Taro's Travels

Ebbs and Flows

taroso — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 05:42:00 GMT

Beneath London's streets the water pipes leak; they were installed the century before last, and are showing their age. All across London the roadworks continue; the water pipes are being dug up and replaced. By 2010, proclaim the signs, another Victorian relic will be gone. With so many living or working in the Greater London region, standard use outstrips local supply, so fixing the pipes helps reduce the amount of water that must be pumped from elsewhere. There have been hosepipe bans to save on water use during the hot summers of recent years. Late last year, with fine irony, they even revised the legislation in preparation for this year’s summer.

It's September already, and summer is yet to really start, with its months of rain and threatened rain and intermittent sun between the stretches of grey mugginess when there should have been days of unclouded blue. The nicest day of the summer occurred the day before I arrived, I'm told; since then, the weather has been temperamental at best. By all reports it's been the most miserable summer since they started recording rainfall. There are floods across the country, and the likelihood of further flooding if more rain arrives.

With important UK cities being lowlying ports, there are dire warnings of insufficient planning for sea level rises. Recent reports suggest that the Thames flood barrier downstream from Greenwich will not be able to protect London from storm surges that may be four metres higher than the current level. The attendant at St Katharine's Pier told me that high tides were higher now than she'd seen them before. She pointed at the green algae ringing the pilings on Tower Bridge. If predictions of rises are correct then the river will be splashing the bridge's mechanical parts before too long.

Two millenia back, the Romans were growing wine grapes in the Midlands. If predictions of temperature rises are correct, then before the century's out there'll be vineyards up there again. There is always, however, the hope that the dire predictions could be wrong. After all, four decades ago climatologists were suggesting that global cooling and a return to ice age was a possibility. During the Little Ice Age four centuries ago they even held “frost fairs” on the frozen surface of the Thames in winter. The world was colder, then, and the Thames ran slower.

The river might be faster and warmer now, but using the waterways remains slow. It took Kathrine and Peter weeks to bring their 50 foot narrowboat, Iron Maiden, down from Cambridge, a journey that can be completed in three-quarters of an hour by express train. The network of canals and rivers enable inland passage from the south of England to north of York and from the Channel to the Irish Sea. I’ve taken two canal rides – a half hour waterbus up Regents Canal from the London Zoo to Little Venice, and a four hour trip on Iron Maiden up the Paddington branch of the Grand Union Canal from Greenford to Kensal Green.

Canal travel is measured in “lock miles”: add the number of locks passed through (in my case, none) to the number of miles travelled and divide by four to get a reasonable approximation of the number of hours a journey will take. Seaborne travel, on the other hand, required exactitude. While latitude - how far north or south you were - could be determined accurately using visual instruments to measure angles of sun or stars, to determine longitude – how far east or west of the Prime Meridian at Greenwich you were - required the development of extremely accurate timepieces, chronometers. In addition to displays astronomical, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich is filled with chronometers and displays of the development of accurate timekeepers. This includes the four original chronometers developed by Harrison – the three earlier ones are rather large and complex and would not be out of place cased on a mantelpiece, and the final prize-winning one is far smaller, like an oversized pocket-watch.

Even when it rains - and it did - Greenwich is pretty when you stand looking down from Observatory Hill across the northern stretch of the park to the Thames and beyond. Below the observatory lays a wide expanse of grass, and the buildings and connecting arcades of the Queen’s House and Maritime Museum. Between there and the river lie the buildings of the former Royal Naval College, now moved to Dartmouth on the south coast of England.

Sea-traffic has moved too. The wharves and quays and docks used to be the hub of Britain’s trade routes. Now the ships unload their containers further closer to the sea, and many of the landings are private: the Hilton Hotel has a liveried attendant at the gate on theirs, St Katharine’s Dock is a precinct with not only a hotel and shops, but apartments and a marina too; and what’s now Canary Wharf in the Docklands has been redeveloped as a cluster of glass-faced highrises, with trade there to challenge even the primacy of the Square Mile of the City of London. Beneath Canary Wharf’s canyoned streets lie a network of air conditioned malls, with shops selling goods brought from foreign lands, and water that’s been bottled and chilled.

Authenticity

taroso — Sun, 7 Sep 2008 17:08:00 GMT

My ability to happily suspend disbelief appears to have withered.

There's a shop stuffed with Beatles memorabilia at 231 Baker Street, and a shop dedicated to Elvis memorabilia next to that. A couple of doors further up, nestled between numbers 237 and 241-243, lie two black doors. The one on the right is the entryway to the Sherlock Holmes Museum and shop, which sells Sherlock Holmes memorabilia; the one on the left purports to be the entrance of 221B Baker St, the fictional address of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.

Entering the shop, you pay your 6 pounds to be allowed upstairs. For the record, this is more expensive than:

Taking a week or two to really immerse yourself in the halls of the British Museum;
Having a pie and pint in a pub on Portobello Road after a morning's antique-gazing; or
Strolling the spaces of the Tate Modern.

The stairs are lined with a clutter of old paintings, and framed prints and photos; its rooms, two per floor, have old furniture, and cabinets cluttered with Victoriana; and its rear windows have a view of the shop's glass dome and air conditioning vents.

In the sitting room on the first floor a young blonde in a housemaid costume sat on the divan studying for her driving test, and doing her best to ignore us tourists. The letters "VR", for Victoria Regina, were hammered into one wall. Purportedly they were bulletholes but it was obvious to any amateur detective from the lack of depth and the outward fraying of the wallpaper that this was not the case.

"Sherlock Holmes's bedroom" contained a violin, and a stuffed stoat in a small diorama that hung on the wall; "Dr Watson's bedroom" contained medicines and medical instruments. Finally, on the top floor a rogue's gallery of wax figures appeared. "Perhaps it means more if you've read the books", said Kathrine, who hadn't. I had, and it really didn't.

I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but disappointment was probably not it. I've always liked mockumentaries and mocked-up documents, even Sherlockean ones (Infocom's The London Thames). But I didn't like the Sherlock Holmes Museum.

After about 15 minutes we escaped in search of the Tate Modern.

It's a wicked thing to tell fibs - Sherlock Holmes in The Three Gables

Portobello Road markets, on the other hand, I would have enjoyed more had I known my antiques. I'd first read about it in Jonathan Gash's books - not that it's particularly obscure, mind you, with its arcades, shops, and stalls thronged with bargain hunters. And while I can enjoy reading books on antiques or watching antiques shows (multiple cameras were filming in the market at the time), my fundamental flaw is that I can't tell if something was made in 1987 or 1798.

Nor am I alone. "I really like that plastic comb" said Kerry. The plastic comb in question was half a foot long, and perhaps suitable for keeping a pompadour in place. Flipping over the price tag - 58 pounds - I suggested that there was a possibility it might be tortoiseshell. But it may as well have been plastic -- and I'm not so sure I could tell the difference by sight between ivory and high quality plastic or high quality plastic and jade either. Nor would I have been able to tell that the familiar white-on-blue of Wedgwood ware were available for a knock-down-price because they were made only a few years ago if it weren't for one piece kindly having its date contained within the commemorative design.

So unless you've expertise you're lost. You could, I suppose, use guidebooks but you're still vulnerable to reproductions. A number of people got fooled by an Action Comics #1 (Superman) reprint a couple of decades back, spending tens of thousands on something that was worth a dollar. Old photos and prints are also trivially reprintable. On one visit to Portobello Road, Kerry's flatmate Claire found one "original" which appeared to have been produced on a home printer.

"A bad forgery's the ultimate insult" - Lovejoy in The Vatican Rip

Even the experts at the British Museum have been known to be fooled by particularly good forgeries. Not very long ago, a trio living in a council flat managed to produce forgeries acquired in the BM, Tate Modern, and other public institutions and private collections. And every so often new forgeries are detected, with technological advances providing equipment better able to source materials and techniques used.

Just because an item is detected as a forgery doesn't mean that it necessarily gets removed from display, however. The museum's crystal skull, for instance, is known not to be Mayan, being probably 19th century (and improbably alien) in origin. Forgeries, it seems, may have sufficient relevance or context to justify their labelled public presence. Replicas too, appear throughout - there are castings of ancient carvings that present the condition things they were in before an extra century or two of damage, for instance, and a copy of the Rosetta Stone for hands-on examination.

The collection of the British Museum is wonderful. To skim it takes a full day; to really appreciate it properly and do all the talks would take a lot longer. And yet, not everyone is happy with the depth of the museum's collection. The Egyptians want the Rosetta Stone back, and the Greeks want the Elgin Marbles that once adorned the Parthenon. It was only a couple of years ago that the remains of Aboriginal Australians were finally removed from display and returned to Australia for interment.

The Elgin Marbles may have been acquired after permission was granted by the Ottoman Turks who ruled Greece at that time, and had they remained at the Parthenon they could have been further damaged, destroyed, or perhaps ended up lost to a bank vault in Switzerland or a villa in Buenos Aires. But should possession and recent history trump the rights of the native people of a colonised land to regain items of their heritage, even if those aboriginal inhabitants just happen to be European? Is promoting interest in Greek History to visitors anywhere near sufficient justification?

It makes me wonder if museums really need to display genuine items or if, in general, careful copies would suffice. If nobody but an expert can look at something that purports to be ancient and tell that it's painted plaster or resin or tea-stained wood or metal-worked crystal or plastic, and it's made with love and with great skill, then is there a need for exhibits that are aimed at educating and entertaining the public to present things that really are ancient? Is a desire to see things that were crafted millennia ago rather than indistinguishable facsimiles entirely rational? And if a replica perfect in every way were produced and you knew it was a replica, could you suspend sufficient disbelief to value the experience of it anywhere near as much as the experience of the original?

"Unbelievable" - Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

In Highgate Cemetery

taroso — Tue, 2 Sep 2008 07:29:00 GMT

The granite blocks have been squared and polished. The low wrought iron fence, now gently rusting, has been set to ensure that visitors approach from the pebbled main circuit via the short flagstoned walk and not over the lawn. The graven inscription has been gilded, and the oversized head, two feet in height or more, has been cast in bronze. Roses, wrapped in crepe and plastic, sit in water in a container at the base of the monument.

It's evident that a fair few workers have toiled, united, to ensure that the grandest of graves in the eastern part of Highgate Cemetery is that of Karl Marx and the four others who share his plot.

A couple of feet behind Marx, what order there is gives way to an ever-encroaching tangle of ivy, old trees whose gnarled roots keep the earth unquiet, and brambled canes that bear blackberries the colour of old blood. Paths criss-cross the forest past gravestones with facades weathered beyond recognition, and forgotten memorials swallowed by vegetation. There are newer graves too, there, crammed into what space remains.

The western part of Highgate Cemetery, which reportedly has a horror movie feel, is inaccessible to the general public - you can only enter on tour, and all places were booked out so I've not seen it. Both sides hold a large number of ex-people who've achieved renown in their particular field, be it medicine, writing, engineering, art, or politics. And as a tourist attraction it's interesting to visit, but I wonder a little at the voyeurism of it. Isn't the concept of those Hollywood tours which allow you to eyeball where Hollywood stars live or lived a little creepy? And isn't eyeballing gravestones for amusement in what is still a working graveyard even creepier? Yet despite that I still hope to visit the western cemetery.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.
Douglas Adams
Writer
1952-2001

Linear Minutiae [finally completed]

taroso — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:32:00 GMT

Behold, a reasonably unadorned chronology that will be updated from time to time for the benefit of those who for some reason enjoy this kind of thing.

Sat 29 Aug: Bus from Canberra to Sydney; Flight from Sydney to Abu Dhabi.

Bored yet?

Sun 30 Aug: Flight from Abu Dhabi to London; Train from Heathrow to Green Square and thence to West Hampstead. Bus with Ange and Kieren down to Trafalgar Square to wander around through Covent Garden, Soho, etc. Meet Kez and Fred near Oxford Cross before returning to West Hampstead. Walk up through Hampstead and to Hampstead Heath's Parliament Hill and back.

Mon 1 Sep: Decide not to take map and just wing it. Walk through part of Hampstead's West Heath to the Hill Garden at the back of Inverforth House. Come back past Jack Straw's Castle and into the East Heath. Walk up to Kenwood House. Have brunch while waiting for it to open. See lots of old artwork, much of it Dutch. Walk from there to Highgate to wander the eastern cemetery. Walk down to Highgate Gate, one of the exits of the Heath, and bus to Regent's Park. Spend 3 hours at the London Zoo before taking the watercab from there up Regent's Canal to Little Venice. Walk from there back to West Hampstead.

Tue 2 Sep: Bus to Baker St. Meet Kathrine and go to the Sherlock Holmes Museum. Tube down to Waterloo and walk up Southbank to Westminster Bridge then back down to the Tate Modern. View modern art - no major installation in the main space at the moment, and the gallery with Ernst and Duchamp was closed. Meet up with Kathrine's Peter - now no longer alleged - and later Kerry and Kieren.

Wed 3 Sep: Bus to Baker St. Walk Regent's Park including Queen Mary's Gardens, then down to Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, including Albert Memorial and (unentered) Kensington Palace. Back to Speaker's Corner to see Marble Arch (which I'd somehow missed the first time) then down Park Lane and across Mayfair to Regent St to bus back to West Hampstead. Train to Waterloo and thence to Lambeth North to meet Kerry.

Thu 4 Sep: The all-day whistlestop tour of the British Museum. Will need to go back.

Fri 5 Sep: Tower of London with Kathrine. Meet up with Peter and later with Kerry and Farrah for curry.

No, really, are you bored yet?

Sat 6 Sep: Portobello Road Markets with Kerry (shopping for food, window shopping for antiques). Pie and Pint in Pub. Visit Peter and Kathrine's narrow boat and cruise down from Greenford to Kensal Green.

Sun 7 Sep: Imperial War Museum, in what used to be Bedlam (a fine sense of irony?). Dinner with Ange and Keiren.

Mon 8 Sep: Buckingham Palace for Changing of the Guard; walk from there through Whitehall to see Westminster Abbey and Palace; visit the Banqueting House; continue through Chinatown and Covent Garden to St Pauls. Explore St Paul's (spectacular) before listening to Evensong.

Tue 9 Sep: Boat from Embankment to St Katharine's Dock then to Greenwich. Walk through Greenwich Village then up the hill to the Observatory. Down to Maritime Museum for an hour and a bit before closing, missing the Queen's House.

Wed 10 Sep: City walk - including through Barbican. Stand up comedy night in a pub in Islington - 2/6ths of the comics were Australians, all comics reasonably funny.

Thu 11 Sep: Cambridge for the day. Walk through the West End at night after getting back to London

Fri 12 Sep: Shop for dinner in Elephant and Castle (it was a rest day). Dinner wildly successful.

Sat 13 Sep: Train to High Wycombe before drive to High Basildon for lunch followed by visit to Basildon Park.

Sun 14 Sep: Yumcha with Kerry and Kieren before going down to Southbank to meet Kathrine and Peter to see the Thames Festival. Meet up with Kerry and later Claire, Paddy and Jess to see the fireworks over the Thames. Walk home through Graffiti Alley; most of the original stencil art has been sprayed over.

Mon 15 Sep: Train to Oxford. Wander the town in the afternoon including seeing Christ Church.

Tue 16 Sep: Oxford Castle in the morning; city tour in the afternoon.

Wed 17 Sep: Blenheim Palace.

Thu 19 Sep: Oxford to Nottingham. See Nottingham Caves in the afternoon (good, but accessed from inside ugly Broadmarsh Shopping Centre). Poker in the evening (Apparently Europe's largest dedicated poker room)

Fri 20 Sep: Visit what's left of Sherwood Forest.

Sat 21 Sep: Walks up peaks around Matlock in the Peak District.

Sun 22 Sep: Nottingham to York. Walk on the walls of old York followed by taking The Original Ghost Tour.

Mon 23 Sep: Visit Thirsk -- "Darrowby" in All Creatures Great and Small -- on a damp Market Day to see the rather good Herriot Veterinary museum.

Tue 24 Sep: Visit Goathland -- Aidensfield in Heartbeat -- to trip over the Yorkshire Moors and neighbouring farmland. One thing's for sure: with rivulets to cross, and sheep pats to avoid, and tussocks of heather to leap between, and everywhere mud mud mud, anyone who's ever thought that doing all that in white crinoline as "romantic" is right daft.

Wed 25 Sep: Up to Edinburgh.

Thu 26 Sep: Visit Stirling, walk up to the William Wallace Memorial and back followed by Stirling Castle.

Fri 26 Sep: Stroll up to King Arthur's Seat and back, then see the Castle. Yes, I do see, to have done quite a lot of walking.

Sat 27 Sep: Fly to Dublin, staying with Peter's Aunt Betty. Go down to central Dublin's Orange Light District in the evening for a couple of hours.

Sun 28 Sep: Betty takes me through via some Irish bogland to walk a short stretch of the Wicklow Way. The Irish bog is somewhat similar in appearance to the Yorkshire Moors being heavily heathered, but is different in that swathes of peat blocks have been extracted. After my first real Irish Coffee -- caffeine, sugar, alcohol, cream: it's delicious evil in a glass -- I bus to Galway.

Mon 29 Sep: Wander round Galway.

Tue 30 Sep: Ferry to Inis Oirr, the smallest of the Aran Islands -- Father Ted's "Craggy Island" -- it's wet, windswept, and very very stony. I'd intended to get a ferry to Doolin in the afternoon, but it was too wet and windswept in Doolin for the ferry to be leaving for several days, so I unexpectedly had to spend the night

Wed 1 Oct: Ferry back to Galway in time to make the late bus to do the short tour down to the Cliffs of Moher (huge, verdant, stony, wet, so very very windswept) getting off at nearby village of Doolin. Stayed at the Aille River Hostel (highly recommended!) and spent the night at the pub with a couple of Swiss travellers, who'd made several trips back to Doolin owing to its excellent live music scene.

Thu 2 Oct: bus down to Cork City, and thence to Fountainstown to meet up with bride and groom and the Canberra contingent of wedding guests -- Kerry, Minh, Naomi, Nell.

Fri 3 Oct: Turkish Shave in the morning, and a fine wedding, weather remaining great for the photos, in the afternoon. There is allegedly dancing at the reception. There's also possibly the most embarassing attempt ever by a group of Australians at failing to sing Men at Work's "Land Down Under", but fortunately the Irish Band knew lyrics and music.

Sat 4 Oct: A lazy morning and another party in the evening.

Sun 5 Oct: Road Trip with Nell and Naomi, heading up to the Ring of Kerry. We were originally going to go for Killarney, but reached the thoroughly charming Kenmare, and stopped for the night.

Mon 6 Oct: The Ring of Kerry is one of the most beautiful areas in Ireland... allegedly. We had mist, fog, cloud, rain -- near horizontal at times -- with a few patches of sun by the time we got in site of the beginning of the Dingle Peninsula. The day wasn't unmemorable, however, with a bumpy ride down a foggy track through the centre of the peninsula. Reached Killarney, smelled the dank bunkroom that the unfriendly manager of the unfriendly hostel there showed us to, and went and stayed at the 5 star hotel nearby for basically the same price once the included breakfast was taken into account

Tue 7 Oct: Said goodbye to the girls, who found the 5 star breakfast so good that they stayed another night, and bussed down to Cork City and thence to the airport.

Thu 9 Oct: After 35+ hours of travel, wherein I lost a day, I arrived back in Canberra. A couple of weeks later I unjetlagged.

When I'm 64

taroso — Sat, 3 Feb 2007 15:26:00 GMT

[written ages ago but only just released from draft]

Tired of lying in the sunshine
-- ("Time" / Pink Floyd)

I've had my April 1st entry sketched out for half a year. It was to be called "Adventures in Fiction", and in it I was to confess that I had secretly returned to Australia a scant few weeks after leaving. Having been unable to cope with Bali, and knowing that other places were even more discomfortingly alien, I'd secretly returned home to Australia where I'd spent the last 11 months hiding out in Gosford, playing computer games, programming, and mining other peoples' travelogues for material with which to construct my own, unable to confess my shame at having failed so miserably as a backpacker. But in that journal entry, still thoroughly ashamed, I was coming clean and asking forgiveness for my mendacity. And, you know, I think it would have been plausible enough to have worked. It was certainly a good rationale for why there were no photos or postcards.

The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
-- ("Time" / Pink Floyd)

So far I've travelled for 9 months, visited 11 countries (12 including a brief stopover in Colombo, Sri Lanka on the way home), missed four weddings (and thankfully no funerals), spent the tail-end of my 32nd birthday on an 20 hour train from Bhubaneswar to Chennai, and written 63 subjective entries of dubious accuracy and variable but generally increasing quality. And I'm travelled out, which I didn't think I'd be, as I blithely set out on 2006-04-23 to travel for at least 14.5 months; there was a point at which I envisaged my travels as most likely lasting until the end of this year - so twenty months or so. In hindsight, my answer to "How do you eat an elephant?" was actually "Take one very large blender and a straw...". Oh foolish foolish Taro.

You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
-- ("Time" / Pink Floyd)

Anyway, why was I travelling for that mysterious figure of 14.5+ months? Well, that was how long I had half paid leave (By the end of the 14.5 months, I would have had 7 and a bit months half-paid long service leave, and 7 and a bit months half-paid annual leave usable - leave is accrued while on leave). And why, far more importantly, am I travelled out? Basically, the periods when I enjoy new sights/sites have been getting increasingly shorter, and the periods when I can't take another monument, mausoleum, mosque, museum, mountain or monastery, are getting increasingly longer. In retrospect Kathmandu was really the tipping point. In short, I'd rather play computer games, program, and read other people's travelogues, and since that's the case I may as well be in Gosford since there's no point in travelling for the sake of travelling.
This isn't just the extended bout of food poisoning talking. I very much liked Darjeeling and Pelling, but my time in Gangtok was more inside than out (If you've spent a week in Darjeeling, then Gangtok is not particularly special - though the trip to Tsongo Lake was great). In Kolkata, wandering the inner city was pleasurable - it's far nicer a city than its reputation would have it. For some reason the phrase "Black Hole of Calcutta" has stuck, and I'd a back-of-the-mind image of wall-to-wall slums which didn't quite accord with my front-of-the-mind knowledge that it's a tech centre. Central Kolkata has some lovely old buildings including a wonderfully gothic High Court complex and the Victoria monument, wide streets, and the area of the Maidan - kilometres of grass, parks and gardens, fields, playing fields, racetrack, and (active) fort. [Yes, there's some hideous poverty on and within walking distance of the Sudder Street tourist ghetto, and elsewhere, but there's also the Park Street area, where stylishly-dressed crowds queue to enter expensive restaurants, and huge billboards everywhere with ads for the latest mobile phones, 11000 rupee digital cameras and other consumer goods and luxury items].

Closing time
You don't have to go home but you can't stay here
-- (Closing Time / Semisonic)

But I didn't go into the Indian Museum despite passing it a dozen times, nor into the Victoria Monument, the Marble Palace, or any of the other sights. I started out intending to visit a couple of other Museums one day, and never quite made it that far. And, sadly, I don't regret having missed them, and that's not good; nor is it fair to any country to travel it without sufficient enthusiasm. I like India - a few people suggested that India was a place you either love or hate - but I can't see myself being untempled out and unmuseumed out any time soon.

If it were just India, - I have been in Asia for 9 months and West Asia for 3 - I could hop a plane to Egypt or Turkey or Prague and see something rather different, but I suspect that this travellers' ennui is a general one and I don't want to get to the Pyramids, Petra, Cappadocea or Istanbul and find them Just Nice. So, Gosford it is -- or, rather, Sydney then Canberra -- and India and Asia Minor and North Africa and Europe will still be there in another couple of years, when I can take them in with fresh eyes, mind, and enthusiasm. And I don't regret that. And it means I'll see friends in Australia sooner than expected, at the cost of seeing friends in Europe later than expected.

I travelled from Kolkata to Puri (Orissa) to Chennai to Bangaloru to Palolem (Goa) to Mumbai, and since making the decision to return nearly a month back, I've not yet regretted making the decision to return. I decided in Puri that I was no longer a backpacker and no longer a traveller. I was On Holiday, and with that change in classification I was free not to do anything useful for days at a time. So I didn't. And life has been good. I've wandered a little but I've felt no obligation to really see those places properly - which would be wrong and unfair to them if I were a backpacker or a traveller, but fortunately I'm not. One of these days, when I am again, I'll see India properly.

No bird exploring in the sky
Explores as well as I
The corners of my life.
One must keep moving with the times.
-- ("A Bowler Hat" / Stephen Sondheim)

I told someone that I wasn't travelling to find myself, I was travelling to lose myself. I knew quite well who I was, and that's still (un)fortunately the case. Losing myself? Well, most of my flaws are still my flaws - and though a number have the edges knocked off them, they come through loud and clear in this journal. Still, I'm only halfway through this current journey, even if there's going to be a brief hiatus of a year or five. Anyway, that, I think, will do for the moment.

Will you still need me? Will you still read me?
When I'm 64.

Second Looks Part 1 [Posts #1-#20]

taroso — Thu, 1 Feb 2007 11:03:00 GMT

You miss things on a first look. Sometimes you miss a lot.

In Pokhara, for instance, I arrived in the mid-afternoon, headed over to North Lakeside to find a room, and then took a wander. It was pretty enough, with sun on the lake, and clouds behind the heights. Colour me blond, but I vaguely noticed that there was no snow and they didn't look so high. The next morning I went for a walk. The sky was cloudless, and there to the north behind those not-so-heights were genuine snowy mountains. Much prettier. There's a little more to Pokhara than meets the casual glance too. The tourist ghetto is on the northeast side of the lake; it's pretty enough with its bookstores, cafes, restaurants, bars, hotels, travel agents, internet cafes, money changers, trekking shops, supermarkets, houses, and practically nothing else. The central city is a few kilometres away through suburbs, and there's a few things southeast of the lake, but I didn't realise just how much of Pokhara there is until I hiked up the not-so-height of Sarankot and saw the Pokharan sprawl. It really is a fair-sized town, and the lake area is an important but relatively small part of it.

So it's time for a little journal housekeeping - things missed, shifts in perspective, sights yet unseen, events unhappened.

General

* Formatting has been corrected, though blog-bugginess has made me want to scream. It doesn't output numbered lists, for instance, despite rendering correctly in the editor.

* Spelling errors have been corrected. Some were just embarrassing - "centremetre", for instance? Some things that may be seen as errors, though, are my preferred variants (eg "eg" rather than "e.g.", "their" rather than "his or her", and "noone" rather than "no one" or "no-one"). What ever/what-ever/whatever.

* Grammatical errors have been corrected, though many probably remain. When you rewrite sentences multiple times at speed, it's easy to miss things.

* I've removed all the category tags. Trying to pigeon-hole my entries using single tags is painful. If they ever add multiple tags, and I can be bothered, I'll go through and tag things properly.

#1. Start of Tour

People who've visited Bali months after me report the same thing - Kuta is very deserted.

#2. Kuta-Ubud

I've hardly used my sleep sheet in my travels.

#3. West Ubud by Bike

One of the risks with monkeys is they are potentially rabid, so if they bite or scratch you need to go and have shots. Another is that some will snatch glasses, keys, and other things that a traveller finds it useful to retain.

#4. East Ubud by Foot

Well, apparently not risking bird flu since you can't catch it by ingestion.

#5. Miscellanea [Ubud/Bali]

Perceptions of places: edited... tick; filtered... tick; verbose... big page-filling tick; possibly entirely inaccurate... tick tick tick; frequent... ~~Bingo~~Damn. No.

Photos: Well, with one exception I'm glad to say that I stuck to that resolution.

Dogs: I am still not a dog person, but I'm far less nervous around large dogs than I was, perhaps because there are so many dogs roaming free, and it's rare for them to bark, much less growl.

Language: On Java the stress patterns were a bit different to Bali.

Freezer Bags: They're highly recommended because they're soft and easy to tie. It helps if you keep your passport in one at all times, inconvenient though that is.

Extra long shorts: Surprisingly unnecessary as cargos roll up easily and allow one to Tiffin in Raffles. One pair of shorts that doubles as a swimming costume is more than sufficient.

Excessive Detail: One of the benefits of further travel has been that I have learned to filter and edit somewhat. Many details are just Too Much Information in a linear piece -- pavements in Ubud... sheeeeeesh. On the other hand, if I'd ever do a piece comparing Pavements of the World, then the information might have a place (the piece might well be horrible, but at least the information on Ubud pavements would fit well).

Extra 8 kg in pack: Extra 11 kilos in pack would be nice not to have (at last weigh, my pack plus daypack is about 23kg) but I'm a bookaholic with an at-times three a day habit and I've accumulated more clothing including a Real Towel -- those microfibre handtowels just don't do the trick. I've been loathe to throw things away because the heavy useless things (sleeping bag, sleeping mat, water filter, heavy-duty rain jacket) would also the most expensive to replace, and it's likely that they'll be necessary in future. I left winter items in Kolkata, but that was more bulk than weight. The master of travelling was Richard, whose pack was a ridiculously light 7kg (and he was getting rid of some of that by dumping winter gear).

Extra 8 kg on body: I'm down below 70kg, and while I could probably afford to lose more, so could you. One of the best weight loss tales ever is about the two-pill diet solution that was sold at the turn of the 20th century. You'd take one pill when you wanted to start losing weight, and another when you'd lost enough weight. In the first pill was a tapeworm egg, in the second was vermicide... which only goes to prove that some details are just Too Much Information even in a non-linear piece.

Salesmanship: A common opening gambit in Nepal and (to a lesser degree) in India has been "Where do you come from". It's a general enquiry, of course, but the followup for touts and beggars is generally different. Someone making conversation will normally ask how you like India or bring up cricket. Someone after something in Nepal would often attempt to give the capital and national animal. More common in India than Nepal is "Ah, I have a friend in...". You also get asked for Australian coins quite frequently. "Where do you come from?" can also used to determine how much they'll try and charge you.

Sugar: Artificially-sweetened soft drinks are extremely rare, and often need to be imported. Interestingly, in some countries such as Thailand and India they add salt to juices and lassis, which is good for rehydration even if it does taste a bit wierd.

#6. Northeast Ubud by Motorbike

There are times when riding pillion on a motorbike has been unavoidable. Sometimes this hasn't been particularly particularly wise, given the difficulty of balancing the driver, myself, and my backpack.

Incidently*, I was involved in one very minor accident in Yogyakarta, but the bike was at low speed and I was the hapless pedestrian who failed to notice the "left turn permitted on red" sign. "Look to the right, look to the left, don't look to the right again..."
[*Is there a term more appropriate than this?]

#7. 24 hours in Bedugul: Culture Shock by Nightfall

One of the very few choices I've made that I (mildly) regret was to leave Bedugul after only one day. I've made lots of other snap decisions, and they've mostly been correct decisions, but this one was made for the wrong reasons. Ah well, I can always go back sometime.

#8. Lovina: Seven words written on seven subjects

I'll never write in this style again.

#9. Bali to Java: Whistlestop tour

Buses: Moral: pack less, carry less.

Surabaya: Still the most insane traffic I've seen. Everywhere else including Bangkok and Bangalore has been a relief.

Kraton population: The figure of 25000 was probably Yogya rather than Solo

#10. Solo: Palaces and Music

I really should have picked up a CD or tape of dangdut music while I was there.

#11. Solo: Hindu Temples in the Hills

We went and visited a tea plantation in Darjeeling. The season's picking had finished the week before, but the lady in the tea house at the entrance gave us an amusing presentation of Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe tea (which only requires a couple of seconds to brew!) with lots of spiel as to why it's named as it is, how to brew it, how the leaves can be used thrice, and the different grades of Orange Pekoe.

#12. Yogyakarta: Temples and Volcano

The earthquake hit Yogyakarta a week after I left. Thousands died, but fortunately Merapi never had a major eruption (things settled down within a few months); I was told that there was the potential for Merapi to put out enough lava to reach Prambanan and the northern parts of Yogya.

#13. Yogyakarta: Batik Sellers

Did I pay the higher price for my small purchase? Oh yes, yes indeed, but I justify the extra expense as being a valuable learning experience, so it's an investment in my development as a traveller. It's psychologically interesting, by the way, how absolute price matters far less than relative price. If the price of something is X for a local and [X * (100+N)%] for a foreigner, there's an acceptable increase of N% where a particular traveller won't mind, but this is pretty much unrelated to how much the item or service would cost in one's home country (as long as it's definitely cheaper) - it's more a balance between daily budget and perceived utility. And so you see and participate in absurd and petty haggling over ridiculously small sums - have you ever gone to the wire for a saving of what you realise later is 2 cents Australian?

There are places where most tourist attractions have a gouge of somewhere between 400% and 2400%. In other words, foreigner price can be between 5 and 25 times the local price. Take the Sun Temple at Konark in Orissa, for instance. Local price is 10 rupees, foreigner price is 250 rupees. On an absolute level, it's about A$7.50, which is cheaper than the cost of entry to pretty much any major tourist attraction in Australia, and the Sun Temple is a UNESCO World Heritage site so you know it's important and magnificent and worth seeing. On a relative level, though, 250 rupees is the cost of a day's lodging and meals in neighbouring Puri, so by those standards it's pricey. And such markups are common* - 15 times for Kolkata's Indian Museum, 10 times for the interior of its Victoria Memorial. On the one hand I certainly have the capacity to pay - it just means I spend more and save less. On the other hand, if I'm rather templed out or museumed out, then a foreigner price of more than about 5 times local is a great disincentive to see yet another one, no matter how fantastic it may be.

[*India's markups for tourist attractions are fresh in the memory, but as far as I can recall only Cambodia has had markups of a similar magnitude]

#14. Miscellanea: Java

And you think you have it rough: A room of one's own, indeed a bed of one's own, is a luxury. Many hotel/hostel staff sleep in foyers and halls. The internet cafe I'm posting from has people sleeping on thin straw mats in the stairwell.

Ice Cream: It's Walls pretty much everywhere.

#15. Singapore

From talking with others, it seems that one's impression of Singapore varies depends on where one has been immediately beforehand. In other words, if you've been somewhere with cold showers, squat toilets and bedbugs it's wonderful; if you've been living the highlife in a major metropolis it's sterile

#16. Kuala Selangor: Trees and Wildlife

West Coast Malaysia has so many oil palm plantations; green and brown walls extending to the horizon. Much like pine plantatations, their foliage is so thick that the ground underneath tends to be devoid of any other vegetation since little direct sunlight penetrates. Coconut palms are far friendlier to other plants.

#17. Taman Negara: Journeys

One squirmsome thing our guide did was to allow a leech to crawl over his hands - he wasn't worried because he said that the skin was too tough for the leech to bite; he wasn't bitten. Like so many things, familiarity with leeches really seems to reduce squirmishness with them - Chok Eng, who'd grown up on the peninsular's East Coast was rather unconcerned by all the leeches at FRIM.

The service at the restaurant was so slow because they only had a single burner so could only cook one dish at a time, and we'd all ordered different things - it's a common problem for small eateries with lots of customers.

#18. Melaka: Food and Museums

The Assam prawns I had there were one of the best dishes I've ever had. I'd visit Melaka again just for them, and the fact that there are museums worth (re)visiting helps too, in particular the small architecture museum.

Alas, sometimes people who deserve excoriation in print don't get it because of potential ramifications for others - there's a minor saga from Melaka that I won't record; if you feel that you really need to know it, ask me in person.

#19. Fragments from Pulau Penang:

Fruit: At the time I thought I'd had lychees so that's what I wrote but they were actually rambutans. The two fruits taste and look similar once peeled, but the skin of a rambutan is red and spiky (but soft), while that of a lychee is rough and brown.

Flies: On east coast Malaysia and in Thailand there were lots more flies.

#20. Kuala Lumpur: Interludes with Friends and Friends of Friends

Fish Heads: I've no problem with a baked fish with the head left on, but the thought of a bowl of soup with a fish sans body sitting in it is mildly discomforting, which I realise is irrational.

Dancing: Somewhat tricky when the only shoes you have are hiking boots - clubs generally don't allow sneakers. One gains a new appreciation for the Stomp dancers.

Fun and Games

taroso — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:30:00 GMT

Carom
Carom is a cross between pool and air hockey played with a square wooden board and some discs. The object is to flick the game disc at a disc of your own colour and knock it into a corner hole. The board is coated with a layer of chalk, which keeps friction down. It's not originally a Nepalese game, but it's huge there - you see tables set up outside everywhere.

Chinese Poker
Bruce introduced us to what he called "Chinese Poker". It's a rather nice strategic card game, particularly the three player version - I played quite a bit on the bus with him and Florian. You shuffle as many packs of cards together as you want; one suffices for three players. The cards are dished out. On the first game, the player with the three of hearts plays it. Play then goes around the circle clockwise - you need to beat the previous play using the same number and type of cards, the ranking being 3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-J-Q-K-A-2-BlackJoker-RedJoker. The winner of that round gets to make the next play - sequences of 3 or more, 2 or more of a kind, or lockstepped sequences of 3 or more (eg 3,3,4,4,5,5). So to beat a play of (3,3,4,4,5,5) would require at least (4,4,5,5,6,6). The winner of the previous game gets to exchange the highest card of the loser of the previous game (ie the last player left with cards) with any card they don't need. There's also the "bomb", a set of (5, 10, K) - which automatically wins the round. Sequences can't go over the ace, ie the only thing that beats Q-K-A is a bomb. The jokers are of uneven value singularly, but can be paired. As I said, it's a rather nice strategic card game - one of the interesting things is that it can be worthwhile to lose rounds if winning them would damage the structure of your hand. It's possible to be down to one card and be locked out of the game by another player playing pairs and triples.

Collect 4
You use four cards of the same value for each player, shuffling all the cards together. The objective is to collect any set of four. One player counts down repeatedly "3-2-1-Go". On go, you pass a card anticlockwise to the next player, receiving a card from the player to your left. When you have four cards of the same value, you touch your nose. When that happens, all other players must touch their nose. Last player to touch their nose takes a penalty of some kind.
In the case of the game on the boat down the Mekong, the penalty was a pen mark on the face. This was the only time I ended up using my Wet Ones in all the months of carrying them.

Cricket

One of the major differences between West Asia and East Asia is the presence of cricket - on weekends, parks are jam-packed with games and practice, and many are cricket fans.

Foot-Juggling
There were quite a lot of games similar to hackysack around - ie, keep an object in the air without using hands. In Malaysia they used a rattan ball, or a plastic equivalent, in Indochina and China it was a weight with a badminton-shuttle-style flight, in Nepal and India there were rubber scrunchies.
Frisbee
Brett brought a frisbee, so we often had a game when our vehicles stopped for a break and elsewhere. Brett and Jeff were both excellent, performing fancy catches and fancy throws with ease. Everyone else was less so. I was fairly abysmal -- hand eye coordination Not So Good. Interestingly a lot of locals' instincts were to throw the frisbee upside down.
Sho
Sho is a three-player Tibetan counter-racing game rather like backgammon (but more complicated). The object is to get your stack of coins to the end of the course which is set by small cowrie shells (that can be shifted as required in order to expand or contract sections of the course). Just like backgammon, if a stack lands on an opponent's stack of equal or less height, it's kicked off the course. You can see a version of the rules here.
Style counts when playing Sho. Shouting, slamming the dice cup down from a great height onto the leather of the pad, scooping the dice off the yak-leather pad using inertia and the cup rather than your hand, and brushing your opponents dead counters aside are all considered good form. What's more, fiddling the dice is not only allowed, it's encouraged! Our drivers would carefully place their dice in the cup, and attempt to use inertia to keep the dice in the same orientation. Some of them were rather good at it, and would achieve multiple turns by either rolling 3s or by killing opponents' stacks. Most of our group bought sho sets in Shigatse.
Video Games
If you see a sign saying "Video Games", there's a fair chance that it'll be a dingy room filled with what in Australia are called Poker Machines - ie, gambling games.

Roads and Traffic

taroso — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 05:29:00 GMT

I first saw Nepali trucks (which share their style with Indian trucks) at the border town of Zhang Mu. Chinese trucks were drab and staid. A typical Nepali truck is bright and decorated to the point of garishness. Its body is painted a brownish shade of red. There's a slogan painted along the top of its windshield - something religious, probably. There's another slogan above the side window - something to raise a smile, perhaps. On top of the cab, a wooden superstructure has been erected so that extra cargo or passengers can be secured, and this displays a picture of Ganesh. Curlicues, and images of vines and flowers wind along the sideboards. On one side of the rear bumper is carefully lettered "Speed Control 40 km/h", and on the other an equally carefully lettered "Horn Please" to let you know that the driver will indicate if it's safe to pass if you honk. There may even be an eye painted at each front corner, just as a fisherman adds eyes to his boat's prow to lead him safely home.

Seatbelts are almost unused throughout much of Southeast and West Asia. Occasionally you'll find a vehicle where the driver has one, but passengers apparently don't require them. There was a long period where I'd enter a vehicle and find myself clawing over a shoulder for a non-existent belt. And the thing is, you really do miss seatbelts when the vehicle you're in is weaving in and out of traffic, or weaving its way across traffic, or even bouncing and skidding on a cliff-top dirt track in search of the nearest pothole or cliff-bottom to bring the four wheel drive to a full stop.

I'd originally intended to come down from Sikkim and head over to Assam and other northeastern states. I'd originally intended to visit Bhutan since you can do a daytrip from West Bengal's Jaigon to the Bhutanese town of Phuentsholing. Phuentsholing is an aberration. You can cross for free there provided you're out at night; to visit elsewhere in Bhutan you need to pay US$200 a day for the minimum stay of a week. Or rather you could cross for free there. In mid-December bombs went off and the border closed. So no Phuentsholing. This made the interesting bits of the northeast even less accessible without long stretches of travel. India's northeast frontier is, really, rather inaccessible for an overland traveller.

If you were to glance at a sketch map of India, you might note that one reasonably ideal route to explore the northeastern states could start from Jaigon, head to Assam, duck down to Meghalaya, and then up to Arunachal Pradesh coming down through Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, and finally Tripura. From Tripura you'd cross into Bangladesh and from Banglandesh into the southern part of West Bengal, not far from Kolkata. If you were to sit with a map of India you'd note that the main roads really don't join up like that, and you'd need to backtrack out of most of the other states into Assam. But you could still cross from Assam into Tripura and thence to Bangladesh. And then perhaps you might consider the question of permits. Access to Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram are all restricted. Some require group travel; others are apparently difficult to get any permit for. Perhaps a permit may be obtained from Guwahati in Assam. Or perhaps you'll need to duck down to Kolkata -- or perhaps even travel a week to New Delhi and back. But if you're travelling solo, then a group may not be immediately available. So perhaps it's not so essential to visit those restricted states?

But at least you could still cross from Assam into Tripura and thence to Bangladesh. From Guwahati to Tripura's capital Agartala is a gentle three hundred and fifty kilometres as the crow flies, and a somewhat longer and less gentle distance when the twists and turns of the road are taken into account: assuming no unexpected stops are required, it's a twenty-five hour travail. Any unexpected stops - and these may include tires bursting, mechanical failure, or even members of the National Liberation Front of Tripura attacking your armed convoy - could result in extended delays, even permanent ones. It may not be entirely surprising, therefore, that I decided to bypass the northeast, and head south to Kolkata instead. I do intend to visit northeastern India one day; perhaps not until after the Border Roads Organisation work their magic.

The decision to bypass the northeastern states was a snap one (though not exactly, I feel, a hasty one):
- I'd arrived back in Siliguri from Gangtok rather later than expected
- The bus to Guwahati didn't leave for another 22 hours
- Siliguri was as uninspiring a junction on the second visit as it had been on the first
- Another 22 hours in Siliguri seemed excessive
- The difficulty in getting through via Bangladesh meant that I'd likely need to backtrack to Siliguri from Assam
- To backtrack once to Siliguri was unfortunate; to backtrack twice would appear to be rather careless...
So I hopped an overnight bus to Kolkata.

After the excellence of Sikkimese roads, I was surprised at just how poor the road between Siliguri and Kolkata was. Sections and pillars of what may eventually be a dual carriage highway appeared beside our road for a little while, but within a couple of hours roadworks and construction had been left behind, and the bus was shuddering over fragmenting asphalt. A few hours of fitful dozing later, and I was roused by the sensation of falling half a foot from mid-air back onto my seat; the bus had hit a dirt track. I wondered momentarily if our driver had decided to take a shortcut before noticing three things: both sides of the road were lined with sleeping trucks, there were trucks immediately ahead of us, and there was a sign giving distances to places, including Kolkata. It seemed that our track was not just any dirt track; it was a major route.

It wasn't long before we hit a traffic jam; there was a constriction; oncoming traffic had the momentum.

We stopped.
We waited.
The oncoming traffic passed, and we continued on.
The hours passed, the roads got better, the sky grew lighter, and we arrived in Kolkata in time for breakfast.

But I've not yet told you about the crash.

We were barrelling down the highway - it was on the good patch between Siliguri and the roadworks - when we hit a truck. The truck, parked with lights off, was mostly but not entirely off the road. We were lucky: somehow the side of our bus was heavily dented and scored, but we avoided a head-on collision and there was no other damage. I don't understand just how the bus managed to get hit where it did, as it never appeared to swerve - there was just a loud bang. There was a few minutes of a lot of angry shouting between the truckdriver and the bus driver, but nothing was written down, and the bus driver returned the bus to its course, so I don't know if any further action was ever taken.

I can understand why many prefer Indian trains to Indian buses. They're faster; smoother - oh so much smoother; you can walk around; you can go to the toilet - catching a bus requires bladder control for men and extraordinary bladder control for women since their stops are infrequent and some toilet stops don't have any privacy (public urination is acceptable for males but not females); you can buy a reasonable assortment of food; you're less likely to get caught in a traffic jam or sideswipe a sleeping truck. In short, if I were to ever take a twenty-five hour trip from anywhere to anywhere I'd rather do it by train than bus.

Foreigners receive preferential treatment from Indian Rail, which has a separate booking office in major cities and sets aside blocks of seats on sleeper trains. This means that tourists only have to book a few days in advance, and may be able to avoid queuing for hours at the railway (if there's no foreigner booking office, it's worthwhile getting a travel agent to buy your ticket just to avoid the need to queue!). It does require showing your passport and paying in foreign currency (or showing a receipt). If you can't book a few days in advance, then a bus is the way to go.

The Indian trains I've taken have been second class sleeper trains: no air conditioning and no compartments -- just cubicle after cubicle with two tiers of three opposite each other and a tier of two over the main aisle, running parallel to it. They're not incredibly comfortable, but at least you can get a reasonable amount of sleep. The sleep you get on trains (and this applies to Chinese and Vietnamese ones too) is never particularly great - the beds are hardish, and you always have a mild fear that while you are sleeping someone is going to divest you of your wallet, passport, daypack, and shoes; upper berths are preferable to lower and middle ones since they're less accessible. When I got on my first Indian train (Kolkata to Puri), I was just wondering whether or not to bother cocooning my pack with my wire mesh when all the local travellers started chaining their luggage under the bottom bunks. I decided to follow their example.

Luggage is somewhat safer on an overnight bus; there are less people wandering through at all hours, and packs are generally locked away. Much as with trains, there are different classes of Indian buses - air conditioned and non-airconditioned, sleepers with flat beds of a similar quality to the trains, executive 1x1x1 where there's aisles between each seat, 2x1, and 2x2. If you're lucky your seat will recline almost fully, and the shock absorbers will bounce and sway you over rough patches. If you're unlucky you'll have no leg room, your seat will barely move back, the part you're sitting on will detach from the back, and you will feel every dimple and pebble on the way.

Of course you could fly. Planes are safer - your chances of dying in a (passenger) plane crash are minute - and they provide all the benefits of trains at a fraction of the travel time. But -- and it's a big one -- as a backpacker attempting to travel on the cheap, the cost of a plane ticket in India will cover not only the equivalent train ride, but also a week of food and accommodation. So it's lengthy trains and buses all the way, but I can cope with that.

And the Meek shall inherit Room 101

taroso — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 10:34:00 GMT

It was the nearest hotel to Pokhara's Camping Chowk and the price was too low, but I took the room anyway. If I was to return to Kathmandu the next day, having just returned from trekking, it seemed silly to lug luggage all the way to Lakeside North, only to have to lug it all the way back at sparrowfart the following morning to Central Lakeside, where the taxis loiter. So I ambled along the underpass between shops to the courtyard around which the hotel was built.

The courtyard was rather pleasant, with lots of midday sunshine, balustraded walkways running round the perimeters of upper floors, and masses of potplants filled with flowers and greenery. The room, with bathroom attached, was 150 Rupees. 150? I know that the hotel was marginally north of Camping Chowk, but you pay that much for a night in a room without a bathroom at the top of Lakeside North. So I did a cursory spot check of the essentials: pillow ok; mattress not fantastic. Perhaps low season had struck while I was out of town? Whatever the reason, walking any more seemed an unnecessary luxury, and even though the price of the room was too low it seemed to meet the standards of acceptable squalour to which I had become accustomed. I took it.

I'd had a glance at the bathroom which contained the essentials (toilet, shower, sink, mirror, walls, floor, roof, etc.) but not a particularly long glance. Having accepted the room, I'd time to make a slightly more considered appraisal: the toilet didn't flush, but that wasn't particularly a problem since there was a bucket... three small daddy long legs had webbed a small patch above the door... and there appeared to be quite a few mosquitoes that had alighted on surfaces. I asked if there were another room; there wasn't. Given that the alternative was to pick up and move (and you know how loathe I am to do that) there was little choice but to spend a little time eradicating mosquitoes. The spiders I left untouched; punishing them for their abject failure as effective insect trappers seemed a little vaderesque, if eugenically sound.

There are about three and a half thousand species of mosquito, 150 or more of them in Nepal. My bathroom appeared to have two types. Which of Nepal's 150+ species these were is beyond the limits of year 10 biology and couldn't-care-less-ness. I hoped that neither were disease-bearing.

After twenty minutes or so of slapping and clapping, the bathroom appeared to be mosquito-free, and I inspected the bedroom. Mosquitoes clung to walls, roof, and curtains, and so another period of slapping and clapping ensued. Yes, it would have been simpler and perhaps more sensible to walk, but at that point I'd invested a lot of time in making the room mosquito free - ah, the perils of being somewhat obsessive. Two hours later, I looked up at the last two mosquitoes and left them for later. As you would know, if a job isn't worth doing, it really isn't worth doing properly, and I was bored with such mindless ~~exercise~~ violence. So I went out and did such necessary things such as eat, buy a ticket to Kathmandu, and deal with a week's backlog of email.

I returned that night. Outside my door I paused to look at those potplants on the balustraded walkway. Each had a driptray full of water; well, that explained the mosquitoes. Inside my door, it seemed that the pair I'd left had been busy breeding, which was a bit of a worry as I didn't realise that two mosquito species so obviously different could interbreed... and so quickly.

It was a long night - there's always those last few mosquitoes that only whine when the light goes off - and eventually I'd smeared most of them over hands and walls. At least, though, the room appeared to be hermetically sealed once the bathroom door was bolted, and I left the room to its insect inhabitants at sparrowfart the next morning. In the shoeboxy "Bachelor Mansions" I stayed at in Chennai, killing the swarming itinerant mosquitos was a fool's errand. The louvred windows were unsealable and had no screens, so the room would only stay clear for minutes before reinforcements arrived. Instead I huddled uncomfortably within my mosquito net.

A mosquito net is a useful bit of kit but it has a few downsides: despite being porous, it's degrees warmer under one than not; you need to hang it from something, and that's not always possible (at least without damaging walls); you need to use your bags and other belongings to create structures to raise sections of it off your skin (just hanging it leaves the net still in contact with limbs); and it appears to spontaneously grow mosquito-sized holes.

A Mosquito net isn't the only tool in the fight against sleep-disturbing mosquitoes. A fan helps if it's powerful enough, since mosquitoes are attracted by carbon dioxide, and a fan diffuses exhalations. The white noise that fans generate also help avoid the need for earplugs. Di-ethyl something something something, the insect repellent better known as DEET since noone can remember its proper name, is somewhat effective but stops working after only a few hours. I caught a 9 hour non-airconditioned bus from Chennai to Bangalore and got eaten alive by mosquitoes that appeared to be under the misapprehension that the DEET I basted myself with was some kind of appetising sauce.

I've only been bitten a few times by bedbugs, and seen them fewer, but I'm not sure if I like them any more than mosquitoes. On a balanced consideration, they're much nicer parasites: they are silent, they are rare, you can enjoy the outdoors without being harassed by them, and most importantly they are disease free. Mosquitoes kill millions with their malaria, dengue, and other diseases (many of them incurable); bedbugs are just uncomfortable. Yet, there's something extremely unpleasant about the thought of them crawling over one's sleeping form in search of a vein, and their bites remain itchier longer than those of mosquitoes.

Then there are the cockroaches and the rats, that pair supposedly poised to take over the world when the nuclear conflagration occurs. Compared with mosquitoes they appear relatively infrequently. I've actually seen relatively few cockroaches overseas: a few in rooms, a few scuttling out of drains, a few elsewhere. There may well be eateries all over that (never having completed their HACCP plan) are crawling with them, yet I've probably seen more in a comparable period in Sydney. There are rats in darkened streets, scurrying from niche to crack - the ability of a 4 cm high rat to run through a 2 cm gap is rather impressive - but not a majorly visible quantity either.

I suppose that the swarms of roaming dogs that fill so many city streets may keep the rat population suppressed; warm rat would provide a welcome respite from their usual meal of cold garbage. I don't know what's keeping the cockroaches in check; perhaps it's the surviving rats. There are predators that should be keeping mosquito numbers low, but they appear to be slacking (spiders, I'm looking at you).

Which is why, if I'm one of the lucky survivors of the nuclear conflagration, I, for one, am prepared to offer up my veins up to our new Mosquito Overlords.

The Perils of Power

taroso — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 12:15:00 GMT

That he was on holiday did not stop the UK electrical engineer from burbling enthusiatically on the dangers of electricity; the Australian sparky he was conversing at was less effusive. Their group and mine were sharing a bus back from the Mekong River to Saigon, and the ride back was filled with talk of skin resistance (drops to zero when wet), the merits of UK plugs (the ground pin is longer than the others and the shaft of the pins are insulated), what to do when you dig up electrical cables (get the hell out of the hole - supply of electricity will resume shortly) and suchlike. Most of the rest of the bus sat cringing in silent laughter, as though he'd been providing Too Much Information on something completely anorakish like twitching or trainspotting. I found it rather interesting (but then I am anorak) and having once allegedly done a year and a half of Computer/Electrical Engineering (that's what it says on the inglorious academic transcript) I was at least able to follow along and interject vaguely sensible questions.

There is no shortage of electrical dangers for a traveller to get passionate about: catenaries of loosely strung cable threatening to garotte pedestrians of average height, spliced wires in bathrooms (most duct-taped but some just twisted bare copper), strangling vines slowly wrestling poles and cables to the ground, second-storey residents drying their washing on adjacent telephone lines, or even just the general lack of ground pins on most electrical equipment.

In Sauraha, many houses had gerry-rigged connections to the power lines. This was usually just a couple of hooks strung over the upper and lower power line, perhaps attached to a piece of bamboo to keep things stabilised and easily removable. In Kolkata, there are actually signs which urge the reporting of power theft.

Compared with elsewhere, blackouts have been fairly common in West Asia. Hille (and surrounding villages) were without power owing to a landslide months earlier. Some places such as Kathmandu, Kolkata, or Pokhara, have sporadic blackouts. Come nightfall in Sauraha or Darjeeling, however, it was almost guaranteed that electricity would fail for an hour or three while demand was high. Businesses lucky enough to have back-up generators or uninterruptable power supplies could rely on them for a while (though power was not always restored in time); other places would use candles or dim battery-operated fluorescent lights.

In Rabongla the enjoyment of a room with TV and hot water (there was a negligible difference in cost between a nice-ish room, and what can only be politely described as a complete $#!+#ole) was somewhat marred by the fact that power was rarely available to light the TV or heat the water. When power was finally restored, an electrical fault soon made the use of the heater unadvisable - there was actually a jet of blue flame coming from one of the taps! I winced in anticipation as the hotel employee calmly walked across the water-soaked bathroom floor and reached for the switch. When flicking the switch had no effect on the fire, his next step was to unplug the heater.

I was a little shocked that he wasn't.

Nation/Statements

taroso — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 08:56:00 GMT

When the British colonised Australia, their culture and agriculture were imposed on a country that was in many cases unsuited for it. Seasons were six months out of phase, and the soil, climate, and weather patterns were so different, that by the end of the year, those who had come with the First Fleet were in danger of starvation. Some introduced species including rabbits, cane toads, cats, carp, lantana, and prickly pear, which all thrived in Australia, quickly had a negative effect on native species. The farming (eventually highly successful) of other introduced species such as cattle, sheep, wheat, cotton, and rice caused some longer-term problems including water shortages [agriculture contributes 3% of GDP but consumes 70% of Australia's stored water], topsoil degradation/loss, salinisation, and other ecosystem damage and destruction. Hindsight is 20/20, though; the introduction of all the species mentioned above was done with good intentions and no idea that the conditions in Australia would produce so different a result from overseas. Prior experience and habits can be very difficult to give up, after all.

So, too, with cultural traditions. Well after World War II, Australian Christmases were still thoroughly British, with Roast Dinners and Hot Pudding served in the blazing heat of Australian midsummer. Modern Australian Christmases are generally more sensible, with cold cuts of turkey and ham, seafood, salads, and room-temperature or frozen desserts followed perhaps by bushwalking or a swim, but traditional notions of Christmas still remain. Christmas cards often have the standard tropes (snowy window ledges, snow-laden trees, snowy cottages, and a fur-trimmed Santa Claus with his reindeer and sleigh) and though there are some very nice Australian Christmas carols, which reflect more of Australia than traditional snow-bound carols, those traditional snow-bound carols are as difficult to uproot from Australia as lantana. I'm not even Christian, and haven't been one in half a life, but there is a certain magic to the idea of a White Christmas, a subtle indoctrination that has taken place all my life through stories, art, music, movies, TV, and games. Prior experience and habits can be very difficult to give up, after all.

You might think of India as being a hot country (one blonde correspondent responded with great bemusement) but it borders the Himalayas in the north, and winters in its mountainous regions can be bitterly cold. It thus seemed like one of a Good Idea to head for somewhere vaguely Indian, vaguely northern, and vaguely mountainous; in other words "Darjeeling". Darjeeling is situated at about 2000 metres height in the part of West Bengal above the "Chicken's Neck" (the isthmus between Bangladesh and Nepal). It's a former British hill station, and is considered rather un-Indian in character, being cool, not particularly crowded, and having Nepali as its major language. Darjeeling does get snow but mainly in January and the state of Sikkim was more-northerly, more-mountainous, and even-more-vaguely Indian, so I went there with a couple of others who were staying there - Richard from the UK and Ronen from Israel.

Indian bureaucracy appears in need of reform. It seems to be worse, surprisingly, than that of the communist countries I've visited. For instance to get a visa to China, I collected a form at the door, filled it in, stood in line, and submitted my passport and paperwork to the clerk. That afternoon, I came back, stood in line, paid the processing fee, and got my passport complete with visa sticker back. Laotion visas could be granted at the border. Vietnam's was granted by posting things off in a registered envelope. India's required me to stand in a line to get an embassy-checking form, fill it in, stand in a line to submit it, come back three business days later, stand in line, collect the approval, stand in another line, submit my visa application form with payment, come back later, stand in line and collect my passport complete with visa sticker back.

Getting a Sikkim permit, free and now pretty much a formality, was similarly arduous. We'd intended to get it on the Thursday, but that was a strike day. The strike was not a 1980s Australian-style one where buses, trains, and government employees don't work, but otherwise life can go on as normal. This was a complete shutdown, with hardly a vehicle on the street, and every shop and restaurant closed (or in some cases "closed" if they pretended to comply but left their door enticingly ajar to attract passing starving tourists). On Friday, then, we walked a couple of kilometres to the Office of the District Magistrate to show our passports and collect a stamped application form, walked back into town to the Foreigner Registration Office to have an approval done there, and returned to the Office of the District Magistrate to have the permit finalised. Combining the roles into one office, co-locating the offices, or even shortening the process so that it starts at the FRO and only requires one visit to the ODM are not new ideas, but seem unlikely to be implemented in the near future.

A permit is required for Sikkim, as it is for a number of other northern states, because of separatist rumblings and their proximity to China, which up until last year claimed sovereignty over it. Claims of sovereignty were relinquished in return for India's recognition of Tibet as part of China; ah, realpolitik, how I do love thee. Since July this year trade has started to open up over the Nathula pass, though the region requires an extra permit to visit since it's a military area with a large contingent of goodwill stationed there in tin-roofed huts. In recent years, Sikkim has received masses of funds for public works. Everywhere you go, you see concrete slabs with project information including the budget. All over, there are bridges and roads in various states of completion (not before time, either, since the roadway of an older-model suspension bridge north of Pelling had partially collapsed). In a few years the state of Sikkim's roads should be rather impressive.

In the Nathula Pass area, the roadworks are the responsibility of the Building Road Organisation's Project Dantak, and everywhere there are signs. Some of the signs are exhortations to safe driving, which you see a lot of on the way to Darjeeling as well: "No Need for Over Speed", "Donate Blood at the Blood Bank not on the Road", "Slow Drive, Long Live", "Three Enemies of Road: Speed, Liquor and Overload", and "Speed Thrills But Kills" among others. Others promote the work done: "Faster, Higher, Further with Project Dantak", "East or West, BRO is the Best", "BRO Men Cut Through the Hills But Join the Heart". Others seem attempts at projecting an aura of confidence: "Dantak - Strengthening Relations Between Countries", "BRO - Not Only Road Builders But Nation Builders", "Kashmir to Kannyakumari India is One", and "BRO and People of Sikkim in Harmony".

I've little doubt that the development funds pouring into Sikkim is beneficial to the Sikkimese, but my favourite sign, for its wonderful if inadvertent colonialist sensibility, is "BRO - Flagbearers of Prosperity and Civilisation". So many, including China in Tibet, Spain in South America, France in Africa, the British and their descendants in North America and Australia, some even with the best of intentions, have attempted to bring prosperity and civilisation to the natives. And since I'm here, I shouldn't forget the British Raj in India, where the costs and benefits of a century of British-style prosperity and civilisation are still a matter of debate. What isn't a matter of debate, however, is that Britain bequeathed India its system of Civil (Public) Service, without which gaining a visa or a Sikkim permit might not be such an interesting use of a traveller's time.

With permit finally awarded, our first destination in Sikkim was Pelling, which has a couple of Buddhist monasteries and the ruins of one of Sikkim's capitals back when it was still an independent kingdom; though the British exercised control in Sikkim, it wasn't part of the British Raj, and has only been an Indian State for thirty years. Signs on the way to the ruins exhorted us to "Keep up the spirit. The day is yours" and "Do not get tired. Great excitement is awaiting". The ruins were pleasant for their outlook but were otherwise nothing special, being no more pleasant than Pemayangtse monastery which overlooks them. Lonely Planet, with delicate understatement, describes them as being "over-restored". Pelling is worth visiting not for its structures, though, but for its fantastic panoramic view of the five snowy peaks of Kanchendzonga, the world's third-highest mountain. From Pelling we trekked to the holy lake of Khecheopalri (not really worth visiting) and from there to the trailhead of Yuksam (again not really worth visiting unless you are trekking further). Richard and I broke the journey from Yuksam to Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, at Rabongla, staying at the Hotel Silver Fir, where inefficiency was revealed as not only a trait of government employees: finalising the bill took an hour..

I know, by the way, that a number of you have requested start taking and posting photos. To sum up my arguments against this:

* I'm lazy. If I take lots of photos I'll probably never write another word again... which may well be the reason that a number of you have requested that I start taking and posting photos. Sorry.

* Photos really do convey a different experience to text. I know that a picture is meant to be worth a thousand words, but it's the rare photo that conveys anything close to the right thousand words

* Photos taken on a cheap digital camera can achieve great results under optimal conditions but if there's any haze about, forget about getting a decent shot of (eg) that fantastic panoramic view of the five distant snowy peaks of the world's third-highest mountain.

* A camera is just another thing to get broken, stolen, lost, damaged, arrested over, etc. Life is less stressful without portable electronics.

* If you really need to see what the fantastic panoramic view of the five snowy peaks of the world's third-highest mountain looks like, either Google it for someone else's blurry digital photos, or go to Pelling and take blurry digital photos yourself.

* Prior experience and/or habits die hard.

But since it's almost New Year, and flexibility and change is a good thing, I promise that I'll post a picture Real Soon Now; it might even convey something resembling the Correct Thousand Words.

Richard and I are spending Christmas 2006 in Gangtok (Ronen having headed down to Kalimpong yesterday); I've even splurged and treated myself to a Room Of My Own with private bathroom, hot water, and cable television. There's not much here but (despite it being Just Another Day) neither of us feel like travelling on Christmas, and it's a pleasant enough town that (much like Darjeeling) spills down the hillside. The weather here is sunny with not a skerrick of snow to chill the slopes; I'm in a t-shirt today. There's a cable car ("ropeway") to ride, and a zoo, some lookouts, some temples, and the usual assortment of other things to visit. To the east of Gangtok, the Nathula pass area is but a short jeep-ride away, but tourists travel there to see Tsango (aka Chomgo) lake. If you went there now you could enjoy a swim in its waters, indulge in some bushwalking on the slopes around it, or partake in a Christmas picnic, though momos (a Tibetan/Nepali dumpling) are more readily available than delicatessen items.

Anyway, may your celebration of the winter solstice and the (re)birth of Sol Invictus, or whichever other (semi)mythical figure you happen to be worshipping this year, be a great one.

Merry Festivus to all.

And to all a very good night.

Taro of the Jungle

taroso — Mon, 4 Dec 2006 16:20:00 GMT

Sauraha, gateway to the Royal Chitwan National Park lies about eighty kilometres south-west-west of Kathmandu as the kag flies. By road it's a six hour journey. If you add a couple of hours rafting on the Trisuli River, it's a full day's journey there by the time you've waited for things to stop, start, and stop-start. The bus doesn't go all the way to Sauraha, but to Tadi Bazaar, a town on the highway a few kilometres north. From there it's a motorbike ride - either via a circuitous road route, or using a slight shortcut over footbridges which fail to inspire confidence as their planks are widely spaced and wobble, and concrete pilings from an older structure lie tumbled in the creek.

Sauraha lies on a flood plain across the Rapti River from the RCNP. With the exception of the tourist hotels and bars clustered near the river, the area consists mainly of farms. I arrived there at dusk, the air smoky, and the sun a deep red half-submerged in the grey of what I think was a band of cloud but what may have been distant treeline. It reminded me more of images of Africa than those of India. My hotel was on the Rapti, though on that first evening little could be seen from its grass-roofed cabana: a sandbar in the middle, and a dark mass beyond that. Further upstream there was beach, with more hotels and many more cabanas.

The Tharu are the native people of the region, the Terai; they migrated from the Thar desert region in India and managed to survive Chitwan's malaria-infested mosquitoes (now pretty-well eradicated) - allegedly with the aid of spicy food and raksi, an evil strain of firewater. Many still live in traditional wattle-and-daub huts, the wattles being dried elephant grass, and the daub being a mixture of cow dung and mud. Some of the women had rings through their septa and tattoos on the backs of their hands; men traditionally dressed in white, though it seems that it's done mainly for the benefit of tourists nowadays.

If you ever go to Chitwan, the Tharu cultural show is well worth a watch. There's a great courtship dance; the remainder is interestingly analogous to Morris Dancing - the performers are all male, sticks feature prominently, one of the dances featured a peacock (much as Morris Dancing has its hobby horse) and one a transvestite. The instruments used were percussive (drums, tambourines, rattles, cymbals, and the clashing sticks) but there was singing and recorded music. I suspect that the courtship dance may be non-traditional since it's the only one to feature a female dancer (who also probably played the peacock).

The region is a twitcher's paradise. Mated pairs of ruddy sheldrakes have flown in from Siberia; Nepal house martins, which pock the riverbanks with their burrows, swarm everywhere; kingfishers are fairly common, particularly the blue variety; prides of peacocks wander the grasslands; egrets and ibises flock on the sandbars; and lots of other birds were seen, though neither my guide nor I could identify them - we're not twitchers. The local bird society's office was closed when I passed so I couldn't see whether their checklist had pictures, but here's a text-only list; twitchers, have a field day.

After an hour's ride in a dugout canoe, passing a multitude of birds and one barely noticeable mugger crocodile, we disembarked and walked cross-country to the shore opposite Sauraha. Chitwan has diverse vegetation regions. There are areas where elephant grass grows taller than you, and you follow game trails hoping not to meet anything. Other places are tangles of bushes, where you walk low if following a trail, and walk lower if not. Along the rivers are tall hardwood trees, low grass, and patchy bushes. Further in, there are tall trees and trails running between thickets.

I saw a hog deer, which saw me and bolted. There was evidence of something (possibly a tiger) leaving tiger-paw-shaped pawprints around the river, some digging around the base of a tree which my guide identified as being a sloth bear hunting for termites, and the footprints and droppings of what may have been a passing one-horned rhinoceros. And there are other species to be found in the park: the elusive Pangolins (a scaled anteater), Gharials (a long-snouted crocodile), Fishing Cats, and Hyaenas were all to be seen appearing in drawings in the Visitors' Centre, but not in the flesh. Most species in the park are nocturnal and there are 932 square kilometres of wilderness, so it's not entirely surprising that it's rare to see many of the creatures on a morning tour, particularly given that some of them are uncommon if not endangered - there's only a hundred and something tigers, for instance.

~~Cynic~~ Realist that I am, I did start wondering how long it would be before enterprising locals somewhere in the world set up a nature park with no animals in it to steal their livestock and produce. Every morning before tourists would arrive, they'd go in with their special shoes, a spade, and some shaped patties of processed vegetation. Every so often, someone wearing a tiger suit would pop up momentarily, which would cause great excitement; even more so if the nature park were in Africa, say, or on O'Connor Ridge in Canberra.

As we waited for the dugout canoe to ferry us back to Sauraha, I we saw an elephant standing in a field on that side of the river. It wasn't one of the exciting dangerous wild ones, though, but a privately owned domesticated one. In the afternoon we visited the Elephant Breeding Centre, a rather depressing place, where adult and juvenile elephants stood around each with a foot chained to a post while the few baby elephants were unchained but herded to remain near their mothers. The babies are all sired by wild bull elephants; their mothers were transferred from elephant rides to forced labour at the age of 20 or so.

Early on a foggy third morning, three Nepali tourists and I squashed into a wooden howdah atop an elephant. It was a poorly behaved elephant, frequently attempting to turn when it wasn't meant to, and occasionally bolting. The mahout would flail at the top of its skull with his cane, and when that failed to work would unhook his iron goad and prick it until it was approximately cooperative. I was grateful that the elephant never decided that the easiest way to deal with the annoyances above was to roll over.

Riding on an elephant has a certain image of glamour. The reality is that it's uncomfortable because elephants move one foot at a time so the howdah - hard, wooden, and cramped - is constantly rolling. In addition, you may hit branches - there are lots of them at such a height, and if someone pushes one out of the way incorrectly, a branch (some of which are thorny) may spring back with force. Spider webs criss-cross paths. Elbows from fellow passengers can be a problem. Still, on an elephant, you're safe from attack, they're speedy and manoeuvrable, and they can go where vehicles cannot. They're really the only way to travel.

My riding companions had a lot to say, and said it at length. Perhaps wild animals don't run away when people on an elephant chatter away; we saw one deer, seated and unmoving in frozen stillness. And then everybody stopped talking for a while, which was very nice. We saw peacocks waddling, and other birds flew by.

Suddenly a call rang out, musical tones breaking the relative silence. The tourist seated behind me had a lengthy conversation on his mobile phone. It was a busy morning for him -- over the next hour and a half he answered and made several more calls. I restrained myself from reintroducing trophy hunting to the area.

Just when I was wondering if this was going to be as unsuccessful a safari as the day before - a deer and some birds are nice, and all, but they're not really so special - we crossed over a river and saw a distant rhino.

Everyone was volubly excited. Rhinos have terrible eyesight, but their hearing is excellent; this one turned and bolted. Our elephant headed at pace around one way through tourist-high branches; another elephant went the other way. Eventually the rhino was cornered against thick bushes and we had a good period of up-close rhino viewing. Nearby, we came across another pair - a mother and cub - both lying down and unwilling to even move!

I was very lucky. Others who went riding that morning saw no rhinos at all, and I not only saw those three but another one later that day, standing in the water at 20000 lakes (being dry season, the number was off by a factor of a thousand). No tigers appeared, unfortunately, but I guess that's an incentive to return.

Avatars

taroso — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 15:48:00 GMT

Shakyamuni Buddha, he who was Prince Gautama, and Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, current King of Nepal, have more in common than just royal blood and birth within Nepali borders: both are seen by Hindus as being incarnations of Vishnu. Avatar or not, however, Gyanendra may be the last king of Nepal. In recent months most of his powers have been removed, a delineation has been made between what is considered his private property and what is considered to belong to the nation, a government commission has found him responsible for the death of protesters, he no longer has immunity from prosecution, there's a fair chance he will be charged with something once the government works out how to do it legally, the Nepali Maoists (who were once elected to power) will soon take a sizeable chunk of legislative power again, and most of the non-Maoists aren't mad about the king either.

King Gyanendra came to the throne unexpectedly when his nephew allegedly killed a large number of family members including his brother Birendra, and then perhaps shot himself; conspiracy theories abound. Gyanendra managed to make himself really unpopular by suspending Parliament and returning Nepal to a state of absolute monarchy. Back in Aprilthere were strikes and protests, which forced him to reinstate Parliament and led to the current situation. As in Tibet, where photos of the tenth Panchen Lama are more common than those of the eleventh Panchen Lama, in Nepal it is Gyanendra's predecessor, King Birendra whose portrait is more often on display. In short, well may we say "God Save the Queen", but there's a fair chance that nothing will save the Kingdom.

In better times for royalty, the Kathmandu Valley had not one but three kingdoms, Kathmandu, Patan, and Bakhtipur, formed when a king split his kingdom among his three sons, though which of these were Vishnu's avatar I couldn't say. Being kings, each had a Durbar (palace) Square - Patan's is an hour's walk south of Kathmandu's in Lalitpur, part of greater Kathmandu, and Bhaktipur's is an hour's bus ride. "Square" is a poor translation, though, since none of them are: Kathmandu's, in particular, is more a ragged "C" shape running around the imposing white Hanuman Dhoka Durbar. On the periphery of that square opposite the southwestern corner of the palace lies another palace, that of the Kumari, the "Living Goddess", avatar of Teleju/Durga.

"Have you seen the Kumari?" asked a prospective guide, "It's a special festival today". That last bit, by the way, is toutspeak for "It happens everyday". "Later", I said, waving him off. He continued his pitching with "You need to have someone call her", which was probably true as I'd ducked in earlier and there wasn't a Kumari in sight. Later, I returned there, passing between the two painted lion statues, where an aged peddlar fans her stack of pictures, through the front door doorway, and into the low vestibule which opens onto the palace courtyard.

There were tourists-in-waiting when I arrived but their accompanying guide had no luck in summoning the Kumari and they soon departed. Muffled voices emanated from the top floor windows - they were open and screen-less. The roof beams in that top floor room were glossy, and from time to time, against the red glow of what I presumed to be a curtain, I could see the reflection of a dark shape moving. Perhaps the Kumari?

The Kumari is a limited incarnation: she's selected when young according to strict criteria, including favourable animal sacrifices, and is still young when her tenure finishes at puberty, the divinity passing to another girl.

"No entrance for foreigners", said a sign on the far wall. Yelling and clattering, a boy of about ten came running down unseen stairs, burst out the door next to the sign, raced across the sunken courtyard and continued out through to Durbar Square. A servant's child? A playmate? A brother? Several minutes later he retraced his route with similar haste and clamour. After a few minutes of relative quiet he ran down once more to the courtyard; one hand clutching an inflated ball, the other a hackysack. He kicked each around briefly before returning upstairs. Time passed.

The palace is a compact three storey building, with its footprint reduced by its public courtyard. It's brick, with stone carvings, carved wooden window lattices, and an excess of pigeons. The windows on the upper floor were without lattices. Much of the tiled courtyard is sunken, leaving a walkway around the edge. In that sunken area lie three structures surrounded by iron frames. The central shrine has a vine growing over its frame; the other two, asymmetrical in position, appear to be convex plates. All are plastered with tikka.

Tourists filtered in and out of the courtyard in dribs and drabs, gazing hopefully at the empty frames on the upper floor, before leaving disappointed. A trio of middle-aged Australians hung around for nearly ten minutes, with the bearded one, dissatisfied with merely watching and waiting, calling out for the Kumari to reveal herself. The windows remained empty, and they too left in search of more dependable attractions.

What may have been servants appeared from time to time: a mustachioed male in his mid-thirties clomping down the stairs and crossing to unlock and pass through a padlocked door; a younger male, pausing mid-sprint to acquire some tikka from one of the metal plates; a middle-aged woman shaking what looked like a yellow towel by the upper-left window.

The courtyard started to fill up again, and three of those arriving were Indians. One of them pulled a digital camera from his jacket pocket. Their guide warned that the courtyard could be photographed, but the Kumari shouldn't be. Another of the signs on the wall stated as much: "Taking photographs of Kumari strictly forbidden". A tourist entered the building, refusing the peddlar's entreaties to buy a snapshot of the Kumari in full regalia.

As we waited, I wondered if the guide would be successful, or if the Kumari would remain a fragmentary experience: a title, a location, voices, reflected traces, frozen images, servants, and the boy; defined more by absence and expectation.

The guide said he would see if he could negotiate for the Kumari to appear, and entered the building through the forbidden doorway. The boy appeared at an upper window, ball still in hand, and paused there staring at us. He was joined by a slightly older girl, bespectacled and all in black, who seated herself at the far right of the tableau. Perhaps it was she that was the dark shape whose reflection moved on the overhead beams.

A girl with heavily-kohled eyes and wearing a red dress and pillbox hat which reminded me of a stewardess's uniform of forty years past ran to the middle window and leaned out: at last, the Kumari! A glance down later, and she turned and ran out of sight. The Indians pushed some notes into the donation box. The tourists drained out. I put my notebook away and followed them. She'd appeared, but my experience was still fragmentary: A title, the location, voices, reflected traces, frozen images, servants, the running boy, the bespectacled girl, and a flicker of the Kumari.

When Snacks Attack

taroso — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 04:54:00 GMT

I seem to be on the "Eat Whatever the Hell You Feel Like Diet" and it's not appearing to be doing me major harm. An essential part of this diet is the ingestion of a balanced quantity of junk food. Two classes of this might, perhaps, be distinguished: travelling and stationary.

Travelling junk food is prepared for an extended period on rail or road with irregular or non-existent meals. Here, a trip to the local supermarket is in order, and this can be an adventure in itself as when you can't understand what's written on packets choosing snacks can be a matter of pot luck. It's not necessarily obvious what things taste like, and even when - with Western Expectations - things have an "obvious" taste, there's no guarantee that things made by Eastern Manufacturers will match it. There have been biscuits that were simultaneously both sweet and savoury, jellies whose gelatine may have been yak-derived, and dried fruit that's been pickled, salted, or even just dried differently from fruit in Australia. Under such circumstances it can sometimes be safer to seek familiar items.

A jar of Peanut Butter found in the supermarket at Chongqing was thus a welcome discovery. There were, perhaps, too many peanuts to eat in China (there have been quite a few meals where fried peanuts were one of the main dishes) but peanut butter was nice and safe; a reasonable accompaniment for plain crackers on a long train journey. A third of a jar of peanut butter later I was peanut-buttered-out but I kept the jar until Pokhara, on the theory that I'd eventually become unpeanut-buttered-out. By the time that I was, minuscule ants had managed to traverse the threads of the lid and invade the jar.

I once wrote that whenever I get down, I give thanks that I don't have a peanut allergy. Somewhat exaggerated but true - it gives perspective, peanuts being present in so much cooking. By coincidence two members of the Tibet trip have peanut allergies (thankfully mild), which meant they had to select their dishes carefully while in China - Chengdu is in the heart of Szechuan, after all.

Stationary junk food, on the other hand, can provide a way to recentre and connect to the past after an overload of new or unusual flavours, whether as a meal or snack. For instance after weeks of noodle soups, stir fries, or rice dishes, pizzas or burgers can come as a welcome return to some measure of the familiar. I've written once before, for instance, about really wanting some properly-done roast chicken with all the trimmings. Western junk food should not necessarily be thought of as worse nutritionally than more local cuisine, though. In travelling, there are periods where you'll eat days if not weeks of oil-drenched stir-fried dish upon oil-drenched deep-fried dish upon oil-soaked soup - for safety if nothing else. Under such circumstances pancakes, pizzas, burgers, and other slightly-less oily comestibles can come as gastronomic relief.

Fortunately most places which cater for western tourists cater for western tourists. For instance Leisha's in Langmusi did excellent food with fine vegetable burgers and plate-sized yak burgers too large for all but the most rapacious of eaters (those who finish get their name posted but may yak). As with so many places, what's on their menu doesn't necessarily meet expectations, however: their apple pies were very good but essentially turnovers, and their chocolate brownies not so very good but essentially chocolate-chip cookies. Worse, though, is where the junk food is done badly. Dal bhat is the nutritious and filling staple while trekking from lodge to lodge in Nepal. After five straight days of it I was ready for a veggie pizza. I got a veggie and salt pizza and was back on the dal bhat the next night.

On the snack front, Saigonese creme caramels were wonderful, I dislike Tim Tams but was glad nonetheless to see snack-sized packs in Indonesia, and practically never drink Coke or Fanta of any variety in Australia but there have been a couple of days when it's been practically intravenous. Speaking of fizzy drinks, when I ordered a soda water on my first night in Indonesia it came in a Fanta-branded bottle. I also discovered rust stains around the mouth of the bottle, so left it untasted. Glass bottles are recycled over and over, and it takes a while to get used to the rust. Plastic water bottles in Nepal have a "Crush after Using" advisory on their label to prevent them from being reused; it seems that otherwise there's a risk of them being refilled and sold. But I digress; back to snacks.

Chocolate in Asia is often of poor quality. Often sugar is higher than cocoa solids, and in places such as Malaysia and Indonesia, palm oil is used, which gives quite a noticeably different flavour. Dark chocolate seems to be distinguished more by colour than anything else: 20 or 30 percent is common, and if you find anything above 50%, it's almost certainly European. One particularly unpurchased and untasted brand of dark chocolate in China used "Cocoa Butter Substitute", also known as "vegetable oil", to augment its 5% cocoa solids.

Nepali chocolate, mostly imported from India, has something new: artificial flavouring in the chocolate. I don't think that there are sufficient words to accurately describe how vile and chemical Nepali KitKats are. Good chocolate, by the way, is close to being a necessity while trekking - a nice little energy boost while at altitude. I took a couple of blocks of 75%, but many make do with Snickers and Mars bars, which are available at a premium at every lodge.

Zhang Mu was the last place we stayed in China; a border town whose shops had familiar-looking junk food brought over from Nepal. After we'd changed money and eaten, Colin still had some spare yuan so he decided to treat us to Real Chocolate. There was no question about which one we'd choose. "Toblerone", said Japp; "Toblerone" said Julia; "Toblerone" said I. "Four Toblerones", said Colin, and the shopkeeper passed over four bars of milk chocolaty sweetness. A shop or three up the hill we discovered that there were dark chocolate Toblerones to be had in Zhang Mu. Colin went over to try to negotiate a swap while I tried to refrain from laughing hysterically at his chutzpah. It was not entirely surprising that the shopkeeper refused to take him up on his offer but "It was worth a try", he said and, to be fair, it was.

The prospect of real chocolate, or at least more-real chocolate than we'd had in a month or more, was enough to give us a temporally-displaced sugar rush. "Zhhhhhhhhhm", said Japp, brandishing his bar. "...Zhhhhhhhm", said I, making the connection, and we mock-duelled our way from the street into the hotel lobby, getting some odd looks from those present. There's a distinct possibility that the phrase "Help me Tobler One. You're my only hope." was uttered. What can I say? One has to revel in one's immaturity while one can.

Language and Culture

taroso — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 12:46:00 GMT

One advantage of trekking with my guide Shyam was that I could pick up a little - and I do mean a little - Nepali while on trail, thus putting my 8 year Linguistics degree to some minor use (well, we also had a brief Tibetan lesson in Lhasa, but it was brief). I'm a language dilettante, unfortunately. In formal study I've a year of High School Latin, two years of HS French, two years of HS Japanese, a year of Uni Spanish, plus a semester of analysis of Buginese. Just enough to be incompetent in all, and have them all blend into a near-useless mental melange. Fortunately I still have a tenuous grasp on English, the Lingua Franca of our modern world.

English has a lot of words; it was well over half a million at last count (not by me, thankfully) with all its inflections ["I wug, you wugged, she wugs, they are wugging"], derivational morphemes ["un-" + "wug" + "-able" => "unwuggable"], and imports from other languages. One of my two favourite words - purely for euphony - is the loan word schadenfreude, the meaning of which happens to be lovely in its unloveliness too. And English is fluid in its semantics when members of a group or subculture develop their own shared meaning for common words - witness the evolution of different words for "good": "swell", "funky", "bad", "wicked", "cool", "hot" etc.

So it was that "whatever" in our group came to mean "twelvish". We'd twelve passengers plus a group leader, and at times a local guide and one or more driver, so when Brett would checks that we were all present, the count would end up as something like "One... Two... Three... Whatever". In Intrepid Tour Leader parlance a "passenger" ("pax" for short) is a member of a tour. In some cases, terms were old but some passengers weren't aware of them - "FIGJAM" and "dag", for instance. "Dag", by the way, is one of twenty Australian terms to be added to the MSWord dictionary in the next update - it's really that important to Australian culture! I was surprised, though, that "bonza" and "ridgy-didge" - a favourite saying of X.'s along with "stone the crows" and "Rafferty's rules" - were so popular. I thought "bonza"/"bonzer" died out half a century back.

A couple of months ago my mum sent an email, the body of which was "One thing I noticed - you use -----------ish a lot". I responded "Yup. It's because I like to be precisish when I write. [I also like paradox!]. -ish forms provide a nice level of nuance with less syllables than 'approximately' or 'roughly'. Partially it's because a lot of my writing (as I've written to you before) is conversational in style, and I use -ish forms in speech". I'm very pleased to report that -ish words were frequently used on tour by myself and others.

It's one of the perils of travelling that you do see x hundred monuments, y thousand museums, and z million religious buildings. I've written in previous entries that I've been "templed out". Our last major monastery in Tibet was at Sakya but when we arrived it was closed for the lunch period, and to enter the buildings we would have had to have waited a few hours. "Are you all monasteried out?", inquired Brett. We were. We so were. So instead we wandered the grounds, and had an enjoyable time doing so; Sakya remains one of my favourite monasteries. I should add that I get un-templed out every time I go to a new region and the style of temple changes. I also expect to get throughly churched-out, castled-out, and galleried-out in Europe, but that's not such a bad thing.

"According to Chambers Dictionary (2003), which is the primary reference, only nine of the answers to the clues are real words defined as in their clues. The rest have been arrived at by false scholaritude, whimse, hyperfeminism, poeticisation, up-to-dating, incorrect retroformation, etceterums." - Preamble to Listener Crossword 3889, "Neologification", by 'Waterloo']

There were coined terms too, including "fauxriginal" and "passiongers". We've seen a lot of fauxriginal items for sale at markets and stalls. Nepal is home to nearly as many counterfeit books as Vietnam, watches guaranteed to fall apart are readily available, and knock-offs of The North Face trekking gear, collectively known as "The North Fake" fill the trekking shops. Passengers who hooked up were, logically, "passiongers".

While vaguely on the subject, the dating section of the Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook was educational. Apparently "Never mind, I'll do it myself" is a suitably handy phrase to know, and itinerant banjo players in search of a good time may find success with "You look like my cousin". Pride is a deadly sin and all, but I'm very fond of the fact that when one of my fellow passengers said to another "I'll always think of you as the sister I never had", I could but add "I'll always think of you as the cousin I never... had".

Sometimes a coined term is just so right that its meaning is evident the moment you hear it. May I present for your amusement "packwash". If you don't find its meaning so evident, you may have always had regular access to a washing machine. Packwashing is when you store dirty clothes long enough for them to become cleanish enough to be reworn.

"Remember you can wear your underwear 4 times without washing: forwards, backwards, inside out forwards, inside out backwards." -- "Not the Sunscreen Song", by John Safran

But what I ask is "Is there any need for neologification when English already has such a rich and untapped vocabulary?". There are roughly a hundred and ninety thousand words in the UK Advanced Cryptic Dictionary wordlist - perhaps under forty thousand once inflections, plurals, proper nouns, and phrases are omitted. When you've ten thousand pages of bad writing to complete, that's not so many new words per page. A doable task, then; a kind of large-scale long-term game of Bingo. If I really need to, my last page of bad writing may well cover my visit to Dublin and homage James Joyce. It will be by far the least readable thing either of us have written. Once upon a time,so it's said, James Joyce was sitting disconsolate in his study when a friend dropped by. "I've only written seven words today", Joyce told him. "But James", reassured his friend, "Seven words is a good day for you". "Yes," wailed Joyce, "But I don't know which order they go in". But I digress.

Is there really a need for neologification when current English is flexible enough to make any number of groanworthy but topical puns?

X: I Say I Say I Say. Why is Little Miss Muffet like Saddam Hussein?
Y: Both their surnames have a U as the second letter, an E as the fifth letter, and a double on the second and third letters.
(*crickets chirp and a tumbleweed blows across the stage*)
X: There was a pun in that?
Y: Er... they both tried to tuffet alone?
(*silence as the drummer attempts to rimshot and misses*)
X: Interesting exploration on how elastic the lower boundaries of wit are, but have another crack at it.
Y: Er... They both had curds in their whey?
(*rimshot muffled by the gentle splatter of tinned tomatoes hitting bone*)
X: Thank you. Thank you. I'll be here all week, and unless the cleaners work overtime so will Y.

When coming down from Everest Base Camp, I was surprised to find that yoghurt tasted absolutely disgusting to me. Twice I ordered it, and twice I was unable to eat it. It was purely a personal reaction, though, as others tried it and had no problem with it. I don't know why it happened. In Nepal, yoghurt in Nepal is often called "curd", but since it's a rather solid yoghurt, the name is accurate enough. Tibetan yoghurt was similar, though generally more yakky in flavour. Yoghurt in a lot of other countries has mainly been of the drinking variety. I don't quite understand how you can have Acidophilus in yoghurt that's been treated so that its bottles are stored at room temperature, but I'm still alive. Drinking yoghurt is now fresher as lassis, common enough in Tibet, are even more common in Nepal with its heavy Indian influence.

While in Lhasa we visited the Braille without Borders School, which is targetted at teaching and training the young so that they can live and work independently, which is something that Tibetan blind generally weren't able to before the arrival of the organisation since Tibet's Buddhist society saw the blind as having warranted it as a result of actions in past lives. There are a lot of older sightless as well (due to both heredity and as a result of eye disease) who don't attend the school in Lhasa. For them, the organisation has a farm near Shigatse, where (among other things) cheese is produced. This is real cheese, too, not the Chinese processed plastic or yak-chalk normally seen in Tibet. They've a foreign expert in to assist with the cheesemaking, and there was talk of mozzarella being produced - whether from yak-stock, or whether from buffalo or beefalo (which are common in Nepal but not Tibet) I don't know. It's not like yak milk can't be made into good cheese as it's available in Nepal.

By-the-by, have you ever noticed that the blind dress much better than I do? If so, then you're not one of those sartorially-snappy unsighted people. But I micallef.

micallef (verb): to pursue a question, usually rhetorical, to its logically hideous conclusion.

Thank you. I'll be here all year.

Those Two Certainties

taroso — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 04:10:00 GMT

It was time to get my pre-trip shots, and my doctor had spent quite a lot of time in Nepal [she has credits for the Health section in a few Lonely Planets, but not, ironically, the Nepal 6th edition, which is what I have]. October or November? "It's lovely that time of year", she said, and so it is. And - there had been just a little insurrection around that time - what of the Maoists? "Oh the Maoists aren't too bad. They'll demand money but they'll give you a receipt."

Excuse me? Did I hear correctly? I did.

Somewhat bewildered, I mentioned this to Brett. He dug around in his folder of TourLeaderDocuments and pulled out one of those fabled receipts. He'd once had a group baled up by a Maoist checkpoint but had managed to beat the price down from a thousand rupees each to a hundred rupees each. On the next trip he used this receipt to avoid paying anything. This was reassuring: I now knew that our leader had the stones to safeguard our budgets from members of an armed group involved in a civil war that had killed over thirteen thousand people. None of these thirteen something thousand dead were tourists, though; noone in Nepal wants to kill the golden goose of tourism, though tourism is only just starting to recover after taking a bruising in recent years. The worst that's happened lately, so rumour has it, is that an anti-communist Polish trekker was beaten up and wounded for refusing to pay.

On our first morning in Nepal, driving down to Dhulikhel from the Chinese border, the bus was stopped briefly at a piece of cord across the road by some villagers - kids, really. The bus driver hurled some abuse at them in Nepali - a refusal to pay, I'm guessing - and drove on. Not long after that we stopped at a more authoritative checkpoint with a red flag and genuine Maoists. Brett got out, showed the receipt, and after some discussion we were waved through with our wallet, bus, and skin intact. They're not meant to be extorting tourists any more - their nominal leader, Chairman Prachanda, has said that they're not, but you get the feeling from reading the newspapers here that the Maoists are a conglomeration of smaller organisations each with their own slightly competing ideas about how things should really work.

It's ceasefire time at the moment, which means that the soldiers manning the sandbagged bunkers with their garlands of barbed and razor wire can relax. Such bunkers feature at government checkpoints and around public buildings and structures, the Maoists having targetted them for bombings before. The Maoists control most of the country, though, including the trekking routes. The government presence on the Annapurna Sanctuary trek is limited to a couple of Tourist Registration Certificate desks - the former checkpoint at Doban, for instance, has been abandoned.

I paid the government their 2000 Rupee fee to be allowed to enter the Annapurna Conservation Area, though this was never checked. According to my guide Shyam those travelling by taxi are stopped, but we went by public bus. At Landruk, at the tail of the first day we encountered a Maoist checkpoint. There were no weapons on sight, and apart from the Maoist operating it and his non-descript offsider there didn't seem to be anyone other Maoists around. He was polite; I was surly but restrained. There are certain things it's good to be known for doing first in Nepal such as climbing Everest, but I'm afraid that I lacked the stones to safeguard my budget from members of an armed group that had yet to kill a tourist. He was, by the way, the most Maoist-looking figure I've yet seen in Nepal, being black-clad with glasses (which few Nepalis wear) and sporting a black goatee (a fair number of Nepali males are mustachioed but I don't think I've seen another with a beard).

I was allowed to pay the Maoist Tourist Tax so I did, and was issued a receipt. It's a glossy blue and white rectangle, issued by the "Tamuwan Autonomous Republic People's Government" for the sum of a hundred Rupees a day; 700 Rs in total. Shyam said that it's better than it used to be: a 1500 Rupee flat fee no matter how long the trek.

Under section 102.6 of The Australian Anti-Terrorism Act 2005, it is an offence to provide funds to a terrorist organisation but fortunately the Australian Government doesn't consider the Communist Party of Nepal a terrorist organisation. As of May this year neither does the Nepali Government. Americans visiting Nepal may be in for problems, however. The headline of today's edition of the Kathmandu Post reads "Maoists to remain on US terrorist list", and as the US State Department lists the CPN as a Terrorist Organization under the Terrorist Exclusion List of the Immigration and Nationality Act and under Executive Order 13224, it's technically illegal for US citizens to contribute funds... for instance to pay the tourism tax. For that matter the laws probably apply to foreign backpackers too.

At Birethanti yesterday, on the last day of trekking, I showed my TRC and got signed out by the government worker seated at an open-air desk. Beside him were three Maoists whose desk sat under a red canopy. Whether "Maoist" is quite the right word, though, is another matter as the troika's middle figure was badged with a shiny red Lenin silhouette, and a picture of Lenin was affixed to one of the poles. I showed my receipt, and Shyam and I continued on to the bus.

Unfortunately I believe that in most cases it's not trekkers who are really affected by the tourist tax but the Nepali guides and porters whose baksheesh is affected. I provided Shyam with a breakdown at the end:

Budget: 14000 (PM 6/11/06 to AM 13/11/06)
Costs/Fees: -5850
Food/Water/Accommodation: -5805 [I ate quite a bit of Dal Bhat...]
Transport: -310
Maoist Tourist Tax: -700
Total Spent: -12665
Total Remaining: 1335
Tip (Rounded): 1400

Dhanyabad! [thank you]

Annapurna Sanctuary

taroso — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 14:25:00 GMT

Zero

"I'm not going to pay someone ten dollars per day to walk in front of me", said my neighbour Sandrine. She lives in a mountainous region in France, and is ~~to the fact~~ au fait with trekking and orienteering. I don't know how far she managed to get as the recently-introduced Trekking Registration Certificate (TRC) requirement means that independent guide-free trekking is supposedly dead, which is a problem if you like your space and alone-time. Jeff and Liz, for instance, ended up quitting their Annapurna Circuit trek because of it. I, on the other hand, have done one multi-day trek since 1990 and since solo travellers are liable to violent robbery on a couple of stretches and I'm lazy enough to let someone port my pack, a guide-cum-porter was not unwelcome.

Back before getting to Nepal, indeed back before leaving Australia, I had the idea that I would do the Annapurna Circuit. Once I actually arrived in Nepal, it didn't seem like such a great idea for a few reasons. Firstly, inertia and laziness kicked in -- I'd been on the grind of tours for over two months, and the last thing I felt like was another three weeks of movement. Secondly, I'd been in Tibet, and had minor altitude related problems there -- actually needing to walk and risk altitude-related problems while walking over 5000 metre passes didn't seem fun. Thirdly, the landscape of the middle of the Annapurna Circuit seemed to be high and barren and similar to Tibet -- I'd had enough treeless desert for a while. Fourthly, I wasn't sure of my general fitness -- I've had one multi-day trek (the three days in Tiger Leaping Gorge) since 1990. Fifthly, I wasn't sure whether three weeks of trekking would pall -- after a week, for instance.

While Alain, Florian, and Steve had bookings for the Annapurna Circuit trek and joined up with other groups as our tour finished, therefore, I hung around Kathmandu doing very little, then travelled over to Pokhara and did... more, but still very little. And, after two or three weeks of not doing, and being at last ready to do at least some trekking, I found myself a tour agency and chose the Annapurna Sanctuary trek, which is commonly known as "the ABC trek" since it goes to the Annapurna Base Camp. It's a nice easy trek, normally taking ten to twelve days including Ghorepani (Poon Hill), so my guide Shyam and I did it in six and a bit days. Though we did walk quickly, this is really not as impressive as it may sound since Shyam was carrying about ten kilos more than I was, and I'd retained my altitude conditioning from Tibet so we didn't need minor ascents in order to acclimatise.

Day 1: Phedi to Landruk

If you had to, you could guess what "Phedi" means from its sound and its location. Just like the root in "pedal" and "impede" it means "foot". More properly it's "Dhampus Phedi" since it's the bottom of Dhampus village, though Dhampus proper takes over an hour to reach. The bus from Pokhara dropped Shyam and I at Phedi, which is basically just a small row of roadside eateries across the road from what I thought at the the time were rather a lot of stairs.

We climbed stairs and we climbed slope and we climbed stairs again. It's farming country, it was harvest time, and the trail wound upward through fields of crops and stubble. At the main village area of Dhampus, lodge upon lodge crowds the way. The farms give way to forest. The trail runs down to water and then back up. The forest gives way to farms and then to forest again as the trail runs down to water. At about 4 that afternoon, we arrived at Landruk. It's yet another farming village (perhaps easier to appreciate from a distance so you can see just how many houses there are, as the buildings on the trail are mainly lodges), and sits upslope on the eastern side of the Modi Khola, the river Modi. Over the river but higher up sits the village of Ghandruk.

I suppose I should write a little bit about the carrying situation, and this is as bad a place as any. My backpack was maybe 9 kilos, and Shyam's pack 5 or 6; I was carrying 4 kilos or so in my daypack and could have carried my pack. Having a professional carry it meant that we could travel at a quicker pace (which was set by Shyam). Also...

*drumroll*

...I'm lazy -- please trust me on this, if only so I never need to type it again! It was, believe it or not, a light load for a porter; we passed a lot of them on the trail. Trains of mules or ponies are used on the main routes, but for many lodges, porters are the way to get food and other necessities there. Those porters bear a ridiculous weight using their neck muscles: a strap goes around their forehead and is attached to a basket, container, or other object. We passed one lad who was toting a metal water cylinder which was not only higher than him, but a metre and a half in diameter. Worst off weightwise, I think, were the porters for the package tours. Customarily they'd carry two full backpacks or more (I'd really winnowed out my excess, leaving much in Pokhara). Others would carry tents and twenty litre water canisters. Others would carry baskets piled high with supplies. I really don't envy the porters their job.

Day 2: Landruk to Bamboo

From Landruk the track led down to New Bridge, with its shiny new metal bridge, then up to Jhinu. We could have headed down to the hot springs there, but instead continued further up and down to where we could cross the river for Chhomrong, the last major village of the area; there's a school there, and homes, farmland too, and (as you would expect) lodges and shops. So: lunch at Chhomrong, down the hill, up the hill, Sinuwa.

Sinuwa is an odd village. The section of Sinuwa nearest to Chhomrong, for all that it's across a river and on a different hill, is really part of Chhomrong, being still permanent settlement with farmed terraces carved down the hillside. Far Sinuwa is a cluster of lodges only open during the trekking season, as all lodges from this point forward are. Separating the two is an hour or so of uninhabited unfarmed forest.

A sign warned of the perils of landslides. As if to illustrate, not five minutes afterwards there was a clatter uphill and a few rocks bounced down. This was not, fortunately, the result of a landslide, but just the dislodgements of sheep forcing a path through the bushes. Further along, landslips were evident. On a shady corner of the path there had been a shrine dedicated to the god of the area, but only the waist-high petal-covered fragment of a larger structure remained; the rest had spilled down the slope in a litter of stones. A bell was attached to what was left and Shyam rang it thrice before we carried on.

"German Bakery", said the sign outside our lodge at Bamboo, and a glass case displayed pastries and pies. We'd arrived just on dusk after a long day, and it was an odd remnant of civilisation in so rustic a setting. The water was solar-heated but the evening air wasn't, so I shivered my way through a shower in the dim confines of the concrete shower room. The dining room had a kerosene lamp for light and a kerosene burner under the table to warm it; the bedroom had a thin quick-burning white candle for light and warmth.

Day 3: Bamboo to Machhapuchhre Base Camp (MBC)

Even though November is the dry season, the path on the lower reaches between Sinuwa and Dovan was soft, with frequent creeklets cutting it. In parts, the creeklet was the path. You could see why trekking Nepal during the monsoon season would be unpleasant, since during those wet months trekkers also have leeches to contend with.

Bamboo was a fit name for the area: there was a lot of it around there. Oddly, I saw far more bamboo on the ABC trek than I did in China. You have certain expectations, and one of mine was that I'd at least visit some vast whispering forests of centuries-old bamboo in China. Instead I only saw one small stand in the wild (Tiger Leaping Gorge), and the only largish quantities seen were planted in the Panda Park in Chengdu. There's a variety of bamboo up on Nepali slopes, including one or two which are very grasslike and look like they could do with a mow [bamboo is, of course, a grass, but you don't always think of it as such], and one which, because of the angle of its leaves, gives the impression that someone has stuck bits of praying mantises to thin dowel. Nepal is so green compared with Tibet - just a few hundred metres in height makes so much difference, though the rain patterns in the Annapurna region probably help a lot too.

Machhapuchhre translates as "Fishtail", the reason being that the sides of its face curve inward with reasonable symmetry so that lower down it's narrower than its flattish top. and the best place to see the symmetry on the ABC trek is between Deorali and MBC, where the mountain can be viewed front-on. Before and after there, the view of its face is oblique and its the appearance of the "fishtail" is skewed and less obvious. Owing to the height the area is fairly barren, with low brown grass. The branches of the last of the trees were leafless and dripping with moss. It's the worst stretch for landslides: a treeless valley bounded by cliffs, with chunks of rock embedded in the path and bouldered channels to clamber over. It's safe in November, said Shyam, but earlier in the year it's very dangerous, and you always need to keep an ear out for the groan of an avalanche and move quickly.

Machhapuchhre is a sacred mountain which has never been summitted and where climbing is banned so "Machhapuchhre Base Camp" is a bit of a misnomer, but we stopped at a lodge there for lunch anyway. In its dining room were two Canadians who were dining before they headed down-mountain in the hope of reaching Dovan. The daughter of one had died a couple of years back. The other, a friend and colleague, had been vacationing in Nepal at the time she died, and had built a cairn up at ABC in her memory. They'd gone up that morning to add new prayer flags to it.

Shyam and I had been intending to head up to ABC after lunch (it's only an hour or two away), but while we were eating the weather turned nasty. Cloud rolled up the valley, and before long there was wind, rain, horizontal sleet, and flurries of snowflakes. The snow didn't stick this far down but it was still freezing, so cold that our breath fogged the dining-room's air. By the time the weather cleared it was later afternoon, so we overnighted there.

Day 4: MBC to ABC to MBC to Sinuwa

We started day four in the pre-dawn light with a walk up to ABC. It was the first time on the trek that the altitude had hit me. With the packs left behind at MBC, and I still with my daypack, Shyam now walked faster than I did, and I was puffed. Above MBC the terrain continued to be barren, with frost-brittled grass, rocks and boulders, and what was left of the day-before's snow. The stream was iced-over.

As you arrive at ABC, Annapurna South is on your left, and on your right is a ridge. The ridge overlooks a huge dark glacier-scoured strip perhaps a hundred metres or more wide and half that in depth. The Canadian's daughter hadn't died in Nepal, but hundreds of others have while attempting to summit its peaks. Many have died on Annapurna, and there are lots of cairns on the ridge. There's a more permanent monument there for Anatoli Boukreev, a Russian climber who died a nearly a decade ago trying to climb Annapurna I. The monument's plaque includes a lovely quote as his epitaph: "Mountains are not Stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion".

But the Annapurna Sanctuary does resemble a stadium, arena, or amphitheatre, with its the panorama of snowcapped mountain against sky almost all around, only broken by the brown dirt of one hill, perhaps 20 of 360 degrees. We walked up along the ridge to where we could see the frozen glacial lake and a small waterfall of snow-melt, and then down across a depression where enough snow had settled that it made a satisfying crunch underfoot as we crossed.

After breakfast, we returned to MBC, where a centimetre of ice on top of the bathroom's water bucket made cleanliness an unnecessary luxury. We descended quickly as coming down from altitude gives a rush since your blood gets saturated with oxygen. Tea at Deorali, where a Victorian with fears for the integrity of her legs had remained behind while her group ascended. Late lunch at Dovan, where the threat of bad weather never eventuated. Through Bamboo in the late afternoon, where the lodge proprietress said "Stay".

I waved a hand at the sky and smiled "The day is still young", though to be honest, the day with its minor wrinkles concealed by fading light was not as young as I blithely suggested. We finally arrived at Sinuwa in the gloom of evening. It was perhaps far too long a day, but at Sinuwa there was electricity and really hot water.

Day 5: Sinuwa to Deorali (near Ghorepani)

It was another long day and the oxygen had worn off. From Far Sinuwa to Near Sinuwa and down to the bridge where Chhomrong was far more intimidating a climb up than it had been on our outward journey, we went. From Chhomrong our route was different to the way we'd come the first time. Instead of returning down to the river, we followed the hill round. An eagle hunted the skies. Something small, brown and sinuous with a white ruff around its face scampered out, looked up, and disappeared over the side of the trail. It was a thief of chickens and eggs, said Shyam, but not a snake killer, so it wasn't a mongoose. Maoist grafitti appeared on the occasional building.

The farms were scattered, the groups of tourists passing the other way were frequent. We left the farmland below us as the track climbed through forest. Shyam made a warning cry as we passed through, and a troupe of monkeys retreated watchfully. We skimmed through Tadapani at the top of the ridge - it's customary for those coming from Ghorepani to stop there, as there's quite a lot of uphills between the two - but we continued down to the bridge and then back up again. Halfway up the hill, another guide-cum-porter strode down the hill past us, his Sydneysider hobbling twenty paces behind. "I'm not a Nepali. I'm not a Nepali", she moaned.

Up to the hilltop with its pair of lodges, we travelled, and down to the base of the ravine where more lodges huddled, we trudged, and upstream past a small and rudimentary hydroelectric station and up stairs and up slopes, we travailed, and so we came at last to Deorali.

Day 6: Deorali to Ghorepani to Hille

"Deorali" means "pass", and there are (unsurprisingly) more than one of them in Nepal. In other words, this one was not the same village as the Deorali near MBC. One of the standard activities of the ABC trek is to climb Poon Hill before dawn so that you can watch the sun rise over lots of mountains, but it would have been near-impossible to reach Ghorepani on day 5, so we spent dawn on the lesser-known Gurung Hill Tower instead. Gurung Hill is above the lodges at Deorali, but is only 15 minutes' climb, rather than the hour that the top of Poon Hill takes in the dark from Ghorepani. The view is a touch different but you still see peaks in the Dhaulagiri range, Annapurnas South and I-IV, Machhapuchhre, Himalchuli, etc. It has an excellent vista on the eastern hemisphere; the view westward is blocked by a ridge.

After breakfast we left Deorali, climbing through rhododendron forests (supposedly lovely in March but flowerless now) and along the bamboo-lined ridge to a point above Ghorepani. Cloud covered the heights while we were there, so instead of climbing Poon Hill we just descended and headed through Ghorepani and along the trail to Nangathanti and Banthanti. From Banthanti, we had miles of the most painful stairs I've ever experienced to clamber down. Shyam had no trouble as he strode down them. I hobbled forty paces behind him, whimpering "I'm not a Nepali. I'm not a Nepali".

An hour from the bridge at the bottom of the hill (fifteen minutes under normal non-sheep-and-goat-herding-obstructed travel) we were in the aptly named village of Hille. For a village so close to towns, I was surprised that there was no electricity, but was told that a landslide earlier in the year had killed several people and wiped out buildings including the hydroelectric plant for the area. The government was unlikely to repair it while the Maoists had control over the area.

Day 7: Hille to Nayapol

An night's rest did wonders for my legs - I was back up to speed for the final hour and a half. At Nayapol we caught the bus for the two hour ride back to Pokhara. Miraculously it was an express service so an hour later we were back in Pokhara, and by midday we were at Camping Chowk in central Lakeside.

Verdict: Highly recommended guide, route, and tour company. Highly non-recommended schedule.

Tibet: Art, Religion, Politics

taroso — Sun, 5 Nov 2006 12:03:00 GMT

Sacred Art

Buddhism has a large cosmology, with its six realms (inhabited by humans, animals, demons, hungry ghosts, demi-gods, and gods), buddhas (past, present, and future) and boddhisatvas, though whether they're viewed as genuine entities, or as conceptual aspects depends on the practitioner, I believe. Statues and murals in Tibetan monasteries reflect such diversity.

Mandalas are a circular two-dimensional representation of an imaginary three-dimensional structure, the image of which is to be meditated on. We saw a few three-dimensional models at different places, including a couple made from dyed butter (rare). There are colour mandalas, too which look like paint swatches and provide a more abstract meditative aid.

There are also the eight auspicious symbols - conch shell, lotus blossom, eight-spoked wheel, parasol, endless knot, pair of fishes, banner, and vase - and within one design, elements of the others will be seen. As the collection, they appear primarily displayed outside monastery buildings, but they also appear in statues and artwork. Some Tibetan women wear a conch shell around their wrist as a bracelet. Swastikas - a cruciform representation of the wheel of dharma appear in decorations -- incidently, the image of the hexagram (Star of David) is also used but for educational bodies, generally with a book and/or lamp in its centre.

Thangkas are more a medium than a religious art form, I think - it looks like you get the same pictures in murals, but thangkas are painted on canvas/cloth, and so are rollable. Monasteries' thangkas may be multi-storied in height, only to be unrolled and displayed at special locations at particular times of the year. Individuals will have smaller thangkas. Pretty much every component of a thangka is formalised, from the choice of colours, to the figures and what they are wearing. It's mathematical in its precision, with exact ratios and specific postures for figures to be in. Before a thangka is painted, drafting lines are pencilled in, then the specifics of the entire piece are added.

Japp's friend Shashi is a thangka painter; they met in Holland through Japp's aunt when Shashi came over to exhibit/lecture. He teaches at the Tsering Art School at Shechen monastery near Bodhnath in Kathmandu, and has a small room where he and his two assistants produce Thangkas. I asked him what individual creativity a thangka artist was allowed, and he told me that he had some flexibility in producing backgrounds. A genuine thangka takes about a month of labour to produce. Unfortunately the artists who make them are in competition with those who only imitate the form of the thangka; a lookalike can be completed much quicker because the time required for layout and preparation is cut. It takes five years to apprentice as a thangka painter - there's not only the technique to learn, but also all the symbols, postures, and ratios to memorise. I admire the skill, but unfortunately - as art - it's not for me.

Some of us visited the traditional medicine hospital in Lhasa, where we were shown medicine thangkas. Tibetan medicine, is partially religious in nature, and uses thangkas as reference works for diagnosis and healing. Much of it sounded fairly medieval - they've all kinds of instruments for blood letting, prayer and meditation is used, and urinalysis includes the doctor tasting it. Jeff, who'd done a year of medicine before he went on to more sleep-friendly studies, was not quite impressed.

Topics for the Dinner Table

It's obvious just how fungible reality is when you compare things from the perspective of the Chinese Government and the Tibetan Government in Exile. The realities they lay out are as different as white and black. In one, Tibet is a land full of happy frolicking people liberated from the yoke of serfdom, in the other, life has rarely been worse for the Tibetans suffering under the yoke of colonial invaders dedicated to stamping out all things Tibetan. With the limited information I have, the truth appears to be one of those awkward shades of grey.

Long ago, the Tibetans were ruled by and/or politically connected to the Mongols -- "Dalai" is Mongolian for "ocean", and the title "Dalai Lama" was bestowed by a Mongol Leader in the mid-16th century, well after the start of Tibetan Buddhism. Owing to the one-time Mongol unification of Mongolia/China/Tibet and later suzerainty or sovereignty by China over Tibet, the Chinese now justify sovereignty over Tibet. If you'd like a minor complicating factor, when Nepal invaded Tibet a couple of centuries back, China kicked them out and obtained tribute for over a hundred years. Further complicating the whole mess is the fact that the "Greater Tibet" claimed by the Tibetan Government in Exile is about double the size of what is now the Tibetan Autonomous Region - an area that while having an ethnic Tibetan majority was never in its entirety ruled by the current Dalai Lama. And there are perhaps strategic reasons for holding Tibet, too: many of the region's major rivers originate there - Mount Kailash is the source of four - and it's been argued that water is the major reason many of the wars of this century will really be (and in some cases have been) fought.

And the historical boundaries of territory is one of those nasty grey areas; just look at the changes in Europe since the mid-16th century. For that matter, just look at the changes in Europe since the mid-20th century -- or 1990, for that matter. Should the fact that X percentage of Tibetans want independence from China matter? Should the fact that X percentage of Kurds want independence from Turkey/Iraq or Y percentage of the Northern Irish want independence from Britain or Z percentage of Basques want independence from Spain matter? There are independence movements all over. Is there a minimum percent? And how consistent should one be in supporting claims, whether historical or ethnogeographic - if, indeed, one should? England used to belong to well... lots of places, Texas used to be part of Mexico, much of Vietnam used to belong to the Cambodians, Egypt belonged to Macedonia (Greece, not Yugoslavia), etc., and in the mid-16th century there wasn't a European or Asian on the east coast of Australia. I don't have an answer, sorry, but I am very happy being Australian and living in Australia.

Nepal has a lot of Tibetans living here. When the Dalai Lama fled in 1959, so did a hundred thousand other Tibetans, more have fled since, and many of them didn't travel as far as he did. There's a large population in Kathmandu, but a far more visible population in and around Pokhara, where they try to sell handicrafts to any and all. Apparently many of the souvenirs in Tibet are imported from Nepal. They are still refugees - the daughter of one exile told me that even though she was born in Nepal, she couldn't get a Nepali Passport. I wonder, though, how the Tibet of pre-Chinese 1948 aligns with the memory of those few adults and adolescents who were alive then, or even how the Tibet of 1959 aligns with the memory of adults and adolescents who were not of privileged castes.

"All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?" - from Monty Python's Life of Brian

I know that the Chinese have been for much of their rule been bad for many Tibetans. There have been a lot of Tibetans killed and arrested. Numbers are fuzzy and up for a lot of debate - the Tibetan Government in Exile claims 1.2 million, but consensus is that the figure is unhelpfully exaggerated but still in the hundreds of thousands. There are still Tibetans being arrested or killed. An influx of other ethnicities has occurred. There's been repression and religious persecution and censorship. And yet, I don't know - balance of evils - if the Tibetan populace is worse or better off since 1948, and if so by how much. Mortality rates have dropped, education has climbed, and monks now have the benefit of cell phones, cigarettes, and computers.

Life expectancy used to be woeful, not helped by a hideous infant mortality rate. It's still not great, comparatively speaking, but it's much better than it was. Education rates are far better than they were. Penn and Teller, by the way, did a scathing segment on life in Tibet under the Dalai Lamas on their show Bullsh*t. When the Dalai Lama still ruled Tibet, it did, it seem, have slavery/serfdom. As a republican and an atheist, I find the combination of feudal monarchy and theocracy an ugly one, though god-kings probably find the combination of republicanism and atheism ugly too. And the benefits of traditional culture versus colonialism vs savagery (noble or otherwise) vs progress is a longstanding and worldwide debate. I'm not sure that life for nomadic Tibetans is worse now than in 1948.

You can't even say that life has never been worse for Dalai Lamas than under Chinese Rule. Of the fourteen Dalai Lamas, five out of thirteen died before the age of twenty-five, three of them before achieving their majority. It's probable that some, if not all, were murdered. There's nasty internal politics going on with the Gelugpa sect, too - in recent years a schism between the Dalai Lama and his followers and those who worship Shugden has arisen and monks have been murdered. China has meddled, too. In particular, when the 10th Panchen Lama died, the 11th was announced by the Dalai Lama. This boy was unacceptable to the Chinese government, and the monk who selected the boy was arrested, the boy and his family were taken into 'protective custody', a new round of lots were shaken and drawn. As a result a Chinese approved Panchen Lama instated. Not that Chinese interference is needed - there are two rival candidates as Karmapa Lama of the Kagyupa sect. It's all very Holy Roman Empire with its popes and antipopes, and would be a little less theologically problematic if the High Lamas of the Gelugpa and Kagyupa sects didn't reincarnate. The Sakyapa sect's lineage is done by heredity instead.

But there are arrests and repression and just recently what appears to be the cold-blooded murder of unarmed civilians by troops. Tibetans who flee to Dharamsala in India and then return to Tibet face not only arrest, but difficulty in getting employment once they return. And there's censorship. There are websites unaccessible from China; the BBC was one, and Wikipedia was only unblocked while we were in the TAR. Just as the Great Wall of China failed to keep the barbarians from invading - twice it failed catastrophically allowing them to take over - so the Great Firewall of China fails to stop news from coming in. There are proxy servers and minor websites and news aggregators and a myriad of other ways for information to filter in.

And, as a tourist, it's the atmosphere of repression that's a bad thing - you watch what you write and particularly what you say. There were security cameras and (reportedly) hidden microphones in various places. There may have been fake monks, informers, and agents provocateur. Rumours swirled about a foreign tour group that was arrested at Shigatse's Tashilumpo Monastery after the tour leader told his group about the Panchen Lama controversy. I can't find a source for it - who knows, it may just be a legend - but it was feasible, and that's enough. That's probably why the topics of choice at our dinner table seemed to invariably end up being scatological, and that's no Bullsh*t.

Some source material:

The 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica entry written before Tibet's period of de-facto independence (highly recommended)
An Atlantic Monthly article on Tibet through Chinese Eyes
A counter-view on repression in Tibet
UN stats (the data sources may be biased, particularly for the early figures, though)
Wikipedia's Entry (like all wikipedia articles take with buckets of salt)
A counter-view on Tibet (with some more links down the bottom)
Background and analysis of the Shugden controversy
Open letter from Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, the founder of the breakaway NKT sect/organisation
A decade-old Tibet FAQ (much of the information may be out of date)

Sacred Sites

One night as we sat around, C. railed against corruption in the monasteries. He'd been a monk for a couple of weeks, and was currently alcoholised and angry; luxuriously soft beds, mobile phones, the exploitation of nomads who made barely anything a year, and fat monks were his targets.

I've alluded elsewhere to the cash-centrism in Tibetan temples, and his rant - from what I saw - seemed at least reasonable. Few places felt sacred; many of them just felt crowded and oldish, and some just felt crowded. In addition to a few minor locations - a couple of hill-side nunneries and hermitages, and a few small back-street temples - the complexes that seemed to me to retain a real sense of the sacred were Pabonka, parts of Samye, and Sakya.

Pabonka, west of Sera Monastery, is possibly the oldest monastery in Lhasa; there's some debate as to whether it or the Jokhang is older. We visited it as part of our stroll up the mountain. It was a quiet but welcoming place, which few temples seem to be, and the monk stationed at the main temple was happy to show us around - the carefully-painted murals, the statues of bodhisattvas and lamas, and the main relic of Pabonka: a stone carving of "om mani padme hum", supposedly the oldest in existence. Outside and up some stairs is a small shrine in a walled-off cavelet, its ceiling low and sloping. On top of the rock is built the monastery proper; when we were there, the monks were busy chanting in the cramped chapel on its upper floor. There's a nunnery up the hill that's worth a visit, too. It has a sacred well/spring in a walled-off grotto barely large enough for use to stand in.

Samye was where the first monastery in Tibet was built. We stayed in a fairly rudimentary hotel built within the monastery grounds. Adjacent to the the hotel is the main building, which was damaged during the Cultural Revolution but renovated some years back. It contains a temple as well as some minor chapels and shrines; there's one that you access from the main room by crawling through a hatch in a panel and climbing up a ladder. I walked the khora (a circuit round a sacred site) around the outskirts of the grounds, spinning the prayer wheels and ducking into the outbuildings, each of which had one or more shrines. I actually found I preferred some of the outbuildings to the main building -- go figure.

Sakya was the last of the major monasteries that we visited. Although there were many older places that we visited, Sakya felt the most ancient. Its walls were roughly plastered with a section that had crumbled away under repair, its ground was uneven, and its arrangement of prayer wheels odd: just as Buddhist swastikas are clockwise in rotation, so Tibetan Buddhists walk their khoras widdershins, spinning prayer wheels with their right hand. At Sakya, however, there were prayer wheels placed so that they could only be spun with the left hand unless you were walking the khora deosil, which is done only by Bon practitioners. It was lunch, so the Sakya buildings were closed and we didn't go inside, but there was one chapel with a skull on the door, and interesting decorations hanging from the roof of the porch: motheaten stuffed wolves, vultures, and other predators.

I was not alone, might I add, in finding a number of the holy sites we visited to be little more than buildings, though some also really liked the Jokhang. The Jokhang is the central temple in old Lhasa. It's large and ancient, and devout pilgrims prostrate themselves before it, around it, and in it. For me, it's not the Jokhang but the Barkhor around it that I like. The Barkhor is in many ways just a market area, with stalls on stone cobblestones, but because it surrounds the Jokhang there's one-way foot-traffic around it, and signs to streets running off it are labelled as exits. At dusk, when it's time for evening prayers, a flow of Buddhists and others walk khoras around it.

Tibetan Buddhism is heavily influenced by the pre-Buddhist shamanistic Bon religion, the Bon religion is traditionally a sky-centric religion, and more than walled spaces and enclosed candle-lit buildings, it is the high barren places which retain the most magic. White stupas sit on hilltops smothered in a tangle of prayer flags. Every time a prayer flag flutters, it sends a prayer. Prayer flags - yellow, green, red, white, blue, over and over - are strung over passes, and over gullies above Pabonka, too. From sufficient distance with their colour bleached it looks as though some gigantic spider has webbed the crevices of the mountain. White scarves, "kotas", are thrown at holy statues and stupas, or tied to prayer flags where they too can flutter. Where many traverse the high places, a litter of prayers on squares of paper coat the ground - stacks of "wind horses" that have been tossed in the breeze. In death, Tibetans are neither cremated nor inhumed. Instead, they undergo "sky burial", where their corpses are taken up-mountain and prepared for the vultures to strip. [Incidently, Colin, Japp, Jeff and Liz, who had been attempting to reach the top of the mountain behind Sera the same day we did the less-strenuous mid-mountain path up from Pabonka, had to turn back when they were hundreds of vultures who had turned up for a sky burial gathered and started swooping].

Happy New Year

taroso — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 07:36:00 GMT

I'm the last of our little group of passengers left in Kathmandu, Col and Jaap having both flown off to Thailand this morning, and I'm sitting in an Internet cafe just off Jochne, better known as "Freak Street". Freak Street, which runs south from Kathmandu's historic Durbar square, was once a mecca for visiting hippies but when I walked down it there wasn't another foreigner outside, and only a handful in its shops; the bar and restaurant-infested Thamel region a kilometre further north is the tourist ghetto now. I've been happily ensconced in Thamel for half a week now, and will be there a few days longer while I unwind from two months' back-to-back tours and try to write up my backlog of posts for this journal.

Thamel was rather quiet yesterday as lots of businesses remained closed or had limited trading hours owing to it being the last night of the Hindu Diwali festival, which in Nepal is generally called "Tihar". For that matter, Thamel has been far more subdued than expected (though I've yet to experience a non-festival night so this may be inaccurate); it's not Banglamphu or Kuta. Parts shut down fairly early and well before midnight many stretches of Thamel are dark; by a not-entirely unrespectable hour of the morning swathes of Thamel are pretty deserted. Still, there are things open 24 hours a day.

We crossed from China into Nepal on the 19th of October (Thursday), the first day of Tihar. Tihar this year was a little unusual, being six days long instead of the usual five days. On the first day, Kaag Pooja, rice was offered to crows. On the second, Kukur Pooja, dogs were decorated with garlands and tika (the facial paint) and offered food and worship. Apparently it's the only day that Nepali dogs get any respect; certainly a little make-up is not enough to make me any more of a dog person than I'm not now.

On the third, Laxmi Puja, candles and lamps were lit both inside and out, and an orangish path drawn from an outside lamp to the interior of a premises to attract the favour of Laxmi, goddess of wealth, and even a few days on you can still see traces of the paths. It's a general truth well known to arsonists everywhere that firelight makes ugly places pretty, and Thamel - not particularly ugly for a tourist ghetto - was no exception when thousands of additional lightsources warmed its streets and alleys. This night also coincided with the New Year of the Newari (the indigenes of the Kathmandu valley).

The fourth day ("Gai Puja") saw cows being honoured, though there were few - if any - cows to be seen on the city streets of Thamel. The object of the fifth day's worship varied: the Newari paid homage to themselves ("Mha Puja"), others to oxen ("Goru Puja") and/or their dung ("Gobardhan Puja").

Yesterday, the sixth and final day ("Bhai Tika"), saw sisters pay homage to their brothers by daubing their foreheads with tika; the brothers reciprocate with gifts. Jaap participated in one such ceremony with the family of the girlfriend of his locally-based friend Shashi, the girlfriend of his locally-based friend Shashi, and his locally-based friend Shashi* and returned with red tika plastering his hairline bloody - he'd had seven, each one representing a chakra but only the highest remained. [*I suppose I could have written "his locally-based friend Shashi, Sashi's girlfriend, and her family" but while that would be less structurally hideous, it would also be rather less true ;-]

As part of the celebrations they set up bamboo swings - just for fun and entertainment, I think, rather than for any particular religious purpose - with four huge poles planted in the ground, bound at the top. Off this frame, a seat is hung by rope. There were a few around Dhulikhel, and we saw one being used yesterday near the Bodhgaya Stupa.

New Years Resolutions? None, apart from my usual resolution to make no resolutions. New Years Resolutions tend to be broken which leads to unhappiness. Besides I have no shortage of long-term goals; it's short term decisions that I'm short on - where am I going to go in Nepal, and when? But that's a decision for tomorrow. Or the day after.

Heights and Depths

taroso — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 09:35:00 GMT

20: End of Phase 2c (Beijing to Kathmandu via Tibet)

The last dinner of our tour was held in a Tex/Mex-ish restaurant in Kathmandu, and afterward our tour leader Brett was presented with a little scrapbook as a thank-you and memento of the trip. A few people had to leave at that point owing to starting tours the next day; the rest opted for drinks at the bar opposite. The formal end of tour wasn't quite the end of things as a number of us remained in Kathmandu for varying durations, so there were a few more meals, a trip out to the Tibetan Bodhnath stupa and the art school nearby followed by a walk down to Pashupatinath (the holiest Hindu temple in Nepal), and some general hanging out. It was an excellent trip, and after 28 days or more, despite the potential for stress and friction, we were still a cohesive group.

19: Quiet Days

Before coming to Kathmandu, we stopped for a couple of days in nearby Dhulikhel. Our hotel was a hillside resort; a little slice of luxury after a period of rough travel and rude accommodation. It had tablecloths, flushing toilets, hot showers, cable TV, and what can reasonably described as "cuisine" - their restaurant does a haunch of chicken dressed as a bird, with a "head" and "tail" of vegetables. So, we received a very gentle introduction to Nepal (which in turn is supposed to be a very gentle introduction to India).

We strolled between village fields. We stopped to watch a school sports carnival. Girls had a "sari race", where they had to put a sari on and then run to the finish line, boys had a "cockfight", where they had to hop on one leg and evict or unbalance their opponants, and the female teachers played musical chairs while the male headmaster called the changes. We caught a local bus and rode on the roof to the town of Panauti, where we wandered the streets and visited the Indreshwar Mahadev temple complex at the confluence of two visible rivers (according to legend there's a third river submerged underground, so that a trident is formed). On the bank across from the fork, a funeral was taking place, with a crowd of men around a corpse prepared for a pyre, and a few women hovered around the periphery. Rituals were performed, and the pyre lit.

18: Border Zone

Our entry to Nepal was over the "Nepal-China Friendship bridge". You could tell that inter-country amity was a key consideration when it was designed, because it only had one narrow lane each way, and traffic was snarled so badly on the final slope it that our drivers dropped us at the top of the last bend and let us walk the last few hundred metres. We were fortunate that they took us so far, as between the immigration checkpoint at the border town of Zhang Mu and the bridge lie miles of no-man's-land, with shops and (what appeared to be) dwellings lining the road as it scribbles back and forth down steep and shady slopes.

Because of its orientation, I found Zhang Mu ("Dram" if you were Tibetan and "Khasa" if Nepali) visually and spatially interesting. Taken in isolation, its buildings are on the ugly side: streetfront counters selling the pick of Nepali imports, eateries of various styles and standards, cramped pink-lit massage parlours where pink-lit masseuses perch on pink-lit couches, and residential buildings; in other words, it has all the facilities that make a Chinese border town just another town. And yet, it's placed on so steep a slope. The only road to the checkpoint, one-laned for much of its truck-jammed length, serpentines down for quite a distance from the last turn off. A precipitous mess of stairs allows a longer walk to be avoided by cutting from one part of the road to another. The ugly buildings pile layer upon layer up the slope, and many have a view: of other ugly ugly buildings further down, of the green and pleasant no-man's-land, across the gorge to Nepali trees and farmed slopes, and of the river and falls between them.

17: Coming Down

Zhang Mu didn't feel like Tibet at all. The area around it was lush and the vegetation thick. There were trees -- so many real trees. Our road there passed (and in one case passed under) waterfalls, and once when we paused we saw what looked like a small logging camp way down by the river. Tinggri, where we spent the previous night was undoubtedly Tibet: barren, dry, treeless, and with the Himalayas stretching across the horizon. Our room in the motel there was one of the rougher permanent structures I've been in. I suspect from the little quirks in the architecture that concrete may have been slathered over underlying mud buildings. The feet of the bed were on wooden blocks because the concrete floor was neither flat nor level, opened-up beer cartons were used to line the base of the mattress, the walls and roof were dressed with floral cloth. In the shower room, tepid water streamed from a pipe embedded in the roof; the concrete underfoot there was freezing, and so was the wind, which came in through gaps overhead.

16: At the Bottom of the Top of the World

It was the very end of season at Everest Base Camp, only mid-October and icy but not snowy yet, but already some of the tents there were in the process of being packed up to be taken away by the trucks that were there. The proprieter of the Hotel California - yes, one of the tents there - said that by the next day half of the tents would be gone. We were the last of his customers for the year, and his tent was being packed up that day. Our last week would go quickly, said Brett, and it did. From arriving at our hotel at Rongphu Monastery, just eight kilometres frm Everest Base Camp and the highest monastery in the world, to the end of tour took just seven days.

The Nepali Everest Base Camp, a hike of weeks even if you do fly in to Lukla, is far less convenient than the Chinese one. It only takes two or three hours to walk up, and approximately 1 hour 22 minutes to race down as adrenaline and oxygen floods your system. Just behind the camp is a a hillock on which sits a stupa swaddled by prayer flags. The hillock, a pile of brown dirt and rocks still well below the snowline, isn't much higher than the valley floor - it's far lower than the moraine overlooking the camp which we came over as a "shortcut" - but I was still puffed when I climbed up with Jeff and Liz. There's an uninterrupted view of Everest from the top, and because it was still early the clouds had yet to shroud the peak. Yes, unless you've already been you really should!

Our first view of Everest had been a distant one the morning before, when our drivers made a pass-top stop to let us admire it. "That's not so big", I said - we were still a fair distance away. By afternoon the Himalayas looked a bit bigger - the next major pass had a view of half of the top ten mountains, though as the afternoon clouds had come up they were a bit harder to distinguish.

15: The High Life

Coming down from Base Camp my prediction of when we would be back was actually way under. Because of the rarified air at altitude, distant objects look clearer and thus much closer. The lack of air pressure at altitude means that food packets puff right up; in theory they can even burst. At altitude batteries don't last - my torch was dim after 15 minutes use - though this is due to low temperature rather than lack of oxygen. The key problem at altitude, though, is the potentially fatal Acute Mountain Sickness. We were all affected to some degree, but as we had weeks of acclimatisation, none of the problems were particularly serious. There were a couple of nosebleeds, headaches a-plenty, difficulty sleeping, and most of all difficulty breathing (you can get puffed climbing one flight of stairs), but noone had to stay behind or receive emergency treatment. Most of the over-50s on my tours were rather fit (two of them were Hash House Harriers) but there are scarily fit over-50s out there. While we were comfortably ensconced in four wheel drives, droves of them were cycling their way up mountains on their way to Everest Base Camp.

We were packed four or five (including driver) in fairly beefy four wheel drives; mine was shared with Japp, Helen, and Vanessa. Over long days of travel as we travelled westward from Lhasa, we sat, and read, and chatted, and played games, and watched the arid landscape through the dust of those ahead. Nepal is largely attractive; I don't think that I can say that about Tibet proper, apart from the area around Zhang Mu (which, although territorially Chinese, is Nepali in climate and terrain), but the description "harsh beauty" does fit it. I think of Tibet as being high desert even where there are rivers and there's grass on the ground. There is very little vegetation, and even fewer wild trees -- there used to be more, it's said, but they were clear-felled decades back. The air is cold but dry, affecting lips and sinuses in particular. It has bare cliffs and hilltops, tumbles of rocks and boulders, rivers carving their way across desolate plains, and rolling hills where patches of dirt and sand interrupt the stumpy brown grass. Yet, even miles from the nearest village in the middle of nowhere, you still see people - nomads and herders, campers and travellers, and farmers eking out a subsistance existance.

Back when we were still on the Tibetan grasslands, before we'd reached the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), I noticed a sandy patch, and wondered if it was a sign of impending desertification. The area was once the Tethys Sea, Steve told me. When the plate India's on hit Eurasia, massive uplift occurred, the Himalayas formed, and sand and shells got lifted kilometres above sea level. We saw more sand after that, and once (while driving from Lhasa to Samye) we stopped to admire the odd contrast of sanddunes beside the road with snowcapped peaks in the background across the river.

14: Ups and Downs

One of the ways to help acclimatise to altitude is to walk up things. It gets the lungs working, stretches your capacity, and when you sleep you do so below the maximum altitude you've reached that day.

Gyantse has not only a monastery - visited, of course - but also what's left of a hill fortress. It's where a British force under Captain Francis Younghusband, invading on dubious pretext, defeated the Tibetan Army with the assistance of machine guns and artillery. I decided to shortcut the zigzagged path, and was badly winded by the time we reached the main gateway - and the highest point in the fortress was many stairs further up.

While in Lhasa, four of us - Bruce, Julia, Steve, and I - walked partway up the mountain behind Sera monastery. There are many routes up and down and across the hill, but we took the one which went past the monasteries and nunneries. A more energetic quartet - Colin, Japp, Liz, and Jeff - made an attempt on the top - 5000 metres or so. It was a fine route, with views looking down to central Lhasa, the Potala Palace, surrounding mountains and hills, and tunnels at their foot. It was also just long enough a walk for me. The Potala Palace also involved quite a bit of climbing - though stairs rather than slopes (the only slope to walk is from its exit to the bottom of the hill). It's by far the grandest and most imposing building in Lhasa and is full of temples, shrines, and tombs of Dalai Lamas. Only parts of it are accessible on the route through it, however, which starts at the top in the "Red Palace", and works its way down through the older lower "White Palace" floors.

Our first real climb, though, took place in Langmusi. We'd started with a walk to visit one of its two monasteries, and even just walking to temples twenty metres up the slope was tiring. Behind that monastery is a small valley which we walked up which was far nicer on the lungs. The route goes past a holy cave and the spring from which the valley's stream flows, and into a verdant rock strewn open area. Our group wandered off in different directions. A few were content to stick to the valley floor, a few decided to really push themselves and vanished in search of the heights, and Ness and I ascended one slope through spiky scrubby bushes to a rock outcropping where we met Col and Steve who'd chosen an approach from the other side. For some reason, slopes are far easier to ascend than stairs.

13: Vodka Training

There were two Intrepid groups that travelled on the train from Beijing to Xian. It's a matter of fact that ours was more fun. Kevin and Lea, who'd come off a Russia to China Vodka Train tour, had been quietly gnawing their limbs off in disappointment at the fellow passengers they'd been saddled with. We gave them and their Genuine Russian Vodka a warm welcome to our group, and congaed up the train in search of the dining carriage. I can understand why they were so disappointed with their fellow passengers. When we arrived at Xian, our group and theirs ended up at the same bar. By about half past ten, all the members of their group had trickled away in dribs and drabs in cups of warm milk and bed, except for Keven, Lea, and their tour leader Sharon.

Most of our group, the skeletal remnant of their group, and a couple of other Intrepid tour leaders who were in town, went to the Black Cat nightclub. And there was music and dancing and podium dancing and for some there was a little pole dancing. And there was more vodka, which may not come as a surprise given that previous sentence. Nor was it particularly surprising when we heard they'd left their tour behind: the prospect of days caged on Three Gorges cruise had apparently lost its appeal. I believe they rejoined their fellow passengers afterward.

12: Sights and Brett

We went and saw the Terracotta Warriors near Xian, which were impressive in their quantity and artisanship but... okay. We went to see part of the Great Wall at Mutianyu, and tobogganned down (the friction burn on my elbow still isn't quite healed). And we went with an excellent local guide, Kevin, to the Forbidden City in Beijing, much of it under repair and inaccessible. In the park behind the Forbidden City, we walked up the hill to see the smog-drenched skyline, came down and watched a master calligrapher write on the flagstones using water and a sponge-tipped pole, and then went and feasted at a nearby restaurant.

We had quickly established - by our first meal - that Bruce, Florian, and I loved our chilli, and it was lucky for us that we had stops in Beijing, Xian, and Chengdu (capital of Sichuan) because it was hard to satisfy a capsaicin addiction in Tibet: if they had chilli sauce, it was more tomato than anything else. Not everybody shared our taste, and our second dinner - in a Sichuan restaurant in Beijing - brought tears to the eyes of several. The dinner included a particularly memorable chilli chicken, which had less chicken than chilli (they were the dried variety, so they weren't so very hot).

It seems, by the way, that almost everyone who joins a package tour falls into one of four categories. We all did. These categories are Technical (science/engineering/computing), Public Service, Financial (including accounting), and Health (or ex-health). The one exception was Kym on the Gecko's tour, whose wife Di was ex-health. Go Figure.

So - who were my fellow passengers?
Alain - Quebec, Canada.
Bruce - Canberra.
Colin - Leeds, UK -- travelling for at least a year.
Florian - Switzerland, originally Germany.
Helen - Sydney.
Japp - Southern Holland -- travelling for 5+ months.
Jeff - San Diego, USA.
Julia - Köln, Germany.
Liz - San Diego, USA. Fiancee of Jeff (incidently because 3/4 of her surname is contained within Jeff's, they're going to portmanteau their names when they wed -- very cool!).
Steve - Shepperton.
Vanessa - Sydney. Friends with Helen
And our tour leader was Brett, originally from Michigan, USA

We'd first met as a group in the bar of the hotel (though Japp and I, who were sharing a room, met earlier that day and went for a bit of a wander). We sat around the table there, and introduced overselves. We received cloth bags, chopsticks, and a booklet with information and maps for the places we'd be visiting. Brett went over some background information about the areas we were going to, what would happen, and life on the tour in general. He leafed through the trip notes and read out a key passage:

This is a demanding, overland travel trip, which is suitable for the experienced traveller. The affects of altitude, long days travel in old 4WDs over extremely rough roads, accommodation in shared dormitories that vary in quality from the basic to very basic and the possibility of severe and sudden climate changes means that this is definitely not a trip for the armchair traveller. Be prepared for no showers for several days, and in the event of a landslide blocking the road you may be required to walk carrying your own luggage for unspecified distances.

Then we went out for Peking Duck at a local restaurant.

11: Start of Phase 2c (Beijing to Kathmandu via Tibet) / End of phase 2b (Hanoi to Beijing).

We went out for Peking Duck at a local restaurant, though two passengers didn't attend. Afterwards, five of us went for last drinks at the bar next door. Phase 2b, the Gecko's tour from Hanoi to Beijing was not nearly as successful as phases 2a or 2c, and one critical factor was the difference in tour leaders. Both Long and Brett not only really knew their tour routes, but also really seemed to really enjoy their time with the group. Tina, unfortunately, did not give that impression. Another critical factor was the attitude and actions of some of the participants. Phase 2c had the potential to go far worse than phase 2b, after all. Both had long days of travel, uncomfortable nights on sleeper trains, and stomach problems. But in one, they triggered problems; in the other, they were bonding experiences.

The tour wasn't by any means all bad - there were some excellent meals and conversations, activities we did, and locations that we saw. But as a unified whole, it wasn't so good. At the end of tour, I wrote a letter. It was written out in longhand on the fly, so the structure is imperfect and sections will be elliptical if you're not familiar with all the gory details (some information is also in previous entries - see Oil and Water in particular), but bear with me and I'll share some of them in later sections.

10: Dear Tina,

Firstly, I regret and apologise for any of my contributions to making the tour worse. Unfortunately once morale in a group starts to decline, it's very difficult to reverse the slide, and events which would (hopefully) be laughed off or shrugged off if morale were higher tend to cascade and increase.

I also realise that not every problem can be laid at your door - there is blame that can and should be apportioned to your company, Gecko's oversight of tour membership, possibly rules and restrictions on tour guides in China, and various members of the group. BUT (and it's a big "but"): A number of problems - even though not directly your fault or responsibility - would, I believe, have been mitigated or avoided if your tour leading had been more effective.

One principle of problem resolution is: if people complain about something there IS a problem that needs to be fixed. This may not be the problem that they're complaining about - quite often it won't be - but there is, nevertheless, a problem. Dismissing their complaints or saying "that's not my responsibility" is only guaranteed to make things worse.

As a tour leader, one of your roles is as a facilitator. In other words, you are there to ensure that things go as smoothly as possible. We realise that there are things you do not have the authority to do - things which only your company or Gecko's can authorise or change - BUT you are the representative of both your company and Gecko's. You are also, as tour leader, our representative TO your company and Gecko's. If and When there are problems you need to:
- Determine the real problem
- Show that you understand that there is a problem
- Come up with some ideas/strategies for fixing the problem - perhaps with the group
- Try and negotiate up your hierarchy about the problem/solution

And, most importantly:
- Keep everyone informed - even if nothing gets done.

Unfortunately, too often it seems that you have been content to be a transport and accomodation coordinator only. This is an active tour and promoted as such, and you not only avoid the active components, but in the case of Tiger Leaping Gorge seemed to work hard to dissuade all but the easiest trekking. Worse, your knowledge of locations is patchy. I realise that tour leaders cannot have in-depth knowledge of every place visited but certainly the basics are:
- Where is the exchange closest to the hotel, what can it change, and what hours.
- Where is a place to have early breakfast/24 hour restaurant if available.
- Where is a nearby (cheap) Internet (if rare in the location)
- Where is a cheapish laundry (if hotel prices are ridiculous, as quite often they are)
- Where are some good eateries, including for vegetarians - preferably with English menus
- What and where are some interesting but minor (ie: not heavily promoted) things to see and do.
- Provide participants with a map of the above - not everyone has a guidebook.

Scheduling has, as you know, been a major contribution to problems. Compounding this has been the lack of dayrooms, which are standard on other Gecko's tours. These may be the fault of your company or Gecko's. Compounding this, however, has been the number of poor meals/snacks that we've needed to have as a result of not being able to either have dinner before leaving, or having to transfer from one extended travelling duration to another. We could have broken for even half an hour in Dali after getting off the train; similarly in Wuhan on our way to Yang Shuo.

In the movie "Gosford Park", one of the characters says that the key attribute of a good servant is "Anticipation". The same, I believe, is true of a good tour leader - and I can only judge by my experience of Vietnam. Anticipation means not only having things booked well in advance, but also using part of your "free time" to expand your knowledge of places so that you can answer basic questions with confidence. It also means identifying and understanding problems before people complain about them - and preferably putting a solution into place, so that you can say "This is what I'm doing". By showing anticipation, you show that you care about the concerns of your tour participants. In the last few days, you have picked up more, but unfortunately it's rather late in the tour.

Anyway, I hope you will take these comments as constructive, and wish you more success in future tours,

Taro
PS: If people ask durations, rather than hedging, just say "About 4-6 hours, depending on traffic", etc. We know that exact figures are impossible to predict. Short statements will make you sound more confident.

Yes, I understand that there's a certain amount of irony in that what I've written about fundamentally concerns empathy and her lack of it, but if it doesn't come naturally, you can at least approximate/synthesise it if you try.

9: End Times

Much of the tour was strained to some degree or another, but breaking points had been reached, there was shouting and tears, a couple of people had a meeting with the local Gecko's rep to complain, and there was reportedly threats of a fistfight. The structure of the Gecko's tour, incidently, was different to the Intrepid one: Brett was employed directly, while Tina was employed through a local Chinese company and Long through a local Vietnamese company with oversight by Gecko's. I think that it helped that most on the Intrepid tour either were a backpacker, or had been one in the last couple of years.

Even the end of the tour was not without its moments, though. Climbing the Great Wall at Simatai, for instance, was a fantastic experience. The section was less well maintained than the section at Mutianyu, but that was ok because it felt more natural. Standing at the bottom, it looked absolutely daunting, but only the first climb from the second to the third watchtower was really hard going, and on reaching the final point (further travel was blocked off as that section of the wall was still unrestored) it felt like a reasonable achievement and the view was clear (which apparently it isn't always).

8: Trains

Those who were on the train from Beijing to Xian found it a great experience. Those on an identical train from Xian to Beijing didn't. Part of it was because we'd had so much train travel: Kunming to Dali, Dali to Kunming, Chongqing to Xian, and Xian to Beijing. Part of it was because three-berth sleeper trains are really uncomfortable - a couple of people ended up catching a plane to Beijing because of this. Part of it was because of scheduling. Part of it was because of the lack of dayrooms throughout the trip. And part of it was because morale was way way down at that point.

7: Scheduling

I'm not a particularly bad person, I believe - I don't torture kittens for fun~~; I do it for curiosity's sake~~ - but I did cause one passenger to cry in Beijing. We'd come off the train from Xian in the morning rush, sleep on a sleeper train is poor sleep, and we were unlikely to get rooms until midday. "Well at least we'll have rooms by the time we get there", I said with what in retrospect was over-subtle irony, as I gazed at the hellishly long taxi queue that had exceeded its barricaded confines and coiled around the hall...

Scheduling was a problem because instead of leaving after dinner, we frequently left in the afternoon, which meant that not only were we eating a large number of snacks/junk food/non-meals, but we would arrive at awkward hours of the morning. For instance, we spent too little time in Chongqing, a city I really liked just for its very city-ness, because we had to leave for the station in the middle of the day. This meant that those who went to the zoo only had half an hour to see the pandas. We then arrived in Xian at 4:30am, where under normal circumstances we would have had to have hung around until mid-morning to get a room.

6: Dayrooms

A dayroom is simply a room that's been rented until the evening. They're not essential, but they do make life nicer, because it means that you can leave your bag there, have a lie down if you want, and - particularly important if you have overnight travel - allows you to have a shower before you leave. Dayrooms were standard on both the Vietnam leg of the Gecko's tour and the Intrepid tour, and passengers who'd taken other tours (including those run by Gecko's) said that every one they'd been on had dayrooms.

In Yang Shuo, people weren't particularly impressed with the suggestion that they could pay for a dayroom if they really wanted when there was a bike ride organised during the day and a train journey that night, but things were somewhat mitigated when the when the hotel allowed us to use the toilets in the lobby to shower in - the showers, by the way, were over squat toilets so wearing thongs was advisable. Matters really came to a boil at the Three Gorges Dam, however.

5: Three Gorges Incidents

The Three Gorges Dam, the largest dam in the world, now plugs the third gorge. A cruise normally starts at Yichang (or at least it used to), cruising upstream and getting from below the dam to above it through a series of locks, so you have a chance to see it reasonably close. On the train to Wuhan, we were told that instead we'd be catching a bus to above the Three Gorges Dam - indeed above the third gorge - and the boat would be leaving at 11ish at night. People were not impressed by this change in schedule. Nor were they impressed with the prospect of no dayrooms, needing to hang around and do nothing until we could board the boat at about 10pm as the driver was to drop us off earlier, not seeing the Largest Dam In The World at all unless they were willing to pay a couple of hundred yuan (about A$35) for a bus + dam tour, and not having a cooked dinner - Tina advised against both food from places in the area upstream, and food on the boat.

The dayrooms and the bus and dam tour? Ah, now there's another saga. Coming off the overnight train at Wuhan, we carried our bags to the bus station ten minutes away and hopped on a five-hour bus to Yichang without even time to have breakfast. This didn't leave people in a particularly good mood. The news we'd received about the change in schedule made people crosser - the Three Gorges and their dam were one of the selling points of the tour. Compounding this was the fact that Tina appeared to not only not understand why people were upset about the schedule changes and lack of dayrooms, but kept saying that it there was nothing she could do, that it wasn't her job, and that if people wanted to they could talk to her boss or Gecko's because she couldn't. A call was made to Gecko's in Melbourne.

The end result was that the cost of the bus to the Three Gorges Dam was covered, most of the passengers paid a hundred and something for the Dam tour + guide, and Sue and I saw the project area, were given dayrooms (which I didn't use, so that was a waste), and had ice cream for afternoon tea. The bus came and picked us up, and because it was late afternoon we ended up seeing the dam anyway, at a distance not too dissimilar from that which passengers on previous cruises had seen it. The boat was boardable at dusk, and we did. The food on the boat was perfectly edible, even if they did like their fried peanuts, so I ate it. Quite a few of the group, however, had prepared food for the entirety of the trip - and so didn't eat the meals because of that.

The other key incident - and I don't believe I'm particularly evil~~; I'm just written that way~~ - is that one of the passengers quit the tour. It all started with Margie, who was hopeless with names. We'd been travelling for weeks at that point, and she still had trouble with mine. I'd tried "Just think of the cards", and that had brought no joy. At one point she'd called me "Toejam" - the word had just been used in a conversation. So those of us who were eating cooked meals aboard were sitting round the dinner table, and discussing this - I'd mentioned that I was running out of incorrect names to call her - Maud, Mindy, Mavis... you run out of them quickly if you're trying to avoid repetition - and after some discussion, we ended up with the highly incorrect "Merkin" and "Minge". At that point Daniel said to Terry something along the lines of "And what about you... Terrence", and I said "No, it's not TERrence" (he'd said not to call him it way back at the start of tour, and I'd thought little of it since then), "It's terRENCE". At that point he left the table, locked himself in the cabin he shared with Dan, and shortly thereafter moved in with X. At Chongqing he left the tour. There was, it seems, a rationale for not wanting to be called Terrence, but I didn't know about it at the time, and I Don't Read Minds. Mea culpa. Mea minima culpa.

4: In Another Gorge

Tiger Leaping Gorge was probably the highlight of the Tour. I've written elsewhere about the bus breakdown on the way there, and the truck ride we took instead, but that was actually very good for group dynamics. On our first day, the walk was almost all along cliffside road. On the morning of the second day, we walked down the trail from our guesthouse to Middle Tiger Leaping Gorge to admire Middle Tiger Leaping Stone and the churning Yangtze river close up, before ascending on the short but difficult laddered route. After lunch we hiked the high trail to another guest house. On the third day, some of us continued on the high trail up and over and down through the twenty-four bends back to the village of Shangri La. The others took the shorter walk down - they'd be picked up and driven back to Shangri La. Tina wanted us all to go down, and said that the high trail wasn't worth doing and there wasn't much to see. There was: high forest, the only wild bamboo I saw in China, the river far far below, clouds drifting slowly upwards beside the path, and the cliffs of the mountain opposite. It was the most scenic of the three days (though the second was also very good), and consequently my favourite.

3: Contagion

There was a major run of the runs. Three of the tour stayed in Li Jiang (two of whom were only doing the Kunming-Kunming loop, and for whom Tiger Leaping Gorge was the focus of their tour), at least three of those who went on the trek (including myself) were affected, and others had been sick earlier but were Loperamiding their bowels into immobility. The epidemic was almost certainly the fault of X, going back as far as the bus ride from Lao Cai to Kunming on our first day in China.

We'd stopped at a small roadside shop, and he'd picked up the running hose that they'd been using to wash the bus off the ground, had a good drink, and then filled up his bottle. That was the stop, by the way, with the first disgusting introduction to Chinese longdrop toilets, and it's a reasonable supposition to believe that the same hose had been used to clean them. So even if the water was uncontaminated - and that's a big if - the hose was a definite worry. It wasn't unexpected that he came down with a bad case of travellers diarrhoea.

If you eat Chinese style, it's standard for everybody to use their chopsticks to get food from platters. After X. reported sick we started requesting individual serving spoons, but it was probably a little late by then. He wasn't careful or considerate with his illness, either: There were two occasions that I'm aware of, and probably more, where he left squat toilets absolutely painted, with no attempt to clean up after himself. Noone was impressed, and since this was early days on the tour, in combination with his other behaviour, it really played a big part in bringing people's enjoyment of the tour down (it was a factor in many of the passengers moving to another hotel in Li Jiang).

2: Facts and Figures

If this had been Tina's first time running the tour, there would have been a lot more understanding, I think, but she'd run this particular tour four times before (and had been to some of the locations on other tours). There were, as implied by my letter, a bunch of minor things that she should have known as a tour leader for a tour on the budget end of the spectrum - the contrast between the nature, quantity, and quality of information we got for Xian on the two tours was marked.

Whether or not she gave incorrect information deliberately or carelessly or ignorantly, I don't know; I've mentioned, for instance, her assessment of day three of the trek. Another instance: While most of the group were flashpackers, Dan and I were on budgets and a RMB200 tour of the Li river would have broken it. We therefore decided that we would try to do it ourselves but Tina told us there were no buses to the boat location. There were, and we did the day for about RMB120, which was more affordable. The Er Hai lake tour was disappointing for the price (she'd strongly pushed for hiring a private boat, which wasn't entirely private) and content (the best bit was at the end of the day in the town of Xi Zhou, mentioned elsewhere). A number of people strongly suspected that someone somewhere was skimming/skimping - although the only direct evidence I have is that the cost of the Martial Arts show was near half the price on the Intrepid tour than the Gecko's.

1: Early Times

Even at the first group meeting in Kunming there was a certain strain. Tina's discourse style tended to be on the hectoring side, and a couple of people who were late to the meeting got a lecturing. In addition, four of us had had two days' travel with X. behaving insanely, so our nerves were a bit frazzled. We'd had a thirteen hour bus ride from the border town of Lao Cai, having been accompanied by Long on the overnight train from Hanoi. We said goodbye to Long there (he was about to return all the way back to Hanoi on the day train as he'd another tour to lead soon) and crossed the border where, we met Tina.

0: Start of phase 2b (Hanoi to Beijing)

Wheels Within Wheels

taroso — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 12:30:00 GMT

The Wheel of Dharma

The Wheel of Dharma is one of the eight auspicious symbols in Tibetan Buddhism. Present in many religious artworks, as well as underlying some Tibetan Buddhist rituals, it signifies the cycle of death and rebirth.

Into Thin Air

Trekking in the Himalayas can be perilous as landslides, avalanches, heavy snowfalls, gale-force winds, and other more-local factors can block passes and trap or kill unlucky travellers. Up until 1990 there was a 37% fatality rate for Everest summiteers, and there's still an average of 4-5 percent chance you'll die if you try. Even lower altitudes are not without their hazards. Just a few weeks back while we were still on tour, reports filtered through to us of a party of Tibetan expeditioners who'd run into some difficulties while crossing the Nangpa pass west of Cho Oyu on their way to Nepal. According to eyewitnesses, a number of them, including a 17 year old Buddhist Nun, were blown away as they attempted the treacherous crossing, with only 43 of the original party of 70+ completing their trek. I don't think that exact figures of how many were picked ~~off up~~ up off the slopes by Chinese searchers in the area have yet been published.

Basic Training

At the base of a mountain on the northern outskirts of Lhasa lies the Sera Monastery. It's one of the key monasteries of the Gelugpa sect, and is a centre of teaching and learning, housing three monastic colleges. In a courtyard within the compound, monks gather each afternoon at 3pm to debate on religious matters. To debate, the monks split up into pairs (or small groups). One monk (or a small group), standing, asks questions; the other (or a small group), seated, responds. The technique used by interrogating monks is well worth a watch - they clap as they ask their questions, with a backhand being brought down into an awaiting palm if the answer is incorrect. There was even one interesting technique only used by what seemed to be the most stylish and proficient of debaters: the monk performs a well-balanced 360 degree turn while his right hand circles anticlockwise around his head. It's all not entirely unreminiscent of 15th century African-Brazilian dance. The dop dop of the monks' clapping can be heard from quite a distance, by the way; it's audible hundreds of metres up the mountain, at the top of the gully that lies behind the monastery.

Mark well the nation's Houses of Prayer

Whether it's the Catholic Church's historic sale of indulgences, the prosperity theology of modern Pentecostalism, or the karma-improving release of purchased birds in Southeast Asian temples, there's few things that go together so doubleplusgoodwise as religion and commerce. Temples and monasteries within Chinese borders are no stranger to the spiritually uplifting power of cash, and it's rare to find one -- of whatever denomination -- without clusters of shops or stalls selling incense, books, prayers, statues, charms, trinkets, beads, cards, services, and other essentials mandated for proper reverential worship.

Lamaseries, however, have raised the enabling of donations to a fine art, and the Tibetan faithful repay their efforts by donating with fervent regularity. Other temples provide donation boxes at important locations; Tibetan lamaseries provide opportunities to donate every few steps. Devotees clutching wads of low-denomination notes scurry from one location to another on their circuit, making their offerings. There are donation boxes, true, but also plates and dishes overflowing with takings, notes crammed into every available crack, and statues whose laps and hands spill forth notes. With such a plastering of donations, it can be hard at times to see the subject of photographs and the contents of cabinets and cases - Buddha figurines, statues of buddhas, boddhisattvas, and high lamas, religious art, and scriptures.

The seat of the Panchen Lamas is Tashilhungpo monastery in Shigatse, and in at least a couple of major shrines there are table piled with amulets and other mementos. For a minor fee you can purchase some from one of the monks manning these posts; I'm not sure how much haggling is considered polite. Photos of the late 10th Panchen Lama, a beloved figure among Tibetan Buddhists, can be seen all over Tibet both within monasteries and without, by the way. For one reason or another, no other Tibetan Buddhist figure has a tenth as many pictures on public display, and some don't even have any.

The Modern World

Such a outpouring of generosity by Tibetans (many extremely poor) is to improve their Karma, and increase their station and opportunities in their next life. Standard prayer also works to purify negative karma, but it's less efficient than the mechanical solution known as a prayer wheel, a cylinder containing or bearing one or more prayers. Every time a prayer wheel is turned one revolution clockwise, it has the same benefit as though its prayers were said once. There are portable prayer wheels on spindles which Tibetans keep in rotation as they walk, and larger prayer wheels to be turned at fixed points inside and outside monastery buildings and grounds. Prayer wheels don't even require conscious action to be effective - there are prayer wheels that function by convection as hot air rises from butter lamps, and others from the flow of water downstream, all equally efficacious per revolution.

There are Tibetan Monks who have been enthusiastic adopters of technology. It's common to see them using their mobile phones, and it was refreshing to see one particularly progressive young monk playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City at the small Internet Cafe in Langmusi. As modern hard drives reach 12000 RPM or more, for really good Karma improvement a computer might be most suitable.

Wheels

A number of Tibetan Buddhists, particularly pilgrims, will prostrate themselves in-place repeatedly outside a temple; the Jokhong in Lhasa sees quite a lot, for instance. More widespread is the kora, which is the performance of one or more circuits around a particular holy site. As prayer wheels are placed around monastery walls, etc, they are turned by those walking koras. Some will prostrate themselves at each pace, which vastly increases the amount of time required. The particularly devout will perform their prostrations facing the monastery, which increases the number of prostrations that they need to do.

Holy sites are not limited to the man-made. Mount Kailash in western Tibet has a 53 km kora around it. There are those who do their koras with prostration. There are those whose prostrations face the mountain. Once is not enough for those doing it. Three is the standard minimum, thirteen is better, and one hundred and eight koras supposedly lets you escape the Wheel of Dharma.

Yak

taroso — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 08:26:00 GMT

In Romanised Tibetan, "a" is pronounced roughly the same as the start of "about" or the "u" in "hut" rather than the "a" in "hat"? That doesn't make "Yak" quite "Yuk", since in Lhasa dialect, a word-final "k"/"g" is phonetically unreleased (or even glottalised or omitted) but it's close enough. "Unreleased" means that you cut-off the "k" as soon as you reach it; if you want to try making an unreleased word-final "k" yourself, try making a "bk bk bk" chicken sound. But I digress.

How a maid can milk a bull / And every stroke a bucketful." ("Willow's Song", Paul Giovanni)

Properly speaking, even though in common English usage "yak" is gender-neutral, in Tibetan yaks are only male; a female is either a "dri" or "nak". I'll continue, however, to improperly use "yak" only.

During warmer months, nomads herd their yaks and longhorned sheep out on the grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau. Yaks are central to the traditional Tibetan way of life. Their standard tents are made of black yak hair and filled with the smoke from burning yak dung, which gives them lung and eye diseases; their festival tents are white and decorated with floral designs. When the cold approaches, they retreat with their herds to their permanent winter homes; in one such home, we stayed.

The winter home, a cosy two-room cottage, was kept year-round by a 67 year-old grandmother. The unheated entrance room was used mainly as a storeroom (though half of our group needed to sleep there); the living room was kept warm by a yak-dung stove, which was thankfully vented through a chimney. You see hand-pressed dung drying on (vertically) walls all over. We had vegetarian thenthuk (a tasty flat-noodle stew), and tsampa (a not-so-tasty mix of yak butter, tea or water, roasted barley flour, yak cheese, and sugar; somewhat resembling cheesecake base and probably nicer if baked).

Yak cheese comes granulated, is extremely tough to chew, and is unmemorable in taste; it's unsuitable for making cheesecake. Yak yoghurt is strongly recommended if (like me) you prefer yours natural-style, and often arrives over chunks of fruit. Though yak-milk yoghurt is very pleasant, yak milk is strong tasting. It cuts through the sugar and spice of Masala tea, and yak butter is even stronger. I tried yak butter tea -- a Tibetan staple -- for the first (and probably last) time in Samye. The original reason for using yak butter instead of milk is probably that it could be stored for longer: nomads lack refrigeration, and summer on the grasslands can be warm.

Every temple is filled with yak-butter lamps, often large and multi-wicked, and many worshippers bear either bottles and jugs full of melted butter, containers of solid butter, or else small yak-butter lamps in order to keep the fuel topped up. Tibetan temples' air is heavy with the scent of burning butter, and their surfaces are coated with years-worth of burnt butter residue and congealed spillage. Sacred sculptures are made with a mixture of yak butter, barley flour, and dyes. They last while the weather is cool; when it warms they slowly melt and rancidify. These sculptures are constructed with great skill, and the butter gives them a slight translucence, making flesh and petals seem more lifelike - much as wax or marzipan is used elsewhere.

On the flat, shorter-haired dzo, a crossbred yak-cow hybrid, are more common (the backstreets of Gyangtse are filled with them), but on the high slopes, where the footing is precarious and snows can accumulate, yaks appear frequently and dzo do not. At the snowy pass overlooking the holy lake of Yamdrok Tso, groomed and saddled yaks were available for photo opportunities.

Yaks are covered with shaggy fur, normally black but sometimes white. Rough-spun yak-hair cloth, much like hessian, is used for tents and as temple shades on which are displayed Tibetan Buddhism's eight auspicious symbols. Softer wool can also be produced and turned into yarn or cloth. Their fur is wrapped around temple prayer poles, or dyed red to make decorative ruffs for Tibetan mastiffs and livestock or tassels for work animals. Their meat, apparently a touch gamey in taste, is a staple part of the Tibetan diet, and their leather, horns, and bones are all used in craftwork.

Health and Hygiene

taroso — Thu, 5 Oct 2006 13:05:00 GMT

(In which Taro continues in his quest to provide Way Way Way Too Much Information)

Steve: "He's a fountain of knowledge on squat toilets"

Taro: "I'm a bidet of knowledge"

There are lots of cultural differences to get over, and toilets have definitely been one.

In Southeast Asia, toilets -- both squat and western -- were accompanied by a hose, sprayer, or dipper; you either don't use toilet paper, or use only a small amount to dry yourself. Paper isn't flushed since it's likely to clog. Instead, a bin is provided, preferably with lid. Almost every Southeast Asian toilet I've used has been relatively clean, and once I got the hang of things, I've found them preferable to western toilets since there's no contact. Chinese squat toilets have been another matter. Southeast Asian toilets were pretty much always accompanied by water -- even if I had to fill a bucket outside. Outside of hotel rooms, Chinese toilets rarely are, which means their lidless bins are often overflowing and rank.

The first toilet we encountered, on a cliffside between Heikou and Kunming was bad - one festering room for each gender, reeking of ammonia and excrement. It was essentially a long drop toilet, except that the long drop was preceded by a slope, so there was residue. The next toilet was worse: Multiple long-drops with slopes preceding them, each toilet separated only by a waist-high divider. The concrete slopes in this one had accreted the leavings of previous users. The toilet at the entrance to Tiger Leaping Gorge had one long slope, shared by all users. This trough had running water, at least, but apparently noone had cleaned the place thoroughly in a while: What passed for air was thick with ammonia.

To be fair, there are public toilets on the other end of the scale: The ones at the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, for instance, are both fine. In Beijing, there's actually a star rating for public toilets; there was one at the Forbidden City with Four Stars awarded. Quite what this means I can't say: Perhaps they provide towel and toiletries; perhaps a spa or mints on a pillow. I've too, have started awarding ratings to toilets. One, on the way to Xiahe got a Three Brown Star Rating: No slope, just a sunlit pit below the hole. The only thing keeping it from receiving a coveted Four Brown Star Rating was that there weren't any pigs below. Apparently the one at the restaurant we didn't go to was worse!!

In places where there's no public toilets, public urination is common. This is particularly true in Cambodia, where wandering mines ensure that wandering people may never wander again, but elsewhere it's not entirely uncommon to see sober locals relieving themselves against random walls. In China, babies don't wear nappies. Instead, their clothing is designed for easy clearance - it's split so that a parent only has to pull the sides apart and point the kid towards the gutter. Apparently they're trained to go when they hear a soft whistling. In Kunming, there was even a kid clutching a toilet roll who was squatting in the dirt under a kerbside tree...

Just two things of which you must beware:

Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air

("Pollution"/Tom Lehrer)

Littering appears to be socially acceptable. Perhaps it's because there are quite a lot of workers whose job it is to sweep streets. At the dock for the Three Gorges cruise, there was a net below the gangway between the funicular lift and the dock; "It's to stop rubbish getting in the water", suggested someone. It was a surprise therefore, when the lift attendant ripped up some rubbish as she crossed the gangway and threw it into the water. Apparently there are forty-something boats plying the gorges to sweep garbage from the water.

Few places' water is potable (safely drinkable); Singapore's is and so is Dalat's, where they proudly advertise that they were the first city in Vietnam to have it. Instead you normally rely on bottled water. I have been cleaning my teeth with tap water in most cleanish-looking places on the theory that I'll only be getting a few of the local germs since I spit thoroughly, and that having a few germs is likely to make me less suceptable to diarrhoea. It's a risk, but a calculated one. By and large it appears to have paid off as I've only had one bout since Southern Thailand, and we're pretty sure that that was from group dinners -- first one member had it, then half the group had it -- but more on that elsewhere.

Water quality is not the only problem. Air quality can also be extremely poor, with smog reducing visibility severely, and causing respiratory problems - many of us have come down with persistant coughs and runny noses. Beijing's air quality is actually not so bad (they're planting a lot of trees to ameliorate the problem), Xian's is fairly awful, and Lan Zhou (which we only stopped in long enough for breakfast) supposedly has the most polluted air in China. When it's dry, however, Xian's smog does have a bright side -- literally: There's a lot of light pollution at night, and all the neon signage suffuses the place with quite a nice glow.

Almost Godly

Since starting tours I've normally had the benefit of hot water showers, which has been particularly nice lately since the weather has been coolish. Back in Indonesia (and again in Luang Prabang in Laos) showers were a rarity. Instead you used a mandi, a tub filled with cold water which you scoop out with a dipper. This sounds worse than it is. The weather -- in Indonesia at least -- is generally warm so cold water is refreshing, the tub allows impurities to settle out, and it means that you use less water than you would in a shower. A cold mandi in Laos was preferable to a cold shower, since you can easily target body areas!

Someone - I can't recall who - advised me before I left that I'd have to get used to the fact that I would stink. Deodorant was hard to find in Southern China - only large supermarkets or chemists with lots of western-oriented toiletries had it, and their range was inevitably small (whereas there was normally a wide range of other products - toothpaste in particular). Perhaps southern Chinese are low in apocrine sweat glands. Showering helps, of course, but hot water showers in humid cities can be perilous: You have a shower, get out and dry yourself, dress, and are immediately sweaty again. Hopefully a thing of the past until I get to India is when dehydration means that unexcreted urea ends up being converted to ammonia and put out in sweat.

I gave up washing my own clothing in Southeast Asia as laundries are cheap and my own poor efforts generally left clothes smelling little fresher than when I'd started. In major cities in China I have washed a few things out as laundries can be tricky to find and hotel laundry can be ridiculously expensive - A$3 for a pair of trousers, for instance? The peril of laundries in Southeast Asia was that outside of major cities, machine wash was rare. Instead "Rub and Scrub" was often the primary method used. This, for those who've not had the pleasure, involves the laundress taking a scrubbing brush and trying to remove as much fabric from your clothing as possible. Worse, about a third of the time, the amount of residual body odour removed was little better than if I'd done it myself. In cooler climates, whether clothing requires a wash is determined by the smell test: if it doesn't, it can be reworn.

Some possible uncommon but serious side effects of doxycycline include:
-- a life-threatening allergic reaction (symptoms are trouble breathing; closing of the throat; swelling of the lips, tongue, or face; hives)
-- blood problems (symptoms are unusual bleeding or bruising)
-- liver damage (symptoms are yellowing of the skin or eyes, dark urine, nausea ,vomiting, loss of appetite, abdominal pain)
-- irritation of the esophagus
(FDA Advisory)

It was a relief to reach southern China, as it meant that I could finally stop taking Doxycycline (which I've been on since before leaving home). Doxy is an antimalerial prophelapsis; if you're lucky the strain of malaria that you get infected with isn't yet immune to it. In addition to rare but serious problems it has three common side effects. The first is that you may burn more easily, but I've only burnt three times so far on travel, and never badly. The second is that it kills your gut bacteria, so it's a good idea to take yoghurt to replenish, otherwise stomach upsets are expected. The third (so I'm led to believe) is that if you get hit with malaria it only suppresses the symptoms, and doesn't actually kill the parasite, so you end up with malaria anyway.

Surfaces

taroso — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 08:54:00 GMT

Yesterday, in a park near Tianamen Square, we saw some traditional-looking buildings that had recently been built and another that was in the process of being finished: a couple of square metres of bare concrete was left uncovered and labourers perched on bamboo scaffolding were busy sticking thin brick tiles on.

Spurious oldness has been a major problem with quite a few of the cities we've visited. These are places with undoubted heritage that have been over-restored, filled with shops, and been opened to the crowds. Oh the crowds! It wasn't always this way; I'm led to believe that less than a decade ago these places had a more genuine appearance. The problem with spurious oldness is that it feels fake. The paving stones are square and unworn, the bricks moss-free and unweathered, and the roofs free of plantlife. Even if there's not a shop in sight, it feels wrong.

Yes, I know that I love Luang Prabang but there's such a variety of older premises there, and the restoration seems to have been done with more attention to authenticity. In China's old cities, many of the restored buildings are cookie-cutter in their shiny regularity. To be fair, this is probably how the Chinese tourists like it - there's crowds of them there, after all

Li Jiang: Charming while walking to one's guesthouse, with willow-lined stone canal-ettes; less charming once you actually have time get to wander the major streets. Gets more charming the moment you get away from the shops and into the crowd-free shop-less alleys up the hillside.

Yang Shuo: Yang Shuo is a backpacker haven. Much like Li Jiang's main streets, it's filled with light and music of bars and the clamour of souvenier shops and shoppers. It does have some charm, though, being nestled among the always-attractive limestone karst, and it's a bus to boat rides further north on the Li River. The Lotus Caves near the boat ride is simultaneously fantastic for its limestone formations (the "lotuses" are disk-shaped), and hideous in its tastelessness: there's concrete paths and railing, coloured lights, and advertisements for a certain hotel.

Dali: The old city is even less charming than Li Jiang since there are really no non-major streets with a natural feel. Xi Zhou, about 25 km north of the old city is worth a visit, though, as it has crowd-free shop-less alleys, old buildings, and at least one hidden temple. It's a real working town, which is really the problem with Dali, Li Jiang, and Yang Shuo: The "old" bits aren't real and don't work at being anything but tourist traps.

Then there are places where the reverse is true. Kunming, wonderfully modern in the city centre, has had a lot of its older areas torn down. Even in the centre, though, there's still a little real life if you can get off the main roads - street markets and genuine neighbourhoods. These older areas, hidden within the main blocks, probably won't last much longer, though, as stretches of waste ground lie awaiting the construction of new buildings.

Beijing has lost more than two thirds of its hutongs (alleyways) in the last few years and more are scheduled to be torn down. The blocks near Temple of Heaven Park have been shrouded by hastily-built brick walls, with most of the shops that lined the main roads there now derelict; a few dour shopkeepers hold the fort. The Olympics is coming, and preparations must be made. Shanghai is also changing rapidly, says Nik. Unfortunately I can no longer get to it on this trip, and so see it before it transforms completely.

Sorry to sound grumpy. It's not just China: I mourn the gentrification of The Rocks, the conversion of Grace Brothers Broadway into a mall, and the simplification of the layout in the Australian Museum. It might be progress, but sometimes the magic gets badly lost.

Not everywhere has been overrestored, though: The Muslim Quarter in Xian has a real feel to it despite the plethora of shops - it's amazing just how effective slightly uneven paving can be. Even Antique Alley which runs from the market past the Great Mosque is still great to wander - if you've ever wanted something with Chairman Mao on to put on a mantlepiece, this is the place to get it! The Great Mosque, by the way, was rather an unusual complex: it's very Chinese in design, with no domes but with carved animal figures.

Sometimes a place can feel wrong without any attempt at antiquity. The Three Gorges Project Area is a temporary city - a place for workers and companies associated with the Dam project. When the dam is finished, most of the city will be razed and terraformed, and a few hotels put up for visitors. Sue and I were dropped off at a hotel for a few hours while the other members of our tour went for a more in-depth look at the dam. The wing we were in was in the middle of refurbishment. I went out for a walk. The town's streets were near-devoid of cars - much less people, its parks were filled only by maintenance workers, and the local pool was empty of water and bathers.

In contrast to overfinished areas, in the countryside - particularly noticeable around Yang Shuo - the predominant architectural style of newer buildings can best be described as "unfinished". These multi-storey brick buildings are roughly-mortered but what really makes them distinctive is the way that their upper storeys appear to lack any kind of window fitting: No glass, no curtains, and no shutters. On the top storey, the stair to the roof may not have a door, and on the edge of the flat slab, a low wall may be formed. This is not an even wall, however, but what appears to be a random placement of bricks - a one or two lines in some places, and waist high or higher in others, as though the builder was using up excess bricks, or hoping to complete the wall when the money from a particularly bumper harvest came in.

Speaking of walls, I've visited two sections of the Great Wall, both restored. Simatai is rougher and less tourist-friendly than Mutianyu, though interestingly there was a section at Mutianyu where there was a section of paving deeply grooved and worn, apparently trodden by centuries of guards.

Tonight we went to the "Legend of Kungfu" show, which is promoted by agents as being "The Shaolin Monks Show". It was an impressive display of skill, fitness, and some fakir tricks, but I doubt that anyone going came out of it with any more understanding of Ch'an Buddhism than when they went in. "Shaolin", incidently, isn't mentioned anywhere in the show, however, nor does it appear on the brochure or ticket, nor is there any obvious claim that the performers are in any way genuine monks rather than highly-skilled secular acrobats and martial-artists, which is refreshing.

38 short notes

taroso — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 04:57:00 GMT

(5)

DdaDACDF

(3, 4)

If I'd done as much travel as I've done, I would have taken the Gecko's tour from Hanoi rather than from Saigon. I don't think that I would do Hanoi-Beijing overland solo, though.

(1,4,3)
It's been customary to tip drivers, etc, for services rendered. Quite what a driver has to do to not be deemed worthy of a tip is still a mystery. According to those tour members who did one optional extra, their bus driver managed to hit a dog -- and nearly its owner -- but still received his gratuity. He had, suggested our tour guide Tina, still done...

([4], 3)

Average weekly income in China is about US$45, and is rising significantly year by year.

(2)

As of last Thursday, I'm finally in the black on my credit card (again) for the forseeable future... The hope is that between now and Turkey I save a lot, so that when I hit Europe I can starve in comfortable squalour.

(3)

Petrol costs about US$0.50 in China. In Cambodia it was about US$1.

(4)

The day before the tour started, Cameron had his wallet stolen. Apparently a girl in Saigon hopped off the back of a motorbike, gave him a hug, performed what can only be politely described as a bag snatch, removed his wallet while he was otherwise distracted, and absconded with it.

(4)

China's current notes have pictures of Chairman Mao on them - For some reason, the older notes I've seen don't.

(4,5)

On the one hand, if I'd done Saigon-Hanoi myself, I would have saved a week-in-Europe or more. On the other hand, I would have missed out on a really good tour (my estimation of Long's excellence increases daily!!)

(5)

I keep my cash and passport in a hidden wallet which attaches to my belt. It's infinitely more comfortable than my money belt, which only exists to generate heat rash, but I don't suppose that a skilled razor artist will be significantly deterred.

(3,3)

A rough but easy measure to work out how prosperous a place is is to compare the ratio of motorcycles to cars. A few places have had a lot of late model cars and/or work vehicles - Ranong, for instance.

(6) [== (4) + (4)]

Vietnam had some food that was not to everyone's taste - Dried cuttlefish, with chili, and a range of eggs - pigeon, pickled/charcoaled hen eggs, and fertilised duck eggs. Long bought one of these duck eggs, and Cameron and I tried some of the yolk, which was a little stringy and slightly hard but otherwise normal. Then Long turned over the albumen, to reveal the eye and beak of a partially-formed duckling. Urgh. On the Mekong river trip, we were offered deep-fried elephant fish at lunch for a goodly sum - it looked rather monstrous but I was told by someone who'd eaten it on another tour that it was tasty. You do need to worry about Schistosomiasis if you eat Mekong River fish, though.

(4,4,8)

I was expecting accommodation to be basic - but the Vietnam leg surprised me - consistently we stayed (at least) at three star hotels with buffet breakfasts. China's has been comparatively basic - many of the rooms have had neither air conditioning nor fans, only the hotel in Kunming provided breakfast, and most of the tour members moved out of our guesthouse in Li Jiang into a more upmarket hotel (I didn't since a/ I can cope with tepid showers and squat toilets, and b/ I'm cheap)

(3)

There are loads of billboards in China. Kunming was plastered with them. Advertisements are heavy on the television channels, too.

(8,4)

I watched Australia bow out of the World Cup in - of all things - an Italian restaurant in Cherating, Malaysia. It was quiet, but quite a good spot to be watching from nonetheless because snacks and drinks were quality.

(3,4)

At the train station in Kunming - which looks more like an airport terminal - a number of young beggars swarmed over some of our company - in some cases clinging to legs until they could be repelled, and in one case going for a wallet.

(2,3,5)

I've sure been dropping the pounds. I was 84kg at New Year, about 80kg when I left (I dropped weight after my food poisoning), and last time I weighed myself -- in Hanoi -- was 72kg. Did you know that people who drop weight are statistically more likely to die than those who keep it on? Did you know that statistically speaking, overweight females live longer than normal-weight males? No, I'm not planning on returning to Thailand to take the logical steps to improve my life expectancy. Guess that's why I'll <cough> only be living until 77.

(4)

A game of three-card monte was being run on the Cambodian side of the border with Vietnam. You see a fair number of card games being played - I'm guessing for money - and quite a lot of discarded cards lying in the street.

(5,3)

I've been lucky so far - the only things that have been possibly stolen were three cards: My medicare card, my ACT proof of age, and my YHA card. I'm also missing a towel, a good shirt, and a good sock, but I'm blaming careless launderers for those.

(5)

There are lots of scams reported in Yang Shuo. One apparently happened to an Intrepid tour group that were riding bikes. An elderly woman "fell" in front of one of the bikes, whereupon her relatives gathered round the unfortunate rider and demanded 20000 yuan - about US$2500. They eventually accepted a tenth of that but it was still not a bad morning's work.

(3)

The advertising for one cafe in Yang Shuo claimed not to sell Opium or Heroin. On the other hand, cannibis sativa was happily growing - doesn't it make a charming pot plant - at quite a few places around Tiger Leaping Gorge.

(4,4,2,4)

Hawkers continue to annoy. I need one of those T-Shirts they sold in Kuta - something along the lines of "No I don't want accommodation, postcards, carvings, a massage, drugs, food, a tshirt...". They were selling tshirts in Dali with the Chinese characters for "No Money", but given they were charging about $8 Australian for it, I thought the irony was a little too fine.

(2,5-4,8)

It's called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine. - House of Games, David Mamet.

In Phnom Penh, I was stopped by an Australian who said that he'd just been robbed of his bag, which contained his wallet. He was from Canberra; he spoke the secret incantations by which public servants make themselves known to one another. He asked for a few dollars to buy a meal while he sorted out a transfer of cash. He asked me which hotel I was staying at, and promised that he'd make sure I'd get it back. I gave him a few dollars.

[to be continued below]

(4-8)

Everyone in China keeps an eye out for forged RMB50 and 100 notes. There are a few anti-counterfeiting devices that are checked for: the metal strip embedded in the note; a watermark; areas of raised printing which feel rough when rubbed; and ink which changes colour depending on the angle of vision. An American physicist I met on the trip to Borobodur (Indonesia) was one of the people responsible for the development of this. The colour changing metallic inks are on lots of notes that use rag paper rather than polymer.

(5,5)

We've not done much train travel in China but on the two occasions we have, we've been in triple-berthed sleeper compartments - no doors, just open cubicles, so security is a bit of a worry. There are supposedly cushier four-berthed compartments past the dining car.

(10)

Almost everywhere is cheap to stay for the long-term. The real expense is getting from place to place -- and losing days or nights along the way.

(3)

If you're in Vietnam on a budget, you can actually be better off paying for a buffet breakfast and skipping lunch...

(4)

The only things I miss are familiar foods. Books and internet are reasonably available. What I really want is a hard (biscuitty) chocolate brownie. I would pay a ridiculous price for one. Unfortunately chocolate brownies in Asia are all of the cakey variety. I also want one Killer Python, a small quantity of different varieties of real cheese (except for Malaysia - and probably Singapore - "cheese" has been soft and plastic), roast chicken, and a pony for Christmas. Mmm pony.

(3)
We caught a 70 minute flight from Kunming to Guilin. In-flight entertainment appeared to be primarily advertising; inflight food was a packet of peanuts. I nearly caught a flight from Vientiane to Siem Reap before I realised that it would take a week of my budget. In Europe, on the other hand, I may be flying a lot since fares are (currently) so ridiculously cheap.

(5)

I've generally felt safe - I'm more likely to be pickpocketed than mugged, and I have the advantage there that my clothes and backpack say "Other Targets More Profitable" - it's about the only use I've gotten from the bedroll on the back. I've only used my packsafe (metal cage) for my backpack a few times as I really don't have anything valuable in there, just stuff that's a pain to replace.

(5,2,6)

The tour leaders collect a tipping kitty and dole out tips. Long just gave tips as he saw fit; Tina likes to suggest a figure and get agreement, which is one of those things that's better in theory than practice.

(5,2,[2],3)
There's a Twin Peaks Cafe in Yang Shuo. They sell neither a damn fine cup of coffee nor is cherry among their varieties of pie.

(4)

One of the drinks that Ray exports to China has "Tongkat Ali", which is Malaysia's equivalent of ginseng -- Malaysia has an incredible range of Tongkat Ali energy drinks -- there's probably hundreds. I've seen far fewer ginseng drinks in China, but perhaps people use it more traditionally since it's sold in herbalist shops.

(4)

I've not seen a lot of overt Feng Shui such as bright-red tasselled octagonal frames for mirrors. Perhaps there's less to ward off here, perhaps things are gotten correct the first time around, or perhaps western users are less tasteful.

(5)

This afternoon I cashed the last of my US currency. The exchange rate was 7.879 yuan to the dollar.

(4)

I'm hoping to be able to afford an extra weekly hamburger and milkshake whenever the new Certified Agreement goes through... Preferably a European hamburger and milkshake. Incidently, I was joking with the Swiss couple and Bavarian Anna about the extent of my German knowledge "Ich bin ein Berliner", "Ich bin ein Frankfurter", "Ich bin ein Hamburger". "How do you say I am from Paris?", asked the Swiss guy. I paused. "Je suis Parisien?" He laughed as I unintentionally avoided his trap - apparently a "Pariser" is a "French Letter". My German pronunciation, BTW, apparently sounds Swiss.

(2,8)

[continued from above]

There was no repayment made, but I wasn't really expecting one. His clothes were somewhat ragged, but that's true of many travellers - at times myself included. The real indicator was just how brown his teeth were... Ah, Canberra!

(6,4,4)

I'll tip for good service, I'll buy from hawkers that fail to annoy, and I'll give to buskers from time to time. Beggars, on the other hand, I generally won't donate to - and I'm donating less the more beggars I see. Desensitisation, perhaps, as a particular fist-sized lump of muscle slowly calcifies...

Oil and Water

taroso — Fri, 8 Sep 2006 12:40:00 GMT

Hell Is Other People

How do you politely tell someone that they're driving you and others insane?

On the last night in Hanoi, I left Long, Cam, Jock, and Margie at the Draught Beer place down the road while I had a shower. When Cam came up to the room, he was shaking his head: X. - one of two people joining the tour at Hanoi - was "quite a character", he said. Long had met up with him to do the pre-tour briefing, and he'd then come down to the Draught Beer place where he'd sworn and ranted and generally made a bad impression - so I didn't see him that night. I didn't see him the next morning at breakfast, either, but reports were that he'd come back to the hotel with five local travelling companions of possibly negotiable virtue (who'd been refused entry by the concierge).

I met him the next afternoon - obese, and had obviously done some hard living. It was hard to tell exactly how old he was -- mid-50s, perhaps. And boy did he swear. He was not, at first glance, the ideal roommate. We caught a train that night, so it wasn't until Kunming that my impression was confirmed. I need extensive periods of silence. If there's a silence available he likes to hunt it down and kill it. Lights out is no obstacle to him talking. Earplugs are no obstacle to his snores. He is not, at last glance, the ideal roommate.

Many of his interactions with foreigners are painfully embarrassing. A number of people have independently joked about becoming New Zealanders. On the one hand, he'll happily have long one-sided conversations at people who speak no English: as we approached the Chinese border, he was ranting to our driver on politically-incorrect names he prefers for Aboriginals. On the other hand, when he actually needs more than a monologue, he'll complain at length that shopkeepers and others don't speak English. He's a model of inappropriate behaviour - the bus ride from the border to Kunming was 13 hours of plain horrifying behaviour.

And there's been worse.

He's worst, I think, when under stress. In one-to-one conversations he can be quite reasonable. In some matters he's considerate. He's certainly friendly and outgoing. He's not - despite some impressions - stupid. He does quieten down sometimes. The problem, though, is that his worst behaviour poisons everything, meaning that I don't want to have a one-to-one conversation with him.

It's as though he just doesn't filter what he says. There are a couple of possible medical reasons, one potentially contageous, that I've thought of but how do you politely ask about those? And just how do you politely tell someone that they're driving you and others insane?

You don't, I think. You just avoid as much as possible, which is horrible and cliquey; cowardly, too. But it only - only - needs to be done for another 18 days, and I'm now sharing a room with Rachel (many thanks!!), which is less stressful for me, at least.

Border Crossing

In a previous entry, I wrote that I'd managed to get my passport wet. Chinese Immigration at Hei Kou looked _very_ closely at it for quite a few minutes. It probably didn't help my trustworthiness that with the humidity and heat inside the hall, I was sweating buckets. I'm hopeful that there won't be any trouble getting into Tibet (you need a separate visa for it).

Truckette

In Vietnam, we saw a few small trucks which had their single cylinder engines exposed - flywheels and all. Long told us that they came from China, and since crossing the border we've seen quite a few more. There is even a deluxe model here, identical to the basic one except that the engine is covered by a hood. They're water cooled, but the "radiator" is uncapped, perhaps so that passing rain showers can be taken advantage of.

Grease

There's a lot of fried food available. In some places, fried food is just about all you can easily get. I'm so over fried rice. Even non-fried food is not necessarily safe: I'd a salad for lunch in Hanoi, and there was half a centimetre of oil in the bottom of the plate. On the other hand, Saigonese fried chicken is truly great (I ended up eating chicken baguettes from one Saigon place multiple times. Yes, I know that I said that I'd wait for France).

Public Bus

To get to Tiger Leaping Gorge, we squeezed into what our tour guide Tina called a "public bus" bound for "Tiger Leaping Gulch". I think this may have been as public as the average "British Public School". It was a minibus, and there were only three Chinese (excluding Tina) on it. The remaining passengers were all members of our tour.

Five minutes after leaving we pulled into a petrol station. A little petrol, four litres of oil, and a lot of passenger grumbling about inefficiency later, we were back on the road again. We then stopped at the next petrol station for some water - there was a tank with a hose into the engine. It seemed that we might be visiting every petrol station along the way, we joked, but our driver skipped the next one.

We really shouldn't have tempted fate.

The fan belt broke. We stopped. David, who'd been an Army Engineer, managed to install the replacement without anything needing to be dismantled (it's wound on while the engine is running). We continued on.

We stopped. The oil filter was replaced. We continued on.

Then the minibus ran out of oil. We stopped.

According to David and Thilo, the minibus had a few related problems: The radiator leaked - which is why there was a tank with a hose into the engine, which sprayed water - manually controlled - in an effort to keep things cool. The oil filter was the wrong size, which meant that unfiltered oil was circulating. And the engine had just been hideously damaged because we'd burned through all the oil.

Ten litres of oil were procured and poured in. We continued on. And the engine clattered, and clattered louder, and clattered loudly. Running out of oil had irreversably damaged the engine.

20 km away from Tiger Leaping Gorge, we stopped. Rather than hang around for some unknown period while the engine was rebuilt, we hired a truck to port us the rest of the way - including a wild ride on a cliffside road - unsafe but memorable.

After our three day hike in "Tiger Jumping Gorge", we returned to Li Jiang -- on the same minibus. It was even less "public" than before - now Tina was the only Chinese passenger. Though repairs had been made, the engine still sounded dodgy. It didn't matter, though, as it got us back.

Who's Who From Hanoi:

X. - as above

Long - who left us at the border

Jock - as before

Margie - as before

Rachel - dietician, on her way to London. Originally was listed as being X.'s partner, which would have made sleeping arrangements interesting if she hadn't arrived a day late in Hanoi.

Who's Who From Kunming:

Daniel - IT tech from Queanbeyan

David - ex-Army policeman from Qld [Kunming-Kunming only]

Dorota - Librarian from Perth (originally Poland) [Kunming-Kunming only]

Di - Farmer from SA

Kim - Farmer and enthusiastic fisherman from SA, husband of Di

Roman - Electronics technician from Perth 9 (originally Poland), partner of Dorota [Kunming-Kunming only]

Sue - Nurse from the UK - had been doing aid/development work in the Maldives for a couple of years

Tania - Economist from Qld, wife of David [Kunming-Kunming only]

Terry - Civil Servant from the UK

Thilo - Automotive Engineer ("Master Craftsman") from the UK (originally Germany) - had been diving in the Maldives for a couple of years. Husband of Sue.

Tina, our Chinese guide, who met us at Heikou and travelled with us by bus to Kunming.

Sands

taroso — Fri, 1 Sep 2006 08:51:00 GMT

Sleep and Time

I'm used to spending a week in a place if I don't feel like moving - inertia is my major driving force. Phase two of my travels consists of two months of package tours - the first a Gecko's from Saigon to Beijing; the second an Intrepid starting the day after the Gecko's finishes from Beijing via Tibet to Nepal. I was originally going to have a week between to go down to Shanghai, unwind, etc., but unfortunately the cancellation of the original tour means that that isn't an option.

I'm a marathon traveller doing two months of sprints.

A lot of the travel for the Gecko's tour is on overnight trains. This saves time and is more comfortable than buses since you can lie flat, but it's still not entirely comfortable - the beds are bunks and you sleep
wearing your cash since break-ins can supposedly happen. A big downside of overnight travel is that you arrive at your destination at inconvenient times - an 05:30 wake-up means 3-4 hours of sleep that you probably won't get back - particularly since you're in places for only a day or two and there's so much to do at each place. I expect to quietly die for a week in Kathmandu before doing anything Anapurnan.

Who's Who

Anudhi - Tsunami redevelopment coordinator from Sri Lanka.
Cameron - Paramedic from Melbourne, my roommate until Hanoi
Jock - Mechanical engineer from Bunbury
Long - Tour leader for the Vietnamese Leg from Saigon.
Margie - Nurse from Bunbury, married to Jock
Mia - Social Worker from Perth
Tanya - Travel Agent from Perth - best friends with Mia
Yoshan - Programmer from Melbourne, friends with Anudhi.
... Which really tells you very little.

Sea

In Sydney, I lived beside the water for most of my life. We went to beaches quite frequently. During high school we did a lot of swimming - we had to qualify for the Bronze Star, Bronze Medallion, etc. If I had to swim for my life, I probably could, but I still don't feel particularly comfortable in the water. Perhaps it's a few near-drowning experiences; perhaps seeing Jaws at too early an age. So, despite having seen beaches in so many coastal towns in the last four months, I hadn't done more than set foot in sea.

The beach at Nha Trang was somewhat clean, but artificial in feel. It had umbrellas, deckchairs, and attendants. Its promenade was clean and thoroughly designed, with deliberately placed trees and paths. With its backdrop of hotel after hotel after building site, it unappealed.

Instead I crossed a couple of bridges to the Cham temple - enough said; I'm still templed out from Angkor - and then headed over to Hon Chong Promontory. There was a beach on the other side - probably nicer - but thise one was filthy with flotsam and jetsam. Oddly, as one who wasn't planning on swimming there anyway, I found it far nicer than Nha Trang, with views of the fishing boats and locals in coracles, and a small island barely separated from the mainland. The area was far wilder, with a few basic tourist-free eateries.

We had a cruise the next day - out through a fishing village with its battery of fish-pens, and thence to a reef area. The water was cleanish, there were some black-and-yellow striped fish, but the coral was generally whitish - there were a lot of tourist boats for such a minuscule reef, and the scuba divers weren't particularly careful about avoiding contact. Outfitted with mask and snorkel, I went swimming for the first time since January.

At Hoi An we cycled out to China Beach. The water was wet; the sun was hot; the sand was white and covered with hawkers. I sat beneath a palm tree and enjoyed the shade.

Land

"It's amazing what you can grow in sand", said Marge. She and Jock live in Bunbury, WA, on "the side of a sand dune", which sounds unstable, but apparently with sufficient compaction it's safe to build on. You can also have a vegetable garden - the sand is good for growing potatoes since they only need to be shaken to be cleanish.

They plant in sandy soil in central Vietnam's former demilitarized zone, too - sickly scrubby crops, and grave after grave too. Through the bluish tint of the Hue to Hanoi train window, you can see the sand lying like snow among areas of sparse vegetation. Agent Orange laid waste to much of the area, and Long told us that the only trees that thrive here have been imported from Australia - gums and casuarinas, used to harsh conditions.

Smooth boards and Moxie

"I didn't think you were the type of person to dance.", said Tanya afterwards, when Hanoi's Crimson Love Dancing Studio closed at 10:30pm and we'd all headed down to a Draught Beer cafe - it was her birthday the next day, and she was partysome. I've danced a few times this trip, discovering - incidently - that it's a really good idea to plastic-bag one's passport before stepping out in torrential rain: visa ink smudges and runs!

As my fellow travellers now know - as do any of you who've been <cough> fortunate enough to see me dance - when I dance, I do so enthusiastically, in a style best described as "epileptic marionette". Give me something fast and I'm happy -- if a danger to others.

There was no continuity of music at the club - it went from waltz to pop to techno to salsa. The DJ tried one crossfade but it was hideously rough. At every change, the music would stop, everyone would clear the dance floor, and then new partners would be selected - at least among the locals as we foreigners were cliquey. There were resident professional dancers, each in their black and whites, with identification pinned on. The locals were of varying standards - some rather good - but their dance style was very sedate - fine for waltzing but using low energy shuffling during high energy techno - showed their classical training. Meanwhile Anu and I did our best to give them the very worst impression of foreigners as we refused to shuffle lifelessly and took up way too much dancefloor.

End of Phase 2a - Saigon to Hanoi, 23/8/06 to 1/8/06. Only Margie, Jock, and I continue on to China with two others yet to join us.

Mars and Venus

taroso — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:51:00 GMT

Kallisti

"9", said Tom - an assessment of one of the girls on our trip. No holier-than-thou-ness, please: male or female you probably rate people too.

"9.5", replied I, "until she spoke". I have a low irritation threshhold, and it's triggered frequently. I'm an equal opportunity misanthrope, however - I irritate myself.

Fairy Tales

Once upon a time, there was an astronomer named Schiaparelli who discovered the Martian canals. These were confirmed by renowned astronomer Percival Lowell who built the most advanced observatory of that time and spent years observing the features of Mars, including the great canals built by Martian natives to channel water from the polar regions to the desertified temperate zones. He published multiple books on the topic including his anthropological deductions regarding Martian life. Such work directly and indirectly inspired generations of writers including Edgar Rice Burroughs, HG Wells, and Ray Bradbury.

Once upon a time, at around the same time as Lowell was mapping Mars, and roughly quarter of a century after the discovery of X-Rays, physicist Rene-Prosper Blondlot discovered N-Rays, a new form of radiation.

Once upon a time photographs of the Martian surface sent back by spacecraft Viking I revealed the presence of a gigantic monument - a weathered face.

Once upon a time - not for very long - I took up the use of Tarot cards, as is perhaps not unexpected for someone of my name. And the cards told me what I needed to hear, because they always do.

Don't you just love recognising patterns in noise? Sometimes a cloud is dragonish, or like a bear or very like a tower or a sheep. I used to close my eyes just to watch the fractal sparks.

Chiromancer

On the covered bridge near Hue, our group met a wizened old lady ("crone" isn't quite the right word - she smoked like a chimney but she was petite and sweet). She'd been married to a GI but he died. Now, for D10000, she'd read your palms and tell your fortune - and in the case of Jock and Marge the fortune of their kids too. Ages of marriages, ages of divorces, number and genders of offspring, when money would arrive and other eventually-confirmable or dismissable specifics. Apparently I'm to get more money next year, probably because I'll stop living on US$15 or less a day, and I'll die at 77, which on the one hand - so to speak - is bad since it's less than average for an Australian male, but on the other hand is good since I did one of those life expectancy calculators a few years back and it told me I was going to die at 49.

There were a few difficulties in deciphering her accent, and of course we tend to excise from memory "uninteresting" details that we can dismiss as noise. I was a "very good man" she said, to the amusement of my companions, and suggested I was a doctor or a teacher - I obviously have delicate white-collar-worker fingers, though it's not a bad stab to suggest that a traveller is a teacher since so many were, are, or will be. Even I - having once sworn never to - might teach sometime.

I'll be marrying in two years, with two kids, 1 boy 1 girl. There are two possibilities - someone of my age, or someone much younger - 20. That was either out of left field, or a rather interesting attempt to cover as many bases as possible. Or, as the group agreed later, it could be someone in their mid-twenties, or perhaps even mid-thirties. 20 was an interestingly specific number, though, for someone who had otherwise - with myself and others - studiously avoided giving exact ages for such things.

Addenda

I've missed out on lots of details of people along the way for one reason or another -sometimes because they don't fit the story, and sometimes because I'd dearly like to forget them.

Jess, for instance, was heading up to China and planning on doing some insane overlanding to get to India - she was thinking of working her way through Central Asia into Kashmir, since she couldn't apparently get to Mongolia without an invite. Like I said - insane overlanding. Couldn't make her fit into the correct entry without killing flow, for some reason.

Putu, who I met on Lovina Beach at night, was a cook at a hotel operated by an Australian. She spoke a little English and I spoke a little Bahasa - so we stumbled through chatter - it was too dark to use my phrasebook. But I'd already decided on what to write in Lovina.

Putu - a male one - ran a cooking class in Lovina. I was going to tie it in with later cooking courses. Have yet to take another one.

There have been a bunch of taxi drivers who I wish nothing but ill upon.

And there have, of course, been other omissions, but that's enough names for now.

Eros vs Eris

"The intense desire to talk with someone, sharp as any pain; this was what people meant when they talked about love. Just the super-heightened desire to share thoughts. That alone." Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson

Once upon a time, along the way, I fell a little in love (for want of a more nuanced word). It's true: within this chest there beats a fist-sized lump of muscle pumping oxygenated blood through my vascular system! She was, incidently, 20. "Interestingly random", you're thinking perhaps? Or perhaps "Ick" -- but I had her pegged originally as mid-20s, and whoever said neurochemistry was rational, anyway? No doubt if she'd been 19 or 21 the "20" could be rationalised as being as unspecific as others - there's always pattern, whether real or chimeral.

No, this wasn't in Patpong, though I was in Bangkok for a week.

I'd thought of the idea of seeing somebody's face when you closed your eyes was poetic licence. Interesting fractals, sure, but surely not something so recognisable and distinct. I'm not fishing for sympathy - this was, after all, an interesting and overwhelmingly positive experience. It's not that I'm (still) out of love with - well, again, that's enough names: if you don't know, or know enough to know, you don't need to -- it's that I can't countenance ever being in love with her again. Sufficient temporal distance; sufficient spatial distance; sufficient emotional distance. Nice, even if I did have to go travelling and fall a little in love to get there.

Reality Check

Anyway - no neat happy starting - much less any neat happy ending, and if I'm not married to someone of about my own age in two years, either, don't feel particularly disappointed. Nor do I expect that if I die before 77 I'll be able to get a refund, since the oracle will probably be gone, and, if not, as a head-in-a-jar my mobility will be limited.

Astronomers have just voted to remove Pluto from the list of planets.

The Randi $1,000,000 for any testable demonstration of paranormal ability remains unclaimed.

More-recent photographs sent back by the Mars Global Surveyor reveal that the "face on Mars" is just a weathered hill - an illusion formed by pattern recognition and shadow.

There's no life on Mars, and Venus is one hell of a place to avoid.

Interlude: Books

taroso — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 09:13:00 GMT

Those of you who enjoy the work of Jeremy Clarkson may be glad to know that I picked up The World According to Clarkson, a collection of his Sunday Times columns, a few days ago. Those of you who dislike Jeremy Clarkson will be glad to know that it was a knock-off, so the two US dollars paid will be supporting the local Saigonese economy and not Mr Clarkson's cigarette and petrol addiction. Those of you who have no idea who Jeremy Clarkson is should watch more Top Gear - he's the snarky one who wasn't on Braniac.

It's a shoddy shoddy knock-off, though, from front to back cover and everything in between. The photocopies are faded, there's bits of string hanging out, and the cover looks like it's been subedited by the Guardian, with a score of typos. I've had, as far as I'm aware, three knock-offs. The first was a Lonely Planet Cambodian guide, which I didn't realise was fake for weeks. It had colour plates and a proper cover, though I did notice that the maps were of poor quality. The other was a Lonely Planet Vietnam guide, which I traded for my genuine Lonely Planet shoestring guide. That's a fine Shoestring travel tip, isn't it: "Save money by using fake versions of our books".

My LP Mandarin phrasebook is, however, genuine - though unfortunately LP didn't make any money from me for this either: Shoestring travel tip - "Trade three second hand books and get a newish book in exchange". It was about the first time I've been happy with such a poor rate of exchange. One for one is great, two for one is normally painful enough. The phrasebook is useful, however, and the three books were heavyish and took up lots of space in my daypack.

I'm carrying too many books - the tally is currently three workbooks, three travel-related books, three novels, two puzzle books, a medical handbook, and the mandarin phrasebook~~, and a partridge in a kitchen sink~~. And, of course, the Clarkson but I'll trade that in. I just need to find somewhere that'll swap one-for-one.

Companions: Travelling and Drinking

taroso — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 05:30:00 GMT

You see and hear English words that are (practically?) unused in Australia - anyone know what a "suzerainty" is without looking it up, for instance? "Confluence" (a joining, specifically of rivers) crops up quite frequently - not surprising given the importance of rivers to life here. In particular, it translates "Kuala" in Malaysian placenames, but it's used elsewhere. I've started to think of it as an appropriate term for the intersections of travellers' lives: meeting, following similar paths for some period -- whether short or extended, then diverging at some point; perhaps to meet again, and perhaps not.

Minh has been working over here for a few months, and had some hideous working hours before a return visit to Australia. We met after he finished work at about 12:30 am (see what I mean hideous working hours!), and went and got some dinner beside the Central Market. Twas good to catch up, however (*cough*) minimally.

I vaguely met A. from Bavaria on the bus from Siem Reap to Saigon but we didn't really speak until the next day when we found ourselves on the same Cu Chi tunnel tour. Earlier in her travels she'd gained herself a boyfriend - American but working in Australia. With only a couple of weeks of face to face contact he was now now studying German and planning on moving to Bavaria.

Sydneysider Romi was on the same tour. She'd had her bag snatched in Nha Trang by motorcycle bandits - goodbye passport, cards, money - so was stuck in Saigon until things were sorted. For some reason it's a bit tricky to get a replacement passport once all your photo ID has been taken... As we were both in Saigon for weeks, we ended up hanging out quite a bit - with rambling walks and conversations about books, writing, etc - she wants to be a writer, and I want to be ~~a reader~~ competent at writing.

There were a few others from the same group on the tour - a Swiss ski instructor and a Scottish couple - but the three of us were the only ones to go to the War Remnants Museum after lunch. That evening we went to dinner - A. was meeting up with Tristan and Nathan from the Central Coast, who I'd also vaguely met on the Phnom Penh bus, and "the Swiss Couple" who she'd met at different cities along the way, and who had been on the same boat to Battambatang as me, though they'd stayed there a day longer than I. There are only a few major routes, and if one is on a similar timetable, these kind of coincidences apparently happen.

While you can pay retail for beer - 2 dollars Australian in GoTo Bar, for a longneck - you can also buy it in refillable containers for about 30 cents Australian per litre - there's a couple of places with kegs that do it here. First drank there with Romi, English photographer Simon, her friend from further north, and his friend American Wayne, who'd been working with the Peace Corps in Africa for a few years was planning on doing some teacher training.

Teaching is a popular way for travellers to lengthen their travel. Americans Devon and Matt, who I'd met on the Mekong River Tour along with Brit Tom, had been teaching in South Korea (and for Devon, Romania before that); and NZer Chris had been teaching in Taiwan and now he and his brother Peter were teaching English here. While there Tom unexpectedly ran into an Israeli friend he met in Australia (for a small country, there's a lot of Israeli backpackers around). These kind of coincidences apparently happen.

There are many Nigerians, too, in Saigon. In the mini-hotel above a silk shop where I stayed for a week, I was the only non-Nigerian. My neighbour Kings was a soccer player, and his roommate was in business exporting clothing, footwear and other goods back to Nigeria, as was Mike, who'd a room downstairs.

There were conversations - many interesting, and some valuable, though as they're pretty much unrepeatable they won't be. But you knew that.

A., Tristan, and Nick were on tight timetables, Simon left for Cambodia via the Mekong Delta a couple of days later, I didn't see Wayne again, Devon flew back to South Korea late on the night we got back from the Mekong Delta, Tom headed north the next morning, Matt flew back to the US the same night, Romi will be here another week or so while Visas continue to get sorted, Chris and Peter will be here for a while, as will the Nigerians.

Distributary: an outflowing branch of a stream or river, typically found in a delta.

End of Travels Phase 1 - 23/4 to 23/8.

Dalat: Kitsch

taroso — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 07:45:00 GMT

When Dalat, in Vietnam's Central Highlands, is viewed from a distance, it gives a very Central European impression. Many of the larger buildings are from French colonial days. The lake is a manufactured one; the hills in the background natural and unspoiled. The gables and eaves of its alpine houses will never know snow and ice - though from the way that some rug up for the 15-20 degree temperatures, you might be expecting blizzards. Its red-and-white scaled-down version of the Eiffel Tower is unimpressive during the day but pretty once it lights up. It's hilly around town - more pleasant to walk (and we did a _lot_ of walking) than to cycle. Cycling out of town, where the terrain goes from hilly to mountainous is recommended only for the energetic. A cable car runs above a pine-forested slope.

It seemed like a good place to burn four days - really two days since travel took 8 hours each way - since I possibly arrived in Saigon a little early for my package. Romi, who had been going to the Mekong Delta that weekend, unbusied further, and decided to go too.

Dalat is aimed a little more at Vietnamese tourists, who arrive in busloads, than Western ones, and enjoys a repution for oddness. The markets are full of what has rightly been described as kitsch. There are swans that one can pedal out on the lake - some hideous metal things, and some less hideous fiberglass ones.

There's skill in the artwork on display in its shops, but it still has a fundamentally tacky feel - perhaps because there's no subtlety of expression. Dalat has several churches but one Buddhist Monk, sometimes called "the Crazy Monk", who's produced concrete faces and many thousands of paintings and drawings. I wasn't mad about most of his work - though the more Chinese it was, the more I liked it - he'd a couple of good ink landscapes, as well as a proficiency in painting bamboo. He'd also a copy of Starry Night up, though whether this was his work or gifted I couldn't say - the art factories in Saigon pump out facsimilies and travesties of well-known and lesser-known pieces by Van Gogh, Klimt, Warhol, Monet, Lichtenstein, and others.

The so-called Crazy House was a hotel and art gallery, but appears to be purely operated as a museum at the moment - work continues on the buildings, and is scheduled to continue until 2010. It's architecturally odd - with accomodation buildings like tree-trunks, oddly-shaped rooms (each with an individual design), twisty ramps and stairs, and a concrete giraffe incorporated into the exterior design. It's admirable for its vision, scale and design, but breathtakingly ugly. Of similar vision, but much nicer, is the 100 Roofs Cafe, which has fitted out the interior of a townhouse as a forest cave - rendered concrete, wood, painted flowers and vines.

This Floating Life

taroso — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 05:46:00 GMT

In the minibus coming back from the River Kwae were A. and R., two Brisbanites. "I thought you were foreign so I was speaking to you really slowly", said A., on discovering I was also Australian - the peril of being half-Japanese, I guess.

She was in Banking - two weeks promoted and on holiday already (her application had, of course, been in for months); her friend was studying "Laboratory Medicine".

... "As in pathology?"

"Yes" - and she wanted to specialise in "Cytology"

So I took a stab at "Cells?" - correctly - she said that people normally thought she meant Scientology, which has apparently produced some highly original - though not widely accepted - research into cell composition.

They were going to the Damonoen Saduak floating market. I'd heard of the one in Bangkok (though I never got around to seeing it), but apparently this one was more authentic. Floating markets are best early in the day, and as it was over an hour's ride from Bangkok they hopped out on the way so as to reduce travelling time.

Having skipped the markets in Thailand, it wasn't until Vietnam that I saw a couple in the lower Mekong Delta. My expectation was that they were accessible by foot; the Thai ones, being a bit tourist-oriented, are. These ones, however, were only reachable by boat. Cabinned boats are anchored on the river, each with a long pole on which are tied a sample of available fruits and vegetables: pineapples, pumpkins, tapioca, melons, carrots, etc. Its customers are locals in small river craft, who leave laden with produce for resale back on land.

At this point of the lower Delta, the Mekong has split into distributaries flowing out to the South China Sea, and crisscrossing channels split island from island. There are longtail boats, but also unmotorised ones which are rowed with long crossed oars while standing. Convoys of barges, both motorised and tug-pushed, transport hillocks of soil. Many boats sail red-faced with black-and-white eyes painted on their prows to ensure safe journeys. The islands of the delta are home to cottage industries, some of which we visited over the course of the two day tour - a rice-noodle "factory", a honey farm, a coconut candy factory, and a fruit farm providing samples of their products.

Earlier this month - date unknown - I made the eight hour journey from Siem Riep to Battambattang, pronounced "Battambong", across the northern part of the lake Tonle Sap. It's wet season, so the flooding Mekong has pushed a water and fish up the Tonle Sap river into the lake and surrounding rivers. Even being wet season, it still took 8 hours for our pilot to scrape our overcrowded vessel upstream - if you're lucky it's supposed to take half the time. The region is home to a floating village, a moveable tourist attraction, as well other collections of houseboats that line banks along the way. I only stayed the night in Battambatang - a snap decision that having spent a week in Siem Reap, I was templed out. I was on the Phnom Penh bus the next morning.

Animals

taroso — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 05:38:00 GMT

I think the last time I'd been to a zoo may have been Ange and Kieren's wedding reception; the only visible animals small and tasty. Saigon's Historical Museum was closed on Mondays, however, and since the zoo was adjacent it seemed a waste of a walk not to do something. Buying a ticket and seeing the zoo seemed like a reasonable something to do.

So I did.

From the entrance, the Zoological Gardens appears more Garden than Zoological - there's a temple over on the right, the museum on the left, large stretches of well-maintained lawn and gardens, but not an animal - tasty or otherwise - in sight. There was an arrow labelled "Giraffe", so I walked past more well-maintained lawn and there in an enclosure was a giraffe. There were no other animals around, but there were a lot of unattended carnival rides - the zoo is open till 8pm on weekdays and probably later on weekends.

Yet another path to follow - more well-maintained grass, and an unpatroned eatery. Beyond that lay the reptile house, swarming with builders but free of reptiles other than the ubiquitous gecko.

Small Cats! ...near invisible as they hid in the shelters.

Gibbons on an island! ...invisible.

Elephants! ...plural, and pretty hard to miss. The elephants that give rides appeared healthier, however - these were all Asian elephants, and most had been detusked - their skin colour was greyish, whereas the ones used for rides have black skin with pinkish splotches.

Tigers... and rabbits! ...Oh My. In one cage, a couple of rabbits crouched underneath a low wooden platform/bed with the tiger pacing beside; in the second, the tiger was in the process of eating its kill - I saw the pounce and heard the squeal from a distance; in the last, the rabbit sat out in the open grooming itself - the tiger lay asleep behind.

There were other enclosures also clustered there at the back of the grounds - deer, crocodiles, hippos and leopards; birds, birds, and more birds; and a petting zoo.

But there was a lot of green space compared with the animals. And this really wasn't a negative thing, either. The place serves as not only entertainment, but as a clean green place where middle-class Saigonites can come and relax without the hassle of hawkers and beggers - perhaps half of the people there were just sitting and talking.

There was a zoo in Siem Reap, too - apparently a smallish one when viewed from outside, as I had to since it was closed. It was a kilometre's ride through one of Siem Reap's navigable swamps, the turning for which was north of the ticket checkpoint for the Angkorian temples. Its lack of visitors was not unexpected since it was a weekday, locals are working or at school, and international visitors pay US$20 (1 day), US$40 (3 days), or US$60 (7 days).

For all that Cambodia and Thailand have lush grass, a number of cows I've seen have been fairly skeletal; worm infestation, perhaps, though water buffalo appear more robust. These are not the only skeletal animals I've seen: a wooden corral at the exit of the Penang War Museum held an emaciated horse; the horses pulling tourist carts tend to show a little less rib.

On a Saigon street, I saw a cage with a tangle of live green snakes - snake is on the menu here, and is pickled in rice wine - "Snake Wine". In a cage above these snakes, terrapins clambered sluggishly. Another cage held a couple of youngish dogs, and in a cage next to that, two kittens nestled under another dog. Dog is, of course, eaten in Vietnam as elsewhere in parts of Asia. A restaurant in Cambodia displayed its promise on a sign outside: "We do not serve dog, cat, rat, or worm". You can never be too careful, I guess, and you do see "meat" as an ingredient at times.

Wars

taroso — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 10:28:00 GMT

History is fungible

Every War Museum I've been to has presented its own version of events; I suppose that the history presented by the Australian War Memorial is similarly individual, but since it presents a history aligned with what we learned at school it may be hard to see.

War names can vary: "The Vietnam War", "The Vietnam Conflict", "The American War", "The Second Indochina War", "The Indochina War"... and when did World War I finish, anyway: 1918, or 1919?

The War Museum museum in Kota Bharu, Malaysia stated that Thailand allowed Japanese troops access to Malaysia because it would have received control over northern Malaysia as a quid pro quo. The Thai JEATH museum, indicates that the Thais resisting Japanese invasion stood down at the order of the government, but provides no more detail.

The War Remnants museum in Ho Chi Minh City presents the Tet Offensive as an unqualified victory; the Western consensus is either nuanced or excusatory - that Tet was a military disaster for the North Vietnamese but a long term political victory. From an Australian perspective, some of the captions appear to be rather propagandist; from a Vietnamese perspective possibly less so.

"War Remnants" is not the original title of Saigon's Museum, though what the original title was is a matter of little consensus: was it "The Museum of American War Crimes", or was it the "The Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes", or perhaps just "The War Crimes Museum"? The Internet is absolutely no help.

~~Saigon~~ Ho Chi Minh City

The main multi-storey building of the War Remnants Museum is an ugly modernist one, but its ground floor contents and those of the museum's peripheral outbuildings are uglier. Unlike the current name, the contents are fairly uncensored.

In the main building, only the ground floor is used. Here, captioned photographs present mainly civilian victims of conventional weaponry, of mines, of napalm and white phosphorus, and of Agent Orange - both those directly exposed, and their malformed progeny. Two jars suspend grossly deformed babies in formaldahyde - discomforting as much for their resemblance to jars of a similar nature appearing in sideshows as their grim contents.

A small replica prison presents conditions and tortures allegedly used by the Diem regime, including two "tiger cages" - cells with bar-shackles. The photographs in the remaining outbuildings are generally less gruesome, detailing historical aspects of the war(s). The human aspect of the exhibition contrasts a little jarringly with displays of weapons and vehicles.

An hour from the museum are the Cu Chi tunnels - an altogether more cheerful and triumphant location, with a display of booby traps, mannequined dioramas showing life as a Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Regular Army member, fortifications, and tunnels concealed and unconcealed. There's one stretch of tunnels - specially widened for comfort and accessibility - through which a continuous stream of tourist passes. It's still not particularly large: Some of us got through by waddling or shuffling on knees; others did it standing but bent right over. That VC members managed to traverse even smaller tunnels for years is amazing. At the end of our tour we saw a documentary whose commentary is rather similar in style and tone to newsreels from World War II.

Phnom Penh

Tuol Sleng was a high school that was converted into a prison by the Khmer Rouge. There were a few pictures of tortured victims, but by and large what was on display was far less explicit but no less horrible than the War Remnants museum: rows after row after row of official prison photographs of prisoners - adult and child - almost all of whom died there, crumbling brick cells, stained lino, barbed wire, and a few dozen stories and vignettes from relatives of the disappeared, and former prison staff.

The original structures at the Killing Fields are gone now, with only signs to identify where buildings once were. A pavilion displays some background information. A glass-sided tower displays skulls. An excavation sits under an open hut, while other excavations resembling bomb-craters sit exposed to the rain. Apparently it's now a private site, owned by a foreign corporation.

The River Kwae

The War Cemetery is immaculate. New brass-plated concrete gravestones are separated by flowering plants. I walked up the grass of the first row, (feeling rather uncomfortable) down the second, and exited. The bridge - the rebuilt iron one - was overcrowded with visitors walking over and back. What's left of the original bridge is at the JEATH (Japan, England, Australia, Thailand, Holland) War Museum.

Fun and War Games

The Cu Chi tunnels has a firing range, where visitors may buy bullets to use in a range of weapons; the Penang War Museum has paintball; while the highlights of daytrips to the River Kwae are the train ride along the Death Railway, the elephant rides, and the rafting. Five local boys played roughly on the earthen dike at the Killing Fields - one pushed another down the slope, where he lay screaming abuse. And everywhere hawkers try to sell their wares.

Angkor: The Geometry of Computer Games

taroso — Thu, 3 Aug 2006 10:45:00 GMT

Banteay Samre, 15 km north of the main Angkorian clusters, consists of a central temple on a stone island, surrounded by a (now grassy) moat, in turn surrounded by a square high wall, surrounded by a walkway a couple of metres wide, surrounded by another high wall. At the middle of each side of the square the walkway is interrupted by doorways. The central temple is small, dim, and gothic - almost crypt-like. The end chamber in this temple is in darkness. The entire thing was deserted. The wall on the inner moat has pillared windows - more pillar than window. There are blocked up passageways and windows in the outer wall. It reminded me strongly of Doom.

Did you ever play "Doom"? Perhaps you don't play games in the first-person shooter genre, perhaps it's too old, or perhaps you don't play computer games at all, but despite its technical limitations it and Doom2 remain enjoyable games a decade and more after release. If you were lucky, you missed the movie.

While modern FPS engines are often 3D -- in other words, they can cope with multiple levels such as floors in a building, bridges, and tunnels, -- most early FPS including Doom could not. They are thus known as "2.5D games", because they provided a 3D perspective, but not a truly 3D world. The maps for such games can be defined in two dimensions provided that the height of floors and ceilings are also defined. Angkorian architecture has generally similar limitations - there is slight overhang on ledges, but only only Preah Khan has a truly two-level structure, and the appearance of this is unusual.

Not all Angkorian temples resemble Doom levels - many of the larger ones consist of three-tiered pyramids topped by a quincunx of beehive temples - a large central one and four smaller ones at the corners of the top tier. Others are single beehives or a series of them, and again there's no resemblance. Angkor Wat, on the other hand, though incorporating the beehive look, is all pillars, pits, walkways and courtyards. I first approached it from the quieter Eastern entrance. It screamed "Trap". While I doubt any deliberateness in the resemblance of some Doom levels to Angkorian architecture (there were other examples - passageways with sequential "doorways", multiple gothic temples at Thommanon and Banteay Srei), I found them interesting as examples of convergent design.

There are resemblences of Angkorian places to other games, but these are less accidental. For instance, Neak Pean is a cross of four smaller square pools surrounding a centralsquare pool. The pools were dryish, and grassy-bottomed. The place had an arena-like feel and would have fitted quite easily into Shadow of the Colossus. And unsurprisingly, there's a Tomb Raider levels based on Ta Prohm since part of the movie was filmed there.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time - Bertrand Russell

Angkor: Places less touristed

taroso — Wed, 2 Aug 2006 11:31:00 GMT

West Gate

I'd not intended to visit Angkor Thom the day I did - the Western Baray and its temples were sufficient, I thought, to keep me occupied, but those plans had been scrapped once I'd seen the track. Instead, I found myself bouncing over laterite paving that had been pitted and etched by centuries of water; looking more like termite-eaten wood than rock.

The west gate of Angkor Thom was a fine introduction to the complex. It's not, perhaps, as spectacular a first sight as the southern bridge, with its statues "Churning the Ocean of Milk", and the huge stretch of wall visible over the moat. Unlike the southern approach, however, there were no sales pitches from hawkers, no buses and moto-remorques, not the electric cars and horse rides, and not the same sense of tidied-up-ness in the architecture and landscape either. The overhanging trees were lichen-splotched, and there was no sign of civilisation apart from a couple of locals on cycles. It looked and felt ancient. Once through the gate things changed - mown grass verges, leaf litter swept away, etc, but the outside was magic.

Walls

Angkor Thom has navigable earthen ramparts with trees growing in them. Only on the exterior stone face is there a drop; on the inner side of the ramparts the ground slopes, and this is covered in bush and brush. You have to descend at the gates; porting your bike - if you have one - down laterite and grass. Elsewhere, it's a bumpy ride over stones, roots, and the occasional fallen branch.

East Gate

The surfaced road out of eastern Angkor Thom leads through its northeastern "Victory" gate. The rarely-visited east gate lies down a deserted dirt track east of the Bayon. Once out of the gate, the track quickly becomes overgrown; I stopped following it after riding into one spiderweb too many.

Forest Temple

Ta Nei, not so easy to find, was off several weatherbeaten tracks. It was supposed to only be reachable over the "French Dam" but I didn't cross anything remotely damlike, just sand and puddles. To get there required turning off the main road, reading a faded sign on a gate past a toilet block, and using a little guesswork in picking one's turns. Fortunately, the final turn was signposted (though the post was rather temporary). A little stablisation had been performed using braces and buttresses, and couple of seismic/meteorological instruments had been placed, but otherwise it was rather unrepaired, with masses of moss-covered stones let pile haphazardly where they'd tumbled.

Big Hill

Phnom Bok is too far from Siem Reap to be comfortably cycled - I hired a motorcycle to see it and other outlying temples. A couple of howitzers are stationed at the bottom of the hill. A smaller piece of Soviet-made weaponry stands on the hilltop. To get from howitzer to field gun, you must follow red-earth track, and then climb a dauntingly long and steep set of concrete steps. Two of the temples have frangipani trees growing on top of them.

Hill

The road that leads south from Angkor Thom to Siem Reap runs past Phnom Bakeng. Tourists tend to visit this temple-mountain in the evening to see the setting sun, and perhaps ride an elephant up it instead of scaling its crumbling slopes -- and where there are tourists, come stalls and raucous hawkers. The main ways up are on the eastern side: the serpentine elephant track; the gentle old road around the hill which pedestrians are meant to follow but few do; and, flanked by two stone lions on plinths, what's left of the stairs. With such a mass of visitors, the eastern side is hardly pleasant.

Fortunately, there are other starting points. Between Phnom Bakeng and Angkor Thom's moat lies the orange-brick temple of Baksei Chomkrong, and north of this is a lonely dirt track. Follow this, and then a southern track leading off it, and you wind around the hill, emerging at the southeast on the main road to Angkor Thom.

On the northern side of the hill, thirty metres of mown grass meets the track, and beyond this a far more tranquil version of the eastern stairs awaits: twin lions, and (from a distance) what appears to be stairs. It's only when you start to climb that you realise how much of these stairs are illusory - a series of horizontal stone remnants covered in moss and laterite pebbles that must be ascended with care. On the western side, where only one leonine sentinel remains intact, a track winds upwards through slender trees. The way appears to be all slope - any stairs have been buried. If there ever was a way up the southern side, it has been lost in the undergrowth.

At the top of the hill, a three-tiered pyramid squats on the flat. Like many Angkorian temples, its stairs require not only feet but hands. I climbed it to join the hundreds waiting for sunset. To the west, the sun was still above the horizontal. The orange waters of the Western Baray sprawled below, but bathed in the late afternoon sunlight between my vantage point and there were a wall of tourists. After about ten minutes I stepped down, pushed my way through them, and clambered down the stairs: I'd seen the view, I've seen sunsets, and I didn't really need to see another one in a place this crowded.

It was a slow clamber; a few others had decided to depart ahead of me. I wondered if they'd felt the way I did until an Australian climbing down behind me responded to an unheard question: "Sure I'm scared. I don't feel like climbing down in pitch blackness". I glanced back. A trickle of tourists had started to make their way down the stairs. I stepped down onto the plateau, and headed around to the southern side. Here, a stream of people descended. To the eastern side, then, and a torrent of people poured themselves down the steps. I stood watching them. If this goes on there'll be noone left up there... and there's really no danger since there'll be some moon.

Back to the east side then for a climb back up. Only about twenty viewers remained. Much better. Even in a couple of minutes things had changed. The sun was now buried behind cloud, and a column of birds wheeled and coiled in unseen thermals. The sun dipped, and the police ushered those remaining - mostly camera-wielding Japanese and Koreans - down.

A German with hefty camera in hand commented that he thought the people who'd left because the sun was going down were crazy - the best light was right after. He was right. On the eastern side of the plateau, the pyramid was in near-silhouette, its features blurred in the gloom. Behind it, pink and grey clouds showed brightly against the electric blue sky.

I picked my way down the main eastern slope. Remnants of the stairs that had once been there were difficult to locate in what was left of the light, but it was less treacherous than the northern or western slopes would have been, and more direct than the winding old road or elephant track. The last of the stragglers descended. I rode back to Seam Reap.

Angkor: Earth and Water

taroso — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 06:03:00 GMT

Muddy Waters

There are two main families of bottled water in Thailand/Laos/Cambodia. The (relatively) expensive type is normally indistinguishable from standard Australian brands. The cheap type comes in 900ml soft bottles with the label printed directly on the plastic and is of extremely variable quality. Different brands look pretty much identical - the best brands are just as good as the expensive brands; the worst brands taste of dirt. These poor-quality waters are probably safe to drink, having been (supposedly) filtered and ozonated/osmosised/UVed/etc, but the taste isn't reassuring.

Muddy Roads

As the major tourist town in Cambodia, with half a million tourists or more staying a year, Siem Reap is in a disappointing state of disrepair. It's not the buildings, which are, by and large, reasonably attractive. The problem is the roads.

Surfaced roads are not unknown in Siem Reap, but there aren't many of them. Anything that's not a main road is pretty much guaranteed to be unpleasant. If you're lucky, it will be surfaced but potholed. If not, it'll be an uneven dirt road.

The drainage is poor, too. During periods of rain, gutters flood with muddy water. Even main roads and those of the riverside market quarter, with its attractive shops and restaurants, are heavily silted. It rains frequently, sandy soil washes down onto surfaced areas from unpaved roads, driveways and unpavements, and remains there. The water mostly goes in a few hours, but boggy patches remain well into the next day, and since it's wet season, it's likely to rain the next day.

Heavily-trafficked dirt roads can appear permanent morasses - even a few hundred metres from the Royal Residence there are near-impassable patches. Villages further out have it worse, with thoroughly cratered and potholed roads and street-spanning puddles. And these are not necessarily poor areas - there are two-story McMansions behind high walls here, and late-model Camrys.

On the beaten tracks

I'd originally planned to visit every temple on my map. I was defeated in this ambition on the first day. Although there are only three temples in the southwestern quadrant of my map, the tracks and dykes on the outskirts of Siem Reap are unsignposted. I set out for Wat Chedai. Kilometres of mud later, I saw stone above the treetops. It was Wat Athvea. There were lots of guides available as I was the only sightseer. After showing me around, mine gave me directions to Wat Chedai. So kilometres of mud later I arrived near the mountain-top temple Phnom Khrom. After I'd climbed up and climbed down, I looked at my map, looked at the muddy dyke, and decided that as I'd be seeing a lot of temples that missing one couldn't hurt.

Up the paved road, then, and across the river Siem Reap to find some temples of the southeastern quadrant. Across the river, and along unsignposted tracks and dykes to discover modern temples that weren't on the map. Kilometres of mud and a bent bike seat later, I decided that I'd be seeing a lot of temples and that missing some of the ones that weren't detailed in the guidebook couldn't hurt.

Flood Plains

It was not until I'd climbed Phnom Khrom that I realised just how flat the area was - just fields, paddies, and dykes for miles around, with Tonle Sap Lake to the south. At ground level, the trees and bushes on the borders of fields hide the horizon. There are hills around, but they are few and far between, and all are holy sites.

Western Baray

The Western Baray is a vast reservoir about 8 km broad and 2.5 km wide. It's a popular swimming spot, and the main area was busy on the sunny Saturday afternoon I visited. A track (as far as I can tell) circumnavigates it, and three temples lie to its northwest, so I started out westward along it. Not far down it, I was passed by a four wheel drive, which drove carefully through what I'd thought of as a track-spanning puddle, but which was revealed to be something a little deeper. As was the next track-spanning puddle thirty metres further along. Another three temples I really didn't need to see.

East was rocky and uneven, but dryer. Parts almost felt like coastal Australia - sandy soil, sandstone, low trees, scrub and bushes, and the glint of barely-seen water. Eventually I turned down a sandy cow-track in the direction of Angkor Thom.

Long Journeys

taroso — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 10:38:00 GMT

A Minor Alignment of Patterns...

So I check out of my hotel, dump my bag next door (where I'll be picked up for the overnighter to Pakse), and walk up the street... and there's Jim, who's in town for a day before heading over the bridge to Thailand to meet a friend from Bangkok. 20 seconds later and I would have missed him. He mentioned that when he makes it down to Cambodia he'd be taking the recently-opened border crossing from Chong Jom, Thailand, to O Smach, Cambodia. I looked at his map (he has a more recent Shoestring Guide than I). The route would shave at least a day off the trip - it was hundreds of kilometres shorter to Angkor Wat, and required far less backtracking. Later I studied my Cambodia guide... and the route is listed in there.

To Pakse

There are little mysteries that crop up while travelling. For example, were the pair who didn't return when we stopped at 1am at Tha Khaek meant to (the bus crew ran around frantically trying to find them)? And was the guy seated behind me really watching porn on his PDA (it certainly sounded like it)? I sat next to near-Parisian Yann, who had decided not to even stay the night in Vientiane. He'd been travelling for a couple of months, having spent about five weeks in (mostly northern) India, and will eventually make it to Australia, for an extended stay with relatives in Normanhurst and Gunnedah. At 06:00 we egressed.

The Three-Country Day

I'm making more snap decisions than I normally would - using the O Smach route and thus skipping Si Phan Don, the 4000 islands of Southern Laos, for instance. My thought was that I'd stop in Pakse for a day and then leave the next, but it was a small town and though there were pre-Ankor Wat ruins, I have a week of Ankor Wat. In about a second after being asked by a tuktuk driver where I was going, therefore, I decided that I'd get as far as I could that day and replied "Vang Tao". He drove me to the bus station where an 08:30 bus took me through border towns Vang Tao (Laos) and Chong Mek (Thailand), and all the way to Ubon Ratchathani. From there another bus took me eastwards to Surin, home of the "elephant roundup".

In Surin there are (and I'll quote my Shoestring Guide here) "elephant races, fights, tugs-of-war and anything else you can think of to do with a hundred elephants. If you've ever had an urge to see a lot of elephants at one time, this is a chance to get it out of your system". While I believe that Bronson will soon be announcing a late-November trip to Thailand, I didn't feel like waiting there for four months, so a minute after arriving I was on an overcrowded minibus to Chong Jom. Two hours later I crossed the Cambodian border. It was around 17:30 and I was the only backpacker there.

Thank you for that laundry list, but what did it look like?

Vientiane to Pakse: Trees in shadow, stars overhead through window reflections, sheet lightning on the distant horizon, oncoming headlights, wooden houses with their outside workareas lit harshly by fluorescent energy saver globes, flooded paddocks at dawn.

Pakse: A sleepy town, which was reasonable as sensible people were asleep. Even the reasonably-large market adjacent to the bus station was only starting to get set up by the time the bus left.

Pakse to Ubon Ratchathani: Flooded paddocks in morning light, flooded paddies in morning light, water buffalo and cows, stilt picnic huts on a lake.

Ubon Ratchathani to Surin: Flooded paddocks in morning light, Milla Jovovitch, flooded paddies in morning light, Milla Jovovitch, water buffalo, Milla Jovovitch, flooded kitchen with zombie monster battering in the door, Milla Jovovitch... Milla Jovovitch.

Surin: In the three minutes I was there, it appeared to be a a town entirely devoid of elephants. Here's a picture of Surin with a picture of no elephants.

Surin to Chong Jom: Ant-like spider trekking back and forth on the window, trees in afternoon shadow, concrete buildings, trees, wooden buildings, trees, passing cars, clouds overhead.

O Smach

There was an immediate noticeable difference in the landscapes of Cambodia and Thailand. The Thai side had many more trees than the Cambodian one, which hosted a red dirt road far wider than the surfaced one on the Thai side. The road was in remarkably good condition. On either side of this road, conveniently sited to lure as many Thais as possible, was a "resort"; I believe this designation was to be interpreted as "casino plus hotel". It was around 17:30 and I was the only backpacker there. Siem Reap would have to wait until the morning; I could go little further that day. Beyond the checkpoint at the bottom of the slope the dirt road continued over a hill to a dirt-roaded village. Here, at a hefty price, overly-basic accommodation was had. The stop was a productive one, though, since I learnt a little Khmae from Kon, the guesthouse's cleaner. Across the road there was what I initially thought was a bar - what sounded like karaoke, and motorbikes pulling up. It was, apparently, a massage parlour; its workers Vietnamese.

A quick and voluntary debriefing

My employer would apparently like to know about "contacts with foreign nationals", which is a big ask for a backpacker on a 14 month tour. In the interests of partial disclosure I should state that in the period covered by this post, I feel thoroughly non-compromised by contact with a foreign national: A fellow passenger in the tuktuk to Pakse's Bus Station was a Cambodian working at the Vientiane embassy - he was going down via the Si Phan Don route, though, so he stayed in the tuktuk when I got out.

To SiEm ReAp By RoAd

I was the only backpacker there this morning, too, but my driver had little trouble in rounding up passengers, mostly to Phnom Penh. The first one picked up was the Chief of Tourist Police for the checkpoint, though having stayed on Khao San Road I was not entirely reassured when he showed me his ID. The trip was listed in my guide as taking five to seven hours. This didn't look promising; it is wet season after all. But, with the driver and I in the front and three adults and a child jammed into the back, we made the trip eastward along a somewhat bumpy dirt road. An hour and a half later we hit surfaced road - we were a kilometre from Anlong Veng, 70km north of Siem Reap. We'll be there in another hour, I thought.

O foolish... stop that.

Anlong Veng used to be the last major stronghold of the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot lived and died here, though it's rumoured that he faked his death. Less than a decade back it was absolutely a no-go zone. It's still a frontier town. The major roads and the border crossings (there's another north of Anlong Veng) major roads to here are only recently bulldozed through. We picked up another passenger there; the driver and I in the front, and four adults and a child jammed into the back.

South of Anlong Vieng, to everyone's disappointment, the surfaced road vanished - we were back on dirt again. This was not the pleasant undulating motorway that the first leg had been. It seemed that a multitude of heavy vehicles used this road. Deep wheelgouges cut into the middle of the muddy track. An abandoned truck listed leftwards in the mire, a tow cable still attached to its front. Potholes, puddles, and patches of sludge made the track treacherous. In some of the worst places boards had been laid; in others a stick in the mud warned drivers away. In drier regions the road felt corrugated.

For the next couple of hours, the car (with the driver and I in the front and four adults and a vomiting child in the back) juddered and weaved - trying to miss the worst of the potholes by hitting smaller ones. We finally hit surfaced road again north of Banteay Srei. The landscape - paddies going back kilometres looked entirely unlike Thailand; probably due to the trees and bushes that grow between the fields. It did, however, look very much like parts of "Vietnam" you see in some war movies - probably because they were filmed in Cambodia and not *cough* Hawaii.

The surfaced road continued as far as Siem Reap, where the car stopped. I egressed and found myself accommodation.

Vientiane

taroso — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 06:42:00 GMT

Low Season

There are advantages to travelling in low season - even-cheaper prices being one of them - but there are downsides too. Repairs and maintenance are done during this period: the museum in Kuala Selangor was closed, for instance, as were the hilltops in Kuala Trengannu. The weather, in particular, is worse. In Luang Prabang it rained pretty constantly, which made walking around town enough of a chore, much less anything further afield. It's been harder to get confirmed tours - cancellations in Chiang Rai, Luang Prabang, and Saigon (the original dates of my upcoming Gecko's trip).

Not the Plain of Jars

Laos still doesn't make things particularly easy for a traveller though even the last couple of years have seen major improvements - visas are now 30 days instead of 15, for instance. But there's one international ATM in the country - in Vientiane. If one comes in with a Credit Card, no travellers cheques, Australian Dollars (hideous exchange rate for them in Luang Prabang), and only a week's worth of cash, it makes one more likely to go to Vientiane quickly... which is counter productive because once someone reaches Vientiane from the north they're more likely to leave Laos quickly. No, Vientiane is not my favourite city.

Laotian hyper inflation is also problematic since even a day's worth of kip is a sizeable wad, which makes it difficult to carry Lao currency securely. The Plain of Jars, near Phonsavanh looked like an interesting place to visit. If enough people had been going from Luang Prabang (a proposed tour was cancelled), I would have put in on my credit card and (reasonably) happily coped with the gouge. Instead, no Plain of Jars for me.

A Failure to Communicate

"One day" can mean the next day. As I discovered at 4pm on Saturday when I turned up to collect my Cambodian-visaed passport from the closed Vientiane travel agent's, it can also mean the same day. Writing on the receipt that it could be picked up at "4pm on 21/07/06" didn't help either - exact dates tend to blur - but "4pm today" would have. So - instead of leaving that evening (or even better - on the day before) for Cambodia, I got to spend the weekend in Vientiane.

I don't hate the place, it's more that I'm absolutely indifferent to it. Such indifference appears to be a common reaction by visitors, which is odd, because Vientiane has French colonial buildings and traditionalish wooden ones and fusional ones. It has trees and temples and monuments. There are arts and crafts galleries. It has tables for dining at sunset along the Mekong waterfront. Yet, it leaves me cold.

It's very odd. It's not that the overhead wires provide visual clutter: Most of Thailand has that. It's not that touristy places are spaced out: Solo was similar. It's not that there are ugly buildings, though there are: Nothing I've seen is as bad as places I've worked. It's a little more attractive further away from the centre. Yet it's not a city I ever need to see again should I return to Laos.

Language

Thai, I found difficult. It has five tones and a voiced/unvoiced/aspirated split on consonants (see below). I know that billions of people speak a language with these features, but they're not something that unpracticed English speakers easily distinguish, much less produce properly. The written language has vowels marked before, above, and after the consonant (which has a default vowel). There are tone markings, but these behave differently depending on which class - there are three - a consonant belongs to. Lao has six tones.

voiced: "d" as in Dog
unvoiced: "t" as in fooTy (Australian pronunciation)
aspirated: "t" as in "Too

Luang... Prabang... by... Boat

taroso — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 07:08:00 GMT

Farewell Thailand
There wasn't much to border town Chiang Khong: an internet cafe that closed at 11pm, turning me out into the waiting thunderstorm; a main street terminating at the Mekong - not long, but long enough for a wet bike-ride home; a few cheapish hotels and restaurants; and stores offering Laotian visas. The morning, grey but dry, brought a 9 o'clock pick up by (naturally) a pickup truck. A hundred metres' drive brought my fellow travellers and I to a waiting boat. We crossed the river to Laos.

Huay Xai
There didn't appear to be much to Laotian border town Huay Xai, either, but we'd only a brief stop there - just time enough to change some currency and buy food for the boat while waiting to be transported to the 'port'. This grandly-titled location consisted of a concrete ticket office, a road down to the water, and a slope - more mud than grass - down to where a dozen roofed longboats were tied up. A bunch of people had arrived before our group, and over the next few minutes more groups disgorged from arriving vehicles. We walked down the slick slope, across a plank, through one longboat and onto ours.

Slow Boats
It's possible to get to Luang Prabang from Northern Thailand in a number of ways, but the two-day slow boat is not necessarily the wrong option even for those of us who (*cough*) dislike long unbroken journeys. Speedboats do the journey in only one day, but their contents need to wear crash helmets, raincoats, and earplugs. An airplane from Chiang Rai is relatively expensive. A mini bus to Luang Nam Tha enables access to northern Laos, but Luang Prabang still requires another day's journey over northern Laotian roads. Despite the overcrowding and the discomfort of its cramped wooden seats (even the padding quickly becomes uncomfortable), a slow boat allows you to stretch your legs and use the toilet. Thatched open-sided workers' huts, perched with model-like appearance on the Mekong valley's steep partially-wooded slopes, drift by. It also gives you time to read, meet people, and play fun silly games.

Baguettes

I bought a cheese and salad baguette for the boattrip. It was awful: salad here means tomato and cucumber, the cheese may well have come from a can, and the actual baguette was greasy. I got another cheese and salad baguette on the second day (different seller) and it was better but still poor. I had yet another baguette for breakfast in Luang Prabang, which was merely disappointing. I think I'll wait until I get to France for my next.

Pakbeng
There wasn't much to Pakbeng either. Its two roads (one meets the other near the 'port') have restaurants, some rudimentary stalls selling water and junkfood, a couple of temples, a tiny market, a dozen guesthouses charging a few US dollars a night, a steam room, a verandah with three pool tables, a pair skinning a dog, and a resort charging many tens of US dollars a night. The number of satellite dishes in a village reliant on generator power suggest that its position as the rest stop between Huay Xai and Luang Prabang brings reasonable prosperity. Cut logs lay stacked near the water, but there weren't a lot of them and there wasn't any evidence of recent logging on the surrounding partially-wooded slopes so they may have come from elsewhere. A handful of buildings were concrete but the attractive ones were wooden and traditional in style. The guesthouse where I stayed was one of these, as was the Indian restaurant where we ate dinner.

Jim

I met Jim in Chiang Khong while waiting for others to be processed by Thai immigration. He's a paramedic from Tamworth (the UK one near Birmingham), which is just far enough away from Birmingham for him not to sound like a Brummie. He's another traveller who's having an extended period off work - being nine months into a year's travel, mostly in South America. He drove from Melbourne to Perth while in Australia, which I found amusingly insane since he was only there for three weeks!

So we ended up travelling companions for a few days - at the same guesthouses in Pakbeng and Luang Prabang, and sharing some meals, and some welcome conversation. I had a Beer Lao with him in Pakbeng, sitting on the balcony of our guesthouse overlooking the rapidly darkening Mekong and shooting the breeze. Beer Lao is a most drinkable beer (a most drinkable drink) but just one longneck had me a little Cadburied - I haven't had much alcohol lately. We parted ways after Luang Prabang - he stopped at Viang Vieng, home of river-tubing and reportedly the "Khao San Road of Laos" and I continued on to Vientiane.

Luang Prabang

We arrived in Luang Prabang in late afternoon. The old part of Luang Prabang is pleasant and pretty during the day - it's classified by UNESCO as a heritage area and filled with traditional Lao, colonial French, and fusionally-designed buildings. The resulting melange is slightly disconcerting, but it works -- and it's thoroughly charming when illuminated after dark. Even an excess of travel agents, each offering the same two half-day trips, doesn't mar Luang Prabang's charm. Many commercial buildings are old-fashioned/traditional in style, and those occupied by travel agents are no exception.

By the time I'd found accomodation in the silversmithing district, showered, and identified a likely spot to find an Internet cafe, the night market was in full swing in the main street. Most stalls at the night market are at ground-level, with local craftwork (mainly textiles) laid out on mats and lit by pendulous lightglobes. Quite a few stalls and shops sell lamps, which add even more illumination to the area.

Marleen and Elmer

I first saw them at the travel agent in Chiang Khong; they were using the internet there, as was I. They assumed that I was Thai, and I assumed that Elmer was from somewhere in the region - in fact they were both from the Netherlands (though Elmer's family was from the Moluccas). They took the same boat from Chiang Khong. And then we actually met at the guesthouse in Pakbeng. Another day on a boat passed.

As we pulled into Luang Prabang, they said that they'd have to go back to Chiang Mai as soon as possible: They'd only a couple of weeks left, they really wanted to do Thailand's beaches, and they'd just learned that flights out of Laos - and Luang Prabang - were infrequent and could be difficult to obtain because of this. There was talk of going straight to the airport... I found this amusingly insane since they'd just spent two days on a boat to get here, and Luang Prabang was reputedly one of the nicest cities in Southeast Asia. But they were pretty adamant that they had to leave.

I saw them later that night after they'd actually set foot in the place, and they'd decided to stay until Tuesday. I saw them the next night and they weren't leaving until Wednesday... [Not exactly coincidence (Luang Prabang is compact) but a minor alignment of patterns - there were people on the boat I never saw again, and others who I only saw again on the bus to Vientiane/Viang Vieng]

Lao Food

With the exception of the baguettes, Lao food has been rather good - but not nearly as heavily spiced as Thai food. On one morning in Luang Prabang, our guesthouse proprietress invited us to try sticky rice - you grab a small chunk of rice, roll it into a ball, and dip it in one of the accompanying dishes. It's been a lot easier to get a good range of vegetarian food here than in Thailand - there's a couple of buffet stalls here, and one is excellent (they do spring rolls using rice-paper skins, with the best lime-chilli dipping sauce I've had ).

Northern Cities

taroso — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 16:04:00 GMT

Maths: E-
Despite previously claiming to loathe long-distance travel of as much as seven hours' duration, I decided to break the eleven hour journey from Bangkok to Chiang Mai only at Ayutthaya, a one and a half hour train ride from Bangkok.

Ayutthaya
Ayutthaya - the island - was very sparse. One street provided a backpackers' haven. Much of the island was taken up by the historical park - green expanses filled with the ruins of the former capital and its multitude of temples. Parts, I would classify as wilds - untamed tangles, some swampy. Cows roamed laneways, dogs roamed the streets, zippy mosquitos roamed the air. It was a rideable city. I liked it.

Chiang Mai
I stayed in a guesthouse in the small moat-surrounded old city. There are still segments of brick city wall on its periphery, but they appear to be newish - there's just a little too much design in their ruin. Indeed, the old town itself feels over-neat. Trees in yards overhang whitewashed walls and spiked fences, brick pavers surface streets, and the few crumbling brick temples and stupas around have been incorporated into newer temples. It's a city of bars and travel agents.

Chiang Mai Muay Thai
When one sees that there's a championship Muay Thai tournament on, starting at 9pm, in a ring surrounded by bars, one doesn't necessarily expect that the majority of it will be 10 year olds pummelling the hell out of each other. The first match was the 28 kg class; there were a few 36 kg matches, and one 56 kg match, which may have been the only match with participants older than 18. That 56 kg match was the only match with much technique, and even that was limited to a few instances of grabbing one leg and sweeping the other. There were no elbows, but maybe they're not allowed in the junior division. Most fights were won on points - the two exceptions were own-goals. In one, the fighter ran into a fist. In the other, a fall did something bad to a shoulder. It was very disappointing. I didn't stay to the end.

Chiang Rai
I decided against doing a hill tribe trek from Chiang Mai. This was on the theory that the areas around Chiang Rai would be less touristed than those around Chiang Mai. My theory proved sound: a couple of hours after booking my three-day hill tribe trek, it was cancelled due to lack of participants - for some reason people don't want to hike during Thailand's rainy season. So instead, I was to travel to Laos the next morning (5am wakeup) with Alfonso, a social researcher from Madrid. The next morning I had to inform Alfonso that I wouldn't be accompanying him as my dinner of tofu and vegetables had poisoned me and a vomitous two day boat ride didn't seem like a great idea. The silver lining was that I didn't have a vomitous three-day trek...

Chiang Khong
So I slept for another five hours or so before I had to either check out or stay another day. I decided to check out, on the principle that hostellers shouldn't profit by poisoning their clientele. I then slept for another few hours on their couch outside before taking the three hour busride to the border town of Chiang Khong on the Mae Khong (Mekong). Tomorrow morning I leave for Laos.

Bangkok: Fashion and Grooming

taroso — Sat, 8 Jul 2006 17:43:00 GMT

A Close Shave
I'd stopped shaving every day. Cold showers, though fantastic in evenings if the heat of the day is yet to dissipate, are not quite so pleasant when the shower is actually cold... and of course cold-water shaves make cold showers longer. And I'm fundamentally lazy. And so the week passed, and (verily) a beard grew, and (lo) I arrived in Bangkok.

Shave, I thought.

...razor, cold shower... definitely not... sink.

...mirror, six-day beard, disposable razor, soap, cold water tap...

Professional Shave!

So, I walked round nearby streets looking for a barber. Lots of beauty salons. No Barber. Many of the salons, however, offered shaves in addition to hair treatments, and there were guys in some having haircuts, so there came a point at which I picked one - maybe Bangkokians didn't use barbers [They do - one just has to walk an extra couple of streets...]. After all, a shave's a shave, and if you can't find a guy who's been doing it every day for the last fifty years, no big loss... right?

O foolish Taro.

A straight razor was produced. Full marks.

Bowl; shaving brush; instant shaving cream. Half a point off for the canned cream.

No hot water; shaving brush dipped in cold water. Vague puzzlement.

Scrapescrapescrapescrapescrape. That's not good.

Scrapescrapescrapescrapescrape. Mime looooong strokes for her

ScraaaaaaaapeScraaaaaaaaaaaape. How about we pause there

And so I sat up. Did I then:

a/ Say "Thank you very much, but you need lots of practice on people other than me" and leave?

b/ Say "You're not doing this right", and stay and try to show her how to shave me (vaguely) properly?

Option b, of course; it would have just been weird to walk the streets with half a beard.

O foolish Taro. You might know more about shaving than her, but not only are you exclusively a disposable razor user so you don't know that much, but you should stop addressing yourself in the second person.

"Hot water".

She filled a bowl from the hair-washing hose; its water was tepid.

"Has to be hotter".

Electric jug...

...

... and there was hot water. And it was good for about ten seconds. Then...

Scrapescrapescrapescrapescrape. I give up. It'll be over soon, and the razor burn shouldn't be toooo bad.

Scrapescrapescrapescrapescrape. Happy thoughts.

Scrape. Well that was awful.

Wiiiiiiipewiiiipewipe. That really was.

"That was an awful shave. It really was".

Mirror. And there's a couple of patches she's missed but I'm not going to make her fix them.

"It couldn't have been much worse"

O foolish Taro.

Mirror. Stroke chin. Hang on is that blood.

Blood on finger. I know they're called cutthroat razors but you have to be kidding.

"I'm bleeding" I wonder how many cuts she's given me

"Yes paper would be good" Should have left earlier

patpatpat. Oh the blood is speckling the... toilet paper

"I'm still bleeding" That's a lot of speckles

patpatpat. Am I bleeding from every hair follicle?

"Do you have any antiseptic or cologne" I'm going to die of blood poisoning

Isopropyl alcohol. Thank frob.

dabdabdab. Ouch

patpatpat. I'm still bleeding

dabdabpatpatdabdabpatpat I really could have wandered the streets with half a beard.

"You need to take 'SHAVE' off your sign. You can't." The razor was blunt, wasn't it... I wish I'd thought of that earlier.

Suits

Clinton (who emailed me some tips on Thailand) suggested that while I was here I could get a suit or two to weigh me down. I'm not so sure he was entirely joking, my sartorial style being what it isn't, but should I ever decide that a three-piece with opera cape and spats is a good idea*, Bangkok is certainly the place to get them. There's a throng of stores packed with bolts of cloth offering a quick turnaround on made-to-measure suits. One store has a sign noting that the price includes the cost of such things as buttons and linings, which suggests that shonky stores abound.

[*I'm not so sure I'm entirely joking]

Clothing Stalls

Stalls, many of them selling identical ranges at vastly different prices, choke the pavements of Banglamphu. There are streets lined with clothes stalls and clothes shops. For a male in need of trousers, there are three choices. The first is slacks - not quite practical for hiking. The second is jeans - I already have one pair and that's plenty heavy enough. The third is military-style trousers - perfect for those who aim to get lost while hiking. I bought non-camouflaged khaki. Among other figures it bears a NATO size marking. I'm hoping this means that there's a certain level of quality.

It's not "Beauty", it's "Skin Maintenance"

Pollution is high in Bangkok - there's a lot of traffic, and a number of people even wear masks. With the humidity and the pollution your skin - and your face and neck in particular - is filthy even after half a day. There are many beauty salons in the Khao San road region offering spas, hair and beauty treatments, and massages (some different; some only same same). There's also an open-walled tent on the side of Thanon Chakraphong which offers eight different facial treatments at a standard price, and the lot as a half-price special. I passed a beauty salon offering an identical deal; a number of the salons do. It had one female customer. I walked down to the tent. One female and two male customers... and I was the third.

<insert your pop-psych analysis of the/a male psyche here>

And the face? Looked pretty much the same but I assumed that it did good things, and it felt great until the humidity made me start to sweat again. The next day I got my first zit in ages. Correlation? Causation? Irony.

Diamond Jubilee

In contrast to the relative rarity of the Australian flag in Australia, I noticed a lot of Malaysian flags in Malaysia on public and private buildings, taxis, and as the background for advertisements. On crossing into Thailand however, Malaysia's flag numbers seemed reasonable.

There are Thai flags and yellow flags bearing an emblem on shops, homes, and poles. There are also pictures of Thailand's king everywhere on posters, billboards, and shrines; many of these are these are metres (and in some cases storeys) tall.

It turns out that it's the 60th anniversary of King Bhumibol Adulyadej's coronation - he's the world's longest-serving monarch. It was a public holiday in Bangkok and surrounds on Friday, and will be again on Monday and Tuesday so that the populace have (another) chance to see him. He's a beloved ruler. People of all ages wear yellow shirts that bear the special emblem, or slogans proclaiming their love for the king. Stalls sell photos. I was amazed he was as old as he is (he's 80 in December) - he looks decades younger.

Chatuchak Markets

Chatuchuk Markets, open only on weekends, are insanely big. Thousands of stalls selling pretty much everything, segueing into the full-time shops in Chatuchuk Plaza. There were baubles, bangles, beads, and bling. Fish, birds and animals both alive and dead. Furniture and nick-nacks sufficient to home-decorate a Chatuchak-sized housing estate. Food and drink (fresh coconut ice cream - Yum!). And clothes - acres of t-shirts and trousers, skirts, shirts and shoes. You could spend hours just walking back and forth. I did.

Or at least I tried to walk back and forth. The design, however, tends to resist logical path-taking: Something catches your eye and you get drawn into a parallel or perpendicular aisle. Or, worse, an oblique aisle - because Chatuchak Markets isn't rectangular and not everything meets at right angles. End result: it's a bit disorientating. Clinton suggested that if I saw something I liked to buy it, because I probably wasn't going to find my way back.

If I'd found a "Pirates are better than Ninjas" tshirt I would have; I saw someone wearing one the other day. I did see a pink Bachalo-drawn Death tshirt, however. Neil Gaiman would be spinning in his grave if he were buried.

Bangkok: Red-light Stop, Greenlight Go-Go [Not Particularly Safe For Work]

taroso — Wed, 5 Jul 2006 06:04:00 GMT

[This is rated M for suggestive language and scenes of an Adult Nature. It's probably safer NOT to read it from work unless you have a relaxed internet policy]

The Naked Truth

One of these days I'll complete my 10000 pages of bad writing but in the meantime, there's a lot to learn on the job. Just how much to lie is one. Lies of commission (unless they're extremely minor and for the purposes of tidiness) are probably unacceptable. Lies of omission are obviously acceptable - noone really wants to read the exact gruelling details of how I got from featureless place A to featureless place B - I've just checked my archive, and I don't. Sorry. Other useful lies such as time displacement serve flow. But I digress; everything herein is true enough.

Be careful what you wish for...

A couple of requests have arrived asking for more information about the locals. I've not been providing enough of the human element, it seems, so I hope this post goes some way towards providing too much information.

Khao San Road, Banglamphu

My first couple of days in Bangkok were a non-event as I spent time chasing visas for Vietnam (a reissue owing to a tour cancellation/change) and China. I've been staying in Khao San Road; a messy collage of stalls, shops, signs, and sightseers. The roads to the north and west are much nicer - less crowded and with trees providing some shade - but inertia tends to keep me ensconced in a place once I'm resident unless there are serious deficiencies, and I've stayed in many a worse place that Prakorb's House. Banglamphu is bigger than just the tourist mecca, of course: further out there are temples, monuments, palaces, and all those other attractions that are far more enjoyable to experience than read about.

Creatures of the Night

I'd a vision of Bangkok of being wall-to-wall Sin City, but the red-light areas are a fairly small part of it. Khao San Road, so busy during the day and evening, quietens somewhat after midnight when the stallholders start packing up, and there are shopping centres in the Siam region with a bigger footprint than Patpong: you can walk every street and alley of the place in under twenty minutes.

Patpong isn't just clubs (gentlemen's and dance), bars (go-go and otherwise), massage parlours, and short term hotels. Hawkers sell food - one had trays laden with deep fried insects (which I wasn't game to try). There are stalls with cheap clothing, nicknacks, tricks, and discs; a heavy concentration of Japanese restaurants; several 7-11s (they're ubiquitous here); Internet cafes; and even a few real shops. And, of course, farang accompanied by their Thai travelling companions, hawkers whispering promises of a smorgasbord of pornographic movies, and arm-grabbing touts flipping over near-identical pictures of massage parlour residents to reveal identical menus for go-go clubs' visual smorgies.

It almost made Pink's advertisement of "man-woman boxing" a refreshing change - I wondered momentarily if there were an World Intergender Boxing Champion who could match Andy Kaufman's wrestling run and then realised that with the number of ladyboys in Thailand, a World Intergendered Boxing Champion was more likely.

Before going to Patpong I did have have some concerns that I would wake ice-packed to discover that someone had removed my passport, money, memory and kidneys. I know the tales are supposedly apocryphal, but news stories like this one http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/904595.stm don't encourage confidence. A French tourist I met the other day had been drugged and robbed - it was GHB, he thought. It didn't seem polite to ask for details so I didn't, but using one's imagination is always fun.

Is that a wallet in my pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

I can't pretend to have had pure intentions* in visiting Patpong: I went specifically to see a show. Even if you've not seen one you must have heard volumes about the ping pong balls, blow darts, cigarettes, and other feats of admirable but worrying muscular control and accuracy.
[*A lie. Of course I could pretend]

The club had a name but I can't remember it. This isn't the GHB talking; it's just that I didn't really pay much attention to the sign.
- "No Cover Charge", the dwarfish tout said, as all the touts do.
- "How much is it really?", I asked.
- "No Cover Charge"
Ah, Semantics... how I do love thee.
- "I know there's no cover charge. How much does the show cost?"
- "Ticket 100 baht".
...and of course when the ladyboy in the nurse's outfit brought the bill, entry had been bumped up to 300 including one free beer, but since beers were 100 baht, this wasn't such a good deal. I negotiated a better price.

The Modern Striptease?

Inside the club, a scantily-undressed young thing named Nio draped herself around me. She spoke about as much English as I spoke Thai, so it was a match made in Patpong. I ordered a cola for Nio and a beer for myself. The beer arrived opened, which was no great loss as beer's still not my drink of choice. It was later knocked over by a flying banana, but in the meantime I pretended to swallow it, Nio pretended to be desperately in love with me, and I pretended to swallow that too.

She continued to stroke my id while the go-go girls gyrated with robotic enthusiasm and the star performers performed feats of admirable but worrying muscular control and long-distance accuracy. My internal monologue provided the usual running commentary.

For one, I considered the classical form versus what was on display. It wasn't just the strip that was essential to the classical striptease, the tease was essential too: what layers to remove, what to hide, what to flash momentarily before reconcealment, and when to ring down the curtain or vanish offstage just as all would seem ripe for revelation.

The show was hardly erotic, which wasn't much of a surprise. The club was rather dark so even when hands weren't providing concealment, you really couldn't see much from 15 feet away, and that was probably a good thing as some things are just plain wrong, and 30 or so of these were on-stage in rotation. Perhaps, though it had bypassed the strip in a rush for instant visual gratification, the modern form hadn't lost the tease after all, and even the use of all those props - balls, candles, darts - can be seen as being reasonably faithful to the spirit of burlesque.

Anyway, eventually Nio made the pitch to accompany me to my hotel for a price.

(Anti)climaxes

One of these days I'll complete my 10000 pages of bad writing, but in the meantime the endings to most of my posts will be imperfect.

Myanmar (Burma): The Daytrip

taroso — Sat, 1 Jul 2006 11:34:00 GMT

Q: How do you eat an elephant?
A: One bite at a time.

I hate long-distance travel, so I decided to break Phuket to Bangkok into three chunks, stopping in Ranong and Phetchaburi (Phetburi). Phuket and Phetchaburi were pretty well uneventful - walked round a bit and got rained on.

"The Phuket Event", or "Pardon me, but I appear to have my ankle lodged in my throat"

Taro: "Can you thank your... boyfriend or husband for the advice"
Her: "He's my uncle"
On the bright side, it could have been worse:
Taro: "Can you thank your... uncle for the advice"
Her: "He's my boyfriend/husband"
Live and learn - the safe phrase I'll be using from now on will be "Travelling Companion".

"The Phetchaburi Event", or "Pardon me, but you appear to have my toothpick lodged in your eyeball"

I discovered this morning that my guesthouse has multiple peepholes into and out of my room. Woot!
On the bright side, fortunately it's low season so there was noone in adjoining rooms to watch me...
On the moral vacuum side, unfortunately it's low season...

BERNARD: I mean, will I end up as a moral vacuum, too?
SIR HUMPHREY: Oh, I hope so, Bernard. If you work hard enough.

The visa run is an activity performed by tourists in danger of overstaying in Thailand. I'd plenty of visa days left but being told that Myanmar was "just across the river" from Ranong, I thought: "Sure, by all accounts it's a repressive regime, but why not do a daytrip and get that extra visa stamp?". Masaya, my travelling companion* from the guesthouse, was scoping out the place as he wanted to visit Yangon later in the month on his way to India. He was yet another traveller who'd done an extended stretch in Australia - his was three months' fruit picking in Perth.
[*no relation(s)]

"Just Across The River"...

"River": The river in question is the Kra Buri. At the crossing point the water's salty, the 1-2ft swell flows 'upstream', and it's 6 kilometres wide. "You say estuary, I say Andaman Sea"

"The": Ranong is on a much smaller river, the Pak Nam, hundreds of metres from confluence with the Kra Buri. I saw the Pak Nam earlier and believed that the opposite bank was Burma... not entirely an unreasonable assumption since the distance between Malaysia and Thailand across the Sungai Kolok was similar.

"Across": The method of crossing is by open longtail boat, an ideal craft for a shallow river, but possibly not for six km of 1-2ft swell in the Andaman Sea. Local travellers bring umbrellas to ward off some of the spray, but you get wet and salty anyway. 2ft swell is a little scary: the boat heaves and rolls, and there are no lifejackets.

"Just": The crossing to Kawthaung takes perhaps half an hour. Clearing four or five immigration and customs points can take longer if you've many locals aboard (the Thai immigration point for non-Thai/Burmese is about a kilometer from the jetty, for some reason).

A repressive regime? (one account)

The really odd thing was that the uniforms of the Myanmar immigration/customs personnel appeared so much less military than the ones on the Thai side (who were wearing camos), and the customs checks on the Myanmar side were non-existent. I didn't see any guns on the Myanmar side, either. Kawthaung is obviously a much poorer town. Only a little is paved (Ranong has dirt roads but the main ones are all surfaced), and the generators humming outside the bank bear testimony to the frequent and extended power outages. Despite the poverty, the mud, and the garbage, though, Kawthaung was prettier than Ranong - there were quite a few Buddhist temples on the surrounding peaks, the architecture was somewhat older, many were wearing sarongs (and a surprising minority hijabs), and Burmese script is just beautiful (see http://www.omniglot.com/babel/burmese_img.htm for a sample). It doesn't appear to be anything of a Potemkin village, though, which I guess is the other oddity: from the posters up, and the presence of an office of the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism, they obviously want to encourage tourism...

Masaya, who was staying overnight, went off to find accommodation. I, who was planning on leaving Ranong that afternoon, had a quick wander round the portside area, a curry, and lots of tea, before hopping on a longtail boat to return to Thailand.

First prize is a return trip to Myanmar.
Second prize is TWO return trips to Myanmar.

It's apparently rather important that one gets an exit stamp when leaving Myanmar. On arriving back at Thai Immigration, I was told I'd have to return to Myanmar to get one. This second trip took more than three hours in total (there were massive delays in actually leaving Kawthaung when the boat operators attempted to get as many passengers as possible, and then there were further delays at Myanmar and Thai immigration...). On the second trip the wind had picked up, hence the 2 foot swell which make the crossing unpleasant. So, I ended up staying an extra night in Ranong and leaving yesterday.

KT, Malaysia to Phang Nga, Thailand: Villains and Caves

taroso — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 12:29:00 GMT

I hadn't been reading the news for a few days in KL, and hadn't received any warning bulletins, so Chok Eng's warnings about multiple bombings in Southern Thailand since June the 15th came as an unpleasant surprise. It seems that there was rising insurgency in heavily-Islamic areas of southern Thailand - more than 60 bombs have gone off, there have been shootings and beheadings. This wouldn't have been such a problem if I was going to Thailand via the west coast but since I was going via the east coast my path would be right through the affected areas...

On reflection my route through Malaysia was not ideal - a more efficient overland route would have been Singapore -> Johore -> East Coast -> Kota Bharu -> Jungle Railway -> Gemas -> Melaka -> KL -> West Coast -> Thailand

In Kuala Terengganu, Chok Eng's brother and sister-in-law (who very kindly took me out for a seafood dinner and showed me some of the town) gave me even stronger warnings about what to do once over the border in Sungai Golok - check with Customs to make sure that the motorcycle taxi I took was safe to use. Don't walk to the station. Leave in the morning. Don't stay overnight, and if I absolutely had to, don't leave the hotel after dark. Expect heavy security round the stations.

So I travelled from KT to Kota Bharu, wandered around the town (managing to pick up my second dose of Travellers' Diarrhoea as a farewell present from Malaysia), took a bus to the border in the morning, and crossed into Thailand on foot.

For a town under siege, Sungai Kolok was fairly relaxed. There was a military police post by the station, and some uniformed personnel armed with whistles patrolling the station. I did see more security - razor wire and SMG-wielding military police - at some of the stations on the four hour trainride northwest to Hat Yai.

Hat Yai (1 night): apparently a popular destination for Malaysian men who can't obtain foot massages in Malaysia. It's supposed to be a good town for food, but unfortunately TD and appetite don't go together. Otherwise it's a place to stop on the way to somewhere else.

Krabi, pronounced "gah-bee" (1 night): a town on a river. It's supposed to have a lot of good beaches nearby, but It's rainy season, so it needed to have more than that. I was originally going to spend a couple of days here, but saw a poster for Phang Nga, and instead of doing a daytrip from Krabi or Phuket, with the consequent hours of unnecessary travel, I decided instead to go there the next day.

The town of Phang Nga is quite a distance from the sea - the land its on is flattish, but its surrounding limestone hills and outcroppings rise near-vertically - so it feels very much like a valley.

Tapan (Heaven and Hell) Cave: Imagine Hieronymous Bosch was commissioned to decorate Disneyland... Before the cave there's a series of statues of black-skinned demons/natives performing gruesome mutilations, eviscerations, and other tortures on white-skinned victims. It's unpleasant, but... silly (the faces of the figures are rather cartoonish). At the back of the cave is a Buddha statue - to get there you follow river-side paths and cross three rusting iron bridges. Above the heaven (cave) and hell bit, there's a huge concrete green dragon - undecorated but traversable inside. At ground level (the "hell" part is in a hollow) there's lots of statues of (Gautama) Buddha, as well as Hindu gods including Ganesh (again, the faces are cartoonish). The place appears much less than it's meant to be - its redeeming feature is its small cliffside temple - a steep climb up concrete steps - with a good view of part of the valley.

Phung Chang (Elephant Belly) Cave: Legend has it that an elephant killed by a spear wound became a mountain here; its tusks (on either side of its "head") being two outcroppings perhaps a hundred metres tall, and its wound becoming the cave. It was a fun though shortish trip - the cave's an underground river channel, and you take a rubber dinghy up the first part, a bamboo raft up the second, wade the final distance to where a natural formation resembles an elephant complete with "eye", and then return down the river. On the journey, my guide Thon pointed out many other simulacra, a number of which were also elephantine.

Phang Nga Bay Cruise: Along with Maria and Terena, two UK backpackers, I went on a cruise around Phang Nga Bay. The cruise followed a wide channel through mangrove forests (minor channels were blocked off with a few wooden stakes - it felt not entirely dissimilar to the level design of many First Person Shooters ;-), passed through one sea cave twice, and then through another. The mangroves stopped, and we were on the sea, with an overlap of islands masking the horizon. We passed an island where we later had brunch - a Muslim fishing village, with a gold-domed mosque that came into view from behind the island's peak. From the boat, we also saw cave paintings in an underhang that were reportedly 3000 years old - their figures were distinct and they were in remarkably good condition for being in such proximity to the water.

"How do you like my island, Mr Bond?": The focus of the cruise was Ko Khao Phing Kan (Leaning Mountain Island) and Ko Khao Tapu (Nail Mountain Island). This pair is called "James Bond Island" by everyone, as it featured in the movie of "The Man With The Golden Gun". "Leaning Mountain" refers to a flat inclined rockface that forms one wall of a chimney. Standing before it on the small main beach, you feel all off-balance. There's also a bat infested cave entrance (depth unknown) on the facing wall of the chimney but there was only limited time on the island. The beach is crowded with stalls selling junk. If they had any business sense at all, they'd sell Martinis, Sean Connery* and Christopher Lee t-shirts, and replica Berettas (you can get them in Hat Yai) or hire out costumes for photos.
[* I know that Roger Moore was in TMWTGG but, honestly, how many would wear Roger Moore?]

KL to KT via Cherating: Roads travelled and untravelled

taroso — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 10:20:00 GMT

I was originally going to write about turtles in Cherating. There's a turtle sanctuary there, with a small museum with models of turtles, diagrams of their breeding cycle, some turtles in a pond, and two tubs of baby green turtles waiting to be released into the wild. At night you can go to the museum, watch turtles come up the beach to lay eggs, watch a documentary, and then participate in the releasing of the baby turtles at a time suitable to minimise the casualty rate from birds, sharks, etc.

Pantai Cherating is a small seaside village consisting of a crescent-moon beach on a forested bay, lots of accommodation of various degrees of quality, souvenir shops, and a few cafes, bars and restaurants. There are more beaches, hotels, motels, and resorts all up and down this stretch of coast. The first Club Med in Malaysia was opened in Cherating though on the next beach up - it's just next to the Turtle Sanctuary. Lonely Planet makes it sound busy, but it's quietish and not just because it's low season - apparently it's been about the same for the last few years. Pantai Cherating is a little run down and will probably continue to run down further. Still, it's cheapish, and not a bad place to spend a couple of nights.

Pantai Cherating is about 45km north of Kuantan on the the coast road. Kuantan, the capital of Pangkor state, is a couple of hundred km from KL, and Kuala Terengganu, my intended destination, is a couple of hundred km from Kuantan. You can do KL to KT in about seven hours. As I hate long journeys (yeah, I probably chose the wrong way to spend my vacation) it seemed a good idea to break the trip into two legs, and Ting (originally from Kuantan) recommended Cherating as being more interesting than Kuantan.

So Ray and Jo drove me to Puduraya bus terminal - we started about 11:30, and arrived a bit after midday. There were no coaches to Cherating - you need to catch another bus from Kuantan - and the next available bus to Kuantan was at 3:30, so we had lunch until it was time to catch the bus. 3 hours or so later and I arrived at the express bus terminal Kuantan ready to catch another bus to Cherating, a bus which left from the _local_ bus terminal, which for some reason was a kilometer away. At the local bus terminal I found the Cherating bus closed and driverless. No more services were running up there for the day (I arrived before nightfall but it was almost dark by the time the non-driver turned up) and the option was either to stay in Kuantan for the night or go up to Cherating via taxi.

I had a small wander and thought about it. Staying in Kuantan round the bus terminal was unappealing and if I'd stayed the night I would have just left for KT the next day, so taxi (ouch my budget!) and turtles it was. By about 9pm I stood in Pantai Cherating. The next day I hired a bike, rode up to the Turtle Museum, rode south on the coast road to the fishing village of Sungai Ular (Snake River), where I had keropok lekor - fish sausage - for lunch, watched a monkey picking coconuts, looked at the beach and distant islands, and rode its backroads to try and find the river further up from the coast road. I then returned to Pantai Cherating to have dinner before going to the Turtle Sanctuary again.

It's meant to be the dry season in Malaysia. KL has flooded a couple of times since I've been there, and Pantai Cherating was no different in its unseasonality. I can cope with a little water, but being on a metal bike in an electrical storm is perhaps not such a good idea. So: no ride to the sanctuary, no eggs, no documentary, no release of baby turtles to the uncertainty of life in the ocean, and definitely no happy tidy end to a blog post. Instead I got to watch some football.

My coach the next day was listed as 2pm on my receipt so I turned up to the busstop at about 1:30 to be safe, and watched as a Transnational to KT sailed past just before 2pm without picking me up. I waited about 20 minutes just in case there was a second coach, then walked back to the beachfront to complain to the agent, with a couple of backpackers from Holland who'd just spent six months in Australia. Anyway, what "2pm" meant, it seems, was that my bus was the 1:30 from Kuantan, but that I should have gotten to the busstop there at about 2 to be safe. And that I should get back to the busstop very quickly. Naturally I missed the 1:30 from Kuantan. I could however catch the 6:30 from Kuantan (turn up at 7 for a 7:30 departure...). By about 11:30pm I had a room in KT.

So what's it all about? Turtles? Why I hate long distance travel? How I made some bad choices? Or, how you can't always tell that a choice is bad or not when you make it?

If I hadn't caught the night bus to KT, I wouldn't have woken to find myself in a sci-fi dystopia after dozing off. Terengganu is an oil state, and while there are probably few things more hideous than the full extent of a refinery by day, at night, with its complex of asymmetrical pipework festooned with orange halogen lights, fire-topped emissions towers, and sheer scale, it's really very impressive; ugly but beautiful; definitely something worth seeing. You should go find one quickly, though; they're more endangered than the turtles are, and noone is going to build a sanctuary for them.

Kuala Lumpur: Interludes with Friends and Friends of Friends

taroso — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 08:37:00 GMT

Details, or the lack of them: Yes, this is hideously late - it took ages to write and then ages to be vetted. There are blog entries that have been easy to write but this hasn't been one of them. I did random touristy things, but KL was mainly about people and meals and hanging out and conversations and I really dislike recording details of conversations. It's not just because "Record of Conversation" sounds awfully like work (there's actually a form for them, though I've not used one in years...). Conversations have many many stories and opinions that people may feel comfortable with me knowing but not with everyone knowing. This means that not much happens herein...

Ray: Ray is a Malaysian Chinese friend from uni days who returned to Malaysia a decade back (with another one-year spent in Australia in the intervening period) and now has a security equipment business and a fledgling drinks export business. He put me up for more than two weeks in total in his apartment while I was in KL between my trips to Taman Negara, Kuala Selangor, Melaka, and Penang. Thanks heaps, Ray!

Welcome to KL: My first day in KL was a bit shambolic as my bus from Singapore failed to pick me up so I didn't meet up with Ray as arranged and stayed in Chinatown instead.

Velvet: I managed to get in contact with Ray late that night - he was at Velvet, a club in KL's "Golden Triangle". The occasion was the birthday of Jo, a close friend of Ray's. It was really good to see Ray again after several years. Jo dragged me round and introduced me to lots of her friends, most of whose names I promptly forgot (if I could hear them at all over the music - it took about eight tries to get "Farsha", for instance) and had to be reintroduced to at later quieter occasions. I'd a few drinks, a bit of dancing, and some half-shouted conversation with Ray and others, before heading back to Chinatown.

Random Touristy Things: Lake Gardens, Bird Park, Butterfly Park, museums, inner-city streets and shopping malls, train system, bus system. Didn't ascend Petronas Towers - I'm still not a morning person and I never got moving early enough (you have to get there before 09:00* to get tickets, and KL's traffic is jammed enough that you need to start travelling before 07:30).
[*I'm moving to 24 hour time - pm and am are annoying me]

Luk-Luk: ... (or Lok-Lok) is a form of steamboat where you select skewers of various foods (meats, fish dumplings, vegetable, tofu...), dip them in boiling stock to cook, and then eat them with sauces. Ray and I ate it twice in one night at a Pasar Malam (night market). The first was standing at a mobile van, and the second sitting down at the hawker centre immediately beside it with Jo and Susan. Afterwards we went back to Susan's and watched Prison Break (in English with subtitles) with Ting and Farsha.

Quote from the evening's sparring:
Susan: "Talk to the hand because the face ain't listening"
Taro: "...Sorry, what was that?"

Language: Unfortunately my pidgin Bahasa Indonesia never really got extended into pidgin Bahasa Malaysia - people in KL generally spoke English by choice since in a mixed crowd it's neutral.

Deli: Ray and I met up with Jo, Ting, and Jo's Melburnian co-worker Peter for a dinner of sandwiches and wine (yeah, an odd combination) at a deli in upmarket Mont Kiara. Jo works in PR and her company, with offices in Singapore, KL, and Bangkok, is owned by an Australian (Peter's dad). Most of Jo's friends are in PR or Marketing (I asked someone at another gathering if he were in PR and he said that he wasn't. I replied that that made a change because everyone else was, to which he responded that he _used_ to be in PR)

Barbecue: When Ray said that his condo had a barbecue, I was expecting a flat metal plate - gas or electric. What I wasn't expecting was multiple platforms of chicken wire. Once the rather grotty top wire was covered with alfoil, and charcoal was loaded onto the second platform and lit by Rohan, there was a hot spot big enough to cook a steak. Given that there were a dozen people there, it was lucky that Susan had brought a proper barbecue. It had never been used before and took about forty minutes to set up, but it was faster to do that and then cook the remaining food.

Chok Eng: Back in the early 70s when my mother was posted to a school in Terengganu, she taught Chok Eng English, and they've remained in contact since. I met Chok Eng about 20 years ago when she came to Australia for a month. Her family were ethnic Chinese in a predominantly Muslim Malay area, but all have left the town - for KT, KL, and Johore.

Fish Head Soup: Chok Eng chose Fish Head Soup for dinner. I was a bit dubious about it, but it turned out to be pleasant, if slightly bland (she said there probably wasn't much fish head). My digestion was helped by the fact that no fish head was visible.

Forest Research Institute Malaysia: Chok Eng took me to visit FRIM, which is on the outskirts of KL. There's a museum, offices and laboratories, gardens and plantations, a waterfall, rainforest walks, a canopy walk, and leeches. Boy are there leeches. The leeches are generally much smaller than the ones in Taman Negara, which is not a good thing, as big leeches are easier to see and avoid. FRIM investigates sustainable forestry, forestry management techniques, wood use and protection, etc.

For those at the University of Canberra in 1994:
** Louis and girlfriend Kate spent a few days in KL while en route to Germany to watch the world cup. Kate was at Arscot House but she wasn't one of the Kates that we knew from that period. I haven't seen Louis in ages - he's still in Canberra but now southside.
** Nik is engaged, hideously busy, and likely to get busier as he continues to divide his time between Kuantan (China) and Malaysia. We had lunch in Penang and dinner in KL at the start and end of my time there. I met his fiancee the first time in KL but unfortunately she speaks very little English, and I no Mandarin. Hopefully we'll catch up again in Kuantan (and he'll be a little less busy!)
** Ray is happy, and probably returning to Australia late next year.
** Taro continues to slack around the world on his <cough> fourteen and a half months of half-paid leave<cough>, resisting his entrepreneurial friends' encouragement to think a little more entrepreneurially.

Fragments from Pulau Penang

taroso — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 08:41:00 GMT

I've been slack and haven't finished writing up Pulau Penang, which was ages ago (World Nomads allows setting post date). As I really need to start writing up other things, please enjoy some disjointed paragraphs, without introduction or ending, instead of a nicely tailored story with logical structure/narrative thread.

I wandered around the northeast waterfront area, with some lovely colonial-era buildings to admire. Fort Cornwallis was unfortunately rather touristy, with one tour group taking turns to posing for photos with a petite chinese lass in a blue dress of traditional english design and modern synthetic colour, and another group posing with replica gun and tricorn hat. Much of the fort's central open space was taken up by an amphitheatre, seating, and shops, but the rooms in the southern wall had some interesting historical info about the founding of Penang by Captain Francis Light.

One thing I've found generally surprising about SE Asia is the lack of flies; for instance, what swarmed over Chowrasta market's pickled and dried fruits were not flies, but wasps.

KOMTAR is Penang's shopping centre/bus interchange/office tower. Unusually, it has the feel of an underground railway arcade - its ceilings are low, its passages are curving and some only have shops on one side, its tiles appear grimy, and its lighting is dim. It links up with the more-modern Parkson Grand mall, home to more shops, cinemas, and a large number of popular electronic games of chance.

Penang's hawker food is good. I ate far too much Char Kuay Teow, flat rice noodles fried with prawns, egg, soy sauce, etc.

I hired a bike and rode down to to Batu Maung, on the southeastern cape of the island. There's an aquarium there, which didn't take too long to see (although its wall-size tank with fish 1 to 5 feet in length was very pleasant to rest in front for a while).

It was late afternoon, I'd ridden more than 25 km, and peddling up Bukit Batu Maung to the Penang War Museum was rather hard going. The museum is not a single building, but is instead a collection of about thirty sites scattered around the hilltop: tunnels, fortifications, and outbuildings built by the British for WW2, and later seized and (ab)used by the Japanese. There's a lot of history to walk and crawl through, climb on, and read, there, and I hadn't sufficient time to see all of it.
Apparently it was "lost" after the war when local superstition said that the hill was haunted and vegetation covered everything for thirty years or more. ...In an effort to encourage tourism, there is apparently also a section set aside for paintball games, which enables participants to gain an appreciation for the true horrors of paintball.

On the way back, I stopped by the (Chinese) Snake Temple, where they have pit vipers - safe not only due to the stupefying effects of the incense, but also due to having been milked of their venom. The only vipers I saw were a few stationary ones draped on a potted tree in a small vestibule; it was almost closing time, and the vipers in the courtyard's walled pit (trees, hollowed stones, bushes, grass) had been (mostly) put away. One appeared to be missing - a plastic tub stood with its lid off, and a staffer was running around the paths and bridge. Another 15km or so of riding and I was home.

I've done a (for me) ridiculous amount of exercise at times. A couple of days before my bike ride, I:
- walked from Chinatown to (and around) the Botanic Gardens at the southeastern base of Penang Hill
- walked from there to the top of Penang Hill
- quietly died
- wandered around and admired the view, the temple, and the mosque
- had some dinner at a restaurant where the terrace had a sign warning about Pit Vipers in the vines above. I ate indoors
- took the funicular train ("funicular" meaning it's pulled by a rope/cable) to the southwestern base of Penang Hill at Air Hitam
- walked back to Chinatown.

Excluding Penang Hill, the walk was about 20km and not too strenuous. Penang Hill, 5km from base to peak was named with British understatement: it can be strolled up in a mere three to four hours. It's amazing how much sweat one can wring out of a singlet and shirt.

The afternoon before I left Penang, I met Nik (and father) for lunch at his hotel. Only briefly, though, as he'd been busy working and had to return to KL mid-afternoon so couldn't spend any time wandering round Penang with him. Afterwards I failed to get to the fruit farm as the Penang bus system does not connect north coast to west coast and it was too late to get back to Georgetown, and then catch another bus or two for the south and west coasts. While waiting for the bus back to Georgetown, I bought rambutans, which had just come off the truck from Thailand.

Melaka: Food and Museums

taroso — Mon, 5 Jun 2006 02:54:00 GMT

I went down to Melaka last Friday with Ray, his distant cousin-in-law Joanne, her friend Jamie, and her boss Samir. I was meant to have gone to Melaka earlier in the week, but my first (and hopefully last) bout of Traveller's Diarrhoea left me unwilling to move very far. For some reason I managed to survive Indonesia...

Population: Melaka was the major trading port of the region hundreds of years ago. It has populations of Chinese ("Baba-Nyonya"), Indian ("Chitty"), and Portuguese descendants that are considered to be native Malaysians.

Museums: There are fifteen or so museums clustered around Stadthuys, Melaka's red fort - many for local and national government, independence, and culture; another for beauty, several on Islam and its roles; one for UMNO (the political party); one for architecture. There are more museums elsewhere - a Baba-Nyonya museum and another dedicated to Chinese explorer/ambassador Admiral Cheng Ho in Chinatown, a Malay museum in the Malay kampung (village) area, maritime and naval museums on the waterfront, and probably others I missed. Lots of historic buildings and temples too.

Royal Malaysian Navy: Did you know that three RAN officers commanded the RMN? Two of them were Chiefs of Navy post-independence...

Chicken Rice: For lunch on Friday we had chicken rice, which consists of steamed chicken with soy-chilli sauce, and rice shaped into balls. Only Melaka does chicken rice this way. I liked the chicken, but the rice balls were only so-so.

Kaya: Coconut milk, Palm Sugar, Egg. Jam it. Serve with slices of very thin white toast. Breakfast on Saturday. Delicious.

River Cruise: We went on a river cruise on Saturday. The river was rather filthy, but our amusing but garrulous guide kept emphasising that the government was in the process of spending millions to upgrade the riverfront, add walkways, implement flow control, and restore it to a more pristine state. Garrulous? He spent five minutes saying goodbye in as many languages as he could think of.

Snails: After never having had snail before, I tried escargot on Friday night, and sea snail on the Saturday night. The escargot tasted not like chicken but like very garlicky oyster. The sea snail came in a salad and had a rubbery texture and bland taste. I was pleasantly surprised at my lack of reaction, as when I had raw horse in Japan fifteen years back I totally froze up and was unable to continue eating once I knew what it was.

Portuguese Settlement: On Saturday night we went for seafood at the Portuguese settlement, which is a few kilometres outside central Melaka. Melaka's Portuguese have intermarried - they're brown-skinned - and those of the settlement make a living by catching and selling seafood. We bought food from two stalls. The one we were sitting beside was operated by free-divers, who had lots of fresh shellfish from the ocean floor - huge oysters with shells bigger than your hand, mussels, furry-shelled clams, Horseshoe crabs, sea snails; that kind of thing. The other sold shellfish/crustaceans, and fish. We ate a lot of seafood, and (with the exception of the snail) it was delicious and (because it was so fresh) un-fishy. Highlight: Assam prawns.

Parties: The brochures issued by Melaka's tourist office have an unusual slogan written on them: "Even birds sleep in Melaka". I'm pretty sure that there have been better ways to suggest that the city is worth visiting. A bunch of people came down from KL on the Saturday to go to a Chinese Dance Club, and more came down for a rave.

Taman Negara: Journeys

taroso — Mon, 29 May 2006 09:45:00 GMT

The well-touristed village of Kuala Tahan sits on the eastern bank of the milk-coffee Sungai Tembeling where it's joined from the northwest by the smaller but equally muddy Sungei Tahan. It's an uncomfortable three hours upriver to get there by wooden motor sampan from the town of Jerentut (itself a few hours coach trip from KL). Though Kuala Tahan consists mainly of lower-end accommodation and floating eateries, it serves as the main gateway to Taman Negara, which is why we went there.

"Taman Negara" translates literally - if understatedly - as "National Park": it's actually "the World's Oldest Tropical Rainforest". I went there with Ray and Jo, and Michelle and Dean (a couple of Jo's friends). Of the eleven passengers in our coach, all but Jo were either Australian or had lived in Australia for years. Small World.

A few hours' coach trip; some lunch; a few hours uncomfortable voyage upriver by motor sampan.

I guess that after reading "boat trip" in the pamphlet I was expecting more of a ferry-like experience: deckchairs, rails and a kiosk, perhaps; on-board toilets certainly. The Tembeling is too shallow and treacherous, however, for a large boat: all along the river floating bottles mark hazards, and our pilots took serpentine routes even where there were no such warnings. At one of Kuala Tahan's floating restaurants we disembarked.

It was late afternoon - time enough to unpack, shower, watch the rain, and have dinner before being taking a boat across the river for a night walk through the near-reaches of the rainforest. The group was a little large and the 500 metres of rainforest path overtrafficked by a constant flow of tourists but our guide was excellent. He explained that we'd probably only see insects, spiders, etc because of how busy the path was nowadays, gave us bits of lore about flowers and plants along the way, and proceded to locate a variety of small creatures including snails, spiders, scorpions, caterpillars, butterflies, moths, beetles, stick insects (very impressive spotting!), a porcupine (briefly) and a [sorry but it's the right word] cute miniature fruitbat. About the only creature that would have been found without assistance was the leech which bit Ray.

We were staying in three different locations - I in a budget 7-bed (but unshared) dorm on the other side of the river, R&J in a single room about 5 minutes away, and M&D in the Mutiara resort on this Taman Negara side of the river. Crossings were made by boat and finished at 11pm, which could be inconvenient. Returning to our side was a close thing - not because of the time, but because thunderstorms upstream were causing the river to flood. The water had already risen a metre on this side of the river, the beach beside the floating restaurants had gone by the time we were over and just after we got back we were told that the river was rising 5 metres in ten minutes (I didn't witness this as I was recovering from faceplanting into dirty water while crossing the boards to the concrete pier).

In the morning, the water had subsided, though much of the beach was still submerged and our floating restaurant was damaged - a log had wedged itself under the ?stern? while the river was still high, and the structure was now twisted. A group - one with a bulldozer - worked to try to remove the log. Our nightwalk guide had given us the tip that we could just do the Canopy + Bukit Teresek walk ourselves (saving us a total of RM170 in the process) so we crossed over. There were longer walks - guided tours into the inner rainforest, but they took too long - we were only gone for three days (more realistically two nights, a day, and travel)

The Canopy walk, another half a kilometre or so along the trail from the junction where we turned back the night before, is a series of ten rope bridges strung from tree-top platform to tree-top platform. Its selling point is that it's the longest in the world. The waiting area was packed - apparently four hundred tourists from Singapore had arrived in KT for the weekend, and quite a number were here.

It started out well: everybody at least 5 metres apart; no more than four people on a platform at a time; no stopping on the bridges. The boards were solid; the ropes were knotted. There were safety monitors on the platforms to ensure flow. A couple of bridges along, the number of safety monitors dropped off. Some of the boards were cracked. Then flow problems started - groups ahead moving slower than they were pushing people through behind. You started getting eight or more people on platforms; people in the group behind started walking more closely together; one of the ropes was unsecured; the ring of a cable end was left flapping with nothing through it... The end result was that it wasn't particularly relaxing to look down at fifteen metres of air, bushes, trees, and thorny vines.

After the crowded canopy walk, we hiked up the deserted Teresek Hill to look at Mount Tahan. On the way up, we stepped over an army of ants that were following a liana out of the undergrowth up to a felled log, then travelling along that log and out of sight. After recovering and enjoying the view, we came back down much quicker. The ants - there must have been millions - carried on one way, and we another.

We had a choice of paths: to go back to the main path via the exit of the canopy walk, or to take a longer but yet-untrodden 1.7 km loop to enter the Mutiara resort from the south. The unseen path appeared more appealing.

"In May 2006 five tourists went for a 1.7 km walk in the Taman Negara Rainforest. Hours later they escaped into Mutiara Resort."

The distance signposted may have been as the crow flies, but it wasn't a realistic assessment of the length of the muddy track. Nor did it appear as though anyone else had walked recently, and when we checked compass directions, I did wonder if we'd inadvertently missed a couple of turnoffs somewhere and were heading into the inner rainforest. The scenery may have been nice. Much like the canopy walk, though, my focus was mainly on getting through the thing. There were leeches galore - more than one a metre spotted in especially muddy patches. Everyone ended up bitten except for me - I owe that to the thickness of travel socks as there were a couple of leeches trying their best, and I'd been bitten the night before through normal socks. Eventually we found the T-junction, and - passing what turned out to be the muddy swimming area - found evidence of civilisation: Steps leading up, some more muddy track, and then a walkway and bridge.

A couple of guys in board shorts passed us - "Is this the way to the swimming hole?". We warned them to beware the leeches, and they carried on regardless. None of us envied them their swim; I remember the crossing of the river in "Stand By Me". Just before we left the walkway, we saw a family wild boar (they were black but smallish - didn't see any tusks) rooting in the mud for food.

Filthy, we sat down for Ice Kacang (Ice, peanuts, corn, syrup, green glutenous threads) at the Mutiara's nice clean restaurant. Earlier, we had planned on exploring Gua Telinga, the "Ear Cave" but it was late and we were tired and lunch and showers seemed more important. So we crossed over to Kuala Tahan instead.

Food (possibly the slowest service ever - well over an hour for all the meals to be served); showers; too much whiskey; an earlyish night (that 11pm last river crossing); sleep; breakfast.

Then a few hours' uncomfortable travel downriver by motor sampan broken only by the need for the pilot to stop the boat and bail water; some lunch; a few hours' coach trip; home.