having been killed by one. You do the math!

Another river crossing... some of them were very long and deep - at one we saw the remains of a brand new Merc 4x4 that had been washed down the river.

Aussies are known for their no-nonsense bluntness, and I got a dose of this one morning when I walked into a small roadhouse in the middle of nowhere to buy an iced coffee (very good and available everywhere). The lady at the counter rang up my purchase on the till, looked up at me and narrowed her eyes, then said 'You look rough', and held her hand out for my cash! After that, 'You look rough' became a running joke, mostly aimed at me... fair enough, I probably did, my defence is that showers were a rare thing, and we all looked fairly rough most of the time! Here's proof though - one of Tanam's photos:

Aboriginal art in a style that's unique to a small area in the Kimberly. Several books have been written which explain how an advanced alien race came and visited the aboriginal people in prehistory - some of the pictures show people wearing odd, modern-looking clothing and belts.

Caroline from Paris had us in hysterics quite a lot. Once, when someone used 'faux pas' in a normal English sentence, it was the only part that she didn't understand.... 'I'm sorry, but what do you mean by zese words... faux pas... I do not understand zis.' We said them many times, and explained that they were actually French words, but she didn't get it at all for ages and ages, until suddenly - 'Aahhhh, shiiiiit, you mean FAUX PAS!! Mais oui, aahhh, FAUX PAS!' This kind of thing happened quite often!

Tanam's picture of us going into a huge cave system, which had crocodiles, shellfish like big prawns/small lobsters and carnivorous bats.

Another angry looking croc

Due to a fire in a hostel in Broome, we had a last-minute change of plan, allowing us a day in Derby to go mud-crabbing. We already knew how tasty these big crabs are, since the night before we'd cooked some in the campfire coals. Woulter and I had stayed up and cooked and ate several hundred dollars worth, as they needed to be either eaten or chucked. But we weren't so good at catching them - using lots of pots just like lobster pots, we got about six between us, but only one was big enough to keep. They all seemed fairly big and vicious to me though - apparently their pincers are strong enough to break fingers, and they were pretty quick at defending themselves!

Tanam's picture - that's Andrew holding the crab, which was saying 'No, we've got to be at least this big before you can keep us'!

We finished up with an excellent night out in a proper Aussie pub / drive through bottleshop / live venue / bookies / motel in Derby called 'The Spinifex', which could have easily been a living museum of Aussie stereotypes! Andrew introduced us to the most vicious drinking game I've ever played, and the night finished up as a bit of a blur.

The next morning we were off to Broome at the unpleasant hour of 6am. As well as having dry beds and warm showers, Broome has the enormous Cable Beach, where we spent a fair bit of time.

That was over two weeks ago, but I've only now had the chance to put it online... Stay tuned for the next installment!

Alice Springs to 'The Top End'

george — Tue, 3 Jun 2008 09:39:00 GMT

I had five days in Alice, and apart from catching up on sleep, reading and putting pictures onto iStock, I joined Chris and Dave (from the tour up from Adelaide) for meals and a couple of cinema visits.

Alice seemed a bit of a strange place. One mystery is Pine Gap, the massive American intelligence base nearby. I tried it on Google, which came up with a host of UFO pages, including one from 'abovetopsecret.com', titled 'Pine Gap - Staging point of an American/Alien World Take Over?' Other than that, it seems to be a huge intelligence place and co-ordination centre for military strikes all over the world. Not sure why they decided to put it in the middle of the Aussie outback though!

The other thing was - as far as I could tell from only being there a few days - a big division between Aboriginal and white people. The two seemed to live totally separate lives in the same town, barely noticing each other. Lots of aboriginal people walked into town across the bone dry Todd River in the mornings, and many spent hours hanging around the central reservations of roads, while most whites seemed to drive everywhere, mainly in flash 4x4s.

Unfortunately Alice isn't the safest place either, with an extremely high violent crime rate. We were advised not to walk the streets after dark at all. I didn't come across any of that though - the only thing was a fight in the hostel between a drunk Aussie and a Canadian!

In the Desert Park (which was very good even though the town is in the middle of endless desert anyway!) I was very pleased to come face to face with a couple of thorny devils, who are in the picture at the top. They were calmly eating ant after ant off a tree stump. There was also another type of lizard which has no legs, i.e. it looked and acted exactly like a snake, but is actually a lizard. Apparently something to do with the shape of its tongue.

They had a great 'bird show' where birds circling around high above flew down on demand to do some party tricks, including this black breasted buzzard which flew in, got a stone in its beak and used it to whack an emu egg until it cracked open.

After a 15 hour Greyhound bus journey up the Stuart Highway (passing the place where Peter Falconio was murdered), I arrived for two nights at a homestead near a town called Mataranka. Here I joined multitudes of retired Aussies. By the way, it's common to come across retired couples touring the country, catchphrases 'fair dinkum, we bloody well deserve it' and 'we're on the road - nothing to go home for except the bloody kids, and they're old enough to bloody well look after themselves!' We were all skilfully entertained by a singer and her karaoke machine at the outdoor bar, with 'Sweet Home Mataranka' bringing the house down.

The homestead was near a warm-ish, crystal clear natural pool, busy with retirees, where three separate times in just a few minutes I heard new arrivals ask 'How's the water' to get the eye-rolling reply 'It's wet, mate!' which was followed by much hilarity each time.

Staying there was a good example of how expensive accommodation in Australia can be. After weeks of swags and crummy dorms, I was looking forward to a motel room, which at $90 (£45 ish) a night surely had to be pretty good. But what I got was a tiny, musty, spider-infested (at least there were no flies!) room, complete with a main door so warped that when it was shut, the bottom part was still well ajar, and a (literally) dribble shower. But at least I got two peaceful nights sleep in the polyester sheets!

Since I was told that there weren't any 'salties' nearby at the moment, I decided to try my best to emulate Steve Irwin and went off as a lone (freshwater) croc hunter.

Straying carefully from a path and along the nearby river, I was soon surrounded by strange noises - the place was teeming with life - with wallabies, all sizes of bird - including a kingfisher, lizards, ants, various fish mulling about the muddy waters, and these huge spiders in almost every direction. Sadly I never saw any crocodiles, but did get a fright when I slipped and ended up in the murky water while trying to get closer to one of the spiders for a picture!

The next day I was back on the Greyhound, and on seven more hours up to Darwin, which is about halfway across the northern coast of Australia.

Darwin's been pretty much demolished at least twice, once in 1942 , when 188 Japanese aircraft, flown by the same pilots as the Pearl Harbour bombings, used over twice as many bombs over Darwin and the fleets in the harbour. Then on Christmas Day in 1974, Cyclone Tracy re-flattened the city, demolishing the vast majority of the city's buildings. So it's pretty much all modern.

The Parliament building for the Northern Territories

This 'salty' looks pretty aggressive, but they actually lie for hours with their mouths open like that, to keep cool

Next I was off to the gigantic Kakadu national park for three days. On the way we stopped at the Mary River to cruise around looking for crocodiles. I expected to maybe see one or two if we were lucky, but they were all over the place, both 'freshies' and 'salties', mainly keeping cool with their toothy mouths wide open, but occasionally cooling off by lazily swimming around the river.

We were really hoping the croc would snap up this stupid bird, but it couldn't be bothered!

The billabong where they filmed the 'shooting' of Mick at the end of Crocodile Dundee. That smoke in the background's from bush fires.

Once in Kakadu, we went for some long hikes up to viewpoints in the tropical heat, and cooled down with swims in waterfall plunge-pools and billabongs, which were known to only have freshwater crocs. Along the way we saw quite a lot of Aboriginal cave art, dating from a fairly recent (with paintings of the activities of the early white settlers) to 30-40,000 years ago.

An 'x-ray' painting of a fish, showing internal organs and bone structure

One thing that distinguishes the Aboriginal cave art in Australia from the cave art in Europe, e.g. in Lascaux, is that - despite the fact that often the age is similar (the Lascaux art is reckoned to be about 16,000 years old) - the meaning of the Australian cave art is still fully understood by people who've kept the cultural information alive, whereas with European Stone-Age stuff, it's all down to the best guess of a bunch of archaeologists.

Swimming hole at the bottom of a huge waterfall

I was pleased that this big water lizard got as annoyed as me about flies - no matter how many times you shake them away they still come back!

A green ant. We were encouraged to pick them up, then bite off the green bit at the back, or at least lick it. The taste was halfway between a very bitter lemon, and sticking a 9 volt battery on your tongue!

Elsa, one of the three Dutchies (that's what they called themselves!) on the Kakadu trip had similar plans to me after we returned to Darwin, so following a night out with everyone and a day back in Darwin to recover, we split the cost of hiring a car and headed off on a 'road trip' down the Stuart Highway, towards Litchfield National Park, where we had some quality picnics and swims amongst the waterfalls.

After that we continued south for several hours, eventually finding a small town called Pine Creek which had both food and accommodation. Here there were some funny examples of the impact that a long legged, pretty blond can have on a one-horse Australian outback town, as Elsa caused quite a stir, getting drinks bought for both of us, and at one point literally stopping traffic when a truck swerved off the road to a halt for the driver to check 'Are you two... like... boyfriend and girlfriend?' When the answer was 'No' the driver did the best he could to get her to 'hop in the truck, darling - you're bloody beautiful!!'. Also the barman enthusiastically showed Elsa his four large and very heavy solid gold nuggets, from a nearby gold mine, then later asked her if she wanted to work there.

Waterfall in Litchfield

Small bit of Katherine Gorge

The next day we continued south to Katherine Gorge, and took a helicopter ride over the huge series of gorges which go on for miles and miles - hiking for about a week is the only other way to see them. After that we headed north to Edith Falls, for a final swim, then began the long drive back to Darwin, making 1,000Kms in total.

As it got dark over the last few hours, we had the spectacle of raging bush fires, often very near the side of the road, making half the sky go dark red under huge orange flames, and the road difficult to make out through all the smoke. It felt like we were on TV in a car commercial, though I doubt if the makers of our little car from 'Cheapa Rentals' would have gone to such expense!

Elsa flew off to Broome the next day and I headed off to Crocodilus Park, where captured salties are and fed up for their meat, for fancy handbags, and - in some cases - for public protection, as some get a taste for targeting tourists and their boats!

Adelaide to Alice

george — Sat, 17 May 2008 04:24:00 GMT

After a day and a half of rain, which was so unusual that it made the front page of the papers, Adelaide looked a lot better in the sunshine. The grid of the small city centre is surrounded on all sides by big parks - like a greenbelt right in the city. Still, after a few days there, it wasn't a patch on Melbourne for me.

I went on a wine tour of the Barossa Valley, Australia's biggest wine growing area, and joined in the minibus by a couple of other tourists, and a bunch of 'spunky' Australian girls who were travel agents from all over the country on a work jolly to try out the tours that they were selling.

We started the wine tasting before 10am at Jacob's Creek and then went on to several boutique wineries - by lunch we had sampled a lot of wine, and had some tasty bbq'd kangaroo to soak it all up.

The Whispering Dam... After this dam in the Barossa was built, people discovered its unusual acoustic properties by surprise. From where the photo was taken, you can talk normally and be heard loud and clear right across the other side. It's bizarre - you can see the person who's talking to you far away on the other side, but it sounds like they're just over your shoulder.

An in-pub, coin-operated breathalyser.

A few days later I went on a quick trip to Kangaroo island, which looks miniscule on a map of Australia, but is actually pretty big - larger than quite a lot of whole countries! That started with a surfing lesson where I managed to stand up on the board enough times to get an idea of how brilliant surfing properly must be, but I mostly ended up tumbling into the roaring surf after all the hard work of getting to and waiting for the right wave.

I was glad that nobody told me about the alarmingly frequent shark attacks on surfers in the bay until I was out of the water!

Unfortunately the weather was mostly crap, but we managed to go for some long walks in the huge national parks, visit big sea lion and seal colonies, try sandboarding down some dunes, toast marshmallows round the fire (while possums in the trees around us made their bizarre territorial
warning sounds), and have a look at the formations of the Remarkable Rocks - the picture doesn't show the scale, a person can easily stand under the weird shaped rock, which is just one of many in the formation...

Next up I joined a motley crew on a ten day trip from Adelaide to Alice Springs with a small company called Heading Bush. Stuffed facing each-other like soldiers in the back of a 4x4 Toyota Land Cruiser, with all our bedding (swags and sleeping bags) on the roof and all our food and clothes in the trailer, we were off to take the rough and winding routes north, rather than the perfectly good Stuart Highway which goes straight up to Alice Springs.

I joined a fairly international crew - Alex (Germany), Andy (England), Caroline (Scotland), Chris (England), Dave (Holland), Gitau (Switzerland), Kirsty (England), Gary (US), and Steve the guide/driver (very definitely an Aussie), but we soon found a shared interest in slagging off the French and each-other. It didn't take long for Steve to have us in a near military routine each night of getting the camp, fire and food sorted out when he stopped somewhere suitable in the wilderness each night around dusk.

It wasn't long before we were taking the piss out of Steve for pronouncing things the longest/widest/oldest etc in the Southern Hemisphere, but when we crossed the Dingo fence (above) it got ridiculous when he proclaimed it the greatest continuous man-made structure in the whole world, more significant than the Great Wall of China! It was built to allow farmers to keep sheep east of the fence without worrying about dingo attacks, and zig-zags coast to coast across the country. Only problem is that it doesn't work properly - we saw quite a few dingoes far south of the fence.

This quite big joey (toddler kangaroo) was commanded by his mum to hop into her pouch as we approached - somehow he managed to fit in, and turn around to poke his head out.

Our camp in the painted desert, and a nearby view at sunrise...

---

This is Dalhousie springs at sunrise, a big and very deep pond fed by a hot spring. Waking up freezing cold in our swags, it was a chilly but
short walk to the lovely steaming water which felt just the right side of boiling. No crocodiles thankfully, but we did get nibbled on our feet
and legs by these tiny minnow-like fish, which apparently like dead skin. The feel of a desert oasis was helped by dozens of native parrots flying overhead and squawking.

Can't remember what they're called, but we saw hundreds of these coloured and the white wild parrots along the way, often in huge flocks.

One thing about the whole journey that really surprised me was how much the scenery changed all the way. No two half hours were the same - one
minute all we could see was mile after mile of flat lunar landscape of grey sand and small black rocks, the next we were bumping through dried up creeks with red soil and bright green trees.

Sometimes the road was straight and flat (but still heavily corrugated, making the truck judder like a pneumatic drill), the next it was winding
around hills.

On the sixth day, back on tarmac after two days on unsealed roads Steve slammed on the brakes and we stopped short of a two metre taipan, not only the most deadly snake in the world, but also the most toxic land based species on the planet (I checked it on Wikipedia!). It was basking on the hot road, and slithered around poking it's forked tongue at us as we watched from the safety of the land cruiser. Since it would have had enough venom to kill every one of us in the group (it's reckoned that one taipan has enough venom to kill 100+ adult men), we opted to stay in the truck!

This point, miles and miles away from anywhere else, marks the dead centre of Australia - if the continent was a spinning plate, this would be where you'd balance it on your finger. Steve our guide wasn't too keen on remarks that if Australia was nowhere, this would be the middle!

Sunset

Before coming to Australia, I wasn't going to bother with going to Uluru (Ayres Rock), the main reason for people coming all the way to the 'red centre' of Australia, since I thought that a big rock in the middle of a vast desert would be a bit of a let-down. But I'm glad I did - just the
vast scale of it is awesome, and doesn't translate at all in pictures. Its taller than a lot of skyscrapers. Plus, on the 8km walk around the base (for some reason, despite the signs requesting that people don't climb the rock as its a sacred Aboriginal site, and also quite dangerous, lots of people still feel the need to) you can see how complex the surface of the rock is, with fissures, gullies and bizarre shapes and markings all over, as well as aboriginal art.

Another astonishing thing was the speed of the sunset once it had reached the base of the rock. In under a minute it went from fully illuminated
bright orange-red to a dark silhouette, with the light moving up the rock and fading away incredibly quickly.

Sunrise

The night at Yulara, near Uluru was the only one we spent at a full-on campsite, and with the nearby roads, lights and noise it was by far the
least pleasant. This was the campsite where, in 1980, Lindy Chamberland saw her baby being taken from the tent by a dingo. Nobody believed her story, and she was locked up as the murderer until years later when DNA evidence proved that the dingoes really had taken the baby away and eaten
it. We'd already seen dingoes scavenging around us after dark in a few places where we camped, but the ones we came across all seemed fairly scared of humans.

This dingo was trying to scavenge off tourists in a car-park

Part of the incredible Olgas (Kata Tjuta), which are not far from Uluru. We walked all round them, and through the valley of the winds (above)

A small part of King's Canyon, where we went for a long walk, above and below the canyon rim.

A Ring Tailed Dragon in King's Canyon. Probably deadly too.

There was lots more on the journey - I could go on for ages! Bits that I've missed out include huge and furry (but unusually for Australia, totally harmless) huntsman spiders; going into underground opal mines and dugout homes in Coober Pedy; lots of swimming in billabongs and creeks along the way - some warm, most freezing cold; an eccentric chap called 'Talc Alf' who lives in the middle of nowhere and seemed to have a unifying theory of the universe and everything, based on the shapes of letters in the Roman alpahbet; the nightly shooting stars viewed from our swags; spotting a whole bunch of endangered Rock Wallerbies, and tonnes more.

A wild camel that we managed not to hit

Termite mounds

A rest from the bumps

Part of the huge MacDonnell Ranges from a helicopter

Emus that had just decided to run across the road right in front of us

A little kangaroo

Ruined houses built by early European settlers

Around the campfire

Just before sunrise from the same place

So after 3085 kilometres on (but mostly off) the road, we arrived in Alice Springs dusty and probably smelling awful, looking forward to showers and a restaurant meal, but not looking forward much to bunk beds in hostel dorms after getting accustomed to sleeping under the bright stars in a cozy sleeping bag and swag around the warm camp fire.

Melbourne and Around

george — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 06:05:00 GMT

Arriving in Australia for the first time, things started well when the beach-babe immigration woman stamped my passport, smiled and said 'see you later' in an enthusiastic Australian voice. Getting from the airport to my city-centre hostel was cheap and easy, then I went out exploring Melbourne.

The word 'beautiful' is also well used. When I bought a new t-shirt, the woman at the till asked me where I was from, and when I replied 'Scotland', she loudly said 'BEEEAUTIFUL!'. I was very pleased, until I heard the next person answer 'Sydney' to the same question (note- Sydney is to Melbegians what Manchester is to Liverpudlians), and she said 'BEEEAUTIFUL!' just as enthusiastically. So I think here it's just a nicer way of saying 'Oh, right'!

The ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) memorial - Australia and New Zealand sent a disproportionately high number of troops to the world wars.

The city from the Anzac memorial

The Yarra River

Anyway, it seems there's more to Melbourne than 'Neighbours' - it's a great city, and after just over ten days there it goes straight into my top five cities-in-the-world-I'd-like-to-live-in list. The population is almost 4 million, but it doesn't feel that big, and it has a nice mixture of slick efficiency with trams, sushi restaurants and skyscrapers everywhere, and bohemian artiness with seemingly even more fringes and festival than Edinburgh. Also it's far more multicultural than I'd realised - I even got surveyed by three Chinese schoolchildren about the range of multicultural things to do!

Melbourne has a crazy traffic thing called a 'hook turn' for cars turning right. If you want to turn right, you have to go into the left lane (?!), then - it seems - wait for the split second while the lights are changing, when no cars or trams are coming from either direction, and GO! It looks very strange in action, but it seems to work most of the time.

I went on the hostel pub crawl a few days after arriving, where I heard an Australian utter the 'c' word (convict) for the first time. I'd been warned not to mention it unless I was sure it wouldn't cause offence. Apart from some good live music, the evening entertainment was provided by an American who got sympathetically but firmly dealt with by a group of security guards after deciding to run up a long escalator which was meant for going down.

This is a galah of 'You flaming galah!!' fame.

Halfway through my time there I went on an overnight trip to Phillip Island and Wilson's Promontory, which is the most southerly point on the Aussie mainland. This turned out to be two day trips joined together, with only German Sarah, Aussie Mark and me staying overnight.

Even down in Melbourne, Australia's water shortage problems are well evident, with signs all over about the current restrictions in order, and others encouraging people to save water when showering, brushing teeth etc. All public water features and gardens etc have signs to explain to the everyone that they're not wasting it - reclaimed water is being used.

Near Phillip Island are lots of banners and doom-laden artists impressions along the road side, like the 'megapylons' ones on the A9, warning about the desalination plant that's planned to provide Melbourne with fresh water from the sea. Apparently it is definitely going ahead though.

But Phillip Island is most famous for its 'penguin parade', where every night thousands of little penguins (that's actually what they're called - they're only about 30cms high) swim in to the beach, stand about for a few minutes until there's a big group, then waddle up the shore to their nests, maybe 500 metres inland. In the dusky light all you can see is these drunken looking white bellies swaying left and right, until they waddle up past the spectators to go to bed. The spectators outnumber the penguins, with several huge, dimly lit grandstands facing the sea, making it look like a some kind of standoff between man and penguin.

The next day we did some walking on Wilson's Prom, and saw plenty animals in the wild, including emus, kangaroos, wallabies, and (my fave) wombats...

After a few more days in Melbourne, I joined a great fun three day tour heading towards Adelaide along the Great Ocean Road and up the Grampian Mountains, which make up the southern bit of the Great Dividing Range.

When we stopped for a photo of the coastline, someone spotted a boring looking snake amongst some rubbish in the layby. But it turned out that it was a tiger snake, the first deadly thing I've seen so far in Australia (there are lots of them!), and one of the most deadly snakes in the world. Apparently it's venom contains a lethal mixture of neurotoxins (Notexin), coagulants, haemolysins and myotoxins. Nice!

A bit of eating...

...and a lot of sleeping!

I learned tonnes of interesting things about koalas, but the one that sticks in my mind most is that a koala will be able to eat up to 10 species of eucalyptus. The ones that a koala can eat are not genetically fixed, but depend on their mother - she gets the young to eat something like diarrhoea that she makes specially, and they build up a resistance to the toxins that the tree puts in its leaves to keep the pesky marsupials away!

Some of the twelve apostles

Anyway, a few hours further down the road, our van driver swerved and screeched to a halt on the windy road as a koala took its time crossing, seemingly without a care in the world!

This arch is called London Bridge. Until 1990 it was connected to the mainland, and a few people were looking at it in a storm when one of the arches collapsed, leaving a couple who had climbed over the fences onto the now isolated bit.

The two people had to be rescued by helicopter, and the whole thing became a bit of a media event, but nobody could understand why the stranded couple didn't want any publicity from the media who were eager to tell their story. It turned out the reason was that the couple were married, but not to each other!

Huge gum (eucalyptus) trees from below...

...and above

The Grampians, named by Sir Thomas Mitchell because they reminded him of Scotland's Grampians... really?!!

One of the pink salt-lakes on the way to Adelaide

Crossing the state border to South Australia (the driest state in the driest continent on the planet), we set our clocks back half an hour - a bizarre time zone if you ask me - and were cheerfully told that we'd just become more at risk of death by serial killer than ever before. South Australia apparently leads the world in serial killer deaths per capita!

If I don't make it out of Adelaide, it was great knowing you!!

New Zealand III - This Time It's Personal!

george — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 02:55:00 GMT

From Queenstown we headed East across the South Island to Dunedin. The city's name comes from Dùn Èideann, the Gaelic word for 'Edinburgh', and that's not the only thing linking Edinburgh and Dunedin...

Dunedin's newspaper is called 'The Edinburgh Times'; they've got an annual Fringe Festival of the arts; the rugby stadium is on Murrayfield Road; the city often has a malty brewery smell (from its city-centre Speights brewery). The list goes on!

Lots of non-Edinburgh-specific Scottish things too - like the centre's dominated by a huge statue of Robbie Burns.

Dunedin was originally intended to be some kind of Christian utopia, run by the Free Church of Scotland, but by the time they had a massive gold rush in the late 19th century (only a few decades after the first settlers had arrived), that idea clearly wasn't going to work. The city was by far New Zealand's richest while the gold lasted.

Anyway, spot the Edinburgh/Dunedin difference!...

City Map

The Water Of Leith

The Scott Monument (Actually it's Cargill's Monument in Dunedin)

Almost all the street names are from Edinburgh, mostly from the New Town, though unfortunately they're arranged totally differently!

Also, it seems that it's just as easy, or maybe even easier, to buy haggis or a kilt here than in Edinburgh!

Even the parking wardens seem similar...

But one thing that Edinburgh can't boast, but Dunedin can is the steepest road in the world, as confirmed by the Guinness Book of Records. Actually Dunedin also trumps Edinburgh in the penguin department - they can be seen most days waddling along the city's beaches.

After that I stayed in the small seaside town of Oamaru for a night, then the next night in a remote farmstay miles out of an even smaller town called Kirau, with the plan being to get some photos of merino sheep living a hardy life in the mountains. It took a lot of walking in ridiculous dry heat to even find some merino sheep, and then for some reason they were reluctant to pose for photos with mountainous backdrops!

But staying in the farmstay was a bit awkward as everyone else staying there were the elderly friends and family of the owners, there for an Easter weekend feast - luckily I had some pasta to reheat!

The bizarrely round boulders at Moeraki Beach.

The next day I rejoined the bus to drive through Mackenzie County, a huge rugged and dry area which was pretty much unused until a sheep rustling Scot called Jock Mackenzie used it to keep massive groups of (allegedly) stolen sheep. Supposedly he'd keep them for several months, then take them to Christchurch and sell them, legally as far as anyone could tell. Eventually people knew what he was up to, but nobody managed to prove anything, so they just deported him back to Scotland. But he'd shown that the area was not bad for keeping sheep, and there's thousands upon thousands of them there now.

Next up was a couple of nights by Lake Tekapo, a massive high-up lake which is bright blue because of something to do with rock bits in the glacial meltwater that it's made up from.

The Church of the Good Sheperd... looks at least 500 years old, but it was actually built in the 1930s!

One of the observatories on Mt John, above Lake Tekapo. Not much light pollution round there.

On to Christchurch where I had a couple of good nights out, then Kaikoura on the East Coast. Kaikoura's big thing is that very close to the coast there's a massive and deep ocean canyon, full of all sorts of marine life including giant squid which support lots of whales, dolphins, sea birds and everything.

The first day I thought I should try dolphin swimming, expecting it to be a bit crap, but in fact it was great... we found a massive pod of about 350 dusky dolphins (they're known as the clowns of the sea as they mess around so much) and slipped off the back of the boat into the pod, wearing wet-suits, flippers, mask and snorkel.

We were told to get their interest by making strange noises, diving down and keeping eye contact. But in no time there were dolphins all around, and maintaining eye contact with one was dizzying as a dolphin would normally spiral around you many times, then often decide to dive deep down - the few times I managed to follow (difficult with a buoyant wet-suit) the dolphin would go far down, then come rocketing vertically back up to break the surface above me.

The most incredible sight though was when the pod was on the move, and streams of dozens of dolphins at a time would come out of the blue into your visibility maybe ten meters away, swimming incredibly fast with their tails making their whole body bounce up and down, and zoom past making their clicking sounds. Every so often you'd see the eyes of one fix on you as it passed, and it would swim around you playfully a few times, then shoot off to catch up.

The next day I booked onto a 7.15 whale watching trip, hoping to get sunrise pictures of the whales, but got there bright and early to find that they were cancelling all sailings until the weather improved.

Eventually, after lunch it was still a bit choppy, but we were told where the sick bags were and went out and saw a couple of huge sperm whales (who were up for a breather before heading down for another 40 minutes to catch more squid), lots more dolphins, fur seals and the odd wandering wandering albatross...

Then I was off to Renwick, in the Marlborough area, famous for its wine.

Here the grapes were growing for lots of famous NZ wines - Cloudy Bay, Villa Maria, Oyster Bay, Montana (still owned by the Check family who started off the wine industry around here), Herzog plus tonnes of others. I hired a bike and pedalled around trying not to get shot (more of that later) - managed to taste a few grapes and they were surprisingly sweet and tasty - I thought wine grapes would be horrible!

A brave hedgehog!

Crossed the Cook Straight from the South Island back to Wellington on the North Island by ferry this time. My first night in the dorm there was distinguished by the fact that I shared my bed with another man - a complete stranger - for several hours!

My four dorm-mates and me were sleeping soundly at around 2am when the remaining extremely drunk and quite large person must have come in, climbed the ladder up to my top bunk (I hope thinking it was his bed which was actually on the other side of the room), then before I had time to do anything about it, passed out and fell into a lump halfway down my bed!!

None of my attempts to wake him (shaking, jabbing, slapping, pinching his cheeks etc) did anything, so I had to choose between him possibly being injured on landing if I tried to get him off the top bunk, or the ever present vomit risk if I left him. I tried and failed to wake him again, then eventually had to leave him to doze. Several hours later he woke up, deliriously looked across the dark room to his bunk bed, carefully found the narrow ladder down, then stepped forwards and landed face-first on the floor with a thud and quite a lot of muffled swearing! But he seemed ok, and then was packed up and gone by about 6am!

On the way from Wellington we stopped at Mt Bruce, where they have big enclosures inside with reversed lighting - it's dark during the day and light through the night. All this is to keep kiwi birds (which are nocturnal) so that the public can see them during the day. Once my eyes had adjusted I spotted a couple of them digging for worms, prancing around in a comical way, and even stopping to make their piercing call. But the most surprising thing was their size - they're pretty big, larger than a chicken and a lot more solid looking (and a lot more bizarre looking). There's loads of endangered species of kiwi - they're still surviving in the wild, but helped by people trapping the introduced possums, stoats, rats etc plus domestic cats and dogs that threaten them.

Then up to Napier, a small city which was pretty much totally demolished by a big earthquake in 1931. The result is that the town centre is all built in the art-deco style that was all the rage (and cheap) at the time.

Napier is on Hawkes Bay, another famous wine growing area. I went on a wine tasting tour which was good fun, and I learned lots about winemaking, including about 'frost-fighting'... if your vineyard gets a frost at the wrong time it can ruin the whole year, so people sleep with a thermometer alarm clock thing - when they get woken up they have various ways of stopping the vines getting frosted. Most big vineyards have a permanent diesel powered propellor thing high in the air every acre or so that looks a bit like 2 bladed mini wind turbines permanently in place - they use them to keep air circulating. But another method is to pay for a helicopter to fly and hover around over the vineyard - expensive but worth it!

Apart from the frost, birds eating the fruit are the big problem - at first biking around Marlborough I'd thought all the gunshot sounds were just similar to the automatic air-pressure machines they use in Scotland to scare the crows away. But no, the vineyards employ teams of people to walk up and down the rows all day with shotguns to shoot and scare off the pesky birds. So I don't know if vegetarians should drink wine! Actually supposedly winemaking uses rennet, so I suppose they shouldn't anyway.

Anyway - crazily - buying wine at the exact place where it's made in NZ is actually more expensive than buying the same wine on the other side of the world in the UK because of taxes etc... and I thought the UK tobacco & alcohol duties were bad enough!

My final 'Magic' journey took me to Mount Manganui, or 'The Mount', a summer beach resort popular with surfers and beach dwellers. Unfortunately, now being well into autumn it was a bit chilly and cloudy, but still busy enough - the hostel was half full of kiwi fruit pickers and packers.

This is where the sport of blokarting was invented - that's a kind of land based sailing rather than the art of being a bloke! I'd already decided that I wanted to give it a try before realising that it happened several miles away from where I was staying.

The trouble with relying on buses to get you around is that getting to anywhere off their route can be a hassle, but I managed to borrow a bike (which had no brakes at all, making stopping for traffic interesting!) and had to cycle for an hour to get to the blokarting track, but it was well worth it.

These things are able to go at up to three times the wind speed, and whipping around the tarmac track in pursuit of others in the fleet (yes, that's what they call it!), sometimes almost tipping sideways at speed, with one wheel high in the air, I could well believe it. Great fun - one of those things that's quite easy to pick up, but it would take ages to get really good.

Now I'm having another lovely family time staying with Jules and Steve,...

...definite farmer's daughter Emily...

..and my rapidly growing godson William, who's Sweet As! At the moment Emily is being great as his full time best friend and protector - long may that last!..

Then on Tuesday (15th April) I'm off to Melbourne in Aussie (that's what Kiwis call Australia, normally with a fair bit of disdain!) Going to try posting shorter blogs more frequently as this one is ridiculously long!

By the way, I've stopped putting my pictures in the 'galleries' on this site as I've been having too many problems uploading them.

New Zealand II

george — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:40:00 GMT

Kia ora!

So after an entertaining day of card games in the backpackers in Marahau while it rained cats and dogs, the next day in Abel Tasman was a mixture of showers and sunshine, and I went for a 'tramp' along another section of coast.

Then back for a night in Nelson before heading South down the West Coast. One of the Magic Bus stops was to see the Pancake Rocks, where erosion had caused stacks of these rocks to take on bizarre shapes.

Then on to Greymouth, where not a huge amount seemed to go on, except for the brewing of Monteiths beer. We all took a tour of the brewery, followed by extended tasting their beer varieties, then an all you can eat BBQ, where none of us came close to beating a record, apparently set by a Japanese tourist, of 37 sausage sandwiches!

Mmmm, beer!

Next, on the way to Franz Joseph, we stopped at the Bushmuseum. Before Brett, Will and others get too excited, it was a museum celebrating the old ways of New Zealand, before things got all namby-pamby, latte sippin', politics discussin', and full of JAFAs (to paraphrase the no-nonsense-talkin' guy from the museum).

Here the main attraction, apart from possum pie and stuffed weasels that dropped down from doorways, was a video about red deer. After people began to realise the level of damage that the beasts (introduced from Scotland just over 100 years ago for stalking but multiplying like crazy), were doing to the pristine native environment, the decision was taken to do a mass cull. A market for the venison was soon found in Germany, and the deer were shot in huge numbers, first by traditional stalking, then by riflemen from helicopters.

But sales of venison were going so well that people decided to try catching the animals alive to farm them. The video had amazing footage of mad Kiwis jumping from the landing rails of swooshing helicopters on to the backs of panicking stags, then wrestling them to the ground in a mess of antlers, hooves and human. This developed into an art of firing nets to stop the running deer, then jumping down to force them onto the ground.

The bushman at the museum concluded that the bungy jumpin' and skydivin' that folk call 'extreme' is in fact for sissies, vegiterians and meterosexuals!

The next few days I stayed by the Franz Joseph and then Fox glaciers, unusual because the glaciers flow down straight into rainforest. Also here is Lake Matheson, famous for its mirror-like reflections... I went there four times trying to get the conditions right, but was totally out-done with my digital camera and wee tripod by a German guy with a huge field camera on rails, supported by a monster industrial tripod.

By the way, it's incredible how many German tourists there seem to be in NZ, and every single one I've met has said they come from 'the middle bit... you won't have heard of it... somewhere between Frankfurt and Cologne'. I'm starting to wonder if this is some kind of organised German joke - they can't all come from the same, unheard of place! Either way, they do have an interesting sense of humour!

Then on to Wanaka, a quiet but alternative-trendy town set beautifully on the side of the massive lake. Here I shared a cabin with five others, all Germans (guess which area they were from!), and had a nice time walking up nearby hills - I left the huge mountains to the pros - and went on my second cinema trip since leaving Scotland in August.

The Wanaka cinema is an experience in itself, featuring a seating choice of old airliner seats, whole vintage cars, and second hand sofas. Halfway through there's an intermission for warm cookies and homemade ice cream, then the projectionist wanders around to ask when people want to start the next reel. We watched Sweeny Todd (which I hadn't realised was a musical), which I thought was a bit underwhelming. It had so much positive hype that I thought it was a bit of a letdown. Entertaining enough though.

Then on to Queenstown, known as the extreme sports capital of the world, which has the party town atmosphere of a ski resort (which it is for half of the year), and seems to be full of adrenaline junkies from all over the world. There's no shortage of things to do - skydiving, jet boating, paragliding, lugeing, canyoning, fly-by-wireing and lots more, including most famously, bungy jumping.

It would be very easy to believe that AJ Hackett, (the man who, with Henry van Asch set up bungy jumping in Queenstown), invented the sport, especially since that's what's claimed by most of the guidebooks and busdrivers etc. They all concede that the modern sport was inspired by the people of Pentecost Island in the Pacific, who build towers and jump off them tied to vines, quite often to their death or serious injury.

But none of them mention the fact that modern bungy jumping was actually invented by a group of Brits, the Dangerous Sports Club, who - amongst other mad things such as trying to hang glide from active volcanoes and take double decker buses down the slopes of St Moritz - did a bungy jump from Clifton Suspension Bridge in 1979, and then from the Golden Gate bridge, seven years before AJ Hackett famously jumped from the Eiffel tower before setting up the world's first commercial jump in Queenstown.

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Anyway, a couple of nights in Queenstown, then I was off to Milford Sound for a too quick cruise along the Fiord, then to Te Anau.

---

From there I started a great overnight cruise of Doubtful Sound, which is less accessible, and much less busy than Milford. Doubtful Sound got it's name because Captain Cook (actually then only Lieutenant Cook) had a major disagreement with his botanist, who was desperate to anchor in the fiord to investigate things, but Cook said that he thought it doubtful that there would be enough wind in the sheltered waters to get their ship out.

And it was easy to see why - we headed out to the Tasman Sea (apparently on a relatively calm day) and could see why the seals looked a bit peeved, it was cold and windy with big crashing waves all over the place. But inside Doubtful Sound, things were a lot more tranquil and cosy, and mirror calm in the morning.

We went kayaking, and also swimming, which was very strange, because - with the area having one of the highest levels of rainfall in the world, around 7 meters a year, the surface water is mostly fresh water, dark brown since it's full of tannin washed out of the rainforest that clings to all the cliffs. So under a level of that is seawater which gets very little light, meaning that deep sea creatures live in the fiords in much more shallow water than they could normally. So the water under the surface was baltic, and diving in off the boat I tried not to think about the deep sea monsters that could be lurking under the coca-cola coloured surface.

Apparently they do get sharks, but we didn't see any, though we did keep bumping into a pod of bottlenose dolphins, which decided to put on an amazing high jumping show for us on one pass.

Then back to Te Anau for one night, and back to Queenstown.

By the way, it seems that the further south you go on the South Island, the more Scottish things get - burns are called 'burns' rather than streams, people say 'wee bit' of this and 'wee bit' of that, and most of the kiwis, Maoris and Europeans seem to have at least one Scottish grandparent. It's a wonder they didn't introduce haggis as well as red deer from Scotland - they probably couldn't round them up!

Back in Queenstown, I had a few goes on the 'luge', where you take a gondola up a big hill that overlooks the town, then race a go-cart which down a banked concrete track.

It was brilliant to meet up with Henny and John on their holiday, on what happened to be St Patricks Day, and we had a great night out sampling the eating and drinking on offer, and eventually a casino where Henny turned into a money making machine on the roulette table, wherever she put her chips was where the ball landed!

Having decided that I'd do a bungy jump in QT, I changed my mind when I was told that they're a bit tame compared to other things available (this is my excuse and I'm sticking with it!)... apparently with a bungy, very soon after you jump off, you start slowing down as the elastic starts stretching out.

So instead, James, a chap I'd met in Doubtful Sound and I did a canyon swing, where you jump off a cliff and freefall vertically for 60 metres, then you catch up with the length of the cable and swing hundreds of meters across the canyon, over the Shotover river. Definitely best to wear brown pants!

They have a bunch of different ways to jump, each rated for scariness. I was going to do the forward jump, like a dive off the platform (rated 3/5), but the jumpmaster said it wasn't that great, but that if I did the 'pindrop' (rated 5/5) I'd get an 'awesome ground-rush'.

So, with getting an awesome ground-rush obviously being topmost in my mind(!), they got me set up and showed me the posture - feet together, leaning forward, looking down with hands clasped behind the back, and kindly let me know that if I bottled it and leant back, I'd smack my head on the rock ledge, about 15 metres below. Nice!

But then came the moment when I realised all the safety stuff, photos etc had been done, and they were ready for me to jump. The guy wouldn't count me down... 'sorry mate, I can't count!', so I decided not to make it worse by prolonging the agony of looking down to the cliffs and river far down below and hopped off the ledge... it was pretty amazing hooning through the air and eventually swinging way over across to the cliff on the other side of the canyon and back enough times to start breathing normally again before being winched all the way back up to the platform.

James out xtreme'd me by a mile though, doing a backward fall first, then one where he was suspended upside down before being released to go headfirst.

After that, met up with John and Henny again and we went for a choice (Kiwi for 'very good') BBQ with an old friend of John's who's moved to Queenstown.

Another good Kiwi expression that you hear a lot is 'Sweet As!', meaning 'cool/sorted/excellent' and I think it was a smart bit of marketing to call the diet version of the fizzy drink Lemon & Paeroa (L&P - it has the same cult status and popularity here as Iron Bru has in Scotland) 'Sweet As L&P'. Only trouble is that L&P is lovely, but the diet version tastes awful... another similarity with Iron Bru!

New Zealand Part 1

george — Sat, 8 Mar 2008 01:47:00 GMT

Hello!... It's been quite a while since my last blog entry, I've been in NZ since arriving from Singapore a couple of days before Christmas.

Christmas with Steve, Jules (my big sister) and Emily was great - delicious steaks on the bbq while wild turkeys roamed free around the garden. New Year's Eve was unconventional too, in bed by about 10pm, but that's late when getting up at farm time/Emily time of about-5.40am!

Julia was due with baby number two on 7th January, but things didn't quite work to schedule, so I had a few funpacked weeks with Emily, including much trampoline bouncing, making (and eating) fairy cupcakes, feeding the chucks, playing hide and seek, and going swimming every day in the hot sunshine (the summer was declared an official drought in the Waikato area)....

It was a very pleasant change from staying in hostels where many people are so concerned about their security that they keep their valuables physically attached to them 24 hours a day, to staying with Jules and Steve, where not only are the doors not locked when everyone leaves the house, but they're actually left wide open!

It's been a very busy summer at the farm, which is being converted from beef to dairy. This new cowshed is one of several new buildings, plus miles of 'races' (hardcore roads for the cows to walk along to be milked) to have been built. Just the cowshed alone needed 24 huge trucks full of concrete to come up the long road to the farm.

Anyway, Julia was soon trying hot curries, bumpy motorbike rides (which she's used to anyway), energetic walks, reflexology and even acupunture, but the baby still didn't want to budge. Then at last, well over two weeks late, a sweet boy called William John Broughton (Billy Broughton for short!) was born, much to everone's delight...

..first bath...

..Meeting the big sister

Mum and Dad arrived when William should have been about three weeks old, but he was in fact about three days old, and they got stuck into Grandparenting. A few days later I headed up to the Northlands of New Zealand, via a few days in Auckland.

Up in the Bay of Islands, swimming with dolphins was unfortunately not possible, since there were baby dolphins about, but we did see plenty of dolphin fun and frolicks from the boat.

I was staying in Paihia, but also spent some time across the water in
Russel, an affluent village that Americans would call 'quaint'. But it was once a whaling station called 'the hellhole of the Pacific' because of its lawless and dangerous nature.

From there I went right up to the blustery Northern tip of NZ, Cape Reinga, where the Tasmin Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. On the way were acres and acres of avacados which had apparently been planted not for eating, but to produce avocado oil, which we were assured is going to be the next big foodie thing, far better (and far more expensive of course) than olive oil.

After that I stayed over on the west coast, by Hokianga Harbour, a very peaceful and easy going area, with New Zealand's oldest school, established almost 150 whole years ago not far away.

But the area has two other claims to fame. Opo the dolphin put the tiny town of Opononi on the map in the 1950s.

She was incredibly friendly, coming right into the beach to play all day with swimmers and dribbling beach balls with her nose. She became so popular in New Zealand that they made films and pop songs about her, and signs were put up all around the town saying "Don't Shoot our Gay Dolphin". But just a year on, she was found on a local beach, washed up dead. At the time it was a mystery, but it's now reckoned that fishermen probably killed her by mistake, using dynamite to stun fish (which was done a lot at the time).

The other thing is the nearby Kauri forests. Less than 5% of the original forests remain, since the amazingly tall, straight and strong trees were felled for The Empire to use as ships masts etc. But some incredible giant trees are still left, including Tane Matua Ngahere (The father of the forest), which also starred as one of the walking giants in Lord of the Rings. It's reckoned to be around 4,000 years old, and to contain more volume of timber than any other living tree in the world.

Right, enough trivia about the Hokianga! I then went back to Jules and Steve's via another night in Auckland.

A few days later, we then went for a lovely week's family holiday at Pukawa, on the side of Lake Taupo, an ancient massive crater lake, which is bigger than the whole of Singapore.

Dad and I went for a couple of days fishing for brown trout in a small river, which was more like stalking than normal fishing. You carefully walk upstream, watching the clear water for any sly trout, which are normally incredibly well camoflauged and easily frightened.

On spotting one you have to cast upstream to it, usually change the fly several times, trying to find one it fancies, and be ready to strike if the fish goes for the it. We got a few both days, but none of the crafty monster trout that we occasionally spotted cruising about in the deeper water.

We also learned from our guide what Kiwis mean when they call someone a 'Jafa'... Just Anothother Fxxxing Aucklander! People from Auckland don't seem to be universally popular in the rest of NZ!

This is Mount Ngauruhoe near lake Taupo, which played 'Mount Doom' in Lord of the Rings

After Pukawa, and a few more days back on the farm, Mum and Dad sadly had to head back to chilly Scotland, then I continued my hop on - hop off tour of NZ with Magic. The first night I stayed in Rotorua via the amazing gloworm caves at Waitomo, lit up spectacurly by these bright worms that attract and eat insects. They eventually hatch into flies that live for a few hours to lay their eggs, then normally dumbly fly into the light and become victims of other gloworms in their own colony - either way they spend their entire lives within the same cave.

Then on to Taupo for a couple of nights and then the capital, Wellington.

When I came to Wellington for a couple of days a few years ago, it made it into my (hastily invented) list of the top five cities in the world that I'd like to live in. After my second visit it's definitely still there, despite the trendy coffee and bagels arty alternativeness which this time made it seem to me like the set for a nineties film like 'Reality Bites' or 'Singles'. I shaved off my goatee beard (which looked ridiculous anyway!) in protest.

New Zealand's parliament building in Wellington, aka 'The Beehive'. I think it should be aka 'The Oil Filter'!

I flew over the Cook Straight to the South Island in a tiny Cessna, for only $7 (£3) more than going on the ferry, then stayed in Nelson before heading to Abel Tasman National Park. Supposedly the area gets more sunshine than anywhere else in New Zealand, and the national park is famous for the crystal clear waters and golden sand bays.

But it started to rain heavily the morning after I arrived, and didn't stop until after dark. Luckily we squeezed in a 7 hour 'tramp' on the afternoon we arrived!

New Zealand green lipped mussels... very tasty!

Soaking in Singapore

george — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 02:06:00 GMT

I knew I was coming to Singapore during one of the rainy months, but with three out of the four days I was there featuring monsoon style rainfall, I felt lucky to have one day of glorious sunshine. Still, for me, going into the shopping centres was as much about relief from the heat as from the rain - I'm a lot more used to rain!

Crossing the border on the train on the train from Kuala Lumpur, and with the everyone onboard having to get off with all our stuff while the police and their dogs took ages to check everything, I was half expecting to get arrested for bringing in chewing gum! But I read that since 2004 it is allowed for therapeutic value (?) only. That was thanks to Wrigleys lobbying hard for chewing gum to be included in the free trade agreement signed between the US and Singapore. Still, it turns out that I was technically breaking the law, as any unauthorised transit of the stuff is prohibited.

It was banned in the first place not just because of the nastiness of gum on the pavements and seats etc, but because youths had been gumming up the doors and locks of the swanky MRT underground & overground trains. And that's the only crime I heard a single thing about while in Singapore. Adverts on taxis remind citizens to remain vigilant, and that 'Low Crime doesn't mean No Crime', but everyone I spoke to said that there may be the very occasional petty theft, but violent crime or anything like that is unheard of.

Singapore city also lives up to its reputation for total cleanliness, which must be at least partly down to the long list of fines posted around the place, depicting misdemeanours like smoking in the wrong place, dropping litter, eating or drinking in the wrong place with their associated, severe fines.

The Guiness world record holding 'Fountain of Wealth'. It was raining anyway!

So when a taxi driver told me that he'd have his head chopped off if he didn't use the meter, maybe he was only half joking! Apparently the sci-fi writer William Gibson described Singapore as "Disneyland with the death penalty"! Seems to me like a land of opportunity - the magician/robber who stole my lens off my camera in broad daylight in St Petersburg could make a fortune coming to Singapore on a working holiday, I think he'd be pretty good at not getting caught.

About to rain again

Anyway, while Singapore lacks in the threat of crime, it certainly makes up for it in the abundance of shopping centres. They're everywhere! And stuffed full of plush shops and unbelievably slow walking shoppers. I've noticed elsewhere that everyday UK brands such as M&S manage to appear like top line, chic labels, and in Singapore one of them is Topshop, strategically placed in a mall full of proper designer label shops. And, while the shopping centres don't go to Kuala Lumpur extremes of having full size roller coasters right in the middle, they do all have multiplex cinemas. I'm convinced that there must be enough seats in Singapore's cinemas for every single member of the 4 million+ population to be watching a film at the same time!

Because of the pre-Christmas busyness, I had to stay in two different places, with the first two nights being fairly bizarre - I stayed at a creaky old hostel in the Catholic Centre, an old but perfectly nice high rise featuring madonna and child statues and water damaged biblical scenes all over the place. The only unpleasant thing there for me was after I discovered a bag of really tasty chilli infused Japanese seaweed in a nearby corner shop, quickly wolfed down half of it, then spent the next 2 or 3 hours being sick, six times!

From the hostel in the Arab Quarter

But I was fine the next day, then the next two nights were in a more typical hostel in the Arab Quarter next to Little India, where the next door street was totally devoted to selling fabrics and rugs. I narrowly escaped from being skilfully talked into buying a very fine, large Kashmiri rug. My excuse that I was flying in a few hours didn't help - "I can fold it up to the size of a big laptop!"

On my last day there I went to the zoo, which was great with lots of well looked after animals, including...

White tigers...

A frazzled looking Emu...

Cheeky monkeys...

The "World's Only" free ranging orang-utan area, where you walk a treetop trail, and they're around and above you. This featured a bit of excitement, when one of the larger orang-utans somehow got hold of a steel bar, and was showing off - running around and swinging it.

The wardens had to clear the gathering crowd, and try to exchange the steel bar for an apple, but that took some doing!...

Mandrills - this one was entertaining the crowd of mostly children, playfully chasing the female around their enclosure with a comical grimace, but the Singaporean parents quickly and firmly told the fascinated children to move away when he caught her, and started some prolonged rodgering!

Anyway, no photos of that you'll be glad to know! After a few days in Singapore I was off on a ten hour flight to New Zealand, where I am now, in the lap of luxury with Jules and Steve and playing with Emily, who's getting excited now that she knows it's Christmas day tomorrow!

Too quickly thru Malaysia

george — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:14:00 GMT

Langkawi

Arriving in the dark from the Koh Lipe ferry, when I found a taxi I was a bit suspicious of the driver's claims that almost every bed on the island was full. Lankawi is right up in the north west of the peninsular part of Malaysia, and for some reason enjoys duty free status. It's a popular holiday spot for affluent Malaysians, and all very nicely manicured. That didn't stop the taxi - doing about 60mph on a smooth dual carriageway in the dark - from hitting a fairly large, dead dog, square on! The driver just said "DOG" and slowed for a bit until he was happy that there was still air in all the tyres.

But arriving at the place I'd planned to stay, it turned out that he was right about the lack of rooms - they were full, knew of nowhere empty, and just said "good luck, I hope you can find somewhere"!

Eventually I did, but not quite in the price bracket I was after - the Frangipani Eco Resort cost just over ten times more per night than where I stayed on Koh Lipe, but it was at least ten times more pleasant!

Anyway, all the busyness on the island was down to the fact that Malaysia's huge and prestigious every-other-year (what's the word for that?), arms trade show was in full swing - I'd thought that something was up when I saw all the warships dotted around the island as we sailed in!

The next day, the trade fair was open to the public with a huge air show to draw in the crowds, so I decided to brave the searing heat on the airport runway, and joined the crowds to see the #1 attraction, the good old Red Arrows from Blighty!

Having not seen them since I was a little boy, the mixture of the excellent and crisp build up from the RAF officer on the tannoy, then the awesome spectacle of the nine hawks thundering around, weaving impossible looking shapes followed by red, white and blue smoke trails got my national pride going, as did the shouts of amazement from the Malaysian public and miscellaneous arms dealers.

Nothing that followed them was anywhere near as good, but the sudden ear splitting roar of three Malaysian F18s coming down close over the crowd from behind, afterburners blazing at what must have been near-supersonic speed scared the living daylights out of me, with some people in the crowd around me screaming and ducking before they knew what was going on. The intimidating manoeuvres gave some inkling of how terrifying these jets must be when they're used for what their made for. Later in the hotel, a Swiss arms trader told me that the F18s' display, and several of the other demonstrations were widely considered to be highly dangerous, using manoeuvres over and towards the crowds that have long been illegal in most countries. I can see why!

But otherwise the air show was very slick and professional, until it finished in the only appropriate way - the PA system was cranked up to 11, and the Top Gun theme tune blasted across the runways!

Much of the rest of the hotel I stayed in was occupied by the Red Arrows crew, but not the pilots and other officers, who were in a posher resort. They were a good laugh in the bar later on, and filled me in on the mechanics of how it's decided where they do shows, and who pays for it (Rolls Royce and BAE pay most of the expenses as it helps them sell their stuff to the foreign governments).

Cameron Highlands

Getting from Langkawi to Cameron Highlands was a mission, since there was a mass exodus at the end of the arms fair, and school holidays had just begun. It involved a very early start, many different forms of transport (ferry, coach, taxi, minibus etc) and several hours of waiting around in a city called Ipoh. But once I did get to Cameron Highlands, it was completely different from Langkawi.

lots of legs!

Being at almost 2000m, it's cool by Malaysian standards, but still warm enough for shorts and t-shirts in mid-winter. Warm enough, but hardly dry - it rained for most of each day I was there, but I suppose you can't have rainforests without lots of rain! It was also the first place in almost three weeks where I wore anything other than flip-flops on my feet.

Carnivorous plants

Met some great people there, and we went exploring the jungle and tea plantations. Lots of tea is grown in the Cameron Highlands, almost all owned by a company called Boh (nothing to do with Ali G or Avid Merrion apparently!), set up in the 1920s by a Scotsman called JA Russel, whose family still own and run the company. It's still the #1 tea brand in Malaysia, unlike everywhere else I've visited, where the only tea drunk seems to be Lipton's Yellow Label!

Anyway, did you know that black tea, green tea and white tea all come from the same plant? I didn't. Plenty other stuff is grown in the area too, including lots of strawberries and other fruits, acres of orchids and tonnes of other flowers, cacti, chives, lettuce, tomatoes etc. It seems that anything you plant in the ground will grow fast and well.

Some of the growers have installed high power lighting systems across huge areas of polytunneled fields for 24 hour growing, giving a bizarre Spielberg-ish glow to the mountains at night.

Cameron Highlands boasts the highest concentration of Land Rovers per capita in the world. Surely not long before some parts of central London can take the top spot!

We also went to visit an Orang Asli ("Original People") tribal village in the jungle, and tried our skills with a blowpipe. Our arrows weren't tipped in poison, but we used a proper blowpipe, about a metre and a half long, and all managed to pierce clean through a flip flop, several metres away. They gave us some delicious food from the jungle, and our guide, who'd lived in the village when he was younger, showed us all sorts of medicinal plants, including a tiny flower which properly anaesthetised your tongue for about 15 minutes.

As we left the village in our Land Rover via the soaked and slippery mud road, the regular medical team for the Orang Asli tribes were totally stuck in their lesser vehicle, and a bunch of children from the village eventually managed to help push them out. As we drove off, a group of young boys gave us sweet smiles and waves to warm the hearts of all us Westerners. But then once we'd passed, and they didn't realise that two of us were in the back of the Land Rover and could still see them, the smiles turned to grimaces and they showered us with obscene gestures!

Kuala Lumpur

Then on to Kuala Lumpur, which I still refuse to call 'KL', because the oh-so-cool people who consider themselves 'Proper Travellers' annoy me when someone asks 'So what did you think of Kuala Lumpur?' and they reply with something like "I'm a big fan of " <pause for effect> "KL. Blah blah blah"

Unfortunately, it rained most of my time there, but - as well as Christmas and other shopping - I got about using the monorail (not as good as Bangkok's Skytrain, but still pretty good) and went to the Chinatown markets and the Petronas Towers, which are very impressive up close. But from the other side of the city, you get an idea of how ridiculously tall they are, since from a distance it becomes clear that the other nearby skyscrapers aren't anything like as tall.

As with most places I've been since I started, the historical influence of the British is clear, and in Malaysia one of the many changes the British made was to introduce large numbers of Indians and Chinese to the population, so the country's an interesting mixture of original Malay, Indian and Chinese people, languages, cultures cuisines and everything. But what made it dead easy for me was that almost everyone spoke English!

Almost forgot - on Langkawi I caught a penguin, and forced him to pose with me!....

Thailand - Bangkok + Western Islands

george — Fri, 7 Dec 2007 12:05:00 GMT

Just before leaving Macau I decided to charge up my laptop - a bad decision since after about five minutes there was a short power cut. When the power came back a few seconds later, the laptop was kaput, and making a high pitched whining sound. So no pictures here for a while!

I met Dom and Nicole after customs in Bangkok airport, and we headed to the brilliant Triple Two Silom hotel in what seemed to be a relatively plush part of Bangkok, called Bangrak.

Bangkok in general is a far more sophisticated and easy going city than I'd realised, and the famous friendliness and helpfulness of the Thais was noticeable straight away, including the novelty of totally un-pushy sales tactics. As expected, the exceptions were the scamming tuk-tuk drivers and their pals who'd brazenly insist that anywhere you wanted to go to was either closed or being repaired. Funnily enough they always said they knew about better places that were open!

We were in Bangkok for the public holiday marking the much loved King's 80th birthday, so in addition to the skyscrapers covered in his image were 'Long Live the King' decorated boats going up the river, and lots of banners. Not that we had any reason to, but apparently insulting the King in Thailand in any way causes much upset.

Dom had been before, and took us to see some impressive and pristinely manicured sites such as the Royal Palace and the Lying Bhudda, plus the amazing Chatuchak and Patpong markets, and we also had cocktails atop the State Tower, where the views of the city at night were awesome, just made slightly bizarre by the DJ's very strange musical choices!

After transport including the ace Skytrain, a tuk-tuk and a fast, public riverboat back from buying fake t-shirts, I was amazed that the Mandarin Oriental graciously allowed the three of us a riverside drink in their swish and exclusive bar while we were wearing our new fake t-shirts rather than something more appropriate like genuine linen jackets!

---

Anyway, after three nights in 'Bangers' followed by a short flight and boat trip, we quickly found ourselves on a sun-drenched beach on the Railey peninsula, which was very pleasant indeed, except for the fact that it was where both Nicole and I picked up a nasty bout of food poisoning, I think from a prawny phad thai. Only the second time I've ever had full-on food poisoning... not nice!

Then on to Koh Phe Phe island, which despite being a national park, and having been devastated by the tsunami less than three years ago, is thoroughly developed again, but with the noise of angle grinders and piledrivers never too far away. Other than that it's very pretty, with karst rock formations all around. The smaller of the two islands is uninhabited, and it's where birds' nests are harvested for soups and Chinese medicines. We went there as part of a boating/snorkelling/canoeing trip, which included going to the famously beautiful Maya Bay, where 'The Beach' was filmed. Dom and I were just gutted that the French girl from the film was no longer living there!

Apart from that we did a bit of sunbathing, read books, played cards, chilled generally, and noticed that among the always pleasant waiters and waitresses were quite a lot of people at various stages of becoming ladyboys - some just normal looking men who wore a lot of makeup and lipstick. Oh, and disposable lighters kept - literally - blowing up in Nicole's face!

---

After Phi Phi, Nicole and Dom headed up to Bangkok via a night in Krabi, and I went South to Koh Lanta where after a few days my food poisoning symptoms finally started to go - phew! Once I could eat and drink without having to be less than two minutes from a loo, I went on a tour of the island, which included me doing a rubbish job of trying to get sap out of a rubber tree. But seeing the process from start to finish was interesting, with the end result being 1 kilo sheets of latex ready to be sold to the condom factory!

---

Then another boat trip south, down to the lovely Koh Lipe, close to the Malaysian border.

The island is part of the huge Ko Tarutao National Park - another island in the park was used to make one of the US 'Survivor' series. The right on Lonely Planet says that nobody should stay on Koh Lipe, the only island where private development is allowed, since it's success will encourage the government to allow more and more development in the park.

But from here I've heard that the Sea Gypsy (yes, that's really what they're called!) people were moved from their homes on all the separate islands to Koh Lipe when the national park was created, and allowed to develop tourist businesses to make up for their lost earnings, so I didn’t feel too bad spending three nights on the island.

My first night in the beachfront bamboo bungalow that I stingily stayed in - rather than the fancy new brick ones that were £1.50 more - featured a rodent attack where I was woken up at 3am by the clattering of things being pushed off the narrow shelf, and the contents of the bin being loudly scattered and nibbled at for much of the rest of the night. All my attempts to see - or even scare off - the perpetrators failed, but in the morning I also noticed that my toothbrush had vanished!

I joined two Swedes on a longtail boat trip around some of the nearby islands, where we snorkelled just above some incredible coral of all shapes, sizes and colours, with all sorts of fish to match.

Among the coral I found my nemeses fish species - these pretty looking stripy pink things about the size of a small trout, which were dotted around the coral, would swim head-on straight at me. Trying to scare them off only seemed to make them more angry, and they'd occasionally have a stroppy little nibble at my legs!

On the safety of dry land, we saw monkeys, a flying squirrel, and - to add to the lightening fast, translucent crabs that I've seen everywhere and tried to photograph on lots of Thai beaches - every single intact shell that I could find was occupied by a hermit crab, some of them only able to find shells that were way too small.

Getting back to my little bamboo bungalow in the hours between the light fading and the electricity coming on, I thought I'd had my daily lot of animal woes with the small pink fish attacks. But the loud screeching, crunching and thwacking noises coming from the bathroom area suggested otherwise.

I couldn't see anything in the tiny, damp bathroom square to add to the list of ants, spiders, lizards and frogs that I'd already encountered there, but as the noises got more brutal and violent sounding I wussed out and found someone to help. He came armed with a big torch and a long wooden spike, and eventually found the problem: two rats fighting in the bamboo cladding. He spiked the losing rat (which was nearly dead by this stage anyway) and managed to extract it after some bamboo demolition, while the other one found a way out and ran off into the night.

---

Leaving Koh Lipe - and Thailand - involved getting my visa stamped by the one woman passport control, and being given the Malaysian arrival card, complete with a warning in bright red 'BE FOREWARNED: DEATH SENTENCE FOR DRUG TRAFFICERS UNDER MALAYSIAN LAW'

But since the island has no pier, getting onto the ferry itself seemed pretty deadly - we missed the lashing rain by a matter of seconds, but the skill of the sea gypsies piloting our small longtail boat to the ferry was put to the test. In the heavy swell and rushing tide, the engine was cut a moment before the rope to the ferry was properly secured, and as our boat veered backwards, smashing against the see-sawing hull of the ferry, our longtail captain frantically turned the manual engine-starting crank. In the end the engine spluttered back into life for us to make another run in and somehow the six of us and our bags made it safely onto the ferry, which soon headed off into the dusk.

Hong Kong and Macau

george — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 05:12:00 GMT

Statue of Hong Kong hero Bruce Lee on the Avenue of Stars in Hong Kong.

After a short and fast train journey from Guangzhou, I arrived in Kowloon, just across Victoria Harbour from Hong Kong Island. So far since leaving Scotland, Hong Kong is the first place on my route where I've been before, on a two night stop-over last year.

More because of a recommendation than the lyrics by The Smiths, I'd booked myself in at the Y.W.C.A., and liked it there so I stayed for four nights. Despite being the Young Womens Christian Association, men are allowed to stay there too, and it's on Man Fuk road in the Mongkok area of Kowloon.

The day I arrived was Miro's (of car share at work fame) last day there on a work project, so after dumping my stuff and going to order a new pair of glasses, I took another super-efficient and clean MTR (underground) journey to meet Miro in Central on Hong Kong Island.

Kowloon Park with flamingos

We then took the mid-level escalators (longest outdoor escalator in the world!) up to Lan Kwai Fong, which on a Friday night was pumping with music and packed full of ex-pats, and had some beers and a good meal before Miro had to head off to catch his 1am flight home.

The streets in Mongkok where I stayed were also packed, but with people shopping rather than drinking. They have a long streets there just for buying particular things - separate streets for aquarium fish; dogs and cats; electrical goods; sportswear; car audio and market stalls. The fish above isn't magnified by a trick of the light or anything - it really was a huge fish in a tiny bag, and there were loads of them all down the street. There also lots of tiny fish too...

Reclaiming some more land for Hong Kong Island

One mission I had in Hong Kong was to buy a Gitzo copy tripod, and to finally replace the camera lens that I had stolen in St Petersburg. With ridiculous, higher than UK prices in both Russia and China, I'd decided to wait. I shopped around MongKok and Stanley Street (on the Hong Kong side, where there's a bunch of professional photo shops), and having found a good website where the best prices that people have got in Hong Kong are displayed, I knew what kind of prices were possible. But trying to negotiate with these guys seems to be a fine art, especially on a busy Saturday. Eventually, having found the only shop that stocked the exact tripod that I wanted to buy, I got properly shouted at by the stroppy dealer, who in the end gave me zero discount! But he did also have the best price for the lens, only £15 more than the skilled local had got, and anyway I got it way cheaper than the original that I bought at home.

The tripod is great, but does add a bit of unwelcome extra bulk and weight to my backpack. But now I can take lots of pics like above and Bruce Lee at the top, so prepare to be bored with lots of long exposures like this...!

Anyway, coming from the Chinese mainland, I was surprised how utterly different Hong Kong feels - obviously there's much more money and general plushness in Hong Kong, but the feel of the place and the people were also totally different. I wasn't surprised to see a group of tourists from mainland China looking completely bewildered and bemused, but maybe Hong Kong residents feel the same way when they go to Shanghai. One small difference is the traffic situation. In a way I'm quite surprised the Chinese government didn't force Hong Kongers to drive on the right after 1997, but it was nice to be in a place again where - unlike Russia or China - when you see the 'walk' green man at the traffic lights, it does actually normally mean that you won't get run over! Despite employing more than 20 wardens at major junctions on the mainland, crossing the road is still like a game of Frogger!

Mmmmn, tasty!

Every Monday night there's a big lightshow complete with smooth announcements and piped music. It's the Guinness World Record Breaking longest permanent regular city light show or something. I watched it from the Avenue of Stars (where Bruce Lee and lots of other local stars feature) and as each one of a long list of buildings taking part is announced, it lights up funkily and does some laser or neon flickering in time with the cheezy syntho-pop music.

Surely a bit early?!

And - just to keep Will happy, a clothes shop in MongKok...

Macau

Then on to Macau via a one hour fast boat from Kowloon. I arrived two days after the annual Grand Prix, and the cars were still being carted away, and the barriers all over town being taken down. It's a former Portugese colony which was handed back to China in 1999 (apparently Portugal tried to hand it back way before, but China didn't want to take on the triad, gambling and economic problems). Now it's booming, with massive building projects all over the place.

It's quite a bit smaller than Hong Kong, but the only place in all of China where casinos are allowed, and gambling seems to be very popular with the Chinese! I didn't take any pictures of the main casinos, but they're almost on a Las Vegas scale, and now include super plush new outfits like the Sands, the MGM Grand and Wynn as well as lots of huge older casinos. I went into the the Lisboa, but my plans to blow up to 100 Mops (Macau currency, almost the same as Chinese Yuan or Hong Kong Dollars) on some pontoon hands were thwarted when I realised that the very cheapest tables started at a minimum bet of 300 Mop per hand. So instead I quickly lost some coins on the one armed bandits and had a look around. Considering that it was a Monday night, there was a serious amount of money changing hands, with exclusively Chinese clientele playing for big money, unless they were watching a bizarre dancing show featuring three white girls.

No Fakes at this pharmacy

Supposedly there was a big embarrassment a few years ago when several Government officials on a trip from the mainland blew a lot of public money on a gambling spree.

The wiring in my room left a bit to be desired! Since all the cheaper hotels were full, I stayed at 'The Metropole', and was expecting lavish luxury, but got a windowless box room complete with suspicious smells! But to be fair, the staff were very nice, and the breakfast was great.

Macau became a Portugese colony several centuries before Hong Kong became a British one, and there is lots of Portugese-ness about it, including all Portugese street names, narrow cobbled streets and lots of impressive old buildings and gardens dotted around the older parts.

Leaving China on a Jet Plane

So having got from the UK to Macau by boat, bus and (mainly) train, I'm flying to Bangkok tomorrow to meet Dom and Nicole. After seven great weeks in China I'm sad to be leaving, but also can't wait to go to Thailand for the first time.

A few more general things about China - could be useful for anyone planning to go soon...

- The Chinese people are incredibly friendly and tolerant, often smiling with 'hello', just smiling kindly, or saying kind one-off lines like 'you are welcome to Guangzhou!' On the whole people go out of their way to help, and also tend have a great sense of humour.

But when you get someone on an off day, or someone who just can't be bothered with foreigners generally, they can be impressively rude, sometimes shouting angrily, or - more commonly - totally refusing to acknowledge the fact that you're standing right in front of them. Sometimes they just turn their back to you as you approach.

- The trains are great

- The big cities are noisy places, as well as the ear-splitting airhorns that are well used by almost every bus and lorry, on the streets there's lots of street vendors and shop workers making crackly amplified announcements to one and all.

- A few times I've felt guilty when asked by people about my travelling plans, when it's clear how much they would love to see other countries, but can't, as much because of the bureaucracy involved as the cost.

- Some things take a bit of getting used to, such as loos which can smell worse than day 3 at Glastonbury portaloos. Never any toilet paper there either. At least I got used to squat toilets after a while!

- Apparently the one child policy is more complex than I'd first thought... Parents from ethnic minorities and couples who are both only children are allowed to have more than one child. [[Actually, having just looked it up on Wikipedia (which has been available since I've not been in Mainland China) it seems that it's even more complicated than that.]]

- The hostels are mostly very good, with dorm rooms normally around £1 to £2 and single ones about £3 to £6. I split it about 50/50, but met lots of hardcore travellers, who wouldn't dream of _not_ staying in the biggest(cheapest) dorm available. Only bumped into very occasional rats or cockroach. Most hostels have 24 hour hot water but in a few where it's only for available 2 or 3 hours in the day.

- As well as the impromptu musical gatherings, lots of people sing in the streets as they're wondering along, normally quietly, but sometimes belting songs out for all to enjoy.

- Chinese beer is cheap, mostly 2 to 5 Yuan (about 10 to 30p) a bottle, but not always good. Cigarettes are about 3 to 13 Yuan, some good brands there. Li Yong in Chengdu described Marlboro Lights as 'junk food'! Maybe he's right!

- I was gutted not to find any that fitted me, but there are some great fake brands, including Nkie, Abidas, Abmdas!

- Pleased to report that I've now pretty much got used to squat toilets, but the availability of Western loos - some even with loo paper in Hong Kong was welcome!

Guilin, Yangshuo and Guangzhou

george — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:45:00 GMT

This rabbit above had escaped from a cage outside the restaurant next door, causing much fuss in the mini supermarket!

Guilin

After arriving and dropping my stuff at the hostel, I went back to the train station to arrange onward tickets, and (not counting the many late night offers of 'massage' in Shanghai) had my first direct offer from a Chinese prostitute. She just started walking along with me saying 'sex?' then 'SEX?' and when I said 'no thanks' or something, she gave a coy smile and said 'But I very beautiful lady.'

Looks quite real? It's carefully shaped and painted cement. Same thing, in loads of different imitation wood types is done in public parks all over China to make banisters, bridges, etc

Anyway, I stayed in Guilin for two nights, at the great Flowers hostel. At a local restaurant, I went for 'Diced chicken fried in a bush of chilies, garlic and ginger' and the description menu was spot on, especially re. the bush of chillies...

The tasty chicken morsels that I managed to find were scorching (spicily) hot, but then eating one of the chilies was a mistake! Weirdly, by the end of the meal the extreme hotness didn't make me sweat and my nose run at all, it just completely numbed my mouth, and - really - made my lips feel like they were vibrating very quickly. No need for laughing gas at the dentist, after eating this I think I could have had all my teeth taken out without feeling a thing!

Apparently even other Chinese (who snack on chicken feet to pass time on the train) think that the people in this part of China take culinary excesses it a bit far, saying they'll eat anything with legs that isn't a table, and anything with wings that isn't an aeroplane!

After walking down a street full of restaurants, the saying seemed spot on, though you can't eat civit cats (a type of skunk) any longer, since that was reckoned to be the cause of the SARS outbreak.

Street music

All decent restaurants have lots of cages and bowls / tanks outside, with most of animals being alive (though barely alive in some cases). Only a few larger ones (dog included) were out on the street in half-prepared state. There were all sorts of fish, terrapins, crabs, turtles, tortoises, cane rats, rabbits, snakes, pheasants and many other game birds, chickens, cats and plenty others, all unknowingly waiting to be chosen from the menu.

About ten seconds before I took this photo, a man took a cat out of the top cage by one of its hind legs, with a metal bar at the ready in his other hand in case it tried to bite him, and headed to the kitchen.

The next day it was quite strange to see a cute young girl, dressed in Hello Kitty type fluffy clothes, grab a net, retrieve a large and enthusiastically wriggling carp from one of the bowls, then bludgeon it to death by repeatedly slamming it hard against the concrete floor. Then she cheerfully walked back into the restaurant to show the fish to its diners!

Apart from the culinary delights and numerous prostitutes of Guilin, there were a few nice parks and interesting karst peaks, but really too many scammers and hawkers, from pretty young women pretending to be wanting to chat in English (but actually wanting to sell discount tickets for river cruises, tea ceremonies or opera shows), to an old man who pretended to want to look at my camera, but then took a photo of me and tried to charge for his services as a photographer!

Li River Cruise

So first thing in the morning, I joined a group of mostly Westerners (the Chinese boat was a bit cheaper, but included an hour of shopping at the start, and apparently had even ropier food than ours!) and we drove for a bit down the Lijiang (aka Li) river, until we had got to the bit where there was enough water to float a boat.

Even here, it was incredibly shallow, and as we boarded the boat, we were all quite impressed at how sleek, modern and comfortable it looked, until we realised that we were just stepping onto this one to get to our crappy, old and tired boat which was moored alongside it!

Then we had a five hour slow cruise downstream to Yangshuo, unfortunately much of the time we were part of a long and closely packed line of boats, with frequent hooting and honking of airhorns not helping any atmosphere of tranquility.

But despite the thick grey haze that made decent photos pretty much impossible, the karst scenery was still amazing, and we saw plenty of activity along the way, including lots of water buffalo, and fishermen who use cormorants instead of rods or nets. Since the birds have rings put around their necks, they can't swallow bigger fish, which the fishermen just scoop out of their bills as they skim together along the surface on tiny bamboo boats.

Getting close to Yangshuo, there was a quality moment when a pushy Chinese woman met her match - an Italian man. She'd decided that she should be at the front of the queue to get off the boat, and made swift progress through the queue of Westerners (the German passengers were at the very front of course!), by jabbing each of us hard in the arm, making angry hand signals, then arrogantly walking past.

But when she tried it with the Italian, a ten minute battle started, with very cross hand motions, intense staring matches, and lots of angry words coming from each in their own language. Trouble almost erupted when one of the boat's crew had to get through, and the Italian had decided that nobody at all, no matter what, was getting past him and his wife (who'd been told to barricade the side with her suitcase)!

Yangsho

So we arrived in Yangshuo, which was just a village in the middle of karst peaks until people started realising its mass tourism appeal, about twenty years ago. Now it is full of Western style cafes and hawkers, including a type new to me - silhouette cutters. These guys will subtly walk along the street next to tourists, and use pocket scissors to make a stylized silhouette, then present for the unknowing tourist to buy. Crafty (no pun intended) because the tourist feels bad about saying they don't want something that's already been done just for them. Of course I bought mine, but not before haggling down to half the original price of 10 yuan.

It even includes the famous peaks around Yangsho at the bottom - the crescent moon peak at the left!

Talking of haggling, my poor skills there came in for much abuse from others when I got a t-shirt which had a ridiculous starting price of 340 Yuan (over £20) for 105. The sellers insisted that it wasn't a fake, though blatantly it was, and made me out to be a 'very hard bargainer'. But even paying £6 for something I probably should have had for more like £2, I was happy enough. My mistake was in starting with my offer as high as 40 Yuan!

"Scotland's not a country!"

In the hostel was a crazy Dutch girl Chantelle, who I'd first met in Chengdu, then bumped into again in Guilin. It came up in discussion that somehow, she didn't think Scotland was a country, and thought I was joking when I told her that it most certainly was. And, incredibly, she's a Geography teacher!

Anyway, this turned into a battle that I knew I was going to win, until she asked a German guy who said he thought Scotland was definitely a country, but said he'd Google for it. And, to my horror, it turned out that the top result had the title 'Scotland Is Not A Country' and listed eight official criteria for a country, only two of which they thought it could meet! Shocking, and it made my position harder to defend. Luckily I'd earler established Scotland's annihilation of Holland in terms of literature, music, famous inventions, cinema etc. The best Chantelle could come up with for Holland was the invention of dykes (doubtful!), and the company Phillips!

I told the German girl and Finnish guy in my dorm, expecting them to laugh at her foolishness, but they both said something like 'yes but really it is true I think - Scotland must be not a country'

Later on we met up with Floren, who'd also been in the Chengdu hostel at the same time, and he'd bumped into a couple of Brits, one of whom was a Scotsman, Andy. Only the second Scot I'd met since Norway. I got Chantel to ask what he thought, and his reply was straight to the point: ″F***ING RIGHT IT IS!!!″

Having got up at 6.20 to climb a local peak for sunrise, I was gutted that all the paths I could find weren't yet open, so I hired a bike overnight and went further away for the next morning's sunrise, but it was no good - the heavy grey haze prevented any decent photos. That night I tried again at sunset, and got a few sellable pictures, but decided to take a boat ride back upriver to Yangshuo, having fallen off and hurt my knee while chasing water buffalo!

While waiting for a boat, a family were taking ages to wash their clothes, while a man walked a water buffalo down to the river for a quick wash...

Then back up the river for me and my bike...

On a different bike mission, five of us headed South from Yangshuo to a huge cave network, which boasted mud pools that you could swim in. As we approached the cave entrance, there was a group of older European types, and - totally unprompted, an old man amongst them boldly announced 'Yes... It is true... We are Swedish!!'

But going in it was just the five of us, our guide, and a photographer who sold us pictures at the end. The cave was amazing with stalagmites and tites, some famous ones shaped like Buddhas, and in places we had to crawl on our bellies through tiny gaps.

This is me getting drenched in cold mud by Floren...

Guangzhou

Many high quality products are made in and around Guangzhou (which we used to call Canton), supposedly including half of all the watches bought in the world, plus excellent banking software of course, but apparently they also make crappy rubbish like Apple iPods here too!!

The city has a great Metro system, just like Hong Kong's, and - despite lots of inner-city slums, seems quite a modern place. Definitely a place of business and commerce, and it seems you can buy pretty much anything imaginable, in vast quantites, on the street from small specialised shops.

Vases for sale

Since dim sum comes from here, I wanted to try the real thing, but ignorantly didn't realise that it's meant to be eaten for breakfast/brunch, so you can only get it here in the morning. Anyway, I did eventually find a place before noon, but despite having at least four mammoth floors to the restaurant, they were full. Even though I was a clueless foreigner (which clearly didn't endear me to them at all!) they decided to set up a new mini-table, which was placed right next to a very busy meat kitchen, with all sorts of things being chopped up. But the dim sum was delicious, and the tea making and pouring procedure was unbelievably complex!

The Pearl river on a hazy day

Doesn't look great, but at least you don't get runover trying to cross the street!

Evening River Cruise on the Pearl River. Tonnes more neon further round too.

Loaded up

Lots of places for you to shop in Guangzhou...

Yunnan Province

george — Tue, 6 Nov 2007 01:28:00 GMT

After 12 hours in a constantly stopping, rickety old hard sleeper carriage from Emei to Panzhihua, I met Norwegian Marianne and Dutch Pieter an the start of an 8 hour bumpy bus journey across the mountainous Sichuan-Yunnan border. They were also heading for Lijiang, and getting there we all managed to avoid being hit by any flying spit, which was coming from all directions, sloppily aimed by passengers towards the bins in the middle of the bus.

Since I've prattled on way too much below, I've put headings for each bit to allow easy skipping. I know if it was me reading it, I'd just look at the pictures anyway!

Lijiang

From sunrise onwards we all noticed the freshness of the air, and for my first time since arriving in China, the sky, clouds and sun were visible - all day long.

Lijiang is an ancient city, but much of it was destroyed in a 1996 earthquake. The next year it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the old city in the centre has been carefully rebuilt under strict planning permission (very rare in China), while nasty concrete and glass has been built up all around it.

The Old Town does look great, especially at night - full of traditional buildings lit up by red lanterns, criss-crossed by mini waterways full of goldfish swimming against the stream, and big flower shaped lit candles bought and floated by people.

But since the rebuilding, it's turned from the main centre for the Naxi people of the area, to a money spinner for incoming Han Chinese, and almost every single building is devoted to selling the same tourist tat you get everywhere else.

With Marianne still afflicted by a dodgy street dumpling she'd had in Chengdu, Peter and I hired bikes and headed north to explore the area towards Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, at 18359 feet high, it's about the same height as Europe's best effort of Mt Elbrus, and way higher than Mt Blanc. Of course it's small fry for China, which also claims Mt Everest, but I think Snow Mountain may be their highest peak outside Tibet. I tried to confirm this with a chatty Chinese man in a later bus, but think he thought I was getting political about the Tibet situation.

Unlike Everest, I was told that nobody's ever made it to the top Jade Dragon Snow Mountain's highest peak. Apparently in one attempt, all 17 climbers died trying, and it's now illegal to attempt the summit.

The best place we found while biking was Baisha village, about 12km out of Lijiang, which seemed like a more genuine Naxi place, surrounded by busy agricultural goings on - all done by hand or with the help of animals (seems that the cattle used here are a luxury - most other ploughing in Yunnan was manually), except for occasional trucks like below.

Maize is definitely the main crop, with odd small fields of other things like chillies.

This farmer had a different approach to controlling his stock - while moving them along, if a few were holding back, he'd reach for his catapult and fly a carefully aimed stone hard at a cow's backside. It seemed to work quite well!

That's the Yangzi river, looking tiny bottom left, and above are some of the peaks of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain

Tiger Leaping Gorge

So Pieter and I arrived in Quiaotou, with enough stuff for three days, and hit the uphill trail. Knowing which way to go sometimes took a bit of help from workers in the nearby fields, but on the whole the path was well worn. The first day was the hardest, as we climbed for most of it up the side of mountains until late afternoon, when we were looking far down steep cliffs to the Yangzi river a kilometre and a bit straight below.

Near the highest point was the first of many rip-offs we'd heard about - in the way of a natural set of rocks that jut out over the cliffs was an old local woman, claiming via sign language that they were her rocks, and that the entry charge was ten yuan. Realising that our only options were to pay her or push her off the side of the cliff, we paid up. But we drew the line when she demanded more cash for us to take a photo of her.

In the first day there, I must have seen more animals and beasties than during all my time in China so far (not including all the live animals in food markets), we ran into all sorts of birds, butterflies, caterpillas...

...lizards...

...livestock including mini pigs...

...huge spiders...

...Stick insects, just like my first ever pet, 'Sticky' (RIP)...

...and one red and stripy snake, which I didn't quite manage to get a snap of before it had started to slither away. It looked a bit too scary for me to try and imitate Steve Irwin!

We stayed the first night at a guesthouse that had a loo with a view

Sadly Tiger Leaping Gorge may not stay much of a gorge for very long - the Chinese government have started prep work on a huge hydro scheme, which I suppose would involve a lot of damming and flooding, as they've already done much further down the river.

Having finished the main route around noon on the second day, we found a hostel and headed down towards the river itself, again - like everyone else, Chinese and foriegners - having to pay an old lady who claimed to be part of the family who built and maintained the path. The only other person demanding cash had been a sweet little toddler on the path, playing with his granny and a friend. The kids ran around and joked with us for a while, not speaking a word of English, then the boy started rubbing his fingers together and pleading 'Money...'

Having made it down to river level, climbing back up was a daunting task, but first we clambered out over ladders onto huge boulders, and sat in the middle of the angry rapids.

Everywhere we went had corn drying all over the place, but each time I asked for corn on the cob (it was on the menu), they said they didn't have any!

Dali

From the far end of Tiger Leaping Gorge, it took Pieter and me three busses and almost nine hours to get to Dali. The third, totally packed bus journey featured the girl in front of me waking up as we cornered hard and bumped our way through the hills coming down to Dali, swapping seats quickly with her neighbour, and vomiting out of the window. At least she made it!

Marianne had already been in Dali for two nights, and had found a great place to eat, where we spent a fair amount of time since it poured with rain all the time we were there.

The small city ('Ancient Dali', not the much bigger 'New Dali' half an hour along the road) has a reputation as a bit of a hippy backwater, and along with plenty clean cut tourists were crusty old white dudes, some staggering around looking dazed and confused.

It was also the first place in China where I've was offered drugs on the street, usually by traditionally dressed women, who'd slyly approach and whisper about what they had to sell.

I got a haircut there, no messing around with trimming, this time got it done shorter than I think I've ever had it cut! No photos getting uploaded of that!

A loo without a view - the Dali hostel was OK, but the concrete toilet block, complete with mice, could have been better.

Kunming

Stayed for two nights, and mainly wondered around the laid-back city's streets and parks. Apparently many people were exiled here from the big cities up north during Mao's stupid Cultural Revolution, but then decided to stay, because they preferred being in Kunming.

Lots of things going on in Kunming's streets...

Playing Mahjong - also lots of people around playing Chinese chess and cards.

Shop clappers - on the busier shopping streets, people stand on stools facing the shops and loudly clap their hands in time with the music that's blaring out of their shops, occasionally shouting things out to attract more shoppers.

Making food - there are tonnes of streetfood sellers with mini bbqs to cook their meat-on-a-stick snacks, but this lady made a small bonfire on the street itself to cook some sweet potatoes.

Catching up on news and views

Waiting around - you see lots of people all over China squatting like this, rather than standing. I've tried it, but can only last a few minutes so far!

Ready to fix a bike - lots of these mobile workshops all over Kunming, fully equipped with inner tubes, wheels, tools etc. and they get quite a lot of business.

Ready to polish shoes - these guys always seem to be in groups of three or more for some reason. Even wearing trainers you still get asked if you need them to be polished, and laughed at when you try to explain why you don't!

Exercise equipment - for adults, not kids. Cleverly designed turning and swinging things, plus bars and frames, to keep all the joints active. Some exercises involve slow pelvic thrusting and don't look like they belong on the street!

Babies / young toddlers always seem to be carried like this, legs dangling straight down.

Also lots of joking around, playfighting, puppy and kitten (and everything else) selling, enthusiastic but totally ignored traffic and pedestrian marshalling with flags and whistles, music making (often a group of instrumentalists with several warbling singers in mini-parks, but just for fun, not busking), and unfortunately quite a lot of begging - much of it by really badly disfigured people.

So I spent a while in Yunnan, but was sorry to leave on the overnight train to Guilin - there was still tonnes more to do and see in Yunnan.

And finally, anyone for a Lovely Puff?...

... or an egg?!...

Chengdu to Emei Shan

george — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 04:31:00 GMT

Thanks for all the very kind comments, but you'll be glad to know that I'm leaving soon for a mammoth journey to Lijiang (which isn't even very far away), so this one's going to be mainly pictures.

Along with the Giant Buddha in Leshan (one of the biggest in the world, but I didn't manage to make it there), one of Chengdu's biggest tourist attractions is the Giant Panda Breeding and Research centre.

Despite looking like they enjoy a bit of fun, the pandas are remarkably intolerant...

... but despite the many signs, the Chinese tourists couldn't care less. While the few Westerners there were whispering carefully to each other as they watched the pandas, most of the Chinese were clapping their hands and shouting 'HO' and 'HA', trying to get them to look at their camera.

As well as Sichuan cookery in general, Chengdu is famous for its hotpot. It's an oily broth which you cook pretty much anything in - we had whole prawns (bit too difficult to deal with using chopsticks), beef slices, lotus roots, bamboo, and lots more. Similar to the Tibetan one I had in Xian, but way hotter, and nicer too. The bottom section is the not hot fishy side, which was a nice break from the red hot other side.

I stupidly suggested that anyone dropping food in should eat a whole chilli from the hot side as a forfeit. Everyone dropped things in, but of course I was the only one made to eat a chili! At first I was quite chuffed at having managed to eat it without a problem, but five minutes later I thought I was about to die!

Apart from playing (and almost always losing) games of poker in the hostel, I liked the peoples' park a lot, where tea drinking, many different styles of dancing (some comical looking prancing in a line but taken very seriously), electric boat driving and elderly karaoke are some of the attractions. A man wielding long wires with fluffy ends and metal prongs was very keen to clean my ears, but I managed to resist.

Later on, watching other people getting their ears cleaned, it didn't look at all like the 'very comfortable' experience that he promised.

Having watched a live Chinese rocket launch (they're launched not far from Chengdu) on a propaganda-only TV set on board a packed local bus, Daniel (a Danish friend I'd made at the hostel who also wanted to head to Emei Shan next) and I got an evening bus South towards Emei Shan (which translates as 'Delicate Eyebrow Mountain') and found, with the help of a local scammer, somewhere to stay before heading up.

We decided to do the climb without the help of the many cable cars and monorails, meaning that we'd go from a starting level of about 2,000 feet, up to the 'Golden Summit' at over 10,000 feet.

Being a holy Buddhist mountain, there are lots of monasteries on the way up, all with impressive buildings containing huge golden Buddhas.

For the whole of the first day, and most of the second day, we were walking through thick cloud.

Bird on a stick for anyone?!

It wasn't until we were at the summit that we broke through it and I started to quickly get a sunburn!

We walked for about 8.5 hours on the first day, then slept at a monastery (called the Elephant Bathing Pool) on the way up, then set off at 6.30am for the shorter second day of ascending. It was a case of climbing stone steps all the way up, we must have climbed thousands of them, and for several hours of walking up the hill - once we'd cleared the 'joking monkey zone', which is full of quite large wild monkeys which will attack and steal from tourists - we didn't come across a single tourist.

Mostly we just saw these (somehow) laughing and friendly workmen, who went up and down carrying these incredibly heavy slabs of stone, resting them on their walking sticks every so often. At the the destination, their load was weighed by an official. The worst part was that it seems they were replacing a perfectly good walkway with a newer one, when nobody seems to use it anyway!

Stopping for food on the first day, I was called 'Lowai' (='foreign ghost' I think) for the first time.

After a day and a half of climbing in the clouds, suddenly joining thousands of tourists in the sunshine, fresh off the cable cars, and clutching bottles of oxygen that they'd bought in case breathing became a problem, was a bit bizarre.

Being a UNESCO world heritage site, the top of the mountain had plush loos, complete with helpful signs!

Xian

george — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 03:11:00 GMT

Telling me all about China before I left, Rosie McC said that Xian (Xi'an - pronounced like Sheean - just a wee city compared to Beijing and Shanghai, with only 7 million people!) was a great place, and she wasn't lying! After a few days I decided to extend my stay to five nights at the brilliant Xiang Zi Men hostel, a traditional Chinese old building with courtyards and all the trimmings, facing out onto the monumental south wall of the city.

Eva arrived from Shanghai the day after me, and we went to a Tibetan restaurant for a traditional hotpot meal, which involved a man with a net going over to a tiny pond in the corner, fishing out a large wriggling carp (an oversized goldfish I think), and bringing it over, weighed at 1.5 kilos for us to decide if it looked Ok. About three minutes later it was gutted and bubbling away on an electric stove set into the middle of our table, joined by oily water, spices, lemongrass, chillies, bamboo, beansprouts, huge amounts of garlic, and - whenever we chose to chuck them in - sliced potato and cauliflower (slightly dull choices, but these were the only optional extras from a long list that our waitress could translate.) All very delicious.

As well as trying to teach me to play Chinese chess, LiYong, a very nice crazy mentalist from Chengdu, looking for a new job in Xi'an (but mainly just fooling around) who insisted on using a special pipe to smoke normal cigarettes, took me, Dan and Adam (who I'd met in Shanghai) and to a proper local restaurant pronounced Loulu (=Happy) the following night - we wouldn't have stood a chance deciphering the menu or bossing the waitresses around without him, and we had a huge meal complete with drinks, tea and soup for about 90 pence each.

Talking of food, Eva noticed it in the hostel, and I had the same on the street the next day - fruit salads here include tomatoes! Fair enough and quite nice actually, I remember being told they're fruits... as long as I don't get a vegetable stir fry which includes strawberries!

Between Eva, Dan, Adam and me going to see the Terracotta Army, it turned out that three of us had studied archaeology, but none of us knew a single thing about Chinese prehistory, so it was lucky that, on the journey from Xian, the staff on the minibus changed so much that we were told the same stories and facts three times!

The terracotta warriors were discovered in 1976 by farmers who were digging a well. Incidentally, one has become a celebrity in China because when Bill Clinton came to Xian on a presidential visit, he met Yang Zhifa, one the farmers and asked for an autograph. Being illiterate, the farmer drew a small circle for Clinton instead and got his 15 minutes of fame.

Lots more excavation is to be done, but almost 10,000 life size warriors have been found already - each with different facial figures, and specific ranks and functions.

In the 3rd century BC, Qin Shi Huang, the Emperor responsible for the terracotta army managed to unite China and also started the Great Wall, but for all his achievements he sounds like a bit of a git! He tricked and killed hundreds of intellectuals; ordered all books that weren't to do with his family history or agriculture to be destroyed; hundreds of his concubines that didn't have children had to die as soon as he did, and he even decided that all the makers of his terracotta army should be killed as soon as they were finished! No surprise that Mao was a big fan.

Before growing a full mullet, I decided to try getting a haircut in Xian, which started with a mandatory head massage and shampooing - I tried to find out how much it was all going to cost but in the end had to hope for the best. After that I was put in a seat and a Chinese car magazine was thrust into my hands. Ten minutes later... 'Hello' - the barber was ready, and the risky business of trying to communicate using only hand signals began.

Cowboy's clothes floor (I think that meant jeans and checked shirts)

I wasn't sure from the signals if he'd decided to take a little bit off, or leave me with a little bit of hair, but a lots of scissor cutting went on, and at the end my hair was a very slightly shorter version of what it had been an hour before! £1.

I also hired a bike to ride the 15km route around the top of the huge city walls that enclose the central part of Xian. Supposedly only one other city in China still has complete defensive walls intact. Never got to see all the way along any of the walls, because of the ever-present smog.

Though the hostel had WiFi, they seemed to have some upload problem or limit, so I couldn't upload to iStock. I decided to try the lobby of a swanky hotel, and went to the Howard Johnson Plaza, not too far from hostel, on the other side of the city wall. I tried to impersonate a guest by wearing my smartest clothes, but still stuck out like a sore thumb as a young, hip, streetwise, undercover traveller(!) from the chinos and pressed shirts of the middle aged tourists.

Anyway, I didn't get chucked out, and sipped my beer (felt I should buy something, but at 29 yuan for a small beer at the HoJo versus 4 yuan at the hostel for a large beer it was like being back in Scandinavia!) as the cheesy music came from a white piano on a fairy light encrusted revolving stage. When I arrived there was a man playing, but he'd got bored and switched the piano to autoplay before I left.

On my last day I headed on a long trip out of the city to climb the Taoist holy mountain Hua Shan, joined by a few real pilgrims, and many thousands of Chinese tourists. Thankfully most of them didn't climb too high, as the steep and narrow walkways at the start were ridiculously crowded with pushing and shoving tourists. Trying to keep polite when you're being repeatedly jabbed by elbows and stepped in front of can be hard!

There were no paths, but chunky steps cut into the rock for the emperors who came to the peaks - back when Xian was the Imperial capital - to appease the gods, presumably for their appalling behaviour, like having to themselves regular lavish eighty course meals that could have fed thousands of their starving peasant subjects!

But the reason for the mountains being considered holy was clear, which me and my camera - only with a 50mm lens couldn't do justice. Huge sheer drops all over the place with autumnal trees everywhere they had a chance to grow.

As well as pilgrims and tourists, these sherpa style guys climb up and down the peaks three times daily, carrying gas, water and food. I had to have total respect for this guy, who - while climbing with his heavy load, was also able effortlessly to play a harmonica and smoke a cigarette, at the same time. He also tried out his English phrases - 'hello', 'how are you', 'good afternoon' and 'I love you'!

On my way down from a peak towards the end of the day, I stopped in at a teahouse, and there he was again, grabbing a bite to eat. Four Chinese guys were also there, and they managed to (with some help from 20 yuan) persuade him to sing a song, which he did with great passion, his booming and operatic voice drawing others in to watch and listen from the level above in the pagoda. After the applause I added my 10 yuan for the effort (sitting right next to him I'd got a good listen), and that prompted him to launch into a further three songs, one of which was a sort of very long Chinese rap, involving audience participation. Then he sat down for a smoke and some more tea to get him ready for another load.

Chongqing Strange Tasting Horsebeans. Do exactly what it says on the tin!

Leaving Xian, it was sad saying goodbye to the friendly staff and new friends at the hostel, especially to LiYong (catchphrases 'Come On' and, sung Ronan Keating stylee, 'It's a little bit funny'), who'd been a constant source of laughter and fun, plus good advice on China and Mandarin. He kindly gave me a dvd of 'Cheers' - not the US sitcom, but the English name of a sweet voiced Taiwanese pop sensation who sings melodic ballads.

Wet One's Whistle

Then the 18 hour journey from Xian to Chengdu, on a much older train, with the carriages identical to the older of the Russian trains, except that they had squat rather than western style toilets. Thankfully my stomach was back to normal by now, as I didn't fancy trying to use one for serious business on a swaying and jolting train, especially after reading somewhere the advice to westerners - 'until you are experienced in using a squat toilet, remove your trousers and pants completely to avoid defecating on them'!!

How to stop the carriage

Having memorised a new phrase 'ni jiang ying wen ma' (do you speak English) with - I thought - all the right tones, I tried it out on a smiling guard in the restaurant carriage who'd said 'hello', but neither him nor the other laughing staff members could work out what I was on about - I think they thought I was speaking English still. But I did manage to get a cold tea when I was after a hot coffee!

More general stuff about China

- Lots of employees. I suppose communist traditions and a population of 1.3 billion have something to do with it, but it's sometimes astonishing to see the number of staff shops, restaurants, trains etc have. In one fairly small, normal priced clothes shop there were four employees in a line outside the door, about eight near the front of the shop as I went in, all wanting to help me find something, three or four behind the till, many others scattered around plus two security guards. I went to the changing room and there were two more staff members, just having a natter and a laugh. Sometimes if getting a drink or something, one person will reach to the fridge and get the drink, one will write a receipt and take your cash, and a third will - if it's not a modern till - use a calculator (or sometimes an abacus) then hand over your change.

- Although most young city-dwelling Chinese are very trendy and cool, it seems to be standard practise that the men carry their girlfriends' frilly and spangley handbags for them while window shopping.

- The food is great, but after weeks of spicy, oily and dumplingy meals, I've sometimes found myself craving things like milk, bread, coffee and cereal, which are pretty much only available from cop-out western or western style coffee shops etc. I've copped out and paid outrageous prices for the odd latte or bowl of cereal once or twice!

Concuss with the world together. Not really sure what they're trying to get at with that tagline!

Beijing and Shanghai

george — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 04:14:00 GMT

Ni Hao! Arriving in Beijing, I was quite glad that - before leaving the UK - I'd used accumulated Airmiles to book a couple of nights in a hotel. It was well nice to indulge in some 'flashpacking' at the end of all the train journeys from Russia, especially as the hotel was the first I've ever stayed in where you get a 'towelling robe' like in the films!

The next day some of us from the train had arranged to meet up, and after trying out the Beijing metro (much simpler and easier than Moscow) and walking along Tian'anmen Square past thousands of Chinese tourists as well as hundreds policemen dotted all over the place, I got to the arches under the huge portrait of Mao, and the five of us eventually found each other amongst the crowds and headed for the Forbidden City.

With supposedly 9,999 buildings over a huge area right in the middle of Beijing, The Forbidden City was much bigger than I'd expected, and 'forbidden' because normal Chinese people were never during Imperial times. Officially the 'Palace Museum', and home to five centuries of Ming and Qing emperors and their entourages - sometimes including several thousand concubines plus lots of eunuchs, who were castrated to remove any possibility of them messing around with the emperor's beautiful concubines, and not reunited with their testicles until death, when they were buried with them in bags hung from their belts!

It was a shame that many of the grander buildings were being restored in time for the Olympics (though there were still plenty of builings to keep us busy), and - as I think often the case in Beijing, the sky was a universal bright white. So no chance of taking many photos for iStockphoto, but certainly the crowds were not put off - huge tour groups wearing red hats were shouted at by guides with megaphones.

When we eventually came to a food stall at the north end, it was time for a late lunch, and there was no way any of us could resist a self heating "thick gravy pouring food" meal! And at less than £1 for lunch, at an official stall at one of China's top tourist sites, it seemed like a bargain. The woman behind the counter dealt with each box with military precision, setting off the heater, stabbing the water pouch, sorting out the food pouches, and firmly telling each of us "8 minute... OK". As we went outside to find somewhere to sit, plumes of steam started to come from every part of the box, and they rattled around, getting hotter and hotter. After waiting for 8 minutes, we got munching, and with the four guys marvelling at the technology involved and Gary seriously considering quitting his job to start a self heating food UK import company, it took Eva to point out to us that it tasted pretty awful and was full of bones. But we didn't really care if it was Ming-ing, it was hot as if by magic!

Having read and heard about the rip off scams involving friendly students who want 'to practise their English' and 'to show you their art gallery', I was amazed how many of them there were in the Forbidden City, and I must look like a sucker, as they all seemed to go for me!

But I eventually managed to shake them off, and after many hours in the Forbidden City, followed by an exploration of Beihei park before it got dark, we found a restaurant which served Peking (Beijing) Duck and despite a significant language barrier problem, the five of us managed to successfully order a huge feast. With new dishes arriving all the time, we still managed to eat almost everything, and the most incredible thing was the bill, which came to about £3.60 each, including tea and beer.

The White Pagoda at Beihei Park

Moving from my hotel to a hostel after two nights gave me a proper impression of the scale of Beijing. I later realised that distances which on the map look like just a few blocks, can take over an hour to walk, but I thought I was well prepared for the taxi journey, having circled the hostel's location on an official map of the city as well as having the name and address in Mandarin.

The driver did a deal with me that he'd find the hostel for 50 Yuan (just over 3 pounds, which is a lot for a taxi here - most of my journeys in Beijing were about a pound), and I thought all the conferences with his driver mates, then the 5 phone calls that he made on the way were done for effect. It only took us 20 minutes to get to the right streets as marked on the map, but then we had a further 45 minutes of driving up and down different hutongs - filled with people, bikes, food being cooked and sold, and all sorts of vehicles and things going on, while the driver got out every five minutes or so to ask directions to the hostel.

Eventually we did find it, and the driver was grateful to be on his way again. Then I had another adventure - I was at the right hostel, but I was staying in an overflow place just up the road. A hostel employee with a tricycle put my rucksack in his trailer and told me to jump in, but I motioned to him that I didn't want to weigh him down, so I'd walk. He gave a bemused 'fair enough' expression, then jumped behind the handlebars and zipped off along the busy hutong.

As I ran along, trying to keep within sight of him without knocking into people or being run over he occasionally looked back and laughed as he turned corners, but we both got there in the end.

Touristy wise, I also made it to the Summer Palace, and the Great Wall (in the end I had to go to Badaling, which is very touristy - the part we walked was 100 times busier than above, and heavily restored but still pretty amazing), plus got a drive by look at some of the 2008 Olympic sites. As well as a huge countdown display off Tian'anmen Square, adverts on bus stops around the city show how many days are left to go, and at just over 300 and counting, it looks like there's no shortage of work still to do. But Beijing certainly seems has Olympic fever. On Tian'anmen Sq you get hassled to buy maps and booklets, Chairman Mao watches and keychains, plus rip offs of the official olympics characters!

The main olympic stadium, aka 'the birdsnest'

We had two excellent farewell nights in a row as the group of us who'd met at different times on the trains from Russia went our separate ways.

After five nights in Beijing, I left my hostel and found a taxi, thinking that an hour and a bit was plenty time to get to the train station for my overnight train to Shanghai. All was going well and we were on the inner of the three huge ring roads which go around the city, when the driver slammed on his brakes to avoid hitting a stopped car infront, and WHACK! the car behind had sailed straight into us at speed. After some prolonged damage inspection, and friendly discussion between the drivers, the police were called, and I had to get my stuff and try to find another taxi, which proved to be quite hard in the dark, especially once the police had arrived. But as soon as I went the other side of a parked coach, taxis were willing to stop, and I made it to the station in time to incredibly bump into Eva, who was booked on the same train as me, and into the same hostel in Shanghai.

Eva had managed to break or sprain her ankle on the great wall, so gallantly (and partly because she told me to!) I swapped tickets with her so that I was far away up at the front of the train, and she was 14 carriages nearer the platform entrance.

Because the standard 'hard sleeper' option was long sold out, I'd gone for the luxury 'soft sleeper' ticket - about 33 pounds (versus just over 20 for hard sleeper), and shared the 4 person cabin (just like the Russian and Mongolian kupe cabins in layout, but more plush and comfortable) with a Chinese family of three.

In Shanghai, I stayed in a hostel dorm which cost 50 yuan - just over £3 a night. And incredibly, that's quite expensive compared to most of the rest of China, where hostel dorm beds apparently start from about 15 or 20 yuan!

Shanghai is home to more than 16 million people and supposedly is still growing fast - despite the one child policy and 300,000 abortions per year. The city didn't seem that huge until we viewed it from the Oriental Pearl TV Tower building, where the skyscrapers and apartment blocks went on and on until they disappeared into the haze.

Also on the newer Pudong side of the huge and dirty Huangpu river, we went to a gigantic shopping mall, and the city's aquarium - complete with the worlds longest underwater viewing tunnel, and lots of jellyfish!

On the Bund, back on the older side of the river, I found the huge former HSBC headquarters, one of the grandest buildings there. The building is now used by Pudong Development Bank, with HSBC now banished to the Pudong side of the river (opposite the bund).

A large sign details the many rules and restrictions for the building (which include the fact that wearing slippery dress and laughing is forbidden - and any failure to abide by the regulations will be punished accordingly) I was brave enough to go in, and the huge marble interior was very plush and suitably stuffy. And there's still an octagonal set of paintings set into the ceiling showing what were HSBC's most important offices: Hong Kong, Bangkok, Tokyo, Calcutta, Shanghai, New York, Paris and London.

Eva and I went on a quick river tour of the Huangpu river - and once our boat turned around we were followed by an army of boats carrying sand to presumably one of the many, many construction sites in Pudong. There are literally dozens of huge skyscrapers being built, all within a kilometer or so of eachother

Apart from that, I didn't really do many tourist things in Shanghai - spent some time wondering along Nanjing Lu, which is supposedly the busiest shopping street in the whole of Asia. But for all the huge TV screens and neon lights, the most incredible thing was that you literally couldn't take more than five paces anywhere on the whole street without being set upon by people wanting you to come to their nearby shops to buy watches, bags, jewelry, hats, shoes etc., or by the groups of students wanting to 'practise their English'.

China so far

- Blast from the past: Ring pulls on cans are the old fashioned type where the ring pull comes off

- The language barrier can be quite a problem, most people don't speak a word of English - I wish I'd learned more than the 5 words that I know at the moment, am still trying to pick more up.

- The 'great firewall of China' really does exist - though it's not the same in all cities, blocking access to BBC News, Wikipedia and many other sites - sometimes including (for some reason) facebook.

- Spitting (after doing a very loud impersonation of a coffee percolator) is indeed very common. It's not that bad though.

- Staring... I heard this can be quite strange, but - so far only in the big cities - it's not been bad. Most people ignore you completely, but some do stop and stare intently which can be weird. The most extreme version was walking back to the hostel late after one of our farewell nights in Beijing. There was a work group out fixing the pavement, well after midnight on a Sunday night. I think they might have been prison labourers or something, and when I walked past, most of the workers just stood motionless and stared blankly, until the people in charge shouted angrily and they returned to their shovels.

- 'Hello'... People really do stop you in the street just to smile and say 'Hello'. Children quite often shout it and then laugh and run away.
- Despite the fact that China's still a police state, people seem to have a healthy contempt for many of the rules, especially with regard to traffic lights etc (crossing the road on a green man is very risky!). On a taxi journey in Shanghai, my driver was lost, so approaching a busy interchange where two policemen were trying to keep some sort of order, he put his seatbelt on, then stopping a whole lane of horn blowing traffic to ask one of the very unamused policemen how to get somewhere. He thought it was hilarous as we drove on.

Some traffic lights even have a countdown to when the lights are going to change.

Shanghai to Xian

This time I did manage to get a 'hard sleeper', and found my bunk for the 18 hour train journey. It was very clean and high tech, but once again I was annoyed that I couldn't speak the language, so my communication in the open carriage was limited to smiling and waving at the baby that the family on the bottom bunks had. Being about 9 feet up on the top bunk was fine, but it did have it's challenges due to the tiny amount of space above the bed. Any kind of turning around to get to the ladder was an acrobatic challenge!

Mongolia

george — Fri, 5 Oct 2007 08:05:00 GMT

We arrived early doors in what is officially the coldest capital city in the world, Ulaanbaatar, and were met at the station by what was - after plenty dour Russian receptions along the way - a very welcome warm smile from our lovely Mongolian guide, who said we could call her Anna... I think our chances of ever pronouncing her name right were slim.

The man himself

Statue of one of the Mongolian nation's founders: Clearly not impressed by this building

We went for breakfast, changed some money (me changing from Roubles to Mongolian Togrog and trying to get my head around another bewildering exchange rate - my evil maths teacher at school was right, I really should have realised that despite calculators etc, you can't beat good old mental arithmetic) then headed to the Gandan (Gandantegchinlen Khiid = 'The Great Place of Complete Joy') monastery, which was indeed great - lots of holy buildings with different functions, some with young monks chanting, and some where they were meant to be working to learn texts, but were mostly joking around having fun.

But sadly at the busy entrance to the main temple, which houses a huge gilded Buddha God statue it was difficult to be reflective since (as we'd been warned may be the case) pickpockets were clearly operating around us with lots of carefully subtle scanning of our pockets while we weren't looking, and the occasional 'accidental' grab at peoples' pockets.

After that we (now about a 12 strong group having joined others who had stopped in different places) drove out of the city and were soon on dusty tarmac, and then after an hour or so onto sandy tracks before arriving at the Elstei ger camp.

The camp was great, with friendly and fun Mongolian staff, but although we were staying in gers, I can't pretend that we were living on the steppe in the way that the nomads do. We had 4 beds with mattresses to each wood fuelled stove equipped ger, and running water with showers and flushing loos in a communal block which also had a big dining area.

That evening Anna introduced us to some games involving the anklebones of sheep. About half the size of a cork, they can be used a bit like dice as they'll always land on one of four sides, representing (as the top part of the bone resembles them) horses, goats, sheep or camels. We played a game involving flicking the same animal type into each other to win points with maybe sixty anklebones.

Down it comes

...and off it goes (there were two bundles this size for the whole ger)

The next day Anna had lots of Mongolian activities lined up, including archery, dismantling a ger, wrestling and horse riding, and we visited a traditional Nomad family (who were now staying put near the camp). There we tried traditional nomad's food, most of them based on mare's milk and straight off a large central stove. Some were very nice, others with salt and fat weren't so hot. The fermented mare's milk (apparently 2% abv) wasn't bad at all.

Having met Dave, a Welsh guy coming the other way, in Irkutsk, who had battle scars from an attempt at mongolian wrestling, I decided that I wasn't man enough to face the challenge, but more than half of the guys were willing to have a go. BTW, the interesting outfit is like that because women used to enter (and sometimes win) wrestling competitions, so the outfit was changed long ago to leave no doubt re. the gender of competitors.

As a man (just), I did get to participate in the eagle dance ceremony that happens before and after each round. The guys above fought bravely, but were no match for the Mongolians, who wrestled around for a bit, then lifted up the challengers, spun them around, and dumped them
on the ground. For the final, we saw how it's done properly.

Once our horses had been caught and rounded up, we were told a few basics - mainly not to stroke or pet them at all, and that the way to make them go was to say 'CHO' quickly. The youngest amongst us, Steve decided to go riding despite being badly allergic to horses, and risked his horse thinking that every 'atischoo' from his frequent sneezes was a command to speed up!

Gengis Khan had his men trained to ride at speed, while firing arrows backwards at enemies - that was my attempt to do the same, but riding at (low) speed and with a camera!

But it wasn't a problem - apart from a few surprising occasions, the horses basically did what they wanted and ignored our attempts to tell them what to do. Keiran, on his yellow horse (Gengis Khan always rode on a yellow horse, so they're considered the best in Mongolia) was the only one of us who was in control, and cruised around and ahead of us as our horses plodded along stubbornly. But there was some argy-bargy, my horse would not let the majority of the others past us, and frequently chomped at the necks or backsides of other horses that he didn't like.

That night the Mongolian vodka flowed maybe a bit too easily, some very sore heads in the morning when we had to reluctantly head back into the smog of UB, ready to catch our final Trans-Mongolian train, destination Beijing.

This train only goes weekly, so was much more full of tourists than the others, with people and groups I'd met on earlier parts of the journey from Moscow converging to cross the Gobi Desert and into China. As above, the Mongolian restaurant car on this last train was by far the most fancy, but the Samovars weren't anything special...

At some points so much dusty sand made it into the train that we could see it like a fog in our compartment, and I felt the occasional sandy crunch between my teeth, but eventually the clouds of sand cleared before sunset, and we went on to Zamyn-Uud, the last Mongolian stop, and our cue to fill in more Mongolian forms and a bunch of Chinese forms too.

Then we rolled over the border past armed guards, before arriving at Erlian to hand over our passports and forms, then went backwards and shunted around for an hour while the carriages were disconnected one by one and moved into a huge warehouse.

This was where the carriages had to be jacked up individually (with us all still on board) to have the wheels / bogies changed to allow for the slightly narrower guage Chinese tracks. An incredible logistics operation, which didn't need many engineers, but it took several hours before the carriages were re-connected and we chuntered back to Erlian to go through Chinese customs.

So getting to bed between 1 and 2am, we slept most of the way through Inner Mongolia, and woke up to dramatic scenery as the train rumbled along steep valleys in Heibei province. Eventually we arrived at the end of the Trans-Mongolian line in Beijing, wondering if the low visibility which we'd had since about 10am was due to low cloud, or the smog.

A good find by Ewan:

Through Siberia

george — Fri, 5 Oct 2007 05:10:00 GMT

Four of us in a kupe cabin (two German guys, Holger and Thomas; one Swedish girl, Eva plus me) we left Moscow not long before midnight, with the temperature outside chilly, but swelteringly hot inside the train - especially for Holger and me on the top bunks.

In our train carriage there were 36 berths, two toilets (one of which was almost always locked), one samovar (a coal or wood fired boiler giving us hot water for tea or soup etc), and two 'provodniks' - in this case two iron ladies who took absolutely no messing around!

Over the 4 night journey, we passed across from Europe into Asia (as soon as we were over the Ural mountains and in Siberia), and also passed a gazillion silver birch trees, countless small villages of wooden houses, through five time zones, and about 5,200 kilometres. Each day we stopped maybe 3-5 times at stations, for 15 minutes or so where, day or night, people were on the station ready to sell food and drink to the passengers.

On the second day on board, the restaurant car (next to our carriage and where we spent quite a few of our waking hours - drinking beer or vodka and playing cards) suddenly became very busy, as the self named 'crazy football hooligans' on their way back to Perm from watching their team play in Moscow arrived, claiming that they only liked two things - Drinking and Fighting. Fortunately they only demonstrated their skills in drinking, but decked out in Burberry, Fred Perry and Lacoste, they wanted to check with us that UK hooligans wear the same labels.

Although they weren't impressed when the restaurant car lady sternly told them "don't steal anything", we had a good laugh together until around midnight when they had to get off for Perm. And they gave Eva a hat!

Anyway, having wondered what being on a train for so long would be like, I was surprised at how quickly the time went, and - having stocked up on books while I could easily buy them in English - how little time I had for reading.

Confusingly in a way, all trains and stations on Russian railways operate on Moscow time, so that our 04.30 arrival in Irkutsk actually meant that we got in at 9.30 local time.

So getting off the train it turned out that three other people from different carriages who had booked with the same company as me, so Keiran, Geraldine, Phyllis and I were taken to the small village of Listvyanka on the south west of Lake Baikal.

Here's a few facts about Lake Baikal to get them out of the way:

- It's the biggest freshwater lake in the world

- Holds 20% of the world's fresh water

- Contains more water than all the North American 'great lakes' combined

- About 80% of the almost 3,000 species found there (including a freshwater seal and a fish which melts if you leave it in the sun) don't exist anywhere else in the world

- It's over a mile deep

- 337 rivers and burns run into it, but only one river (the Angara which runs through Irkutsk) run out of the lake.

- I could go on but that'll probably do!

We stayed in a traditional homestay, complete with a banya (Siberian dry sauna), a drop loo in a shed outside, and had very nice local food including Omul from the lake. Other than being amazed (and a bit amused) at how unbelievably unfriendly the woman behind one of the local bars was - ripping money out of our hands, slamming drinks down hard on the bar and scowling with venom, before bizarrely closing the bar at a random time, turning the music up loud and dancing around with her friends - we went to the local museum and had a pleasant trek in the hills around the lake and had a picnic on a remote pebble beach.

The Angara river in Irkutsk - dread to think what the graffiti means!

After 2 nights on the shores of Baikal we had one night in a hotel in Irkutsk which was fine, but my room clearly hadn't been redecorated since the early '70s, and seemed like it hadn't been cleaned for at least a decade. The funny thing was the leaflet in the room - 'Many places claim to make you feel at home in their hotel, but at the Angara we are confident that this hotel and its facilities are better than your own home...'

So then a 5am hop to the train the next morning, a less plush Mongolian train where the provodnik was much more friendly, and you could open the windows. The carriage I was in had 6 westerners, and about 30 Mongolian traders who seemed to see us as an inconvenience, getting in the way of them constantly moving around their boxes of goods (hair products, food and all sorts of other everyday products).

Having carefully tied up bags of our rubbish on the train, and put them in the bin areas between the carriages, we were shocked to see the provodniks get rid of them along the way by just opening the windows and hurling them out as we sped through the countryside.

That evening we had a surprise stop when the train quickly ground to a halt, and it turned out that we'd run over a cow! You can barely make it out in the picture above, but it's in the light, just beyond the stripy guy's shirt). Much excitement followed, and the train had to keep shunting backwards and forwards for ages while a guy hacked free what was left of the cow, using a small hammer which is normally used to tap the hydralics etc at the bottom of the train at stations, to listen to the pitch of the 'bong'.

After prolonged hacking and noisy train shunting, the parts that were left of the cow were finally freed, and dragged away from the track.

Pretty....

...Chilly

But that 40 minute delay was nothing compared to the six hours taken for the Russia-Mongolia border crossing, which took us well beyond midnight. It was clear that the inspectors and officials had very little interest in us tourists, it was the traders that they were looking to catch, and the officials opened up hatches, floors, beds, ceilings and even unlocked the empty soap dispensers in the loo. People in other carriages saw the train officials bribed to hide things in their compartments, and the customs officials given some products in exchange for a blind eye to duty payments.

So after many hours at the last Russian station, we had a repeat thorough (but much more friendly) inspection of the train at the first Mongolian station, and then - at 1am we could get some kip before arriving early morning in Ulaanbaatar.

By the way, lots of other pics in the 'gallery' thing...

Moscow (Moscaaw for US readers!)

george — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 15:51:00 GMT

I'm иow on my last day in Moscow, heading off for the 5,500+ mile train jouяney towards Beijing late tonight. Should get to Beijing in just under two weeks, afteя three nights near Lake Baikal (Eastern Russia), three nights in Mongolia and the rest on the train. So I probably won't have Internet access until sometime after 5th October - Oh no! And since all my stuff's now packed up ready to depart, there's only Moscow pictures from my first day here.

I booked the trans-sib tickets with a compaиy who include a walking tour of Moscow, and it was just me on the day I arrived, so I had first year Tourism and Leisure student Natasha to myself. Where I'm staying is on the outskirts of Moscow, so we headed to the nearest Metro station (crossing a main railway line on the way and dodging high speed passenger trains) and went into the centre. Realising that I'd be coming back on my own in the evening, I tried to remember the cyrillic station name, and also how to negotiate through the maze of tunnels, staircases and elevators at the huge stations in the city centre.

The mullet hairstyle is still very popular and common in Russia - and another blast from the past, it looks like Shannen Doherty is too.

Some of the metro stations look more like museums - marble, chandeliers and stained glass all over the place, and also some are incredibly deep down in the ground - you get down to a platform for one line, then go way down again to a different platform, then - for my line - down a third, unbelievably long and steep elevator, normally under the watchful eyes of armed inspectors. And there seems to be no need for London style arrival time screens, as trains full of people arrive every 30-60 seconds.

Anyway, we walked past lots of sights, and Natasha had an interesting story for each, including the famous baker who cleverly ate a cockroach that a Tsar had angrily found in his bap, and managed to pretend that it was a raisin! Since it was just me on the tour, I tried to find out her views on the Communist era, and asked her opinion of the actions of leaders such as Lenin and Stalin. Although she mentioиed some of the horrific things that went on at their command, her firm view was that it was part of the history of яussia, and therefore she saw it as only good.

Remembering back to GCSE history, I also asked about Stalin's attempts to erase Trotsky from the history books, but she didn't know what I was talking about!

And she took the opportunity to ask some questions about English (including whether to pronounce "either" as 'eether' or 'ayther' - I said that either was OK...). She had heard of Scotland, but not of Edinburgh, and when she asked me which year the city was founded in I had to admit that I didn't have a clue!

Lenin's mausoleum with one of the Kremlin corner towers behind

As well as Red Square etc, I also went to Sculptuяe Park and had a look into Gorky Park next door. Sculpture Park wasn't really what I was hoping it would be (enormous toppled statues of Stalin etc), although there were plenty of carefully plinth’d ones of Lenin, which is amazing considering how many statues of Lenin I've seen still in active service. But mostly there were lots of modern, arty statues. Gorky Park looked like a Blackpool style funfair, with rickety rollercoasters and lots of candy floss.

Memorial to the unknown soldiers who died in the Second World War

Apart from that, I looked around the Kremlin and Red Square, which has a huge luxury shopping centre on the opposite side from Lenin's mausoleum, complete with Louis Vitton and Gucci shops - surely about as capitalist as it gets... if only Lenin was in a grave he'd surely be spinning, but I suppose he can't while he's on display, encased in glass!

From Russia with Love / Daylight Robbery

george — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:11:00 GMT

Arriving

With me just slightly concerned about having all the right visas and documentation to satisfy the famously tricky on-train Russian immigration officers, the Finnish train Sibelius rolled gently out of Helsinki at 07.27, bound for St Petersburg.

Three quarters of the way through the journey, for the hour or so between the last Finnish station and the first Russian one, we were instructed to go to our booked seats, not to move, and that the toilets were locked.

Expecting a brash immigration officer, twenty minutes later I got one who queried me about details of where I was going in Russia, why, and whether I planned to work. But when he gave me immigration cards to fill in and spoke in Finnish to a colleague, I realised that he was in fact not a Russian, but a Finnish official, making sure that they had details for all passengers. Then later on, with armed customs officers on small metal bridges over the train, it stopped briefly near the border for the Russian officials to get on. The process then took a long time as the train slowly passed through the customs zone, and without a word the officials took our passports and cards. Eventually we were all processed with no problems, had our passports returned, and we picked up pace again towards St Petersburg.

This was actually taken at the St P to Moscow rather than the Finlandski station, but there's not much difference.

Finally arriving on the unbelievably long platform, we then walked to the station itself in no doubt that we'd arrived in Russia - sweeping and majestic Russian music was blaring loudly out of the Tannoys.

On it's way to do some roadworks - I know 'cos I saw it chopping up the road later on.

Crossing the road

In contrast to the Scandinavian preference for waiting for the green man before crossing the road, even when there's clearly no oncoming traffic, the policy in St Petersburg seems to be that you try to cross when there's a red man, even when there is oncoming traffic. It then becomes a battle of the egos between pedestrian and driver.

Walking from the train station complete with all my clobber and having to cross huge busy roads while dodging cars that were meant to have stopped for the lights marked a big difference from Helsinki that morning.

Buying a train ticket for Moscow

I'd decided to stay in a hotel in St Petersburg to give me a break before the cooped up conditions I'm expecting on the Trans-Siberian trains. Needing to get a sleeper ticket to Moscow, I thought it would be good to get the ticket myself, rather than use the hotel's train booking service. Possibly not the wisest decision!

The train I wanted to book was the famous 'Red Arrow', which leaves St P. at midnight, gets in to Moscow just before 8am, and is known for its comfort and reliability.

So I spent 45 minutes walking the entire length of Nevsky Prospect (that's without stopping), past block after block of incredible architecture to get from my hotel to St Petersburg's Moskovsky station.

Having got to the station, just finding the ticket office was the first challenge, so I tried the most likely looking office, but on getting to the front of the queue was politely told this was not the right place for my intended travel dates. For the second attempt, I felt more confident as I could see actual tickets changing hands. But after some brazen queue-barging slowing the queue down quite a lot, I asked if the lady spoke English, and she just looked cross and shook her head. 'Is this the office for train tickets?' just led to more angry head shaking, and when I politely tried 'train ticket, here?', complete with hand movements, she continued to shake her head, and had definitely had enough of me. So 45 minutes in, I tried number 3, in a different office, and finally I was told that the best place for my tickets was out on the train platform. And sure enough, there on the platform itself, obscured by a long train, was a big ticket office. It was very dimly lit, and full of individual queues for the kiosks. I joined the shortest queue I could find, and fairly soon discovered why it was shorter than the rest - with 3 people to go, the attendant pottered about for a while in her kiosk, then closed the glass and left.

So we joined another queue, where the woman at the front took all of 25 minutes to get tickets. Half an hour after that, when I only had two people in front of me, a very pretty girl was trying to get her tickets, and two twentysomething louts went straight up to the front, talked over her completely, and began the process of getting tickets for themselves. The others in the queue rolled their eyes, but nobody said a thing, and the pretty girl just made faces at us about how badly they smelled. But as they became more obnoxious, the ticket lady was raising her voice, and becoming more and more annoyed.

Eventually they left with their tickets, and then the pretty Russian girl left with hers too. Next up was a girl in front of me, and she had no luck at all - after just one short question, the ticket lady just repeatedly shouted loudly at her and bashed her keyboard hard. Everyone in the nearby queues was staring in disbelief. So as I approached the glass, the ticket lady was looking at me despairingly and (I think) swearing profusely in Russian. Replying with my best Russian 'Hello' and then '...do you speak English?...', I was almost preparing myself for physical violence from her, but incredibly she gave a coy smile and said 'just a little bit'. So I carefully explained what I was after, she bashed the keyboard a bit, then started writing out some details on paper, which I recognised as the times of the Red Arrow train. I started to feel cautiously hopeful that - after 2 hours I may actually be able to leave with some tickets.

At this point, and to their great anger, she instructed the ten or so people behind me to move to a different queue. At 2,000 Rubles (c. £40quid), the Red Arrow seemed fine, and my 'perfect!' was met by her 'passport?' which I handed over while just checking with her that Visa or Mastercard was OK. No. Cash only. I hadn't expected this at one of Russia's busiest train stations!

Having only changed 50 Euros to get some Roubles for starting off, I only had 1,500. She bashed away a bit more, and wrote down more details for times at 1,700, still no good. Finally she tried again, and the third train price was spot on 1,500. Not great times though, a slower and older train, and arriving in Moscow at 5am. But of course I went for it, and she even helpfully underlined the important bits on the cryptic ticket.

Russian Menus

Celebrating my Russian arrival with a restaurant meal that evening, I checked that each page of the menu had been - as I'd read that it should be - individually signed by the chef and head waiter, then officially stamped. And it went on for over a dozen pages of small type, detailing every single thing for sale, including all brands of cigarette, cigars and even chewing gum! Apparently this is to prevent the waiters from charging their own prices, then taking a skim. In the end I had a decent enough meal.

Cultural Stuff

First thing on the following morning, I walked the length of Nevsky Pr for the third time, and a bit further to get to the start of the Peter's Tour route. Run by a group of postgrads, they do very highly rated 5 hour walking tours of the city. I found the place just before the start of a heavy downpour of rain, and met New Yorker Jessamyn, who I have to be nice about as she's planning to read this ;-). But that's easy as she was (honestly) very nice!

Nikoli, the PhD qualified born and bred St P tour guide suggested that we ditch the tour and go for a coffee instead, as only two people had showed up, and none of us fancied 5 hours in heavy rain.

So he kindly gave us some inside info on what to see and how, and also some language help. The best of this was how to say 'hello'. Transliterated from cyrilic it looks like 'zdrast-vuy-te', but he said that was rubbish - the way to say it right is to say the following, very quickly and with no breaks: 'How does your ass fit you'

Armed with that, and that ‘thank you’ is just like 'placebo' but starting with an 's', and ending with 'a' instead of 'o', Jess and I headed back to my end of Nevsky Pr., to start at the Hermitage.

The Hermitage was incredible in both the artwork and the architecture, with everything from the first version of the Three Graces to Da Vinci paintings left, right and centre to a long series of huge rooms packed full of Van Gogh then Gaugan then Picassos, ending with three rooms of Matisse.

Jess had no qualms about becoming part of this Matisse (or about prancing down elaborate red carpeted staircases), while the Russian official lady looked on with total disinterest.

The Hermitage is enormous - although we zoomed through most rooms barely pausing, and saw less than half of the collection, we were at the Hermitage for many hours.

A tale of two cities...

Jess already had a ticket booked to see the ballet 'Giselle' at the famous Mariinski theatre, so I agreed to try and get a ticket, and had no problem getting one in the cheap seats right up at the top. But despite being 5 stories up, I could hear and see almost everything, and to be fair both the orchestra and the performers were amazing - especially when the female lead was meant to be gliding forward from her grave, and she did this very fast but almost completely invisible foot shuffle on the tips of her toes from the very back right to the front of the huge stage. It made it look like the stage must have had a built in conveyor belt. Like a forwards moonwalk, but on tiptoes, and smoother! She also did lots of pirouettes and impressive prancing.

Cyrillic alphabet training: "McDonalds" and "Baskin Robbins"

Daylight Robbery

The next morning, I checked out, making sure I was prepared to depart St Petersburg on the overnight train that evening (and effectively the start of my Trans-Siberian / Trans-Manchurian journey). Finally the weather had cleared, and I headed for the Winter Palace, then the 'Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood'. Seeing dozens of American and Japanese tourists wondering around with expensive video and still cameras, I decided not to put my camera away between there and the Russian Museum, where I had a laugh seeing 4 police officers in a police car, all looking extremely rough, and drinking beer from cans, at 11am. After that I headed back to Nevsky Prospect, planning to cross over to the nearby Kazan Cathedral. Camera over my head rather than just over my shoulder as normal, and all pockets etc firmly zipped up and checked, I felt reasonably secure.

Along Nevsky Prospect there are lots of people everywhere selling things or giving out leaflets, and occasional street beggars displaying war wounds or boxes full of kittens. A few metres away a guy was approaching people as they walked past, showing them his selection of booklets and postcards of the city and the Hermitage. As usual, nobody was interested and brushed him away. I edged slightly further across the pavement to avoid his pitch, and just when I thought I was past him, as he was hassling a woman coming the other way, he turned and thrust his fan of photos and booklets in front of me. 'No thanks' with a smile was no good, he carried on, quickly pressing the booklets into my chest, and saying what a good price he'd give me.

Hearing again that I wasn't interested, he quickly tried to sell them again, but eventually accepted that I wasn't going to buy anything as I kept on walking, and just offered me one small postcard for no charge. I said 'No thanks' and he looked sorrowful and finally let me continue walking on, just 10 to 15 seconds after he'd first started hassling me. I thought the free card offer was a bit odd, and turned round to see him crossing the seven lanes of traffic on the street with his booklets and cards, but he seemed to be in no great hurry. But I knew that he'd definitely tried something, so I quickly checked my wallet, phone, bag, carefully hidden passport and all was well. Though my camera must be fine as it was still firmly around my neck, I looked down at it to be sure.... and the camera was indeed still there, but the 18-200mm lens had vanished as if by magic! I couldn't believe it, and looked for the thief/magician, and of course even though I'd seen him just seconds ago, he was already long gone.

Incredible - in the split second while he pushed his booklets at me, he must have reached under them with the other hand, and in what must have been a very carefully practiced move - different for each brand of SLR camera - pressed in the lens release button on the camera and, simultaneously, rotated and then removed the lens. Normally I'd notice the difference in weight with the lens gone, but since he must have removed the pressure of his booklets at exactly the same time as the lens itself, I didn't feel a thing. Also he did the whole thing blind as he was looking straight at me the whole time. And I suppose the free postcard would have provided a diversion for a few extra seconds while he got away. Damn! Damn!! Damn!!!

There seemed very little point in going to the police - even if I found an officer who wasn't drunk, the chances of him speaking English were almost zero, and anyway, I had no proof of what happened, nor anything to prove that I even owned the lens. From speaking to other travellers, filing a police report here involves unbelievable amounts of red tape, and you have to stay in the same town or city for 3 days while it's processed.

Plus St Petersburg police are notorious in Russia for their corruption.

But I did go back to the spot through the day in case he was operating again, and also to some camera shops to check that they weren't stupid enough to be selling my hot lens complete with the filter that I'd had on it. Two shops did have the same lens, but I think they were genuinely brand new.

And, just to give you a laugh, here’s the last picture I took through the lens …

Off to Moscow

So obviously now being doubly paranoid about security, I tried to be philosophical about the whole thing... although the lens did cost marginally more than the camera itself, I've already made the cost of it back, it contained no personal information, I hadn't been beaten up or anything, and a wallet or passport being stolen would have been worse.

Everyone I spoke to about it agreed that there was no point in wasting time with the police about it, so I resolved to try to put it down to experience and enjoy the rest of my day in St P. And Jess kindly came to see me off, giving me more excellent trans-sib advice (she had just finished two weeks on the trains), including the not easy task of finding your berth. I showed my ticket and passport to the provodnista (carriage attendant), who retained her distinctly unimpressed attitude throughout the journey.

But I landed on my feet, in an entirely Russian populated carriage, I was sharing with a great young couple who had recently returned to Russia from postgraduate study in Ohio, and were desperate to speak as much English as possible. The other, older Russian lady in the swelteringly hot compartment spoke no English at all, but was perfectly pleasant as we tucked into little snack boxes that we were given, and slowly chuntered into the dark countryside.

Generalisations about Scandinavia

george — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:47:00 GMT

- The cities have lots of good buskers, using all sorts of instuments - trumpets, saxaphones, wine glasses, glockenspiels etc.

- The food from kiosks on the street is surprisingly good, but not that cheap.

- Coffee is taken quite seriously, and most people drink their coffee black. Sometimes you can't get milk even if you want it.

- They have more reasonable anti-smoking laws than we've now got in the UK... hostels and hotels are allowed smoking areas and rooms, pubs and clubs have smoking rooms, and smoking's allowed in some big public spaces like train stations.

- Its true about the outrageously high proportion of attractive girls in Scandinavia, putting them at a close second to Scotland.

- There are more people asking for money than I expected. As well as a lot of normal beggers on the street, quite a lot of people approached me asking for money with long stories based around "I'm travelling from X to Y and someone stole my wallet, could you spare maybe one crown..."

- Where there's no cycle lane, bicycling on the pavement seems to be OK.

- Snus is more popular than I realised. It's the moist powdered tabacco which you make into a little ball and put under your upper lip for anything between a few minutes to most of the day.

- Almost everyone waits for the green man at the pavement, even when you can clearly see that there's no traffic coming for 200 metres.

- Accutately aimed projectile spitting is quite popular.

- Despite the high cost of Alcohol, people still manage to consume it in abundance!

- Trying to leave the Free Record Shop, which is all over Scandinavia, with a record for free may lead to prosecution.

Me Thinki, Helsinki

george — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 13:58:00 GMT

WTF Magazine. Welcome to Finland indeed!

Helsinki seems like a great place, despite the chilly Baltic wind that blows from time to time.

Having done some tourist bits on Saturday, I headed out later for my first full-on night out, mainly at a huge, traditional pub with a live venue upstairs. They have an odd system of charging here - entry is free, and the cloakroom is a few Euros. But you have to pay at the cloakroom even if you have no cloak, so it's basically just a cover charge. Upstairs they had a blackjack table, so I set myself a limit of 20 Euros ready to lose it, but somehow managed to leave with 55 Euros, through total spawnyness.

Alko - Finland's state owned monopoly off license, and the only place licensed to sell beer over 4.7%, wines and spirits. Good name!

When he was chatting, the croupier talked exclusively about Formula 1 (very popular here, I saw a chap dressed completely as Lewis Hamilton, with the full Sparco suit complete with all advertising). The croupier wasn't a fan of Hamilton though, but he pleased the two friendly Spaniards at the table by going on about Alonso - 'He a real Race Driver!', and tried to appease me by saying that Coultard had qualified 12th!

Anyway, when I left the pub Helsinki was in full Saturday night streets packed with drunkards getting kebabs mode, and I promptly managed to get completely lost on my way back, but I eventually found my way after walking around for some time!

Unfortunately I didn't make it to the tourist attraction in Espoo called 'The Weegee House'. See: www.weegee.fi

They've got a great city bike scheme, you pay a 2 Euro deposit to unlock a bike, then you get it back when you return the bike to any one of the stands that are all over the city.

Good placenames here as well - my favourite is Töölö (this street goes there), but Espoo and Porvoo are good too. Most things seem to end in 'i' though.

Unfortunately the afternoon of the day I arrived was the only sunny period, the other two days have been overcast and mostly raining. Managed to get some iStockPhoto-graphing done though. Seems like there's plenty to see here.

This large UFO landed just before I arrived - here's a photo from today...

Nah, it's actually a church - Temppeliaukion Kirkko - which is cut right down into the rock. Pretty impressive inside. The photo in the dark above is genuine... but not taken by me!

Will - that's the best I could do, there's at least one more in the photo gallery... bet you can't pronounce that right to the end!

And to finnish... hadn't heard of this Scottish whisky before I came to Helsinki...

Turku and Tampere

george — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Eleven hours for the Viking Line ferry between Stockholm and Turku seemed excessive, but the reason became clear soon enough - for most of the way we had to go slowly as our huge ferry negotiated the way through the huge Stockholm Archipelago (made up of approx 24,000 islands) and crept almost silently by a long line of other equally massive ferries and cruise ships coming into Stockholm.

We stopped briefly on Aland Island, then had to carefully weave through the equally huge archipelago off Turku, constantly changing course to stay in the narrow channel markered by buoys between the islands and rocks. So in eleven hours, we were only in the open Baltic sea - which was surprisingly rough - for about 90 mins. And, at least up on the deck when the sun was shining, it didn't feel too Baltic in temperature.

Previously I'd cynically thought that maybe the ferry was on a scheduled go-slow to allow the Swedish and Finnish passengers as much duty-free drinking time as possible.

Despite the sign in the terminal making the absolute zero tolerance policy on drunkedness during the journey crystal clear, on board the promotion of drinks at a fraction of normal prices was non-stop. I no longer think that the Brits are ahead of the game in their duty free enthusiasm, having spotted people getting off the ferry pushing wheeled loaders stacked high with crates of beer, wine, spirits, alcohol and snus. As well as plenty space on the ship for drinking, casinos and karaoke, there was a huge sauna area which took up about a quarter of one floor of the ship.

Anyway, got into Turku and found my 'staff free' hotel, the Omena... you book it on the web, get a room number and a code for all the doors, and to check out you just put a 'checked out' tag on the door when you leave. Dead cheap for a hotel, and it even included breakfast at a cafe round the corner.

Arriving quite late, and leaving Turku early, I didn't get the chance to look around, but from what I did see and hear, the architecture and language seems to be getting more Soviet in style as I go further East. Which I suppose is what you'd expect. Prices seem to be getting less unreasonable too, but still quite heavy.

Tampere is an old industrial town, but now has (amongst other things) lots of museums including the coffee cup museum, the museum of refrigeration, the Finnish boxing museum, the shoe museum and many others. I didn't manage to get to the coffee cup museum, but did make it to the world's oldest spy museum. They had lots of interesting actually used real spy stuff, like a bugged ashtray used in industrial espionage, old cipher machines (one made by Nokia, just up the road from here), and gadgets that were used to copy documents onto microfilm. Amazing how much of the cumbersome equipment that they lugged around in the 70s and 80s could now be replaced by a modern mobile phone with a camera. But that could never replace the gearstick from a Lada which concealed a large knife! They also had the same brand of lighter with a hidden knife which was used in the 11th September attacks.

The spy museum was in the basement of the huge Findlayson Centre. Findlayson was a Scot who brought electric light to Scandinavia in 1882 for use in his cotton mill. And supposedly, as almost every household in the UK has a copy of 'Dark Side of the Moon', almost every Finnish household has Findlayson towels and sheets to this day. And the brand is still going.

I was planning to look around more of Tampere this morning, but it was pouring with rain, so (since someone in the hostel dorm had woken us all up early anyway), I got the early train to Helsinki. It was a fast Pendelino one, but quite a lot better than Richard Branson's narrow Virgin trains. It even had screens to show us how fast we were going (200+ kmph)

Stockholm by Segway

george — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 11:37:00 GMT

I arrived in Stockholm on Monday 10th, and after three nights here, I'll be leaving very early tomorrow morning to head for Finland on the ferry. I've been staying in Fridhemsplan (a few tube stops out), at a massive hostel with several hundred beds. The kitchen's got thirty fridges, numbered to help you remember where you put the milk! Like many others in Scandinavia, the hostel is spotlessly clean and efficient too - the byproduct of that seems to be that many people here on conferences or in Stockholm for meetings seem to use the hostel rather than a hotel.

Church Roof Appeal: Urgent help needed

A football legend but he couldn't control his temper on the pitch

Anyway, instead of boring you with details of the art galleries, open air museums and architecture, or any of the things that Stockholm is rightly famous for, here's details of my tour of the city by Segway:

Having never had a shot on one, 250 'Crowns' (about twenty quid) seemed well worth it, so I paid up and we set off with two guides to a city centre underground car park. There we were told that it is illegal to use Segways anywhere in the Stockholm city centre area, or on any roads, pavements or on bike lanes in the wider city area. All of which we were going to do. But if and when stopped by the police we should say nothing and let the guides do the talking and pay the fines.

But before that we needed to get accustomed to using the machines. For those (like myself before the tour) who don't know about Segways, they're electrically powered, go up to 20kmph, and have no controls as such. You stand on the self-levelling platform, and whichever way you lean, the Segway moves or turns in that direction. They're quite nimble and can accelerate and spin around surprisingly quickly.

Previously I'd thought that it was almost impossible to fall off one, and that George Bush had only famously managed it by forgetting to switch the thing on. But not so. First up was an American lady who boldly got on hers, and straight away started slowly gliding forwards. Rather than leaning back to slow down and try coming backwards as the guide was enthusiastically instructing her, she soundlessly gathered forward pace, until eventually she smacked quite hard into the back of a brand new Saab estate, before falling to the tarmac to be followed by her Segway. The rest of us gulped and tried not to laugh too much. But to her credit she got up and straight back on.

While avoiding the occasional car going into or out of the car park, we all had a quick introduction to using them - the first 10 seconds are very strange, as you get used to the machine compensating for your movements, and getting on and off is surprisingly hard for the first one or two times - then off we went up the car park ramp, and out onto one of the busiest shopping streets in Stockholm, at lunchtime.

The bizarre thing was that we, a group of tourists on a guided tour, quickly became objects of tourism ourselves, being videod, photographed and pointed at as we went.

We were made up of four Americans, who tried to befriend or at least wave at every single person we passed, three Italians, who treated the hour and a half tour as a race with no rules (apart from when they were making or receiving calls on their phones) and three Brits who made good solid progress while steadfastly maintaining our positions in the line. Apart from a couple of spectacular wipe-outs at top speed on gravel (Segways don't seem to cope very well with any skidding or wheelspin), we zipped along, gliding by shopping streets, past marinas, around and through huge parks and past cathedrals, art galleries and Swedish royalty attending an opening of some kind.

Unfortunately there wasn't any time for our tour guides to tell us what anything was, but we were all having too much fun doing slalom at top speed to care!

Despite all that, I still found time to make some coffee:

This is not a pub

In Sweden there's no escape from this rubbish either

This way for fish

City of Gothenburg

george — Sun, 9 Sep 2007 10:04:00 GMT

Haj from Sweden! Actually for some reason they normally say it twice, quickly, sounding like 'Hai Hai'.

'Yu-te-bori' is about the same size as Edinburgh, and is the largest university city in Scandinavia with over 60,000 students. Like Edinburgh it's very easy to walk around, and the very long and very straight roads and walkways here make it quite hard to get lost. But Edinburgh, there's not many cars here, but there are trams and bicycles all over the place.

With a history of building ships and Volvos (and also Hasselblad cameras), Göteborg's got a working class background, but now seems to have become quite a hip and trendy chilled out sort of place.

And it's very friendly here too - I took a great fifty minute tourist boat trip around the canals and out into the harbour with the shipbuilding cranes all over the place. Because of a high spring tide, we had to get off our seats and duck down very low to avoid being decapitated by some of the bridges, and one was too low for us to get through at all.

With around sixty other blatant tourists onboard, we passed parks and squares and were cheerfully waved at by people of all ages, which surprised me. But even more surprising was the fact that both goths and heavy metallers were also smiling and waving. Surely at least the goths should be no more than morbidly pensive at their most enthusiastic!

Among many interesting facts about the city, our guide told us that the Swedish, even with their relatively small population, consume more bananas than any other European country. She described this (and many other things) as 'quite extraordinary'.

The friendliness also seems to extend to the pubs (beer is still expensive in Sweden, but not as bad as in Norway), which were showing Sweden playing Denmark in the World Cup qualifier. The guy standing just in front of me told me to hit him hard if he got in the way of my view. He even demonstrated how hard I should hit him, then tried to get me to test the system out by carefully putting his arm between me and one of the pub's screens.

Anyway, the city is one of only two in the world to boast a floating multi-story car park. And apparently it's for sale. Dunno if shipping is included in the price though.

I thought there was a code by which you can work out the fate of people depicted in statues, based on the number of raised hooves shown on the horse. Which would mean that this guy was wounded in battle. But alas, it seems that it's the stuff of urban legends. So I don't know what happened to him.

Rather than try to work out what these things on the menu were, I went for potluck and tried to pronounce 'Bratwurst Thuringer', leaving out the 'Supergod' bit. And it was a good choice...

... with really good mashed potatoes.