Good Journal Name

People who should really not be allowed on long-distance buses

hotnoodle — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 13:47:00 GMT

1) People who sit in an aisle seat and then pretend to be asleep so that they won't have to move over and share. (That's me.)

2) People who think that 8 hours on a bus is a really good time to make all their social calls and talk for the whole time. Behind me. At night.

3) People who use the onboard toilet before we've even left the station. Like they've been holding it in so they don't have to pay the 20p at the station.

4) People who eat potato chips at 4am. Behind me.

5) Large South African girls who complain about the malfunctioning aircon with a whine that begins "I'm from South Africa, but this is ridiculous..."

6) People who stage phonecalls in order to passive aggressively complain about their neighbours talking on their cellphones. "Hi... how are you?.... Yeah I'm on a bus... You know what I hate?.... People who sit on the bus talking on their cellphones about how they're on a bus.... Yeah it's awful, people are trying to sleep and everything... Yeah... Yeah... The cheese?... Typical.... Are you drunk?.... Did you go to the circus?.... Ok bye."

How not to leave Edinburgh

hotnoodle — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 03:34:00 GMT

Two different ways of making travel arrangements:

The sensible way. This involves planning things in advance, getting cheap deals by booking ahead, spending your time knowing exactly when you're going to leave and mentally preparing yourself, seeing what you want to see and having the experiences you want to have in good time, then boarding a plane for a short flight to your next destination and arriving clean, pressed, minty-breathed, and instantly forgetting the journey because of its smoothness and lack of trauma.

Another way is to have no particular plan and to keep procrastinating until the only available option comes up and spits in your face, forcing you to leap to attention, make hasty arrangements, say hasty goodbyes, lament the things you didn't get to see or do, realise how wasteful you've been because you had no deadline to work against, and then unceremoniously and violently eject yourself from your comfortable perch back into the chaos to which you obviously belong.

You will hurriedly collect your belongings, jump on one bus then an overnight bus then another bus and emerge 15 hours later, greasy-haired, fuzzy-teethed and exhausted into a world of bright light and clean people. You will be forever scarred by the experience and in years to come you will suffer flashbacks to sitting contorted and half asleep in the unending darkness of the British motorway system.

I wasn't expecting to be the first to leave the bike shop. We were all meant to be pissing off on the 31st but with my lack of organisation I expected to hang around until the 1st or 2nd. Then Chris from Mission Beach "04 tells me to come down to Southampton because he's got the 2nd and 3rd off work and an incredible lineup of English experiences for me. Then there are no tickets from either Glasgow or Edinburgh for the 31st or 1st, but there is one Megabus ticket available for tonight.

And suddenly, unexpectedly, unwillingly, I have less than 10 hours left in Edinburgh and I have to get my shit together and leave my adopted family of strays, and remember what it's like to be travelling.

Homeless, hungover and socially retarded in Edinburgh

hotnoodle — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:40:00 GMT

I'm a bum, again. After a week of bike shop bludging, Peter texts me this morning to say that he and three friends will be staying tonight and that Doug and I will have to leave.

Doug is out of the city delivering a bicycle (unnecessarily, it seems) so it's just me that needs evacuating. I don't want to sponge off Alex again, but it looks like the only alternative is sleeping on the concrete floor of the bike workshop. I would do it if I wasn't the only one, but sleeping there alone.... nah.

I'm moody already. Not quite hungover after drinking half a bottle of sherry last night. I drank half a bottle of sherry because it was roughly the same colour as the two pints of cider I drank earlier when I was at the pub with Ewan Skydiver. That was an awkward experience. It reminded me of being in Melbourne and being invited to dinner at the house of a very interesting fellow, only to be confronted by a horde of informed, opinionated, hip friends of his who occupied my host while I sat on the couch being molested by a small dog.

Last night it was simply a gathering of blonde girl-shaped things and a guy who was "definitely not gay" despite appearances. Informed and opinionated they were not necessarily. Nor were they particularly hip, though they were clean, which is not to be underrated. It was more a case of being outnumbered and having no idea what they were talking about.

Blonde girl next to Ewan Skydiver had imbibed a little already and was bestowing proprietary displays of affection all over the dude despite assurances of platonicism, and my eyebrows spent a good hour or so nested in my fringe. She went out to find food and in order to bring the interaction back to a position I could relate to, I engaged Ewan Skydiver in a rousing game of thumb war. He managed it whilst taking a call from aforementioned blonde girl. Another blonde girl asked me about travelling, and her eyebrows disappeared into her hair also when I talked about what I've been doing. "Alone? I could never do that..." Then the conversation switched to vibrators.

Blonde girl #1 called to say she was at an outdoor bar which I like to call "Some Wanker's Backyard", so we went to meet her. She wasn't there, so the plan was to get another drink and wait. At this stage Ewan Skydiver said that he wouldn't think less of me if I piked at this stage -- my discomfort being obvious, apparently -- so I said OK and hastily took my leave. I traipsed back to the bike shop where everybody was watching Gran Torino, and then proceeded to drink half a bottle of sherry.

It wasn't even that I fancied the fellow. Sorry Ewan. It was more the sense of losing an excellent bullshitting companion. It was the disappointment of meeting someone in one situation and then discovering that they are completely different in a different situation, and that I should have just left it on a high. It might be akin to post-shag-shame. It's a big neon "WELL THAT WAS INADVISABLE, WASN'T IT?"

So now I'm locked out of the bike shop, sitting down the road in a hostel which is reassuringly sterile, with uncomfortable couches and hot water from the taps in the toilets. I'm waiting for someone to return to the bike shop so I can get my bags out and head to Alex's place.

I'm a bum.

Edinburgh exercises in homelessness

hotnoodle — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 01:16:00 GMT

I'm a bum.

The definition of a bum is someone who wanders around the city looking for opportune places to sleep. Alex left for a football match in Croatia this morning, shortening my sleep by a good few hours. I hauled my ass down to the street corner and caught a bus into St Andrew Square, then hoofed it through the early morning festival crowds around Princes Street, across the North Bridge over the railway station and up onto the Royal Mile.

I'm sleeping tonight in Peter's bike shop. It's an interesting place that looks more like someone's living room than an establishment for the hiring of bicycles. But since my greeting this morning from the female half of the resident American couple working in the shop was "I thought you weren't coming until tonight," followed by "Are you going to be here all day?" I gathered that I would not be welcome to snooze there.

I start work at 3pm and finish at 11.30pm. It is currently 10.45am. At this rate I'm not going to make it, so I'm prowling the streets looking for any of the following:

1) A comfy couch in a secluded corner of a public establishment, such as a library or museum.
2) A park bench in a secluded corner of a public space.
3) A patch of grass that is not boggy in a quiet piece of park or similar.

POSTSCRIPT: I went with the patch of grass option, constructing a rudimentary shelter out of my waterproof jacket (for the bottom) and my pink frilly french undies umbrella (against sun, wind and rain). Unfortunately the wind and rain part of that equation laughed in the face of my efforts, and I was forced to give up and go buy lunch and eat it in the bus station.

I repeat. I am a bum.

Liverpool, not Nice

hotnoodle — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 04:31:00 GMT

My plane to Nice leaves in about 30 minutes. I'm currently in the centre of Liverpool sitting in a courtyard watching a troupe of tinfoil-sworded middle-aged women perform something vaguely medieval. Probably medieval in the way that Monty Python does medieval. Whatever. That's not the point.

The point is that I am nowhere near the airport. That's because I have decided not to go to France today. I actually decided last night not to go to France today. Unhelpfully I came to this decision after spending 8 hours on buses from Stirling to Liverpool, a journey which I will do in reverse tomorrow to get back to Edinburgh.

So here's where I try to justify it to myself.

JUSTIFICATION #1: I only got to see one day of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and associated frivolities. It's only happening this month. My timing couldn't be any better. Alex is there -- I can probably stay with him a little more. Alternatively I can crash at this bike shop of Peter's. It's stupid to go to France when these things are on offer.

JUSTIFICATION #2: It's going to be mad busy in the south of France right now. I haven't had a good response from any HelpX hosts. I get the feeling that Couchsurfing will also be hard. It reminds me of Barcelona at Easter last year, and Spain in general. I hated Spain.

JUSTIFICATION #3: Doug (one of the other "helpers" from Mull) may well be showing up. He's fun. I know I should make new friends, but old friends in new places is fun too.

JUSTIFICATION #4: They're getting worse now. I asked the four heads and they said that France would be a bad idea. Hah! I asked if I should go to Edinburgh and they offered up a resounding "yes". The four heads are four one-pound coins held and shaken in your hand like dice and then revealed. It's like tossing four coins at once. When they come up all heads, it means yes. All tails means no. Anything in the middle is some variety of maybe.
Doug invented the game on Mull when we were trying to hitch from Tobermory back to Salen. Then he spent them on Guinness so that it wouldn't become a habit.)

I only had three coins to play with, so perhaps it was less scientific, but more important was my response to these answers: relief. The heads confirmed what I actually wanted. I had a similar response when my Couchsurfing host in Nice failed to send me directions in a prompt fashion. I was thinking "no directions means I don't go to France..." and then when he did finally send me directions last night I was disappointed. So...

JUSTIFICATION #5: My gut said no. My "intuition" told me to go back. What a fucking fruit loop. But I'm not sure if I'm confusing "intuition" with "being chicken shit". And since I can't live both paths, I'll never know. Unless the plane crashes or something. This one is stupid because I'm always spouting shit at people about how travel is an exercise in faith: You hurl yourself into the world and trust that your own competency and the goodness of the peoples of the world will keep you afloat. My "nervousness about accommodation" justification flies in the face of faith.

My plane is well and truly gone now. The last time I felt like this was when I deliberately failed to attend my Epistemology and Metaphysics exam in second year. I got an E for that.

Kuala Lumpur to London: An exercise in stupid

hotnoodle — Mon, 6 Jul 2009 07:24:00 GMT

KUALA LUMPUR TO SINGAPORE

I didn't want to leave Kuala Lumpur. I was quite comfortable there. I had almost figured out how Malaysia worked, having spent six weeks there in total. I liked the funny accents. I liked the cheap Indian breakfasts. I liked the fruit. I liked my bizarre adopted Chinese family and their board games. I wanted to play more board games.

So leaving KL was painful. I said goodbye to Shu -- my stoic host of multiple visits, who I hosted in Christchurch and who returned the favour at pretty short notice -- and caught the LRT to Sentral. Then a red bus to the poor person's airport. In contrast to my previous experiences at the low-cost carrier's terminal, it was surprisingly civilized this time. I went straight through. Onto the plane, off the plane in Singapore. Air Asia flies to T1 at Singapore's Changi Airport, and I can half-heartedly swear that it takes longer to walk from the gate than it took to get from KL to Singapore.

SINGAPORE

I arrived in Singapore at 7pm to catch my flight at 11pm. But even with this impressive buffer of time, I couldn't get a good seat. My flight was with Qantas, and everyone flying through from Australia to London had nabbed the best seats, and I was only able to score one in the middle of a middle row.

I was finally allowed to enter the fabled land of Club Changi -- this land that taunted me and eluded me at the start of this journey -- and to be honest I couldn't find anything particularly cool. I found free internet. I found a chair in front of a TV showing Americans re-designing the bedrooms of strangers. I cried. Cried for exchanging the beloved ringgitt for the pound. Cried for leaving the heat, the food, the strange concerns of a different culture. Cried for the end of a trip that I felt I could have gotten more out of, but which still felt like a really long time with loads of happenings. Whatever. I sobbed in front of the crap American reality TV. Maybe I was crying for that too.

Then I bought the biggest smoothie ever, and went to the loo about three times.

SINGAPORE TO LONDON HEATHROW

One word: Stupid. Middle seat on middle row = stupid. Movie selection = stupid. Sleeping on a plane = stupid. I invented a new position: Feet on the top of the seat in front, ass over head, pretty much upside down. That was the only way I could successfully doze. It freaked out the lovely Australian man next to me who woke up to see feet next to his telly screen. He was such a nice gentleman. After this 24 hour flight he was going to Sheffield for some sort of factory training. He was going to stay for three days and then fly home again -- another 24 hours on a plane. One can only guess how much factory trivia that man's jetlagged brain will retain.

The flight crew kept passing me over for a cup of tea. Then my video system died. I pressed the call button once and waited five minutes. Then I pressed it again. It kept switching itself off, so I kept pressing it. Press, press, press. There was a slight scowl on the man's face when he arrived to sort me out. Australians, like New Zealanders, don't like moaners.

We landed in London where it was 12 degrees at 5.30am. After the shiny airports in Asia, Terminal 4 looked like some provincial airport in a communist country. The man at immigration gave me a good grilling that went like this:

"How long are you here for?"
"Four months. Well -- my return flight is in four months but I might not spend all my time here."
"That's a long time. How did you get so much time off work?"
"I quit my job. They didn't appreciate me anyway."
"What is it you do?"
"Web design. Some writing."
"How much money do you have?"
"$4000," (I'm lying) "... and two credit cards."
"How much do you have on your credit cards?"
"In total about $16,000 NZD available." (Not lying. Credit card companies are stupid.)
"Where are you going in the UK?"
"To visit my friend who lives in Stirling."
"What's her name?"
"Delwyn."
"Who's this guy here then?" (Indicating the supplied address on the immigration declaration form.)
"Joe. I'm staying with him in London to sleep off my jetlag."
"How do you know him?"
"Through Couchsurfing.org. He stayed with me at my place last year."
"Hmmmmmmmmmm...."

By this point I was the only one at immigration. He called over another immigration officer and asked if she could find a particular stamp, then he began making marks on my passport. I asked him if he was letting me in, and he said he would, but when I left the country I should expect to get grilled again to explain why I was held up here at immigration.

I put on my best harmless smile -- "Do I look especially shifty?"
He didn't smile back. "Well, you're planning to be here for a while. You have no job to go back to. You don't have much money, and you don't have many plans."
"You think I'm here to work illegally?"
"That's what it looks like, but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt this morning."

I tried to keep the "fuck you, it's 6am and I haven't slept" out of my smile and offered up an oily "thanks, I appreciate that."

My bag was doing solitary laps of the carousel when I emerged. I dug out my leftover ringgitt -- RM50, which would buy me 150 deep fried banana balls or 16 plates of mee goreng or two nights in a hostel -- and changed it for 6 pounds. Enough for a tube ride into the city.

Welcome to London.

Lombok to Bali - Mount Rinjani says "hi"

hotnoodle — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:04:00 GMT

"One ringgit. One ringgit ok?"

I hold up the note in front of my face so the man behind the counter can see. His eyes widen and his lips purse. His is the face of someone who has been offered an extremely good deal but doesn't want to let on.

His nod is quick. My sigh of relief follows equally fast.

I've been on this ferry from Lembar in Lombok to Padangbai in Bali for the past six hours. I'm dying for a cup of tea but I have no Indonesian rupiah left. The going rate for a cup of hot water on this boat is 2000rp, or about 25c New Zealand, which is about 50 sen Malaysian, or half a ringgit. I suppose when you look at it that way, my one ringgit is twice the asking price, and that may be the reason for the man's excitement.

I hand over the money and he fills a glass with water from a rice cooker while his mates examine the note with equally disproportionate excitement. I now have a glass of boiling water. Success! I lower my tea bag into the water and wrap the handle-less glass in tissues so that I can lift it without burning my fingers.

The man sees my precarious situation and hurries to open the door for me as I clutch my prize between two hands. My thankyou is profuse. His is too. We both feel like we've swindled the other. I think that's the best outcome you could hope for from any transaction.

I climb the stairs to the top deck of the ferry. My calf muscles scream. My thighs join in. I'm a spastic carrying a glass of boiling water. If Madeleine were here instead of ten metres away sitting with our bags she would deadpan: "Mount Rinjani says 'hi'."
We are into the sixth hour of a four hour ferry crossing. We have been sitting outside Padangbai harbour for the past two hours. Word on the street is that there's something wrong in the port and we can't dock. About an hour ago we thought we might be moving, but it was just the ferry turning in a big languid circle.

In the meantime the sun has set over Bali and threatening clouds have rolled over the hills behind Padangbai.

We have no food. We have no money. We had 20,000 rupiah (about $2 USD) at the start of the day in Gili Trawangan, but that has been spent on four packets of rice + noodles + spicy chicken wrapped in a banana leaf, one hunk of watermelon, nine bananas, two packets of peanuts and one large bottle of water. The food was wastefully scoffed hours ago when we thought that dry land, an ATM and banana juice were not so far away.

I sit down with my tea. Rinjani says hi as I do so. I try to catch some soothing whiff of jasmine but it gets whipped away by the wind and diesel fumes. Madeleine gets up and goes for a walk.You can tell the people who have just come down off Mount Rinjani by their walks. They'll be stiff, slow and purposeful. You can also recognize them by their groans: Every change in elevation, every uneven path, every step up or step down is a fresh agony. If you watch them getting up from a chair you could be mistaken for thinking them prematurely aged to feebleness: Watch them grab hold of poles, pillars, rails and arm rests and use them to propell their bodies in the right direction, since their legs can no longer be relied upon.

And watch them laugh at the ridiculousness. This is Rinjani saying hi.

To climb Mt Rinjani you need to ascend 2000 metres in one day. It takes eight hours, more or less, with stops for drinks, lunch, gasping, crying, looking at disbelief at the forest that just goes on and on in an endless identical procession of roots that are just slightly too high for you to climb up without holding onto something.

For me it was eight hours of saying "oh my god" and singing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" over and over.

After six hours of forest and tree root it turns into two hours of loose gravel and no trees. At this point my arse and legs in conspiracy with my lingering cold decided to give up the ghost. I was shuffling centimetres with every step. I wanted to lie down and dig a hole in the gravel with my hands and bury myself in it forever and ever. So our guide, the lovely if silent Anton, carried my bag and I hauled only myself up the volcano for the next 45 minutes.

When I was researching this back home I had a mind to do the three-day trek: To the rim, down to the crater lake and hot springs, and then back up to the rim and down the mountain again. Fortunately Mt Rinjani is currently erupting from the new cone that is forming in the middle of the crater lake, so nobody is allowed to go beyond the rim. No lake. No summit. Thank god. If it had been possible I would have booked it and my leg and ass muscles would have bludgeoned me to death in my sleep.

So I climbed the mountain. It was my first ever live, erupting volcano. We ate a big plate of nasi goreng with an egg on top and sweet black tea and watched the sun go down over Bali. At night while bundled up in every item of clothing in our possession we could hear the booms and rumbles of a volcano with bad gas. When emerging from the tent in the middle of the night to find an opportune place to pee we could see the orange glow of hot stuff issuing from the baby cone in the middle of the lake: squatting with pants around ankles in the chill night air, volcano booming in the distance, saying hi to Rinjani in a rather personal way.

(Speaking of peeing: There is actually a loo on the rim. It was built with the help of the New Zealand government. We have a vested interest in being able to take a dignified dump at the top of a volcano in Indonesia, it appears. Unfortunately the door that they affixed to this toilet would also make a splendid wind break for the camp fire area, so it was swiftly removed and reemployed in this new role, leaving the crapper doorless, and the New Zealand government the proud sponsors of a cooking fire shelter.)

Anyway. The result of all this is that I get to be one of those wankers who can start stories with "When I was climbing the volcano in Lombok.... "

That was what I was really after.

We're moving again. Madeleine and I will be back in Kuta this evening, where there is a BLT and banana juice with my name on it.

Mount Rinjani, Lombok - The day before

hotnoodle — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:02:00 GMT

I am sitting in a guesthouse in Senaru, on the island of Lombok, Indonesia. The room is spartan. The only furniture is the double bed which I'm sharing tonight with Madeleine. The floor is tiled. The roof is high. There are ventilation holes above the door and window which admit the sounds of activity outside, including (but not limited to):

The largely incomprehensible babble of Bahasa Indonesia from the staff and inhabitants of this fine institution.
The gushing of water from a hose being sprayed onto the ground to keep the dust down.
The occasional deafening roar of a motorcycle heading up the hill in low gear.
The tinkle of music from the icecream man -- his joyful bounty housed in a box on the back of his motorcycle, heading up the hill in low gear.
A cacophany of animal noises including (from more to less prosaic): A dog barking, a rooster announcing the impending dusk (much the same way as he announces every other time of day), and a goat whose incessant bleating sounds like the complaints of an angry elderly woman from the north of England.

All this is captured and amplified by this room: It's high ceiling, it's lack of muffling furnishings.

My bladder calls. I duck around the corner to our bathroom and flip on the tap to fill the bucket of water that I will use to flush. In the morning I will probably be thankful for this disguising noise -- water hitting water -- as my insides inevitably turn to liquid themselves. The toilet seat is wet -- a reminder of an earlier visit where the flushing action was unpracticed and sloppy, and water was poured all over the seat in the process of chasing some piss and toilet paper down the narrow hole. If we were to seriously abandon ourselves to local habits we would not even be using toilet paper: A bucket of water and a daring left hand would suffice. But us western chicks love our bog roll, and the bucket is solely for flushing.

Four mini pails of water later and my little wad of paper is stubbornly floating in the bowl, and I give up. I wash my hands with water from the tap I used to fill the bucket, and return to bed, where Madeleine has awoken. The angry northern English woman goat has been joined by what sounds like a younger goat. Or should I say, what sounds like a young child from the north of England who has unfortunately become a zombie and is now on an ineloquent quest for brains.

I am bored. As if this is not plainly obvious. We are in Senaru to climb Mount (Ganung) Rinjani... a volcano sitting just behind this village. We arrived before lunch today from Gili Trawangan. The idea was to spend the day exploring the cooler mountain village and perhaps go to look at a waterfall or learn a little about the local Sasak people. The idea was also to have a night's free accommodation at the expense of the organisation through which we booked this trek.

The spanner in the works here is that I acquired a nice cold on our second-to-last day in Ubud, and it has been hanging around for the past six days. I'm still sniffing, now coughing, and altogether feeble. The idea of walking to a waterfall has no appeal and the village is insubstantial and downhill (meaning an uphill walk to get back).

So now we're officially here napping, reading and preparing ourselves for our mountain ascent tomorrow.

The light from the window lessens as dusk comes on and I turn on the light: A single, energy-saving bulb high in the ceiling which turns everything in the room a delicate shade of depressing.

This was all I really wanted to do in Lombok -- climb this mountain. We've spent four nights in Gili Trawangan doing appropriate beach and ocean activities, eating pizza, drinking cheap liquor and being chatted up by inadvisable gentlemen, but I really just wanted this mountain.

And as the cold moves to my chest and my head continues to pound and my insides turn to mush and my body starts to ache with greater insistence, this is looking increasingly unwise.

But we'll do it anyway.

Singapore: Early morning philosophical indulgences

hotnoodle — Tue, 2 Jun 2009 20:55:00 GMT

I'm feeling bizarrely homesick for a time when I wasn't so competent.

I remember the first time I managed to book an international flight on my own, and orchestrated my escape from Christchurch to Melbourne, all under my own steam. I remember when I booked and excecuted my first ever trip to Europe: I remember sitting on the bus on the way to the airport after months of build-up, and giving myself a mental pat on the back. Hey wow. Check you out, doin' all that adult stuff.

I remember the first time I made it through customs and immigration in a strange country: It was in Frankfurt. I came out of the airport and I was in motherfucking Europe and I had to find the bus to get to the poor person's airport to catch a RyanAir flight to Italy. To motherfucking Italy!

The next morning I was wandering around Ravenna and it was surreal. The houses were older than my country.

There was a kick to it.

Now the kicks are getting harder to come across. I had it when I first arrived in Borneo. I had the "holy shit, I'm in motherfucking Borneo!". But it faded quickly. Once you adapt to the heat and shift yourself into whatever gear the country operates in, it just becomes normal. I'm about to go and learn how to navigate the MRT (metro) in Singapore, and that will probably give me a temporary kick, but I don't think I'll get that same pride that I experienced the first time. I know I can work out the public transport system in a city as organized as Singapore. There's no skill required there. Really.

I think my mantra of "it'll all become obvious" is the antithesis of the kick. The kick comes when you amazingly manage to do something in a competent fashion. Oh wow, I didn't fuck up. How unexpected. But having faith that everything will work out somehow and that your future self will find everything she needs when she needs it -- that kind of makes the accomplishment less.

That said.... here I am sitting in Terminal 2 in Changi Airport, Singapore. I'm 29 years of age. I'm sitting in The Coffee Bean drinking my second cup of free refill coffee and scrawling in a notebook. I've just come from Borneo, and I'm heading to Indonesia in a few days. I've got a wallet full of random currencies. It's still pretty cool.

Motherfucking Singapore!

Kota Kinabalu to Kuching: Stream of consciousness

hotnoodle — Sat, 23 May 2009 04:07:00 GMT

Most disconcerting flight from Kota Kinabalu to Kuching. Had looked up from newspaper during course of flight to see bizarre clouds out the window. Looked kind of like we were flying upside down. Had sudden irrational fear that we had crashed and died and that this was some sort of weirdass afterlife. If so, probably hell. What could be worse than an eternity in an economy class seat?

Refrained from looking out window from that point on. Also refused tea or coffee. Had obviously had too much that morning already.

Arrive in Kuching. Not dead after all. Guidebook told me that there was a bus into town. Everyone else said otherwise. Cursed guidebook for neither the first or last time, and bought taxi coupon for RM22. Was directed to the front of taxi stand where the dodgiest looking taxi awaited, accompanied by a grinning man, who was accompanied by a shock of Einsteinesque hair and a huge grin. He looked older in his taxi ID photo. I told him so. He said the photo was taken when he was older. Smartass.

Arrived at hostel called Tracks B&B. New place. Good ratings on websites. Walked into tiny lounge area and immediately obstructed view of large television which was being watched intently by six westerners. Oops. Apologies for... uhh... existing.

Was directed to dorm, adjacent to TV room. Stiflingly hot with noise from television coming through. Took shower and made cup of tea. Tried to be social in TV room, but all eyes are glued to TV watching TransAmerica. Kind of weird. Felt the need to ask questions of hostel manager, but he was glued to the internet, and any questions would have surely interrupted the movie watching.

Urgh.

Walked to nearby hostel. Aircon. Friendly staff. Quiet. Went back to first hostel, paid for one night and checked out. Debated whether this was an occasion for congratulating oneself, or being disappointed with oneself. Decided on the former.

Went for a walk down to the waterfront. (Kuching sits on a bit river.) Was about 5pm so all the shops were closing. Walked around the back of a construction zone looking for food. (Yes, travelling reduces you to very basic requirements: Shelter first, food and drink next. Hunting and gathering.) Am greeted by a young guy walking the same way. I'm used to this. I am a movie star in Borneo.

Hello, he says.
Hello, how are you? I say.
I'm fine, I've just been to see my aunt, he replies.
Oh? How's your aunt? I enquire.
She's fine, she's going to help me to move my mattress, he enigmatically responds.

He asked me where I was going. I had no adequate reply. He walked with me along the waterfront and we chatted. It started hosing down. We hid in a shelter. Told me he was working as a waiter in a fancy restaurant, saving cash to study graphic design. Also, he favourite foods are sandwiches, pasta and salad.

At the cessation of the downpour, he invited me on his motorbike to look at the city. Am very nervous on the back of a motorbike, especially with no helmet, and especially in Asia. But didn't die, evidently. Ended up at the place of the weekend farmers' market, but a day early. Had Laksa Sarawak from a food stall. Talked rubbish.

Back to the waterfront. Sat in what he called the "hanging spot" -- a terraced area next to the river. We promise to meet here at 4.30pm the next day. After he finishes work. In the meantime I'm not allowed to do any sightseeing without him. Hah!

He offers to drop me back at my hostel. We get lost. Zipping through Kuching at night. Ground is wet. Air is fragrant with flowers or something. Wind whipping through my hair. Hands nervously resting on the back of this boy, (as if that's going to save me).

Makes a change from KK anyways.