Heart of the Monsoon

It's always hard to say goodbye. The students. The teachers. The goat that would occasionally wander into the classrooms, waiting expectantly for me to chase it out. That lone eucalypt planted out the back of the orphanage twenty years previously to induce in me a mild homesickness during my stay. The old women on the way to school whose job it is to carefully handcraft with a hammer and chisel each particle of concrete aggregate for maximum adhesion.

Despite the constant barrage of propaganda stuffed into these kids about the inherent evilness of alcohol I was invited to share a couple of beers with the manager on my last night, seeding doubt into the watching kids’ little heads about exactly what in their textbooks should be believed.

And then came the gifts. Whenever I try to think about how anyone could possibly associate 'backpacking cycle tourist' with 'bulky, fragile dioramas' I have to reboot my brain. I can still see the blue screen of death illuminating the inside of my skull. And yet this is exactly the choice hit upon by not only the orphanage but also two different classes at school - completely independently of each other! Two of the three cumbersome and brittle dioramas, mostly depicting scenes of Nepali life, feature unpostable glass panels. But thank you, thank you. I shall treasure them always.

Procuring a room in Kathmandu at the funky Red Planet Hotel (I couldn’t walk past a name like that) I started checking off the things I'd skipped while staying in the orphanage. Spending six solid days ploughing through Leo Tolstoy’s bulky Anna Karenina was first on the list, as well as visiting Patan’s Durbar Square. But first I needed a new camera, as my old one had carked it once more in an orphan-related incident and I was sick of getting it repaired.

But, lo and behold, when attempting to extract the cash required for said purchase, I found my ATM card had expired – and that very day! Embarrassingly, the expiry date was written on the card itself. Running out of cash fast, I got my dad to send me a few hundred bucks through a money transfer (thanks Dad!) while my new card arrived through snail-mail. In the meantime, my dreams of a second trek were put on hold.

Waiting for my new card was a drag. I’ve found that I often get stressed out when idle – only constant activity can actually relax me. My backpacking buddies always want to just sit around and chill out. Don’t these guys realise they may have as little as fifty years left to live? That’s practically this afternoon!

As part of my need to expend energy, I attempted a geohash in a nearby graticule. Riding my bike the 65 kms towards that day’s location, through the psychotically hilly Nepali landscape, I ran my front wheel over a can on the road. Sadly, my new front mud-guard caught it, flinging me over the handlebars and onto the asphalt – yet again redesigning the scar on my right knee which saltates through the shapes of various countries of the UN (it now mimics Thailand). A nearby villager kindly helped me to my feet and stuck a band-aid over the gritty wound, but infuriated me by demanding 100 Rupees for his mercenary efforts. And to top it all off, facing cliffs of despair, I failed the geohash!

Hammering home Nepal’s unofficial national slogan, ‘Suck the Tourists Dry’, the next day, extending my expiring visa on the way, I cycled to the ancient city of Patan, now absorbed into the expanding Kathmandu. Noticing my hair growing to engulf my entire body in a self-portrait I took with my new camera, I tried to ask a no-frills hairdresser there how much a quick pruning would cost, but he initiated my haircut ignoring the question. Imagine my surprise as he announced it to be a whopping 2000 rupees! That's about double the cost of any haircut I've ever had in any country. I acerbically lobbed 200 rupees (still a rip-off) in his vicinity and stormed out. It was especially rich since I'd been the one to go to all the effort of producing the hair in the first place - all he had to do was get rid of some of it. How I miss the construction industry! "Invitation to tender: The removal and disposal of excess production of hair in sector 1 (see attached diagram). Environmental management requirements not stringent. The winning tender will be the lowest bid."

But armed with my spiffing new haircut I was ready to attend Kathmandu’s Australian Embassy to vote in our federal election. Standing on my own at the ballot box, without any How-to-Vote cards to guide me, I numbered the boxes and gave my voice to the clamour of confusion. Usually, to maximise the effect of my preferential vote, I construct a conceptual cartesion plane placing the parties for their policies and popularity, so my vote flows through all the left-wing candidates one by one and then stops. But this time I couldn’t resist being a part of history and just voted Green for the seat of Melbourne – the first time I’ve ever voted for a winning candidate.

Annoyingly, an Australian right-wing creationist couple staying in my hotel only learned through me of the existence of the election so my efforts to vote were canceled out and reversed – but I do believe in compulsory voting so I can’t complain too much. The male component of this couple would frequently engage me in arguments about how science is actually a religion and agonised about how the journal Nature was biased because it wouldn’t accept his paper describing a perpetual motion machine he thought up. At least they were nice enough to take me out to dinner, which, despite the perpetual proselytising, was actually quite enjoyable.

Finally, receiving my new ATM card in the post, I was free. I employed this freedom in visiting the Chitwan National Park on the Nepalese flatlands with a Texan girl who was staying at my hotel. Apart from taking an elephant ride through the jungle, taking a canoe ride through the crocodile-infested river, and being a leech ride along a monsoonal rain-walk, we basically did our own things. It made me feel guilty that she spent so much time hanging out with the locals, like all this time I’d been traveling wrong.

For my part, I took a bike-tour of the 20,000 Lakes (I could only count one) in drenching, yet pleasantly warm, rain, superfluising the morning’s hot-shower; and got myself hopelessly lost in a swamp in the middle of the night returning home from a cultural stick-dance experience – idle threats that this would lead to me being trampled by rhinos proved unfounded. The next day I planned my Kathmandu return – poorly timed to coincide with a Nepal-wide general strike, canceling all transport. Only one bus was operating and I and several other tourists found ourselves having an absolute ball riding home on the roof – we even enjoyed a beer while dodging low-hanging branches.

My next roof-riding experience came two days later during the 14 hour nightmarish bus ride to the long-anticipated Langtang trek. I sat on a roof packed with dozens of other travelers, mostly in the rain, having to walk across waterfalls and landslides (and police check-points: bus-surfing is illegal, but the cops just make you get off and walk through their field of vision). At one stage my head actually came into contact with an overhead power line. Judging by my continued state of being the region was experiencing one of Nepal's frequent power outages (okay okay, the power line was probably insulated).

This is a good time to wax philosophical on the subject of safety. Now, if quantum physicists have anything to say on the matter, and it sounds like they do, at each point in time the universe splits off into an uncountable number of parallel universes, and we have no control over which ones ‘we’ find ourselves in. If this is the case, then by taking any risk at all, whether or not it eventually turns out okay for ‘me’, I have in fact already doomed trillions of parallel Felixes to death in universes with different outcomes. This gives me a responsibility to look after not only the Felix in ‘my’ universe but also all those other trillions of Felixes out there in their universes, so from now on even a close call must be considered a failure. On the other hand, those trillions of Felixes still need to have an awesome time, so calculated casualties are acceptable. Of course, as a physical object in a mechanical universe, ‘I’ don’t ultimately have any control over ‘my’ actions anyway, but that’s a separate issue.

On the roof of the bus I met an interesting ex-US military Spanish guy named Antonio who had converted to Tibetan Buddhism and now lives in the small Nepalese village of Thulu Bharku. He invited me and the four French people also on the roof to a sacred Himalayan Hindu/Buddhist full moon festival at the altitudinous Gosaikund. I and the French guys endeavored to cram in the Langtang trek in the meantime.

This trek was wet. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that it rained all of the time. And the leeches! There were so many leeches the frequency of picking them off could best be measured in Hertz. At the end of the trek I became a human shower-head of blood. There was no view to speak of, it being cloudy and foggy the whole time, but the immediate scenery of deep green mossy vegetation, stupendously powerful rivers, an unreasonable number of waterfalls and exploratory leeches wobbling at us from protruding leaves was spectacular enough on its own. Since my four french companions largely lacked excellent English skills I had to take a crash-course in their language (they did outnumber me) and spent much of my time conjugating irregular verbs (but being merely a degeneration of its classical ancestor I could almost be understood if I just spoke Latin badly).

On the first day of this wet and hilly trek one of the girls, Sophie, became exhausted and out of breath. When she soon recovered I gave her the blankest look my facial muscles could muster: she was an asthmatic smoker exerting herself in a low-oxygen environment. However, the incident did somewhat absolve my friend Seb’s comment on a favoured route of mine that, “We can’t go that way – we have girls”, as though they were some kind of embarrassing foot disease. On the way back the two girls, Sophie and her sister Elise, decided they just couldn’t hack the further trek up to the festival at Gosaikund, and headed back to Kathmandu.

But not before I experienced a genuine ‘John Hurt’ moment at Antonio’s village of Thulu Bharku. For the next trek, Antonio had procured for us tents and sleeping bags from Kathmandu, as well as a new recruit in the form of a Hungarian dude named Adam, whose main claim to fame was his sheer terror of leeches. As we were planning the trip around the breakfast table, I saw everyone slowly turn towards me as blood oozed out of the front of my t-shirt and some writhing serpentine creature tried to poke through it. The bloated leech feeding off my stomach elicited a blood-coagulating scream from Adam that came straight from the script of Alien. Luckily, Adam, alone, escaped having to share his blood with our annelid cousins.

During the ascent to Gosaikund I was getting my election coverage from my tall friend Alex by SMS who was, ironically, also way up in his own mountains – climbing Victoria’s Mount Feathertop for the annual Midnight Ascent. The times we live in, eh? It was amazing that we both had phone coverage, especially as my phone had filled up with water to the extent I had to read his seat tally through an aquarium. My excitement getting the better of me, I took issue with Adam for completely lacking political opinions - he claimed politics was “All bullshit”. Not being politically engaged is an abrogation of one’s civic duty. But maybe I'm just starved for a decent argument not involving the bill.

Other than the unbearable election tension after finally leaving phone coverage on the three day climb to Gosaikund, this bizarre pilgrimage was an amazing experience. We hung out with both terse Tibetan Lamas and high Hindu Sardus, laughed at our black French companion getting frustrated at constantly being confused for a Nepali, discovered a fantastic yak cheese factory (I and the Frenchmen bought 3 kgs of the fromage superbe), saw one of our most spectacular sunsets ever witnessed as we poked above the cloud layer to spot distant snowy peaks previously obscured, and finally joined the thousands-strong throng on the precipitous winding ledge leading to the Gosaikund lake for some even wilder times.

At this loud and colourful tent city there was crazy dancing, free-flowing rakse, frigid lake dipping, and constant driving rain. Yes, ten out of ten for the awesome idea: a massive multi-faith festival of the full moon during the heart of the monsoon, at 4.5 kms above sea level in the Himalayas near the Tibetan border, but the actual reality? Frickin’. Freezin’. However, it was an epic cultural experience. The only other westerners there were some more French guys, and a Welshman who had somehow ridden (or carried) his touring bike up there.

In the morning the two Frenchmen and I left Antonio, Adam and Antonio’s Tibetan friend Thasi to climb over the 4.7 km high Laurabina La Pass and down the Helambu trek back to the capital – none of us able to face another 14 hour bus ride. Pushing our way below the cloud layer we found ourselves among the spectacular scenes of cloud-filled valleys surrounding Kathmandu.

Descending 3 kms in a little over two days took a serious toll on my knees, but it allowed me to intercept a few messages from Alex about the election for the first time in days: a hung parliament. That was it – I had to get to the internet. Ignoring the pain I stumbled down the mountain towards civilisation. At this stage my knees were starting to impair the progress of our party, so I had to let my French friends finish the trek ahead of me. That night from my saddle-topped hotel, I was granted an awesome astronomical sight: a clear sky, the brightest Venus I'd ever seen, and even a rare minus eight or so magnitude Iridium flare, taking me back to when Dad and I used to go flare chasing around the countryside soon after the those satphone sats were launched (yes, I am that much of a nerd). Not sure what the locals think of them. upon waking I hobbled the second last day’s 35 kms to Kathmandu’s outskirts, and then the final day’s 20 km stroll back to my bike at the Red Planet Hotel.

Upon which I then rode to India.

Megaland

To summarise, my bike was in Nepal, my brake pads in Vietnam, my tent in Singapore, my pack in Hong Kong and I was in China.  How did I manage to spread myself so thin?

And what's worse - when walking to the Chinese border, seemingly located in the centre of the town of Mon Cai, I realised just how hard it is to carry panniers in your hands: you have to lift them up as the thin handles dig into your fingers, then hold your arms outstretched so the inward-leaning bottoms don't get entangled with your legs.  And don't get me started on asymmetrical weightings!  I was also forced to wear my cleated footwear everywhere which crunches and scrapes over all paved surfaces.

But despite these encumbrances I ambulated my way into the Great Nation of China.

And what a nation!  It felt like I was in the only 'real' country I've ever visited - all the others seem like a couple of towns separated by bits of country-side in comparison (okay, maybe not India - but that's more like Europe than a single country, or what Europe would be if it had lost the crusades).  China is immense.  It's a truism to say there are a lot of people in China, but what's hard to realise is that these people are not just represented by sacks of flesh, but by the human infrastructure congealed around them.

 

One justification for spending the last few months bumming around the world not achieving much is to figure out what I want to be when I grow up - should I stick with the construction industry, lash out into a cushy engineering design job or do something totally different like inventing a machine that manufactures tailored universes for the rich and then get myself into the speculative real estate market?  But one thing that's tipping the scale for the status quo is that what I find most exciting about new places is checking out the mega-construction projects going on.  Stuff temples, palaces and musea - I want to see freeway projects, half-constructed metro systems and spindly skyscraper scaffolding sacrilegiously puncturing the heavens.  And, largely thanks to China's trillion dollar stimulus package, there is a lot of that - my bus ride to Nanning transported me into the future so thoroughly I was tempted to ask directions to the sky-tube terminal for a nearby floating city.

 

I spent the day in Nanning blundering around in amazement at the massive metropolis I'd never heard of whose CBD is the size of Greater Cranbourne.  I was also still shocked that my hotel room came with its own computer terminal.  Compared to South East Asia the wealth here is mind-blowing.

 

Another truism about China is its authoritarianism and bureaucracy.  It seems to thread its way through all levels of society - even the hotels lock you out of your room electronically if it's one minute past the check-out time (once I'd just had a shower and had to borrow money for the next night while clutching a towel).  And the railways!  Each station is the size and grandeur of an international airport - Nanning's had a huge LCD screen with a looped Communist Party video instructing young nerds how to pick up chicks, or so it seemed without understanding the dialogue.  The bureaucratic infrastructure for the railway network is immense, with a reported average of 10 million Chinese traveling by train at any one time.  And they feel they have to check your ticket SIX TIMES.  Once upon entering the station at the metal detector for the waiting rooms (which are each the size of concert halls), another when boarding commences, a fourth time at the entrance to each carriage, twice on the train when the conductor swaps your ticket for a magnetic tag so you don't wander off before your designated stop, and finally upon leaving your destination station - just to be safe.  On one trip an armed police officer even went through the carriages and scanned everyone's National ID Card.  Luckily I was exempt or they would have discovered my Counter-Government Activities.

 

But they sure are nice about it.  In Nanning, when for the first time in my life I actually missed a train I had a ticket for (never trust 'Windows time'), a staff member with excellent English saw my distress and exchanged my ticket for the next train - apparently it's common practice to get a full refund even after the train has departed.

 

My destination in this case was the karst-city of Guilin and marked the beginning of my totally inept 'drunkard's stumble' across southern China, panniers in tow.  Here I discovered China's love of underground cavities and unnecessarily large dogs.  A PVC-pipe raft floated me down the spectacularly scenic Li River to the even more karsty town of Yangshuo while I suffered under the effects of a rice wine frenzy forced upon me by some Chinese tourists the previous night.  My companions for this journey and beyond were three Scandinavians: a Helsinki girl called Paivi who came with bonus Chinese skills and two Swedish guys called Henrik and Matthias.

 

We spent over a week in Yangshuo and in that time managed to achieve almost nothing.  We went on a couple of bike rides, watched DVDs by the terabyte, and launched ourselves on a night-out from which the recovery required the next two days.  Individually I also went on a walk to the top of Moon Hill which is a karst mountain with a gibbous hole in it, I got to another geohash that involved hours of getting lost and crawling through damp undergrowth and was sent on an epic quest by my dad to find a cafe he went to in 1994 called Mickey Mao's (I discovered it had been renamed Minnie Mao's).

 

Our excuse for such laziness was that it was raining pretty much the whole time.  We were planning to take a hot air balloon ride over the town when the weather cleared up but we were informed that they'd stopped running it because five tourists had recently been killed in a freak accident.  They still hadn't taken down any of the advertising for the "Scenic and safe float over Yangshuo".  During all this lethargy I think we annoyed the hell out of our hostel staff - at about 3am one night after a bottle of wine and a few DVDs I tried to steal my own bag from behind the reception desk so we could draw a penis on the face of a sleeping Henrik with a permanent marker (apologies to any older relatives who'd assumed I'd grown into a mature person by now).  It was only then that I realised the staff actually sleep behind the reception desk.

 

In Kunming I celebrated the six month anniversary of my slow crawl across a small fraction of southern Asia and used the occasion for a reflection of what I'm really doing here.  Figuring out who I am and where I'm going all while enjoying the spoils of my previous life in a new setting is certainly a big part of it, but so is trying to read all the major science fiction novels written between 1958 and 1972.  So far I've learnt that I'm neither completely introverted nor completely extroverted.  I suppose I'm an extrovert on the outside with a gooey core of introversion.  In some places I've noticed a bad tendency for me to see the exterior world as merely a distraction from all the interesting stuff going on in my head or a book, but with my recent foray into the hostel circuit I feel myself getting energised by meeting people and forming groups and inciting parties like a social Prometheus (with similar consequences for my liver).  All in all though, like life itself, my trip really has no purpose.  When once I got stressed out if I didn't see everything there is to see in a place I've now lost all qualms about just doing nothing for a day.

 

Kunming is like many other cities in China, where the technological future has crashed landed into a traditional community like an alien spacecraft brought down by an RPG, remnants of old buildings and cultures crawling pathetically out from under the wreckage.  Despite this the streets are clean, with normal and recycling bins spaced every 50m, the signs and announcements often bilingual although charmingly Chinglish, and immaculately well thought out urban planning creates elegant public squares and integrated public transport.  They still haven't dealt with the rampant spitting though.  I've also noticed, much to my annoyance, that the swarm of motorbikes in Vietnam was transformed into a sedate river of cars as I crossed the border into China, but this is offset by the profusion of top-brand mountain bikes replete with hydraulic disc brakes (a thorough brake pad search proved that none would have suited my bike, much to my relief).

 

The following evening I, Paivi and a Canadian girl called Lauren took the sleeper train to the touristy hillside town of Dali, the main attraction of which was a tall glass of hot brandy chocolate, a ferry ride that proved to be frice as expensive as we'd been willing to pay and so didn't, and a chance to get up to Hadrian in my History of Rome podcast.  However, an unsung charm of Dali was the curiously Melbourne-like weather (or at least pre-1995 Melbourne weather).  Occasional gusts of warm wind interspersed with fronts of cold drizzle presaging an afternoon of sunniness and thunderstorms.

 

The next day we headed up hill to the northern Yunnan town of 'Shangri-La' at the beginning of the Himalayas, both a flagrant abuse of a fictional utopia and an epic place to be for people who like looking at mountains.  I nearly fell out of my seat and then out of the bus as the first of the towering snow capped mountains reared into view.  This was exacerbated by a small child trying to throw up on me from the seat behind (on my trip I've been shat on, pissed on and thrown up on several times by small local travellers - usually on buses so crowded the kids have to be distributed evenly to all available knees).

 

'Shangri-La' (from now on I'll call it Zongdian - its pre-money-spinner name) is really cold.  It sits at 3200m above sea level and on one morning snowed heavily.  None of the hostels provide heating so everyone had to sleep with all their clothes on.  After a day of sipping hot plum wine and tentatively getting a view from a small local hill Paivi and I booked a day hike up a proper mountain near the town.  Unfortunately, I was determined to try some yak meat for dinner the night before and felt like throwing up the whole of the next day.  In the morning we stopped off at our guide's Tibetan family home for some... yak milk tea.  It was so disgusting I almost explosively redecorated the interior of their spartan living room.

 

The hike itself was a beautiful and eerie icy wonderland, snowing the whole time.  Our trip was supposed to take us to the top of a 4200m altitude mountain but we stopped 200m short because our guide was 'cold' and made a fire instead.  Failed again to exceed my top land altitude at Gunung Kerinci in Sumatra.

 

Our descent marked the beginning of my ridiculous double back track across southern China to get my pack previously sent to Hong Kong and return to within hours of Zongdian to cross into Nepal for some real altitude.  Stay tuned for the next episode: Felix in Tibet.

Escape from Singapore

It seems that the more stuff I get up to the more there is to write in my blog, but the less time I have in which to write it. Another of nature's annoying positive feedback loops.

I'd just left Deon's flat in Singapore with a list of complicated instructions on how to get to Johore, the Malaysian town on the other side of the border. It involved catching about 3 buses and a train, and on the final bus I had a massive miscommunication with the driver and got off about three kilometres too soon. "No worries" I thought, "I'll walk it". This was to be a little more arduous than anticipated.

After about an hour of negotiating freeways and figuring out if I could more accurately be described as a bus or a motorbike for emigration queues I at last had my passport stamped as No Longer In Singapore and to celebrate decided to continue my walk across the causeway into Malaysia.

I think Singaporeans and Malaysians have different ideas to each other about footpaths - along the two kilometre or so gap between the two countries the footpath just sort of petered out until I was walking on the road, hoping my bulky backpack would provide some protection in case of vehicular impacts. Pretty soon this road became a freeway, and I still hadn't entered Malaysia. After another kilometre or so I came across a construction site for a new set of flyovers and the engineers there (probably sensing they were among a kindred spirit) politely waved me through towards my destination of Malaysia (I wonder who pays for freeways between countries?), which was by now encapsulating me in a tall barbed wire cyclone fence.

After squeezing my way along the 30 centimetre wide shoulder I walked underneath an overpass (hanging in Malaysian airspace) upon which a heavily armed policeman was shouting directions at me (which amounted to "Pretend you're a bus, not a motorbike - it's easier to go round corners"). I was pretty relieved he was friendly, but of course this Malaysian cop couldn't actually get to me as I was not under Malaysian jurisdiction - I was in Limbo Land, which didn't seem to have its own police force.

On these sorts of occasions it does occur to me to wonder what Normal People do when they try to get between two widely separated national borders without resorting to motorised transport. These sorts of experiences just don't seem to crop up in other travelers' accounts.

Eventually I got through and into Johore, another urban-prairie/gleaming-city so fashionable in Malaysia. I booked a night train and spent the afternoon wandering around overgrown shopping malls and abandoned waterfront resorts, smelling fennel and admiring vines as they jealously embraced their rotting rafters.

As I sat on the platform waiting for my train a sudden feeling of horror filled me. I had realised that I was about to take a train all the way up to the Thai border, sleeping through the ancient rainforest of Taman Negara and associated highlands that everyone seems to rave about. I checked my guide book to make sure I wasn't missing anything but I got a cold dread when I read that one would have to be a moron to take the 'Jungle Train' at night. I felt so bad I considered abandoning my ticket and not getting on board at all, and when I did reluctantly board I spent most of the night squeezing my face against the window in a vain attempt to see something cool.

Sometimes I find myself thinking I'm living in some kind of Panglossion Paradigm - 'All is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds'. I know it's not very atheist of me - I'll have to pay penance to the patron saint of atheists for that - but I suppose it means I'm an optimist at heart. In this case I soon decided that making my way to Thailand as fast as possible (delayed only by having to take two more busses and another train as well as walking across another border - more easily done this time) was quite a good thing - Malaysia is actually a lot more boring than Thailand. Sorry guys, you tried.

On the train through southern Thailand I finally finished reading 'War and Peace' and hefted it around triumphantly at the other passengers. It really is an amazing book - a vast epic with hundreds of complex but flawed characters and incredibly vivid scenes. Not once was I bored reading it, except for at the end during the very long second epilogue which was a snore inspiring dissertation on the forces of history (including a big whinge about Tolstoy's contemporary Charles Darwin - he obviously upset old Leo's religious sensibilities).

Once I'd finally looked up from the pages of the book I noticed some things about Thailand that are distinctly different from Malaysia - firstly it's much more yellow, Thailand's favourite colour. Secondly, I discovered I could no longer read. This was a bit of a problem as I was used to knowing at which station I needed to alight (although luckily I've retained the ability to decipher information derived from my own world). Another observation is that this was the boundary where the Dutch tourists fade out and the French tourists fade in - vestigial colonialism at work. Finally, I noticed that the usually sharp definition between the sexes is in this country... somewhat indistinct.

After spending the night in Phatthalung - the train line's closest approach to my destination on the coast (I like to macro-navigate by compass when there's a lot of public transport) - I headed to Krabi, a karsk formation environed sea-side town. After finding an appropriate hotel with a balcony overlooking the ocean my first act was to check what geohashes were going that day - there was one 25kms to the east (a 70 km ride in all) - right on the boundary of accessibility for three pm. Nonchalantly I decided to go for it, but after several hours riding a hired mountain bike to exhaustion, being chased by wild dogs and finally failing the geohash by 1.4kms due to a missed turn off and impenetrable jungle I had to admit that it had out-epic-ed my expectations.

The following day, despite my natural aversion to guided tours, I went on a sea-kayaking trip. This was pretty awesome. The highlight was dragging our kayak along several kilometres of deep mangrove mud because of a king-low-tide. My guide kept saying "This is your trip, it's your choice if we push on or turn back now". I've always had trouble with that choice. In the end he told me he'd never attempted doing that before and was amazed that it was even possible.

While kayaking I met two English guys called Paul and Karl and for the next couple of weeks we'd frequently separate and rejoin like a flat stone skimming across a still pond, or more accurately (and awesomely), like a B-52 bomber armed with twin 40 megaton thermonuclear devices being refueled mid-air while continuously circumnavigating the territories of the Soviet Union... but without any of the sexual connotations. We were to meet again the next day for a chartered long-tail boating expedition to some nearby islands.

This day turned out to be one of the highlights of my whole trip. Exploring beautiful deserted beaches shaded by rainforest, climbing overhanging sea cliffs, snorkeling through sea caves and wandering along narrow spindly beaches as they were submerged by the tide on both sides before our eyes, the water so glassily transparent above the sand it looked like bad computer graphics.

On our return we decided to hit the bars along Ao Nang beach, playing pool and drinking buckets (I think I'll have to explain that one later). I had to conscientiously check the time in order to catch the last bus back to Krabi and, not having much experience having to catch the last of anything, missed it. As it happened there was an aboriginal girl from Carlton with us who was on a month-long rest day while cycle-touring from Chiang Mai, and she graciously let me borrow her bike for the night. My bed in Krabi was over 20 kms away.

After a couple of wrong turns (I didn't have a map and had left my compass in Krabi) I slowly threaded my way towards home along a road through the jungle and between looming karst formations. Within a few kilometres of my hotel I relaxed a bit and let the gravity well of Krabi pull me in. Unfortunately, like a frog being slowly boiled after being submerged in a bucket of cold water, it failed to occur to me that I had got so far off the beaten track that I had become lost, roadless and lightless, in a plantation forest. Awoken from my daze by a pack of wild dogs I had just enough time to see the humour in being chased on bike by wild dogs through a dark plantation forest twice in a little over two days before I legged it under the influence of a previously undiscovered reservoir of adrenaline. But the worst part was that I had to ride the bike back in the morning.

My next destination was Phuket. A town so dead and lifeless it had me wondering if I'd got on the wrong bus again. I spent a day reading two books that both coincidentally featured the extinction of humanity by oceans - one, 'Ark' by Stephen Baxter, because the sea levels inexplicably rise by 20 kilometres, and the other, 'Cat's Cradle' by Kurt Vonnegut, because the oceans suddenly turn to ice - I had a lot of trouble separating fiction from reality in that town. Nice architecture though.

The next day I checked out of my hotel and took a local bus to Patong beach. I looked around and warily observed the sinister atmosphere and disphasic inhabitants. I got the distinct feeling I was living in that popular science fiction genre where a planet is discovered in a complex orbit around a multiple star system, but when an eager yet inexperienced batch of young colonists arrive just before a rare period of darkness they realise, naturally to their horror, that the planet's unobserved nocturnal biota is not as benign as its diurnal. I had to get out before nightfall.

I spent the afternoon lazily at the beach, dread still tingling in my lymph system. Succeeding this time in catching the last bus out of there I got a call from Paul. By this stage I was hanging by one arm from the back of the comically overcrowded bus, torqued precariously by my book-loaded pack as the vehicle roared up a hill in first gear a few kilometres away from Patong Beach. Paul and Karl were staying there and wanted to know if I'd care to join them. My curiosity was piqued.

Well, there was no way I could fight my way through the crowd to tell the driver to let me off there, but the bus was traveling at a sedate 15 kms an hour or so, and there was no traffic to speak of behind it, so there was an alternative...

To Sumatra!

I spent the next couple of days in Yogyakarta recovering from the all-night hike conquering Merapi (and the excessive partying), sleeping for 14 hours in one day. 'Conquering' Merapi. It kind of sounds a bit exaggerated to me. Really if you wanted to demonstrate hegemony over a mountain you should have to completely dismantle it into its component energy and then reconstitute it exactly as it was except one metre to the left - using only a particle accelerator hooked up to an exercise bike. Or if you really wanted a challenge you could undo every joule and second of the universe and then restart it from the beginning under the same initial conditions that allowed the mountain to exist in the first place, this time using nothing but a bench press and an electric toaster. Anyway, we went up and down the outside of it.

After I'd regained my former energies I jumped on the train and headed for 'Java's Premier Beach Resort' of Pangandaran. Trains are by far the best way of getting around over here. I spent my time on this one listening to my favourite train-riding songs on my ipod, like MIA's 'Paper Planes' and Ben Folds Five's 'Jesusland' (or 'Mohammadland' as I translate it here - quietly), while hanging out the door high-fiving the banana leaves as they shot past. This train kept the same grade as it spanned seemingly unspannable valleys and punched tunnels through kilometres of rock.

Soon I arrived at the beach town which had the misfortune to suffer from a terrorist attack in 2006, then, just as it was recovering from that, was hit by a tsunami in the same year. Hardly any of the hotels were very occupied, all offering unreasonably large discounts and many of the town's structures lacked habitation on their lower floors. Still it had a good, if post-apocalyptic, feel to it. I hired a bike and rode around the various beaches and the national park, and went snorkeling and things. It even had a huge 1950's sci-fi section at the bookshop that made me so giddy with excitement it undermined my negotiating position.

I then took myself off to Java's second biggest city of Bandung where the rainy season had hit hard. I spent a lot of time sitting under a piece of corrugated iron on a rooftop garden eating mangoes. But the real reason I went there was because I noticed that there was a partly accessible geohash there that day which I spent an afternoon chasing after on a motorbike (and getting stopped by the cops for riding the wrong way down a one-way street).

Now, a lot of people are asking me how I'm going with this traveling thing. The answer is that I'm pretty happy, but I often worry that I'm not traveling at my maximum efficiency. Either I'm not enduring the greatest number of tourist attractions per second that I could be, or I'm not fathoming the deepest recesses of the local culture that I can get away with without incurring a Fatwa, or - and this is the worst one - that the intensity of my relaxation is not extreme enough.

So in the view to give myself a bit more time I tried to get my visa for Indonesia extended. Kindly, my hotel provided me with a free car and driver for help in the negotiations (also having an eye to extend my stay at the hotel, no doubt), but as I waltzed up to the counter of the Immigration Department they stared at my passport and burst into laughter. Now I realise the true nature of the visa I had got from the Indonesian consulate in Melbourne, which caused the Airport Dramas in Episode One. There was a texta line struck through the visa, and on the opposite page there was a faint stamp with the date from which the visa was valid and the words '60 Days' written in pen inside it. I must have seen that subconsciously when I thought everything was okay, and the Virgin check-in staff clearly missed it, seeing only the date 30/11/2009 and getting me to buy a whole new, and unnecessary, flight. I've now sent an email to Erin, the check-in chick, explaining the error. And worst of all I now have to abandon my withering opinions of Indonesian Bureaucracy and unlearn all my lessons about paying attention to what's going on.

And so I decided to celebrate by seeing that movie '2012' - both one of the stupidest and most awesome movies I've seen. It had buildings crashing into other buildings, elevated freeway spans tumbling from their piers and pyroclastic flows - so something for everyone. The best part was when the audience screamed 'Tsunami!' when that phenomenon appeared on screen.

The rest of my time in Bandung I spent hanging out with the Indonesian head of Microfinancing, my hotel's funky manager, two independently traveling Dutch girls and two Icelandic girls (with whom I visited yet another bubbling volcano and hot spring, old hat for the Icelanders). My final night I spent in the same manner as that of Yogya - beating a Dutch psychologist in a game of pool.

My final stop before Sumatra was Jakarta - a not very impressive city in which my main activity was discovering the true extent of my sunk-cost obsession: after two hours waiting for my suburban train to travel the single stop to my home station I could hardly give up and take the express buses continuously following the same route - damn it, then all that time would be wasted!

I leave you on the doorstep of Sumatra. I've heard a lot of tales from other travelers warning me of bandits dropping from overhanging trees with machetes, slicing up tourists limb from limb to get at the gooey money inside, "And that's if you can out-run the tsunamis", so I'll keep you posted.