Good Journal Name

On how to be stared at in India.

hotnoodle — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:10:00 GMT

Tiruchirappali (Trichy), Tamil Nadu, India

I was out walking to the internet today when I saw a white person.

(I never go to use the internet anymore. I think it's much nicer to go to it, as if it's a place you can visit, like the library. A library full of porn.)

This white person was a tall guy with glasses. I've seen so few white people here in Trichy that I stared, just like everyone else was staring.

I saw an Asian guy earlier. I stared at him too.

I get stared at a lot myself because I'm white, female, blonde and alone. When I'm in restaurants, in particular, it's a staring free-for-all: Not only am I white, female, blonde and alone, but I'm also invariably eating wrong -- ie, with a spoon. Or drinking out of the chai drip pan. Or whatever.

So imagine how much better the stares were this evening: I was eating my palak kofta and butter naan peacefully in the restaurant next to my hotel, when a man approached the table and loudly asked: "HOW IS THE TASTE? WHAT IS IT?"

I said that it was an excellent palak kofta.

"WHAT IS YOUR COUNTRY?"

"New Zealand."

He said "OHHH," and then started asking me, loudly, something about what the hell is happening in Australia with the persecution of Indians.

At first I thought he was talking about the cricket, then something in the back of my memory was tickled and I nodded and said "oh yeah".

He leaned across the table: Sweat beading on his forehead. "WE ARE ALL HUMAN BEINGS! WE ALL DESERVE RESPECT!"

I reminded him that I was from New Zealand.

"BUT YOUR GOVERNMENT IS HIDING THE PERPETRATORS! I AM UNIVERSITY LECTURER! HIM TOO!" (Gesturing at his silent friend.) "HIS NAME IS MR BABOO. HE IS MATHEMATICIAN. MY NAME IS (something I didn't understand.) I AM ENGLISHMAN. WHAT DO YOU DO THERE?"

I muttered something about web design.

"OH, THAT IS VERY GOOD JOB. WE ARE ALL HUMANS! AT THE END THERE IS DEATH FOR YOU, ME, ALL! HAVE A NICE EVENING!"

The restaurant was silent and staring. I glanced at the man at the table adjacent to mine, giving him my best "who knows?" shrug. He just kept staring at me.

I went back to eating wrongly.

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

hotnoodle — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:47:00 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

How not to leave Edinburgh

hotnoodle — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 13:34:00 GMT

Two different ways of making travel arrangements:

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

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

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

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

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

Gallery: Malaysia & Indonesia 09

hotnoodle — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 02:21:00 GMT

Homeless, hungover and socially retarded in Edinburgh

hotnoodle — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:40:00 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm a bum.

Edinburgh exercises in homelessness

hotnoodle — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:16:00 GMT

I'm a bum.

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

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

I'm prowling the streets looking for any of the following:

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

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

I repeat. I am a bum.

Liverpool, not Nice

hotnoodle — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:31:00 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kuala Lumpur to London: An exercise in stupid

hotnoodle — Mon, 6 Jul 2009 17:24:00 GMT

KUALA LUMPUR TO SINGAPORE

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

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

SINGAPORE

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

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

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

SINGAPORE TO LONDON HEATHROW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to London.

Lombok to Bali - Mount Rinjani says "hi"

hotnoodle — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 02:04:00 GMT

"One ringgit. One ringgit ok?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was what I was really after.

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

Mount Rinjani, Lombok - The day before

hotnoodle — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:02:00 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we'll do it anyway.

Singapore: Early morning philosophical indulgences

hotnoodle — Wed, 3 Jun 2009 06:55:00 GMT

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

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

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

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

There was a kick to it.

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

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

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

Motherfucking Singapore!

Wet in Kuching: Less about a city, more about a boy.

hotnoodle — Sun, 24 May 2009 21:13:00 GMT

I'm dripping on the floor, making puddles around my bare feet. There's a mother and a couple of children cooking on the landing. The boy stops to chat with them ever so quietly while I continue to drip. Then he ushers me up another short flight of wooden stairs and into his room.

"I don't want them to see you."

I sit down on a stool in the corner of his room and he passes me a towel. I give my hair and legs a quick dry. He disappears to the bathroom to change his clothes. I take this opportunity to pass judgement on the boy based on the contents of his bedroom. In other words, snoop.

The room itself is a reasonable size, but unless you consider the sort of window that opens into a hallway to be a window, it is sans window. A single mattress lies on the floor. The sheets have Tweety Bird on them. Propped up against the wall is a collection of "Smallville" DVDs, although he appears to be lacking in anything to play them on.

Hanging along the walls are clothes. I'm guessing this constitutes his entire wardrobe. The room smells like him: Kind of musky, like unwashed hair. I'm familiar with this smell from spending so much time behind him on the motorcycle. It's not overly unpleasant. Just human.

He returns to the room with different pants on, but no shirt. I feign shock, gasp, and cover my eyes until he puts on a dry t-shirt.

He points out a collection of electronic equipment on the table which he has managed to kill: A cellphone, a camera, a GPS device.

"Why on earth do you need a GPS device?"
He shrugs.

I ask him if the mattress on the floor is the one that his aunt was going to help him move. No, apparently not. The new mattress, he says, is much thicker. He holds his hands thirty centimetres apart: THIS thick! It is so thick and bouncy that he can't resist jumping on it. He likes to jump on things, he says. Couches, beds, it drives his parents crazy.

Now that he's dry, it's my turn: We exit his room, down the stairs, shoes back on. We leave the lady to cook her meal in the cavernous space. I glance over the bannister on the way down and beneath us is a bunch of machinary.

Back on the motorcycle: It's not raining anymore, and there's a giant rainbow over Kuching. We head in the direction of my guesthouse so that I can get out of my drenched clothes.

The plan had been to go to the beach. I'd met him around 4pm after spending the day wandering around Kuching and visiting the small museum. (There was a very informative exhibition on offshore oil drilling, it's impact on the environment and on the community. It was overwhelmingly positive and sponsored by Shell. There was also a replica longhouse and a whole bunch of stuffed animals that I'd seen in the wild a week or two ago.)

We met at the "hanging spot" again, and headed off in the direction of the beach, only to be stopped short by a torrential downpour. We did as people do in this situation, and pulled over to wait at a bus stop. When it was still raining 45 minutes later, we decided that the beach was probably a no-go, and that we should instead run the gauntlet to the mechanic to fix his loose chain.

Errands. I like them.

At the mechanic's was a fascination. People stare. Maybe they don't get to see drenched white chicks so often. Maybe it's because I was on the back of his motorcycle and they were wondering what the story was. "They all like to look at you," he says. "Of course," I say. "I'm a movie star here!"

With the beach off the cards, we decided instead to simply go and get into some dry clothes, which is how I ended up at his bachelor pad. In comparison, my guesthouse is like something out of a house and garden magazine: Clean, bright, huge windows, air conditioning. I get changed (aircon on wet skin = brrrr) and offer him a coffee. He can't refuse, and lets me make it because he's not sure how.

We jump back on the motorcycle and go back to the weekend market that he tried to show me yesterday. Lots of bizarre fruits that neither of us know the name for. Clothes, tacky souveniers, animals, dried fish, dried everything else. We get rice and watch Terminator at one of the food stalls.

We sit there and talk rubbish, like normal, and swap notes on various other cultures: He tells me that he would be too scared to go to America because of an evil people who live there, called the Yahudi. I cock an eyebrow. He's pretty emphatic about it: "Look on the internet!" His friend had told him about them. I promised to look it up.

He drops me off at my guesthouse, promising (once again) to meet the next day. He suggests karaoke. I cringe. He says with uncharacteristic sternness: "Aletta. Do you know how long it has been since I went to karaoke?" and I laugh my head off.

Kota Kinabalu to Kuching: Stream of consciousness

hotnoodle — Sat, 23 May 2009 14:07:00 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

Urgh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Makes a change from KK anyways.

Reasons for being wretched in Starbucks, Kota Kinabalu International Airport

hotnoodle — Fri, 22 May 2009 02:34:00 GMT

Wretched, wretched.

It's 9.30am, and I'm sitting in Kota Kinabalu International Airport, Terminal something. One or two. Not the budget terminal anyway. Having arrived in KK at the budget terminal and seen it in its midday-scorching-heat glory, I'm finding this other terminal pretty swanky indeed. But it doesn't detract from the fact that I'm extremely tired, moderately hungover, and absolutely ravenous.

I hereby admit to anyone that cares that I'm currently sitting in a Starbucks. You know you're in an airport when Starbucks is the most reasonably priced food you can find. I'm drinking a coffee and eating a chocolate cinnamon bun. It's bloody fantastic.

I'm extremely tired because I had the worst dorm-mates ever last night. I was tucked up in bed by 11.30pm, like a good girl, and they came rocking in en masse at 2am, rustling bags and flashing head-torches and shhhing each other like only drunk, stupid people can sshhh. Their stealth was miserable and I simply got up and turned the light on for them. Then my buddy on the top bunk decided to be, you know, an uncoordinated elephant. Then he decided to snore, cough and wriggle. Then he decided to hold a conversation with himself in his sleep. I know that all these things were a completely conscious decision.

That's why I repaid the rustling, door-slamming, bag-shifting, light-flashing favour at 5am.

And that's why I'm tired. I'm hungover because I was drinking lots of beer with two English boys last night at a bar. I was drinking beer with English boys because I had met them on the beach earlier in the day. With three days to kill in Kota Kinabalu before my flight to Kuching, there's not a huge amount to do besides shop (two t-shirts for RM15!), go to the movies ("Star Trek" and "Angels and Demons") and hang out on the beach.

I went back at the beach where I saw the turtle. This time I didn't see a turtle, but I did see a reef shark. This caused me to paddle in the opposite direction pretty quickly, even though reef sharks are harmless.

Back on the beach I spied two guys sitting in the water drinking what looked like beer. This amused me. It seemed like a very Australian thing to do, so I positioned myself so that I could hear their accents in order to confirm or refute this hypothesis. Since you've already read the paragraphs above and because you were paying attention, you know that I was wrong. One of them comes over to me to ask the time, and I hurl so much random bullshit at him that he is compelled to invite me to drink beer with them that evening.

Sure thing, I say. It's either that or going to see the Star Trek movie again.

They depart on an earlier boat, and I spend another hour or so loitering on the beach. I sit with my lower body in the water like they were doing, and find myself surrounded by tiny feeder fish which set to nibbling on various parts of my body. It sounds creepy, but you pay big bucks for that kind of treatment in spas in Singapore.

Thirty minutes before my boat, I pack up my stuff and notice that... uhh... my shirt is missing. I retrace my steps to check everywhere where I might have vomited out the contents of my backpack. I climb over the island twice to check the snorkelling spot. I ask every shop and kiosk and lifeguard stand up and down the beach. Nobody has seen my shirt.

So I jump on my boat in shorts and bikini, head held high. I politely request that I may be dropped off at one of the other piers in town, to save myself an embarrassing stroll through KK central in inappropriate attire. They say no, no, no, then yes.

But even then -- goodness me.

If you ever doubt that you are attractive... If you ever doubt that you are, indeed, a world-famous movie star... If you ever think that the opposite sex simply doesn't appreciate all you have to offer... all you have to do is stroll through KK in a bikini. I figured out that if I wore my backpack on my front, I could at least avoid the gawking from the front. But as soon as I walked past those groups of guys who hang out on street corners, the chorus of "woohooohooo!" and "oh my god!" and "what happened??" would follow me.

Anyway, that was an exciting story to relate to these two guys when I joined them for beer later on.

The bar had a deal going: One large Tiger beer for RM17, or two for RM18. No-brainer. Together we imbibed a great deal and talked a great deal of rubbish. They were Daz (Darren, Darrell, whatever) and Dave. Dave from London with a mild cockney accent. Daz from somewhere further north were the pubs are called "poobs". They had just met the day before as well, in this self same bar. Daz had picked a flight to a random place on the spur of the moment, while killing time waiting for his mates to show up in Singapore. Dave had come out here specifically to see Borneo. Nice boys. They walked me back to my hostel, big hugs goodbye. Daz pinches my ass. This delights me immensely, and I'm sure it was completely audible to them when, as I'm walking up the stairs, I meet another chick coming down and enthuse "Did you see that? He pinched my bum!"

So that's why I'm hungover.

I'm ravenously hungry because I woke up at 5am and had breakfast then, in order to take a taxi to the airport to be on time for my 9.10am flight. Turns out my flight is delayed an hour. I'm also ravenous because I couldn't force down much more than two slices of toast due to the abovementioned circumstances.

But anyway. Today I fly to Kuching, in Sarawak, on the other side of the country. It's almost like an international flight with customs and immigration and everything. I'm not sure what exactly there is to do in Kuching, but everyone says that the various attractions are a lot more accessible to "independent travellers", which is a fancy way of saying "cheaper". I want to do some walking in forests. I want to see some caves. I have no plan, but I'm sure it will become obvious.

Uncle Tan’s, orangutans, Kinabatangans

hotnoodle — Mon, 18 May 2009 02:27:00 GMT

Jason Mraz should feel pretty proud of himself. Probably unbeknownst to him, his song “I’m Yours” is currently being sung, strummed, hummed and played obsessively by jungle village dwellers along the Kinabatangan river in the east of Sabah. I don’t expect that when you create something like that you expect it to travel quite so far, or be loved quite so much. These guys are loving this song to distraction. There is no escaping it. Like it or not, this is my soundtrack to the Borneo jungle.

This is my second night in the jungle, staying at a place called “Uncle Tan’s”. We’ve just finished dinner (rice and a melange of vegetables, meats, curry and the ubiquitous tiny banana) and now everyone is lounging around the common area reading whatever they can get their hands on and waiting for their evening activity. They will either be going on a “river cruise” where they will pile into a longboat and zigzag up and down the river with a spotlight, trying to spot proboscis monkeys, kingfishers, crocodiles, macacques and other dormant jungle dwellers, or they will be jumping off the edge of one of the boardwalks here at camp (replete with sexy gumboots) and going hunting for spiders, frogs, insects and other such goodies in the forest surrounding the camp.

I’m wondering if the insect count is going to top what I’m currently experiencing here in the common area. I’m sure you’re aware of the effect that light has on moths. Now imagine that the moths are ten times the size (some the size of my hand with fingers spread) and accompanied by shiny black walnut-sized beetles, dragonflies the size of marie biscuits, and one bat which is flying circuits up and down the building, I presume om nom nomming up the bugs I have just described.

Being blessed as I am with thick luxurious locks, I have had several occasions this evening where I have needed the help of my fellow temporary jungle inhabitants to remove these more permanent inhabitants from my hair. “Uhh… guys?”

It’s pretty cool.

I arrived at this place by way of a six hour bus ride from Kota Kinabalu. Boy, was I glad to get away from those guys at the end, even if it was certain that I would meet Matt again at the camp. Despite the fact that we needed to follow pretty much exactly the same itinerary to arrive here, it was all beautifully co-ordinated: I caught the 12.30pm bus, he caught the 2pm bus. I chose to stay at the Sepilok Forest Edge Resort, he chose the Sepilok Jungle Resort right next door. It was such a relief to be seated on a bus with a brand new bunch of people, none of whom would presume to call me a liar.

I spent a reasonable portion of the journey in indulgent reflection on what exactly happened there. My conclusion placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of Mike the Australian — obviously a very jealous, needy and manipulative man who was singlehandedly responsible for sowing the seeds of conflict. I would have put money on the idea that it was he who first suggested that I was “fibbing”, and 20/20 hindsight showed me a dozen other situations where he had painted me in a bad light. It was clear that his objective was to steal Matt away from me.

Oh yes. On that six-hour bus trip I did become a 12-year-old girl.

Conclusion thus reached, I was imbued with a tremendous sense of calm. I cranked up all the songs on my iPod with special powers of cheering — Including that “I’m Yours” song by Jason Mraz — and watched the landscape roll by.

I arrived at Sepilok Junction at 7pm in the dark, and half an hour later I was sitting around a table with some Canadians, a French girl and a Polish woman, talking rubbish and waiting for an overpriced grilled cheese sandwich.

The main reason foreigners can be enticed to leap off the KK to Sandakan bus at Sepilok Junction is to visit the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre. And for most tourists the visit to this place is timed to coincide with feeding times.

This is when a man will emerge from the jungle with buckets full of bananas, and mount the stairs to a platform where he will scatter a few bunches of bananas and then sit with his back to the jungle. Then the jungle will start to rustle. A single orangutan will make its way hand over hand along a rope — first to one platform, then to the platform where our friend is sitting.

This orangutan is extremely brave because less than 20 metres away about 100 tourists are aiming big black weapons at it.

The orangutan will fossick around in the bucket, ignoring the bananas that are already on the ground in what I consider to be a very human gesture of fussiness. Then, with food in hand, the orangutan will disappear behind the platform to eat, much to the disappointment of the 100 tourists who will simultaneously lower their weapons and exchange bewildered expressions.

This process will be repeated for about three different orangutans. Once it becomes clear that the orangutans aren’t going to break into a song and dance routine, the 100 tourists will pack away their weapons and trudge back along the boardwalk to buy icecream at the cafeteria, 30 - 40 ringett poorer and a great deal sweatier for the experience.

I do not think I have ever sweated more than I did right here, and then again back at my “resort”, hurriedly packing my stuff in my dorm room. There was no daytime electricity, so no fan. I removed my shirt and packed in my bikini. This didn’t make me any cooler, but it did save my shirt from being completely drenched. Note to self: For next visit to tropical country, pack shirts that do not show the sweat quite so much.

I was dropped off at Uncle Tan’s operations base down the road from my resort, and easily settled in for the first of many feeds with the Canadian couple I’d met the night before. Matt shows up, and sits at another table. Rice, vegetables, instant coffee, creamer powder. We pile into mini vans for a three hour journey to the Kinabatangan River.

When you think “Borneo” I bet you think “jungle”, right? And hot on the tail of “jungle” you probably think “orangutans” or “proboscis monkeys” or some other wildlife. Snakes, insects, crocodiles. Things you wouldn’t typically want in your bed. What you should really be thinking is “palm oil plantations”, since that is what really dominates the landscape here — in Sabah here at least. In my naïveté I at first thought that the plantations were the jungle, until it occurred to me that jungle doesn’t tend to organise itself into neat rows.

Here in Sabah the jungle as you imagine it has largely been chopped down and replaced with these highly profitable crops. The remaining forest has been coralled into protected pockets, or inaccessible (to budget travellers) national parks far in the interior.

The success of wildlife tour operators like Uncle Tan’s is ironically in part due to this destruction of the forest: It has concentrated the wildlife into much smaller areas. Along parts of the Sungai Kinabatangan there might only be a narrow sliver of jungle between the river and the palm oil plantations behind it. This means that the orangutans, proboscis monkeys, hornbills, kingfishers, otters and other such creatures are present in higher densities in areas conveniently accessible by boat.

When you think “Borneo” you might also think “elephant”. There are elephants here. The large majority of the elephants in this area are confined to one particular “lot” of protected forest. The problem with these “lots” is that they are separated by oil palm plantations, and the animals have no way of moving between the lots, except by crossing the plantations.

If you can imagine how much foliage an elephant needs to eat every day (I ask you to imagine because I myself can’t remember — but it’s quite a lot) it’s obvious that they need quite a large area in which to browse. Sometimes the lot isn’t big enough, so they strike out for another lot by charging across one of the intervening plantations.

Now, there’s a reason why we say to children who have made a mess in a room “it looks like a herd of elephants have been through here!” An elephant can wreak a lot of havoc in an palm oil plantation. The farmers try to prevent this by erecting electric fences and by digging ditches, but the elephants still try, and it’s apparently not uncommon to find them dead with legs entangled by wire.

And although they are protected, a frustrated farmer may also take it upon himself to dispose of the pest himself. Prosecution is rare because the damage the elephants inflict on the livelihood of the farmer is so great already.
Anyway, this is what our guide told us today as we were squelching our way through the rainforest in one of these protected lots. He was an extremely wry young gent with eyebrows in possession of a life of their own, and obviously no sweat glands given that he was wearing jeans while the rest of us could be wrung out in order to fill a swimming pool.

The jungle trek was more of an opportunity for looking at plants, trees and insects rather than wildlife. Right at the start he pointed out an extremely poisonous spikey tree which will make you extremely sick and itchy. On the other end of the spectrum he showed us a millipede which sprays acid at its foes when threatened, only the acid doesn’t burn, and smells remarkably like marzipan.

In total I have seen a whole bunch of long tailed macacques, one orangutan, two otters, some hornbills, some kingfishers, one frog, several trees full of the extremely amusing proboscis monkeys (called “Dutchmen” by the locals because of their big noses and pot bellies), many millipedes, many moths and beetles, and one bat. I have seen no crocodiles or snakes, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

I have been unable to avoid Matt because, as it transpires, we are the only singletons in an overbooked camp, and therefore we’ve been banished to the staff quarters. It’s not so bad because at least we don’t have to share a mattress under a mosquito net, as everybody else does. And there are only the two of us in the one hut, as opposed to six. But really. I think the joke has gone on long enough.

Unlike the “normal” huts, we have no sheltered balcony with a light bulb. My head torch has finally given up the ghost, despite a sincere bashing. So our only light comes from a single outside bulb, two huts down, and my nightly shit-sorting has to be done in the dark, or in the wet.

Perhaps that’s what I’m going to be associating with Borneo: Not jungle, not wildlife, not even the oil palm plantations. But the shrieking of nocturnal creatures from the jungle, and no escape from the dark or damp.

And that Jason Mraz song. It’s just too damn catchy.

Kota Kinabalu: Sleeping, snorkelling and relationship woes

hotnoodle — Sat, 16 May 2009 02:20:00 GMT

When my little brother first started "big kids' school" my mother used to walk him to school. When she tried to leave she would be assailed by a barrage of wails. Anguish aplenty. She felt terribly guilty about leaving him in such a state until one day after leaving him she ducked around the side of the school and saw him playing happily with his friends -- the same boy who was beside himself with misery only five minutes before.

The next time she left him and he started bawling she said, "Stop that! You'll be fine in five minutes."

And he, by her account, said "drat!"

For the past few weeks I have been working myself into such a state. I've been sitting in my room and fondling my material possessions. I have been walking around the city with a hyperbolic sense of nostalgia. All I have wanted to do is sit and watch television. When anyone has asked me if I'm excited, I have just shrugged and said that I'm excited about the plane, the "free food" and getting new earpiece covers for my headphones from the airplane headsets. I have said that as soon as I get to the airport and smell those airport smells I'll be just fine.

I have tended not to believe me.

But it turns out that I'm just like my brother. As soon as I'm left alone to go play with the world I'm just fine. I don't even remember what I was planning on missing so much. Four days into South East Asian Odyssey #2 and it feels like I've picked up where I left off a year and a half ago. And it feels just fine.

-----

My bed in my hostel in Kota Kinabalu is pretty swanky by SEA standards. The mattress is innersprung. The pillow is comfortable and non-musty. There is a duvet of an appropriate weight and jolly print. The bed is wide enough that I can get some approximation of diagonal -- which as everybody knows, is the most comfortable direction in which to sleep. The floors are tiled. There is blissful air conditioning. I was first in the room, so I've managed to nab the bottom bunk. We even have a window, although it does look out onto a corridor.

Following on from the nightmare that was my Changi Airport stopover, this is heaven. I may as well give up and go home now, there isn't going to be anything capable of topping this.

Such were my sentiments as I was lying in this den of decadent repose, trying to nap on the afternoon of my arrival in Kota Kinabalu.

In the midst of such meditations on the perfectness of my room, I was interrupted by the arrival of a new dorm mate: Matt the insurmountably polite Welsh lad with a confused accent. In a flash I recalled dorm room etiquette and launched into the "backpacker exchange" in order to discover where he was from, where he had been, where he was going, how long he'd been travelling and how much longer he had left to travel. I returned my own vital stats in exchange. Having satisfied this ritual, I invited him to accompany me hunting mangoes, and we spent the afternoon talking an impressive amount of crap at the end of the pier, watching the boats go to and from the islands off the coast.

He was (and still is) a lawyer of sorts. Half way through an eight-month round-the-world odyssey that will take him to Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and both North and South Americas before he's through. He told me stories of being an exceptionally tall bloke in China. We swapped experiences of Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. I told him how I'm usually a complete anti-tourist and that I will probably end up saying "I went to Borneo and all I did was watch the Star Trek movie" and he agreed that that would be awesome. We shared similar sentiments to the effect that Futurama and Family Guy are better than the Simpsons, which only makes number three out of longevity, and that Futurama beats Family Guy by a smidgen because you can actually care about the characters.

Pier, sunset over island, crap-talking... at one stage my top lip curled in a slight Elvis impersonation, accompanied by an eye-squint, and I had to explain that it was my expression to say "Aww yeah... this isn't too bad."

-----------

Now, there's nothing I like better than repeating my own theories, so I'll say it again: Travel is a microcosm of life. Take all the joys and troubles of a normal life -- perhaps sans things like births, deaths, marriages and aging -- speed it up and cram it into a short space of time in another country or place, and that's what travel is.

You meet people, you lose people. You find motivation, then you lose it. You have highs, you have lows. You learn things, you pass the knowledge on. You create new homes and families for yourself. You move between such wildly different environments and situations that it's hard to remember or comprehend what was going on several days ago.

Anything that happens over a period of weeks or months or years in real life can be squished up into a matter of days when travelling. And people who love to travel aren't really in love with seeing new places: They're in love with life, and such greedy buggers that they want to live many lifetimes in the time that they're given on earth.

Over the past few days in K.K I've experienced the entire lifespan of a relationship with my dorm mates, from initial woo to final whoa (or woe, depending on your perspective.)

Following our sunset wanderings and crap-talking, my new friend and I returned to the hostel in time to meet another new dorm mate: A mouse-featured Australian guy called Mike. Mike is from Perth and works in insurance. He had been to Kota Kinabalu before. He knew exactly what to order at the night market, and how to say please and thankyou. He had done all the things that both Matt and I are considering doing in Sabah, and could offer opinions and recommendations. He was our oracle on our first stunned night in Kota Kinabalu. Together we all went to the night market for barbeque chicken, mee goreng and Tiger beer. It was nice. It was like our courtship: Meeting, chatting, sharing interests, discovering each other's perspectives on the world, eating out and drinking beer.

The next day we jumped on a boat to Mamutik -- one of the islands off the coast of KK. We climbed over a hill and donned fins and snorkels to look at fish. Despite going to all the effort of climbing over the island (hey, it's only 300 metres wide) to where the coral was supposed to be better, there was not as much to see as the boys expected. After thirty-odd minutes of kicking around, my neck was beginning to ache so I swam a little closer to shore to stand on a rock and iron out the kinks, while M & M kicked around further out.

Kinks unkinked, I spat in my mask, rinsed it out, and headed back into the water. I hadn't gone particularly far from the island when I saw something that shat all over those fish I'd been so excited about: I saw a giant turtle flapping around under the water. I screamed "TURTLE!" with my snorkel still in my mouth, but the boys were too far away and under water to hear.

I followed the turtle, but naturally it was wise to this uncoordinated mass coming up behind it, and it swam away faster. I figured that it would be just my luck to be chasing a turtle out in open water and to be chopped up by the rotors of one of the boats that plow up and down between the islands, so I stopped the chase and watched the turtle disappear into the murk.

Back at shore I related my story to the boys: "Did you see a turtle? I saw a turtle!" etc. I wasn't even aware if it was something I should be bragging about. Perhaps the waters were swarming with turtles and I should have seen more than one!

Turns out that the waters are not teeming with turtles. Turns out that it's actually a pretty rare occurrence to see a turtle off that island. I felt pretty chuffed. On the boat on the way back to the mainland my lip did the curly thing again: Nice people. Good times.

The next day was my "admin day" where I attempted to work out what I was doing, but mostly just got my legs waxed. That's an entertaining story in itself, but leg waxing doesn't form part of my microcosm of life theory, so you'll have to wait.

The boys went out diving, and returned around 6pm with some interesting news: Their dive instructor considered it largely impossible that I saw a turtle of Mamutik, and that the more likely explanation was that I was "smoking something pretty interesting", or "fibbing".

Thus begins the souring of our beautiful relationship. The accusations. The pleading. The bitterness. The trying to prove yourself right when you have no photographic evidence.

At dinner the boys had bonded over the diving and their shared suspicion. I was indignant and sarcastic, and very good at both. But I still retained fondness for these two souls, remembering the delight of our earlier relationship.

Walking around town I was either in front or behind and feeling redundant because they weren't speaking to me.

Indignance was replaced by a sensation of loss.

Loss was replaced by indifference and "what did I see in them anyway?".

Indifference was briefly tainted by hope as I was invited to join them for a walk to a bird sanctuary, but that was short-lived. After waiting for them to wake up (I'm still on NZ time and waking up like a bolt at 6.30am), and waiting some more for them to get their shit together, and then paying a visit to a mall to look for flip flops, a watch battery and insect repellant, and then waiting for them to ogle electronic goods... we finally made it out of the mall and on our way to the bird sanctuary.

Then they spied a hat shop on the second floor of the self same mall we'd just extracted ourselves from, and they decided between themselves that they must go look, and headed back into the mall.

I was on the other side of the road. I waited for traffic to pass. I watched them go into the mall without a single glance to see if I was following. My patience ran out. My "screw you" threshold was passed. It occurred to me that I would be better off alone. I turned and ran in the opposite direction, filing the divorce papers of my contrived analogy as I went.

One hiccup with this though: One of the jobs for my "admin day" was to book myself into a jungle river camp thing that is apparently very popular and fills up fast. Matt had informed me that he was booked in on a particular date and that they might still have spaces. This was right off the back of our pseudo-relationship-honeymoon, before he called me a liar. So I phoned. I booked. I thought it would be nice to have someone to go with.

Following the "fibbing" accusation later that day, he asked me if I had booked. I fibbed. I said I hadn't. I wanted the chance to change my booking if I didn't want to associate with him beyond KK. Today he nagged me some more. "You really should book. Just phone them up. Have you phoned them yet?"

I'm a terrible fibber, so I just caved and told him that I had booked already. Same date as him. Then I ran away from them outside the mall.

I think this will be like divorcing your spouse and then discovering you're pregnant. Suck.

Long-haul flight #1: Christchurch to Kota Kinabalu: Stream of consciousness

hotnoodle — Tue, 12 May 2009 02:14:00 GMT

Flight Christchurch > Auckland: 8am - 9.15am

Was told by travel agent to arrive two hours early. This time of day very busy, apparently. Am never listening to travel agent again. Check in counter not even open. Extremely tired due to 4.30am awakening in order to two hours early. Have had 2 hours sleep the night before. Awesome. Try to nap but pipe music and lights conspire against. Meet a man who is going to Thailand for six nights. Sing “6 nights in Bangkok and the world’s … your … oyster… “

Brain is obviously fried already.

Flight out of Christchurch offers uninspiring views. Bad weather across most of country. Can only see the tops of mountains jutting insolently through cloud. Snack of floppy quiche and airplane coffee. Thus begins my day of airline cuisine indulgence.

Meet Pete in Auckland for three-hour stopover. Have last meal on NZ turf at Columbus Coffee in Onehunga. Pete good but drinking too much. Should move back to Christchurch. No booze there…

Flight Auckland > Sydney: 13.25 - 14.30 local time. Duration: 3 hours.

No inflight entertainment for the trans-Tasman. Watch “Lost” on little laptop. Is that what I brought it for? Consider that drinking two glasses of white wine will be an excellent idea. Australian savs still not so appealing. Eat inadvisable chicken and noodle meal.

Current plane food tally: 1 snack, 1 meal, 2 coffees, 2 wines, 0 bread rolls.

Arrive Sydney with 30 minutes to kill before boarding next leg. Go through security. Pay a leisurely visit to the bathrooms. Contemplate Akubra hat and rock opal pendant in duty free shop. Am reminded of a gentleman exclaiming in amusement that you can always spot the Kiwis because they wear chunks of their country around their necks. (ie, greenstone/pounamu.) Wonder if opal is Australian equivelent. Contemplate Akubra hat once again.

Row is called for boarding. Attempt to find boarding pass. Succeed. Attempt to find passport: Fail. Am reminded of my last visit to this airport where I lost both passport and tickets. Consider this current situation an improvement, but not by much.

Retrace steps: Toilet — no. Transit security point (common point of failure) — no. Flight still boarding. Run to gate. Panic. Communicate panicked state to gate attendants. Ask if they can call lost and found, although prior experience with this department has not indicated any great degree of competency. Accommodate suggestion that I check my bag once again, but secretly annoyed that they’re wasting time assuming that I’m an idiot when my passport is currently at large.

Passport does not magically appear on fifth examination of bag contents. Communicate panicked state to gate attendant once again. Following an eye roll, attendant agrees to phone. As soon as she picks up the phone my name is called over the PA.

Stupid security had it all along. Just like last time.

Run run run. Sweat sweat sweat. Grin. Thanks. Sweat sweat. Run run. Fucking undignified airport. Make it to the plane and collapse into seat in big sweating panting heap. Not even in bloody Asia yet.

Flight Sydney > Singapore: 4pm > 10pm local time. Duration: 8 hours.

Current airport tally: 3
Current terminal tally: 4

Yay, inflight entertainment. Watch “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “He’s Just Not That Into You”. Guy from Apple ads is hot. Enjoy second movie more than anticipated.

Brain obviously completely fried now.

Attempt sleep, but seated next to a wiggly 4 year old. Wiggle wiggle… POW! Four-year-old tootsies in the thigh.

Really looking forward to Singapore and the various delights of “Club Changi” — so called by sleepinginairports.com owing to its abundance of delights for transiting passengers: Couches for napping, movie theatre, showers, free wifi, etc.

Arrive in Singapore (current plane food tally: 4 meals, 1 snack, 4 coffees, 2 bread rolls, 1 hunk of cheese, 2 ice creams, 2 green salads, 1 fruit salad, 1.5 apple juices) and make fatal mistake: Exit the transit area. Turns out that the rest of the airport is actually pretty inhospitable for sleeping.

Hours of sleep previous night: 2.5
Current number of hours awake: 22

Theorise that I am perhaps in the wrong terminal. (There are three.) Ride sky train between them looking for a quiet nook with some carpet. Alas, all of Singapore is tiled. Noise of announcements and loitering Singaporean teens makes sleep look unlikely. Ask at information if there is such a thing as quiet and carpet. Answer is no. Go to 4th floor of terminal 3 and try to sleep down a dead end with a nice view of the carpeted bliss of the forbidden transit area. Lights, noise, lights, noise. Pack up and try to find a new spot.

Current hours awake: 24
Hours since leaving Christchurch: 20
Airports: 4
Airport terminals: 7

Find carpet on the floor of a pasta restaurant down a lane of shops. It is Shangri-la. Dark, quiet, with a toilet nearby. Lock “paranoia bag” full of electronic gadgetry to a table and bed down beside it. Finally — sleep at 2am.

Awake at 5.30am surprisingly chipper. Obviously sleep deprivation has me deluded into thinking that I’m not tired. Take luxurious spa bath in disabled toilet.

Disabled toilet rating: 6/10. Not enough space between tap and basin to fit whole head. Slight gross sewerage smell. But clean with good shelf and mirror.

Catch shuttle to “budget terminal”. Spend about $8 on tuna sandwich and coffee. Bloody airports. Too hungry not to. Check in. Transit area. No napping area or movie theatre, but free internet and car racing on TV.

Board flight. Very civilized. Tiger Airways is certainly no Ryanair clone.

Flight: Singapore to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia. 9.30am - 11.30am. Duration 2 hours.

Arrive Kota Kinabalu. Spy islands in distance as we’re coming in to land. Slightly excited. Go through health check: Disinfect hands, health questionnaire, thermal imaging cameras. Singapore has pig flu, it transpires.

Immigration, bags, customs, out. Need cash but only ATM in airport is out of order. Men walking around with rifles. Get cash advance on CC and try to catch bus. Wait one hour. Bus doesn’t come. End up sharing a taxi with Australians. Arrive hostel. Check in. Shower. Rehydrate. Attempt to nap.

Hours since leaving Christchurch: 34
Total hours in air: About 14.5
Hours of sleep: About 3
Total airports: 5
Total airport terminals: 9
Days until next stupid long-haul flight: 54

My Spanish Nightmare 2 - San Pedro to Barcelona

hotnoodle — Sat, 5 Jul 2008 22:49:00 GMT

On pirate beaches:

There are various stories behind San Pedro.

The first I heard was that it was a pirate beach and a pirate village. The pirates would emerge from the bay and attack ships as they sailed past. There was even an old abandoned pirate castle! This is my favourite story.

The second version I heard was that it wasn't a pirate village at all. It was a fishing village that was abandoned after a terrible storm killed all the village menfolk at sea. The women of the village donned black mourning clothes and walked to the next village, hence the name "Las Negras".

The third, more prosaic story, is that because there was no road to San Pedro there were no jobs and everyone was poor. People just got up and left the village, over the hill to greener pastures (so to speak, it's all brown). The last inhabitant of the village left in the 60s, at which point the hippies moved in.

They came with their tents and made little paths in the scrub, carving out little tent nooks. They took over the few remaining old stone buildings and turned them into "bars" and a "cafe". They moved into the caves and built houses (and "bars") in there. They brought supplies over from Las Negras by boat, or by the dramatic path that the widows of fishermen would have walked between San Pedro and Las Negras. They brought solar panels and wind powered generators, televisions and refrigerators. They sat on the beach and walked in the hills. They smoked a fuckload of ganja and forgot their various countries of origin. They let their hair grow long and their gazes vague.

I traipsed across these hills and down into San Pedro in the early afternoon, with a backpack full of food, tent, sleeping bag, but still no gas. Coming down into the bay I was met with a sign in various colours and multiple languages asking me to please respect this place, use the pit-toilets and take my rubbish with me. Next to it was a fresh-water spring surrounded by pots and pans.

I weaved my way down the various little tracks, rudimentary staircases, through the maze of scrub paths, with half an eye out for the Germans and another half out for a place to put my tent, heading in the general direction of the beach. I walked into a campsite and a giant man in shorts emerged from a tent and said something to me in Spanish.

"Uhhh, English?" was my eloquent reply.
"We're making some food if you'd like to join us," was his.

That's the way it seems to work in San Pedro. Nobody is interested in polite niceties. "Hello, how are you?" is just beating around the bush. As we're sitting around eating (of course I said yes, I had no gas) a girl comes stumbling through the campsite with a bewildered expression on her face. I'm expecting her to say "I've lost my friend...?" but before she can my host asks her simply if she would like some wine.

"Uhhh, yes," was her eloquent reply.

She was young, cute, Dutch and addled. By what, I wasn't sure. From her demeanour there seemed like there might be some innate degree of addledness. We had conversation befitting addled people and she declared that she was on her way (she made it sound like an epic journey) to see the "man on the beach" who would have some medicine to make her feel better (never has paracetamol been made to sound so mystical). But first, she declared, I needed a home. So she helped me set up my tent (along with my lunch host and his giant rock) and then continued on her journey.

From there I spent the afternoon sitting on the terrace of the cafe (it seems strange to call such an unofficial establishment a cafe, but there you go) discussing life with my lunch host.

His name was (and probably still is) Alex. He and his friend were from Barcelona. Once or twice a month they would jump in the car and drive the 1000 kilometres from Barcelona down to Las Negras and walk across to San Pedro. They would stay for two nights and then drive 1000 kilometres back. Alex was an economist. He didn't enjoy being an economist. He wanted to be a hippy, living in San Pedro, writing a book. He and his friend had been coming to San Pedro for the past eight years. He said it was a wonderful place, and that sometimes at night Led Zepplin would appear in the sky over the ocean to put on a show. That wasn't addledness. That was dry hyperbole, and it was completely unexpected from such a sensible-looking gentleman. I asked if David Bowie ever joined Led Zep and he said it was very, very possible.

From sitting on the terrace to drinking beers in caves, they gave this first-time visitor a grand tour of San Pedro. The first cave was behind the pirate castle. Inside we sat on benches carved out of the walls of the cave and had beers from the fridge behind the bar. We were alone except for the middle-aged, long-haired gentlemen gently nodding to the techno music beside us. They were original San Pedro hippies.

The next "bar" was simply a man's cave house with a fridge containing beer. We walked in and the air was thick with smoke, and he was watching DVDs. The barkeep/cave dweller was Austrian. He'd been there a long time too. He spent most of the evening complaining about how the sand kept destroying his sound system, and that he played the music he played because the erratic guitar was the only music the permanent residents of the bay could listen to day after day, month after month and not get sick of.

We retired to the campsite where a fire was cajoled into existence despite the wind, and a tasty meal of instant paella prepared. We stared at the fire. Alex talked about the woman who, turns out, didn't love him enough. I told him about my recent experience. He said that he understood very, very well. Then I bundled myself up in my sleeping bag (I'd forgotten my jacket) and followed the guys to a birthday party that was going on about 50 metres away. (The combination of darkness and convoluted pathways seemed to exaggerate distances. To me "50 metres away" seemed like "on the other side of town".)

Bongos, guitar, harmonica, kazoo, lots of singing. Everybody crammed into a little shelter illuminated by a blue electric light. From the number of times I heard it sung during the evening, I gather that the anthem for San Pedro is "The Bare Necessities" .

I retired to bed some time around midnight, but because 50 metres isn't really "the other side of town" I was kept awake by the bongos. I took my "auto swelling" mat, my sleeping bag and every item of clothing I had with me, and walked away from the bongos, out onto the beach, down the beach, and found a patch of sand behind a dinghy to sleep.

I woke up a couple of hours later with a thin later of dew on my sleeping bag and the moon staring me full in the face. A little further away, illuminated by the moonlight, was what looked like another boat. Perched on the edge of what could have been a boat was what could have been a man. I was sufficiently cold and sufficiently spooked by this eerie figure than grabbed my things and beat a hasty retreat to my tent. I am so brave. Fortunately the bongos had stopped, and I slept well.

The next morning I woke and washed, visited the lovely pit toilet (which is just a hole in the ground, partially obscured by a short fence, at the end of a dead-end path) and ventured out to the beach. I recognised her hair from a distance... the female half of the German couple. They'd come over yesterday too, but they'd spent most of the day sleeping. I went back to their campsite and had many cups of hot coffee and it was hot caffeinated bliss.

I'd decided that I was too paranoid about leaving my uninsured rental car parked halfway up a hill with my computer in it to stay another night (reason number 8 not to hire a car in Spain) so I proposed another three-person Smart squish-up with the Germans. I bid a rather formal, hand-shake farewell to my friends from Barcelona and the Germans and I made our way back over the hill to Las Negras. Coffee, cigarettes, a visit to a real toilet and then back into the car for the ride to the next town. Goodbyes, hugs, blown kisses and then a cursory map examination for me. How to get back to Barcelona?

San Pedro, looking up towards the "Pirate castle/bar". You can't see the tents because they're cleverly hidden by bushes.

The cafe, which would also have an excellent view of the Led Zepplin concert.

On food and muebles

As I have mentioned before, the one thing standing between me and a hot meal that would almost certainly centre around pasta was my lack of cooking gas. I had no idea where to buy gas in Spain. For four days I had asked in petrol stations, camping grounds, supermarkets and crap shops and I'd found none. For three nights I had dined on dry bread, cherry tomatoes and strawberries.

Then I met these Germans. They had gas. They were gods in my esteem. They told me that the secret was to look for the shops that said "muebles" -- those shops sold everything. I was very excited by this tidbit of information, and after bidding them farewell I set about looking for a muebles shop so that my coffee might be hot in the morning.

Ahh Spain. Are you never open? Every time I would pass through a town it would be siesta time. When I did finally encounter an open muebles shop I was thrilled. I risked an event I was not insured for in order to secure a car park, and then an event which I am insured for to cross the street to the shop. I walked into the muebles shop with no little excitement, imagining the hot coffee that was to follow.

Those of you who speak Spanish will know what comes next. The word "muebles" -- which is, by the way, the same in French and similar to the words "mobilia" in Italian, "möbel" in German and even, perhaps, "meubilair " in Dutch -- means, simply, "furniture". I can imagine the confused expression that I must have thrown at the shopkeeper, because it was bounced right back at me.

What can possibly be confusing about furniture, after all?

So no heat for me. I wrote this record and recipe in my journal on the sixth day. My diet was obviously beginning to take a toll.

"...Here is what is in my pantry, otherwise known as "the ripped plastic bags":

* 1.5 jars chickpeas
* 3 partial loaves of bread in varying degrees of staleness
* Jar of pasta sauce
* Bag of pasta
* 1 jar green olives (pitted)
* Half packet turkey chorizo
* Cheddar cheese (sweaty)
* UHT milk (unopened, awaiting coffee)
* 9 sachets of instant coffee (awaiting heat)
* 1 litre orange juice (zumo de naranja)
* 5 red capsicums
* 2 packets of chocolate chip biscuits
* 2 pottles of emergency "iced" coffee ("Caffeine equivalent to two strong coffees! Shake well before enjoying!")

What can I make with all that? I'm glad you asked! I wish to present my new recipe for boys and girls on the go (without a gas cooker): It is... UNCOOKED PIZZA! Yes! Just slice your bread, smear some pasta sauce over it (you won't even notice the staleness!), slice some sweaty cheese over top (the warmer the better), and plop a slice of turkey chorizo on top. If you're feeling extravagant you can even slice some olives and sprinkle them all over.

It tastes like pizza... but it's uncooked! Yeah!..."

On what you shouldn't use as shampoo:

I ran out of shampoo on day six. For those of you who have lugged your life around on your back or been poor before, you'll know that when it comes to cleansing substances you really only need one. You either need shower gel or shampoo. The shower gel makes an good enough shampoo and the shampoo is perfectly adequate at getting you clean.

I was carrying shampoo. Then it ran out. I hoped that my ridiculously expensive camping ground would have seen fit to equip their bathroom facilities with some sort of communal sudsing substance, but I was out of luck. Not even a cracked, greying bar of soap to be found.

So! No shampoo, no shower gel. Hair full of sea and grease. Body covered in pirate bay dirt. What's a girl to do?

You can now thank me for conducting this experiment, so that you never need to do it yourself.

For the record, if you ever feel tempted to try to wash your hair and body with toothpaste... don't. It doesn't work. You'll come out still dirty, still greasy, but smelling like a Tic Tac.

On the Mediterranean coastline

I continued north and hit the coast again.

I was determined not to pay a single toll until Barcelona, so I alternately sped up the free autovias and dawdled behind big trucks up the smaller red roads.

I drove through Alicante, which lives in postcard-form on the fridge of my house in Christchurch -- a souvenir from when a friend sensibly took a cheap RyanAir flight to the city instead of hiring a car. I didn't stop. Nowhere to park.

I drove past beaches lined shoulder to shoulder with tall, pastel-coloured apartment blocks. I didn't stop because I knew I wouldn't be able to park the car. I saw more apartment blocks advertised on big roadside billboards and those billboards were all in English. I drove through little towns where all the signs were in English, and the shops were all furniture shops, sporting shops or swimming pool shops.

I took a turnoff to a town because I saw there was a big national park nearby, with a lighthouse. The idea of the lighthouse excited me. It would be on a windswept promontory, desolate and rocky. Not the best place to pitch a tent, but I've seen worse. Or there might be forest, quiet and sheltered from the wind. Someone travelling with a tent should make at least one effort to sleep outside of a camping ground.

I drove to this lighthouse. It was crawling with tourists and surrounded by expensive white houses. The houses had swimming pools and (ostensibly) housed English speakers. The tourists were all there to see if they could see Ibiza. Perhaps that's why the English were there too. In any case, there would be no camping at the lighthouse.

I drove around some more, looking for this "park" type landscape that my map had led me to believe existed here. All I found was more expensive houses with giant gates, swimming pools and stupid little dogs. It was practically suburbia. There were reserves where you could take a vertigo-inducing peek over the edge of the cliffs down to the Mediterranean far below, but these fronted more big houses with swimming pools.

I found another reserve, a big park, a designated "green area" of pine trees, bushes and picnic tables. It was surrounded by suburbia, but it was big enough that I wouldn't be seen and I could imagine I was not surrounded by suburbia. I pitched my tent. I read my book. I fell asleep.

I was woken in the morning by the shouts of a man who was instructing his dog, in English, to get away from my tent. I went back to sleep.

On fear:

From my journal on day eight:

"...Fear only makes sense if you have options. For situations where there are no alternatives it makes no sense.

For obvious example: Death. There's no alternative. Not yet anyway. Most people don't live their lives in a perpetual state of dread. There's a healthy aversion, of course, but you're hardly paralysed by the inevitable horror of it.

For not-so-obvious example: driving back to Barcelona tomorrow. On my way out I was struck with the most intense sense of dread I have ever experienced. The fear was so palpable I could have put a ridiculous sweater on it and taken it to the dog park, but it only made sense because I had the option to turn around. Now I need to drive back through Valencia and to Barcelona tomorrow. There's no other option. The car won't drive itself back. I'm approaching it in much the same way as (I guess) we all steadily approach death: I'm really just not thinking about it..."

On disappointing endings:

And, somehow appropriately, the final drive back to Barcelona was completely devoid of any excitement. No tolls. No stress. I didn't ironically crash the uninsured car as I was parking it at my final destination. A perfect anticlimax. I phoned Sam in Sant Cebria around 6pm from a phonebooth at a petrol station and informed him that I would be taking his spare bed that night.

And I had an awesome shower.

Postscript 1: On New Zealand

From what I can see, from the few people I have met in Europe, nobody here knows anything about New Zealand. They ask me if we speak English. They ask why we're not part of Australia. They ask whether people there are "like me". (For which I seek clarification: Appearance or disposition? Appearance. They want to know if we're all as white as the driven snow.)

I explain that New Zealand is neat. It's not crowded. It's beautiful. The people are quirky and relaxed. It's cheaper. You don't have to pay 30 euros to use the highways. "Oooh" they say. "Maybe we'll visit!"

It occurs to me, later, that if I tell everyone to visit New Zealand, we'll end up like Spain. Full of foreigners buying up the coastline and populating the caravan parks. Some might argue that this has already happened. So I've changed my tune. New Zealand is awful. Cold. Expensive. Overrated. Boring. Not to mention very far away. Don't bother.

I'm a bad person.

Postscript 2: On the Red Hot Chili Peppers

Six months around Australia. Two weeks around Spain. I think... yes, I'm pretty sure now... I'm tired of them.

Postscript 3: On breaking:

When I was in Thailand I stayed at Panya when there was no water. I went around Southeast Asia being very dirty. I said I liked it because I was breaking myself -- putting myself in situations where I would be uncomfortable so that when I was comfortable again I'd know what it actually was to be comfortable.

I think Spain has broken me more than Asia. Asia was just about the dirt and the occasional dodgy form of transport. Spain is about dirt, and also space, expense, language, accommodation, excess development, lack of wilderness, poorly stocked supermarkets, noise, cold meals, distance, busy roads, monotony of landscape, lack of showers, lack of shampoo.

I also didn't realise what would happen when I was broken. My desire to travel would completely evaporate.

Postscript 4: On perspective:

"Sometimes when you have a giant highway opening up in front of you and the sky is blue and dotted with Simpsons clouds, or when you're walking back to your village along the road with cars speeding past too fast and too close, or when you emerge from the metro and you're surrounded by buildings, or when you're driving along silly little mountain roads with the sun heading horizonwards and turning the little houses on the hill a ridiculously cute shade of golden... sometimes you get it. It's like when you're in Laos and you're sitting on a bus full of locals who are grinning at the silly falang, or when you're camped out in a village amongst chickens and pigs, or you're haggling with scarf saleswomen in Cambodia, or when you're cooking dinner on a beach in Queensland, or when you're halfway up a mountain in Milford Sound and the whole valley is laid out beneath you. Sometimes you get it then too.

It's this feeling of the immensity of your life. How big everything is. How much room you have to move. How much possibility there is. It's like for the briefest instant someone rips the sky open and lets you look at everything.

The contrary is when you're screaming at the road because you feel like the sky is going to crush you. Or when you feel like you're throwing yourself against walls that won't give. That kinda sucks."

I wrote that about three weeks ago and I have no idea where I was going with it. I was distracted by a basset hound whining because he wanted some bread, or something like this. I wonder how many great, life-changing revelations are ruined by basset hounds. I think I might have been trying to find a non-cheesy way of saying "this sucked, sometimes, but it was good, sometimes, and I'm glad I did it, mostly, because it ran the gamut of what I would hope to experience when travelling, and it only took two weeks! I am super efficient! But I don't need to do it again. Not for a while." I think that's where I was going.

(Late March, 08)

My Spanish Nightmare 1 - Barcelona to Cabo de Gata

hotnoodle — Sat, 5 Jul 2008 22:43:00 GMT

(Written late March, 08)

How to find accommodation in Barcelona during Semana Santa:

Quite simply, you can't. Don't even try. Not only will Barcelona be full of various Europeans on Easter holidays, but also every single American girl on "spring break" from her European place of learning will be there. Every single one. And not only will these American girls have booked up all the hostels, they'll also be walking around with endearingly perplexed expressions, saying "I can't find my friend...?" and you'll have to practise all your best vacant-American-girl deflecting kung-fu moves just to survive.

I know this because I managed to book a hostel for my first night. It was full of vacant American girls and some sweet but unworldly American boys who knew a lot about knives. It had been a long time since I'd stayed in a European hostel, so re-acquaintance with this ungracious form of accommodation was jarring: I had a squeaky top bunk in a tiny, windowless room, backing onto a corridor where the American girls on spring break would congregate because you could only actually fit one and a half midgets into the communal spaces, and only if they hugged really tightly.

My room was also right next to the showers, which meant (and I should have seen this coming) that at 7am everyone in my room was woken by the hysterical screams of the American girl on spring break who couldn't work the shower's bi-folding doors in order to get out of the shower, and the accompanying screams of another American girl on spring break who was trying to reassure her.

"It's ok, we're going to get your out of there!"
"WHAAAT?"
"WE'RE ... GOING ... TO GET YOU... OUT!!!"

The night after that I stayed with a Couchsurfer and spent the whole day on the internet trying to find accommodation for the next night instead of wandering the broad boulevards of Barcelona admiring something made by Gaudi.

But listen, if this ever happens to you, try this: This was my backup plan if all else failed, and I'm a little sad that I didn't get to try it out because I think it rules.

1) The airport in Barcelona is only ten kilometres from the centre. It's a normal (1.30) train ride away. It's open 24 hours, and you can sleep there. It might not be particularly luxurious, but if you've got a sleeping bag and an auto-swelling mat and a tent it might be kind of nice to avoid the American girls on spring break.

2) Sants Station in Barcelona allows you to store your baggage for about 6 euros per 24 hours. After sleeping at the airport you can come back into the city and put your bags in a locker while you look at things made by Gaudi.

3) Or, sometimes hostels allow you day-use of the facilities for a small fee. The hostel I stayed at on the first night gave you baggage storage, showers, kitchen use and free WiFi for 3 euros. This could also be an option worth exploring.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your desire to have me sleep in the airport) I found a wonderful Couchsurfer man 50kms north of Barcelona who agreed to host me for as long as I needed. He had a lovely house in a little village close to the sea and surrounded by hills and forest. He also had an enthusiastic basset hound. He was my favourite thing in Spain. I should have just gone home after meeting him.

Sant Pol de Mar: Three kilometres from Sant Cebria where I was staying. The train station is in the foreground and in the distance you can see the brown tops of trees in the park. I point these out for reasons that will soon become apparent.

On hiring a car and getting out of Barcelona:

But no! I decided that it would be an excellent idea to hire a car. It was cheap! Only 11 euros a day if you forwent the comprehensive insurance and drove less than 100kms a day! So I hired a ridiculous little "Smart" for ten days.

7 Reasons why hiring a car in Spain is a bad idea:

1) Spain drives on the right. You drive on the left.
2) Petrol is expensive in Europe.
3) As are the tolls on the highways.
4) You don't know where you're going, or how to avoid the tolls.
5) You can't drive or park in the cities, which means you have to stay in camping grounds and you don't get to see the cities.
6) Spain is big. You will end up driving more than 100kms a day, adding an extra 8 euros per day to your hire price.
7) You have to pay extra for the comprehensive insurance. If you refuse, you will be constantly stressed because, may I remind you, you drive on the left.

Up until the day before I left, I was planning to visit the Pyrenees. Then there was a whole lot of snow and road closures in the Pyrenees, and I decided to go south instead. Precisely where, I didn't know. Just away from the snow because, you know, I didn't have the "you've slid on snow and crashed into a ditch" insurance.

The first task, therefore, was to get out of Barcelona. I had maps, but not of the city. I asked the guy in the hire place how to get out of the city and he shrugged. I jumped in the car in the hope that all would become obvious. Within ten minutes done two potentially bad things:

1) I had almost driven into the side of a van while driving around and around and around the same roundabout at the base of the highway overbridge looking for the onramp. My wing mirror snapped inwards into a more defensive posture. I said "Fuck" a whole lot.

2) Then I drove up on a kerb with a dramatic "KER-PLUNKPLUNK!" I said "Fuck" a little more.

I pulled over and shook my fist at this highway overbridge. Then I took a few side roads (earning some shaken fists myself not to mention a few blasts of the horn) and found the on-ramp. Then I slipped my burned Chili Peppers CD into the little slot, slid back the sunroof shade and exhaled.

On accepting rides from strangers:

To put the exhaling into more perspective, here's what happened on the way to pick up the rental car.

The village I was staying in was three kilometers from the train station where I had to catch the train to Barcelona. The buses from the village to the train station were every hour. I missed the bus and decided that I could easily walk three kilometers.

And I could. No problem with that. But it was hot, and it was tiring, and I was thinking, "if I was one of these people driving past and I saw a girl carrying a big backpack and obviously walking to the train station, I would probably offer her a ride..."

So when a man pulled up beside me and offered me a ride to the train station, it hardly seemed strange to me. I took a peek in his back seat for obvious signs that he might be a murderer, and I saw a baby seat and a laptop. These were very soothing objects for me, so I walked around the car and got into the front.

Then there was pornography. A nice magazine full of all sorts of shades of peach and pink, lying on the floor. Not so soothing. I raised my eyebrows at this and the guy made "ho ho ho" noises and shoved it to the side. I thought that I could hardly judge a man by what he reads or does in his car when he's alone, particularly if I was only going to be in there for five minutes.

We drove a little bit and exchanged pleasantries, then he pulled out the porno again and waved it in my face, inquiring as to whether it was material that I enjoyed reading. I pulled a "meh, I could take it or leave it" face, and he grabbed his crotch in a gesture I took to mean "this material pleases me greatly." I smiled. Everyone is entitled to express their opinion and offer recommendations for reading material... and it wasn't too much further to the station.

We turned down a dead-end street. I knew the street because it's where my couchsurfing host would park when he'd walk his dog, and it was right next to the playground where I had napped in days previous. "Oops!" said porno man, and turned the car around.

I was stupidly rather surprised when I glanced back at him and saw him with his fly unzipped, tugging on his penis. He gave me a slightly apologetic look and asked (in Spanish, it's amazing how much I can understand from context) if I could please suck on it "just a little". I gave him an equally apologetic look and said no, sorry, and that I would walk to the station now. I opened the back door while still sitting in the front seat, just in case he decided to speed off with my backpack (and laptop). It was a feat of co-ordination incongruous with the fact that porno man was still jerking on his dick and looking at me. I gave him my best "you've made me very sad" face as I dumped my stuff on the road, and he drove away.

I shouldered my backpack and walked to the station to catch a train to pick up a car.

On stress:

Following the Penis Episode and the Getting Out Of Barcelona episode, I considered that the rest of the first day of my roadtrip surely would be all downhill. I drove. My little car was ridiculous but zippy. The highways were smooth and I was passing through pretty countryside: All dry hills and chiseled rock, and later through endless expanses of orange orchards. I stopped in those homogenous highway stops and bought caffeinated beverages. I napped on a rare patch of grass as the sun was going down because I had been awake since 5am and I still had 150 kilometers until Valencia.

Up until that point I hadn't been too bothered by the tolls. I'd been told to expect them, and they were only two euros here, five euros there. Then I got to the toll booth not too far from Valencia and the little sign said twenty euros. TWENTY EUROS? I asked the man if he was sure. He was sure. Twenty euros. That brought my toll payments for the day to over thirty euros. Sixty dollars. Christ.

I followed the signs towards Valencia. I figured it would all become obvious. I ended up in some asshole industrial satellite suburb, asking at the petrol station how I could get into the centre. Too many highways, too many exits, too much "Valencia north!" "Valencia west!" "Valencia south!" and not enough "Valencia centre, stupid!"

I got into Valencia centre and had no idea where I was, and everyone was tooting their horns at me. I pulled over and asked a lady on the side of the road: She was sweet. She saw me approaching with my map, and she smiled and said "tell me." She and her daughter explained to me as best they could, then told me to follow them in their car and they'd lead me there. Again, I exhaled. I got into the city, found the market, parked my car and found my hostel. Success!

Only it wasn't really success, because I knew I'd have to do the same thing again tomorrow, and because tomorrow presented a whole host of other problems:

Firstly, I wouldn't be able to leave the car where it was in order to explore Valencia: It was a two-hour parking zone, which meant I had to move before 11.30am. Longer parking would have cost between 12 and 20 euros.

Secondly, I didn't know how to get out of Valencia. I'd been guided into the city, but the consequence of that is that I had no idea how to leave.

Thirdly, I didn't know where I was going.

Fourthly, I was sure that wherever I decided to go would cost me an arm and a leg in tolls and petrol.

Fifthly I was terrified of driving in the city with no insurance when I usually drive on the left.

Sixthly, I wasn't even excited to be there. Lastly, I was missing a boy

The result of all this? Never in my life, as far as I can recall, have I been so stressed. Sure, I've been anxious. I've been worried. I've had a little pressure on, and I've been flustered on a great number of occasions. But stress, like this, was something new. My brain was zipping through all possibilities, pushing against the doors to see which one would open. When it couldn't find any openings, I just sat down and cried. I cried through my dinner. I cried through one lovely man's attempt at conversation. I cried in the shower. I cried in bed. I didn't sleep because I was still looking for options even though my body had long given up.

To function, or not to function?

In the morning I got up early, purchased bread and strawberries from the market, spread my giant map over the kitchen table and plotted my course out of Valencia along the backroads.

On the back roads:

The first half of my second day was nice: I got off the autovia as soon as I could and spent the next few hours meandering through little villages in the general direction of the middle of nowhere. I drove through pretty national park that was reminiscent of dry Australian landscapes. I got lost on numerous occasions and endured lengthly directions in Spanish where the only words I understood were "left" and "right".

Then I realised that I was only about a hundred kilometers from Valencia and I had a shit's show in hell of reaching the place I wanted to reach that night if I continued at that pace, so I jumped on the "red" road (national road) and made speedier progress through hills and more little villages. I drove past a beautiful unexpected lake with a nuclear powerstation camped on its banks, to emerge from the hills into that monotonous landscape of rolling land covered in olive trees with distant mesas and violent, insistent wind. Brown and grey and industrial.

This is where I did most of my screaming.

I was slightly soothed upon entering the hills and forest again, with their dramatic gorges and lack of wind. I found a spooky deserted campsite at the bottom of a valley, paid the ridiculous fee to set up my tent and ate a cold dinner of dried bread, strawberries and cherry tomatoes.

The next day was a repeat. I'd been planning to do some exploring of the national park but it was so outstandingly cold I couldn't face it. I tried to find a bed in a hostel in Granada but they, too, were full of American chicks on spring break, and besides -- I couldn't find anywhere to park my car. I tried to visit the Alhambra but there was some sort of event going on that required the police to dress up in fancy uniforms. I spent fifteen minutes sitting in a queue to get to the carpark, then drove over the median barrier -- KERPLUNKPLUNK -- and completed a 30 point turn to drive back out of there again.

I drove through alternating patches of sunshine and squalls of splattery rain. I drove through mountains, such mountains, with villages perched on their sides.

I drove to the sea.

As soon as I hit the sea, the grey skies and rain and threatening snow fled and it was all sunshine and that late-afternoon goldenness. I drove along dramatic coastline with little castles perched on clifftops and the wind whipping up white peaks in the Mediterranean beneath me. I got out of my stupid little car to take photos and the wind almost ripped the stupid little door off. I looked for recommendations in my Lonely Planet and the Lonely Planet said "Go to Cabo de Gata", and so I did.

This is where I wrote my previous entry.

Kind of a castle thing on kind of a big rock thing. Look at how rough the sea looks, and then imagine how my hair looked right about now.

My ridiculous little car at the same place.

On the benefits of picking up hitchhikers in a Smart:

Right after I'd finished writing the above-mentioned journal entry I took a drive. Firstly to look for petrol. Secondly to look for gas so I could make myself a coffee, dammit. I rounded a corner and there were a couple of reassuringly rancid looking hitchhikers waving at me in an enthusiastic manner, so I pulled over. I said that if they could fit in my car I would be happy to drive them. They squeezed their bags in the back and then squeezed themselves both into my front seat, and giggled.

They were German. They were lovely. They were hitchhiking and bussing from Malaga to a place called San Pedro, where they said there were lots of hippies living in tents and in caves, and an old pirate castle. They wanted a ride to Las Negras which was the closest car-accessible town to this hippy/pirate beach. Coffee took a back seat (figuratively speaking, we were in a Smart) and I drove them the twenty kilometres to Las Negras.

Here is where I go back on everything I have ever preached about in the past. I don't care what I've said before: It is much more fun to explore with other people. We got lost and ended up at an abandoned gold mine. We climbed around that and sat on the steps burning our knees in the sunshine. We arrived at Las Negras and sat staring at the ocean and eating whatever food we had. We went to the bar and had a beer: My first beer in Spain. We drove to the next beach where they cooked for me and made me a coffee (finally!). Then I drove in the dark back to my depressing campground full of old couples, with the idea of heading over to that pirate beach myself the next day.

The abandoned goldmine. You can see why I thought it might have been a prison, and you can imagine how disappointed I was to discover it was not.

The Germans engaging in dinner preparation.

I hate Spain.

hotnoodle — Sat, 5 Jul 2008 22:31:00 GMT

(March 28, 2008)

I spend a lot of time creating my own set of laws about the world. It's in lieu of organised religion. People without organised religion still need organisation to make sense of the world, but for me that organisation tends to come in observable instances that trigger an "oh yeah!"

Like: If you steal an umbrella because it's raining, you will lose your hat.

Actually, like an organised religion it's very hard to remember the various stories until they're needed. I guess you could say that I'm not a particularly devoted member of my organised lack of religion. But anyway.

My point is this.

One key philosophy of mine is the obvious but very true "things never work out like you think they will." Sometimes I add "stop thinking you're so smart" to the end, because that's usually my downfall. I plan things and I put things in motion with the idea that it'll just be a big domino effect all the way to the ultimate "cool life" end. But really, I don't know enough to predict everything. I only see a fraction of the picture at any time.

I still haven't got to the point.

My point is this. I have this philosophy, and I had forgotten it. I'd forgotten commandment number two (after commandment number one, which is "Don't steal umbrellas unless you want to lose your hat").

I had everything worked out. I have a job that lets me work from overseas. I have a working holiday visa that lets me stay in Europe for a year. I have insurance for the next twelve months, or something stupid. And the idea was to see what it's like to live in Europe, perhaps being poetically miserable at some point, because that's "Life Fantasy Number Whatever".

I didn't plan on a number of things.

Firstly, I didn't plan on being so homesick. I am homesick like you wouldn't believe. I wish someone would do some science on homesickness and figure out exactly what it is that makes someone homesick, because then I could counter it. I've been watching Flight of the Conchords. The plotless Footrot Flats movie. Eagle Vs. Shark. I had to phone my insurance company the other day when I thought I might be DYING and the woman's Kiwi accent made me bawl.

The second thing I didn't plan on was the fact that I actually don't like Europe all that much. I didn't really like it the first time I was here. I think I thought that having a little bit more money to throw around would change things, but no. Still don't like it. It's too full of people, too full of restrictions, and too fucking expensive.

To put this in perspective, for the past four days I have been driving a rental car around Spain. I still have another five days left of the car rental, but I'm just trying to get back to Barcelona to return the car as soon as possible. I hate Spain. I think I must be the only person in the world to hate Spain. I mean, it has cute things: cute little villages, cute fortresses on tops of hills, cute mountains, cute ocean... but I'm here alone, I have this car that I can't park anywhere, I have to stay in camping grounds sleeping in my tent for more than you'd ever expect to pay to sleep in a tent... And I still have about another 1000 kilometres to drive to get back.

Two days ago I was speeding south-west from Valencia, trying to get to a national park just inside the border of Andalucia. I had to cross a 250 kilometre stretch of slightly undulating land covered as far as the eye could see with olive trees (not the cheerful sight you might expect) with the horizon dominated by distant mesas, the sky heavy and grey, industrial towns rising out from the ground, wind whipping across and buffeting my stupid little car, and just this big depressing highway stretching out in front of me.

I loved this in Australia, I don't know what's changed, but I spent that 250 kilometres crying and screaming because I didn't want to be there.

I hate Spain.

I hate Spain so much, and it's stressed me out so much, that I've cancelled my flight to Morocco and switched it for a flight back to Brussels. All this time I was crying and screaming down this stupid depressing highway, I was wanting to be back in Brussels. Even if I didn't understand anyone, even if it was cold, even if I constantly felt like a leech for staying for free at someone's house and not even being able to speak to his flatmates. In Brussels I had a mattress on the floor, I had coffee in the morning, I had movies to watch on my laptop before going to bed. I had routine, and I had a boy. Mostly I had a boy.

And I've seen people like me before. Girls lying in their dorm beds in foreign countries crying because they miss their boyfriends, even though they're going to be home in two weeks. It's so stupid, and it's so weak, and it's so stupid. You're here to have your own experiences. He'll still be there when you get back. What the fuck are you crying about?

Now I know. It's the endless stretch of highway topped by the bleak landscape and the howling wind. It's not knowing where you're sleeping tonight except that it'll be alone and in the cold. It's the idea that you really *should* be doing this, even though you really don't want to, and the conflict between these two wants. It's remembering what it's like to be comfortable and lazy with someone's arms around you. My gut is screaming at me, and because it's screaming at me, I scream at the road.

Anyway, so I didn't plan on that happening. That kind of puts a damper on things.

So I changed my flight to Morocco to a flight back to Brussels. After days of screaming and crying that kind of made me feel better. Weak, but better. All I had to do now was get back to Barcelona and then wait for my flight on the 3rd. Maybe I could even change my flight to be sooner. In any case, it would soon be over and I'd be back to coffee and movies.

But again, I'd forgotten commandment number 2. "Don't think you're so smart."

I arrived at this camping ground in the dark last night. I paid more than you would ever think to pitch my tent. I saw that they had free wifi in the computer room. (Yes, a campsite with a computer room. They also have a special bathroom for washing your dog.) I made myself set up my tent and pee before running to the internet. My hands were shaking at the prospect of reconnecting with a world that didn't involve highways and wind and screaming.

I got on Skype. I called the boy's cellphone. I told him to get on Skype. We spent about an hour talking about how much I hated Spain, and how I was having the absolute worst trip of my life, no shit. And then he whips out the "Aletta, there's something I want to tell you..." and proceeds to inform me that it's never going to work. That he's from Belgium and I'm from New Zealand and there are "implications" with that. That he's more comfortable with me than anyone else he's ever met, but he doesn't love me. That it's not like New Zealand. That we can't be together.

No shit.

So let me piece this back together for you. I'm now driving 1000 kilometres that I don't want to have to drive, to get back to Barcelona, from where I've booked a flight back to Brussels in order to sooth my frazzled soul. And now I'm heading back to this situation. It's like my "home" in Europe has just been ripped from underneath me. There's nowhere safe, and nowhere where there will be any comfort.

A more dedicated traveller would say "fuck it" and keep moving, but I don't think that's me anymore. If you asked me before I would have said I was here to see the things I missed last time, and because I could. And that's what I believed too. But now it looks like I was really here to see a boy, since I'm obviously not all that interested in Europe after all.

So.

Things haven't really worked out like I'd expected. I shouldn't have thought I was so smart.

(NOTE: Comments disabled owing to an overabundance of morons. Yes, it's nice that you love Spain. Yes, I'm obviously an idiot for "hating" Spain. Whatever. Move along already. YouTube misses you.)