Bonus Book Blog!

To celebrate having read 50 books on this trip I have reviewed every one of them – number 50 is Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Yeah, I know, 50 books – why didn’t I just stay at home and read on the banana lounge next to the house and not bother with this whole travel-the-world thing? I’ve tried to give each book some background of when and where I read it, a short plot summary and a super-subjective star rating (out of five). The rating is largely based on how much I remember enjoying reading the book and how well I thought of it at the time of writing the review, so don’t be surprised if a literary classic gets two stars and a pulp sci-fi gets 4.5 (but what pulp!). I’ll be updating the reviews as I read each book, and can get to an internet café to write about it, so remember to keep checking this blog if you’re interested in finding some more good (or bad) reading material or want my expert opinion of books you’ve already read. Enjoy!

Roma Eterna - Robert Silverberg
This book was lent to me years ago by a friend at Uni because I was studying Ancient Rome. I’d been guiltily seeing it sit on my bookshelf for many years without picking it up and so decided that this trip would be the perfect opportunity to read it, as it’s always intrigued me (just ignore the fact that it means I would now never be able to return the book). As it happened, it sucked. It started out well as I lay on a deck chair by a pool in Kuta, Bali, vividly describing Ancient Roman life and extolling the Gibbonesque premise that without Christianity the Roman Empire would have continued into the present day – but the imagined ramifications of this alternate universe were poorly thought through: a single Viking was enough to inure the entire New World against the Romans; there were no advances in science or technology until it all came holus bolus in the 20th century; and that Roman society would remain largely static during all of this time. They never even encountered China! There were so many exciting possibilities and ramifications never addressed it left me feeling annoyed and frustrated, despite its lucid writing style.
2*

Anathem - Neal Stephenson
I bought this 900 page behemoth – a typical size for this author – on special in the Port Melbourne Readings for this trip, and I’m sure glad I did that! What a world he invents – atheist scientist monks living in cloistered seclusion in a parallel universe evoking a technological middle ages. I first heard of this book through the web-comic xkcd, criticizing its extreme use of neologisms, (mobile phones are ‘jeejaws’ for example), but all this is justified by the events in the final chapters. As a nerdy science lover, this book was heaven – mathematical dialogues, analogies ad absurdum, and epic adventures described with a cosmic perspective. It’s like Harry Potter but with celestial mechanics instead of magic, all written with the insight and depth I expect from Stephenson’s excellent style. The plot involves a collection of university-style monasteries in a parallel universe discovering, interpreting and eventually meeting an alien spaceship from a, err, parallel universe. The final scene in orbit is intricately precise, and I was also pretty excited about a rod dropping from space onto a volcano... causing a hyper-realistic pyroclastic flow (how awesome's that!?) – very apt reading for Indonesia. I reckon it's one of the most engrossing reads I’ve had. I left this book at an obscure homestay in Ranu Pani – one day I hope to return to see if anyone’s picked it up.
4.5*

Morality Play - Barry Unsworth
I was given this book for a long forgotten birthday by my auntie, Ruth, and still hadn’t got around to reading it – another guilt inducing spine on my bookshelf I would soon consume. Reading this on Gunung Bromo and at the base of Semeru added to its rustic feel. It concerns a traveling band of early morality play actors caught up in murder and intrigue in the middle ages, presaging the introduction of dramatic creativity in English society. A little slow to get into, especially after Anathem, the plot builds up into a fairly gripping tale. Well written with believable characters, and not too long, although not all that amazing either.
2.5*

Collapse - Jarrod Diamond
A must read for any historically or ecologically aware thinking person, especially for Australians where many of the environmental lessons are deeply instructive and explanatory. Quite a tome though and difficult to slug through – particularly in the early sections where JD goes on and on about Montana which I found difficult to care about (it took me almost the whole central part of Java to get through them). The sections on the Pacific Island communities were amazing and bringing the lost ones back to life was an emotional experience. Not as good as Guns, Germs and Steel, but well worth the wade.
3.5*

Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein
I’d been trying to get my hands on this militaristic science fiction ever since falling in love with the movie of the same name directed by Paul Verhoeven (one of my favourites) in the 90s which is both a celebration of the book and a mockery of its extreme philosophy. I’m a big fan of Robert Heinlein, especially of The Door into Summer and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, despite (or because of) his right-wing libertarian views, but this book disappointed me. It took itself far too seriously and was way too self-righteous – no wonder the film was such a piss-take. Set a whopping 5000 years in the future where humans fight an alien insect race across the galaxy, the plot and characters are a bit cardboardish, largely lacking in Heinlein’s constant wit and humourous observations. I did enjoy recognising the quasi-fascist phrases from the film, used seriously here but ironically on screen (which probably inoculated me against the book), and the monsoonal setting of my reading it, on the garden rooftop of a Bandung hotel eating mangoes, certainly enlivened the experience for me.
2.5*

Double Star - Robert Heinlein
Finally, Heinlein at his best! I’m glad I read this book straight after Starship Troopers because this is everything the previous book is not: witty and humourous, not taking itself too seriously, with an excellent twisting plot that torments and changes the characters within it. No concept is impervious to Heinlein’s insight and boisterous flippancy as he spurts out terrific lines and opinions that dig deep into one’s central cortex, whether or not one agrees with them, or even their underlying premises. An unemployed actor finds himself impersonating a similar-looking global politician with polar opposite opinions and realises that he plays the part better than the man himself. A short and terrific read.
4*

Fall of the Roman Republic – Plutarch
Having been a student of Latin and Ancient Rome I’d often encountered Plutarch and read a few sections of his work, but never delved too deeply into his writings. Seeing this book on the shelf of a second-hand bookshop I knew it was time. He writes well and concisely, with many interesting insights into Roman society and the historical times – the end of the republic – while focusing on the chief characters of the changes that brought the empire. I don’t fully agree with his insistence, so common amongst Romans, that the Great Man is a bigger influence than historical forces, but it does give the book a good structure by focusing on individuals such as Marius, Sulla and Julius Caesar. The collection itself is a modern construction, selecting only the biographies of relevant characters and one day I hope to read the rest of the surviving works of Plutarch, although I always feel guilty reading books from Ancient Rome in English. A good analogue for the chaos of Jakarta.
3.5*

I, Claudius - Robert Graves
Continuing the Roman theme, I was given this book as a parting gift by my friend Pip at home. I’d seen the BBC TV series and was very impressed with it’s evocation of the imperial Roman world of the Julio-Claudians. The TV series is a believably accurate representation of the machinations and intrigues on the Palatine Hill as depicted in Robert Graves work, but the book goes into much greater detail and character depth. Although all of the actual events described could possibly have happened, the license the book takes is quite divergent from our historical knowledge of the time – but it sure makes it a great read! The central thesis that Augustus’ wife Livia basically killed everyone in the imperial court for her own filial ambitions is dubious but certainly entertaining. Claudius, as the competent intellectual masquerading as an idiot who comes to rule Rome, is a terrific central character and the book engenders great sympathy even for his despotic decisions. Warmly welcome reading during my first lonely nights in Sumatra.
4*

The Day of the Triffids - John Windham
Another terrific book! Where do I find them? Well I picked this one up from a bookshelf at home. I tried to read it when I was quite young but it too advanced (and frightening) for me at the time. My second attempt, in the lazy Sumatran seaside city of Bengkulu was more successful. Soviet-engineered intelligent carnivorous walking plants utilise the mass blinding of humanity to feed on their bodies and dominate the earth. A small group of English persons, discovering themselves sighted in a world of the blind, try to form disparate communities under wildly different social systems to repel the invasion. It’s a brilliant and gripping science fiction thriller and social commentary - a true classic of my seemingly preferred genre of civilisation collapse novels.
4.5*

Moby Dick - Herman Melville
I bought this book at home for my trip, having begun reading a condensed version of it aloud to the Eastern Arthurs bushwalking group in Southwest Tasmania a year ago. I was so impressed with its witty use of words that I just had to read the whole monstrous tome (mostly while lying on Sumatran beaches), especially as it has become a top classic of the English language. The plot centers around a traveler named Ishmael and his voyage upon the waling ship Pequod with its monomaniacal captain Ahab who has devoted his remaining life to the extermination of a particular ‘white whale’. But the main character in this book is Melville’s total mastery and control of his language to convey layers of meaning, wry humour and as a vehicle for his indefatigable intellect. And it sure goes into the art of whaling and whaling ships. The life of the whaler becomes a part of one’s own self after finishing this book. Despite some boring and tedious technical sections, most of the novel is hard to put down and the climax is of biblical proportions… but hath Ahab killed the white whale??
4.5*

Methuselah's Children - Robert Heinlein
Yes, I do love Heinlein. I know, I know, super-right wing nutcase that he is. But this book seemed a bit of a mess – lurching between a hyper-intelligent and immortal sub-group of seemingly normal humans (almost all Heinlein’s books involve a secret group of super-men destined to become a new species of human, gradually finding each other and then scoffing together at the inferiority of the rest of humanity – it appeals to one’s sense of superiority, but is just soooo elitist), global persecution of said race, sudden interstellar travel whose methods are not satisfactorily explained, meetings with new worlds and cultures, then a just as sudden return home. It was quite inexplicable, and some of the characters, like Lazarus Long, seemed to be exiles from other books (some are featured in spin-off novels I hope to read to clear things up a bit). Some good concepts (especially one where they meet a race of domestic animal aliens thinking they are the master-race – and are in for a shock) but I can’t escape the conclusion that Heinlein can be hit and miss, with this being a miss. It was good fodder for my Bukit Tinggi hotel in central Sumatra, though, having bought the book in a bonanza science fiction section in a Pangandaran bookshop back in Java.
2.5*

Persuasion - Jane Austin
Jane Austin is a bit of a change from the largely science fiction genre of my reading to date. Since I’d now largely run out of the books I’d bought from home I was at the mercy of local bookshops and fellow backpackers (but I’ve always secretly been a bit of a Jane Austin fan). The main theme of the book involves Anne Elliot slowly realising her mistake in being Persuaded out of marriage to a now successful man ten years earlier, all while being involved in the intricacies of friendship and politeness in upper-class 19th century provincial England. The famous ‘letter-writing scene’ towards the end forces the reader to look back on all the events and observations so far described in a completely different light. A fairly exciting read really and a good distraction from my violent ferry ride across the Straits of Malacca.
3.5*

Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder
I’d been meaning to read this book since early high school and, reaching university, felt I’d missed my chance. After all, a mature adult like me can’t be seen with a book written for 15 year old girls – and the cover’s pink! Well, out here no one cares (until I got to a hostel in the Cameron Highlands and everyone started asking me awkward questions). Simply written and easy to understand this book follows a Norwegian girl’s education of the history of Western philosophy through a middle-aged (and somewhat creepy – don’t they have pedophiles in Norway?) mysterious man. I found the history lessons extremely interesting and well-structured, but the plot a bit convoluted, especially when (spoiler!) Sophie discovers that her entire universe doesn’t actually exist and is really a fiction of a completely different 15 year-old girl’s imagination. The characters asked the question about whether there’s a God – but of course there’s a God in a novel – it’s The Author! Plus I thought this point about us not knowing if we really exist was a bit laboured – but a good way of twisting the plot in essentially a philosophy text book.
3.5*

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
What. An. Epic. In, for once, the true sense of the term. 500 characters; 560,000 words; 1000 pages in 6 point text. Exhibiting endless historical notes and footmarks elucidating this wild and vivid translation of the vast battle for control of Russia in the Napoleonic Wars and its effects on the many and disparate characters. Un-put-downable despite its enormous length – I read it in three weeks through Malaysia and Singapore. The characters are real, the scenes intense and, buried within the cascade of sprawling events and consequences, images of extreme realism and beauty are conjured up to burrow deep within one’s emotional consciousness. The central theme of the book is Fate – whatever choices we make we cannot escape our destiny, like characters in a Greek tragedy, and great events are beyond our control to influence – even by powerful leaders such as Napoleon and Tsar Alexander. Unfortunately, Tolstoy spends the last 100 pages tediously hammering this point into the reader like the blunt instrument he isn’t (even giving a shout-out to Charles Darwin – he’s not a fan). But he can be forgiven after the rest of the book. Tolstoy’s deep-seated conservatism is also apparent, which I found more charming than repulsive compared to my own views, and his great love of Russia is exuded from every page. I originally bought this book for a trip to India five years earlier, based on its price per word, but couldn’t face it then. It’s the last book I read which I’d brought from home. I’ll be reading Anna Karenina soon and I hope it’s a tenth as good as this book. What a ride – reading will never be the same again.
5*

The Ruthless Greek's Virgin Princess - Mills and Boon
“What’s this?” I hear you ask. “Is this a long and improbable typo?” No, in Kuala Lumpur I and a couple of fellow travelers found ourselves wandering a bookshop and discovered about a cubic metre of Mills and Boons. Glancing at the titles we chose the most absurd (it was a tough competition) and took turns reading the book to each other (I can’t remember the actual author, not that it’d be a real name anyway). Of course, the others lost interest after the opening sex-scene so I was left to finish it myself in Thailand after reading War and Peace (yes, an interesting contrast). I have actually read a fair few Mills and Boons in my time – at one point it was joke material on Mountaineering Club bushwalks, where we’d burn each page as it was read aloud (but I know we enjoyed them despite ourselves) – and this one was pretty similar to the rest. They always involve a beautiful but chaste (but willing! but struggling! but yielding!) and misunderstood young woman’s enmity with some strong, handsome and successful Adonis. They hate each other but slowly the leader-in-every-field human show-beef realises how his naïve assumptions about this girl from his childhood have been mistaken, so they have sex and get married. I needn’t go into the particulars. I wasn’t bored but neither was I interested.
1.5*

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
More from the genre of the destruction of civilisation, this time by a mysterious substance named ‘ice-nine’ that freezes water at room temperature. It’s certainly a fun and interesting fountain of social commentary, humourously written. The apocalyptic ending seems strangely out-of-place in this book about the family relations of a brilliant physicist – although he is portrayed as a father of the atomic bomb. Ultimately a bleak and pessimistic view of humanity, though funny and entertaining in a detached way. I got this book from my good friend Deon with whom I stayed in Singapore and I’m grateful that she managed to give me a novel so suitable to my own interests. I read it while sitting on my balcony in my hotel at the Thai seaside town of Krabi, overlooking estuaries and karst mountain formations.
3.5*

Ark - Stephen Baxter
The sequel to Flood, which was one of the most exciting and thought consuming books I’ve ever read. I’d been eagerly awaiting the publication of this book since I read its precedent by a pool in Bali with my folks many months ago and finally found it in a KL mega-bookshop. Its central premise is that the world’s oceans are inexplicably rising at a geometric rate, ready to drown Mount Everest within 50 years. What happens to society? How does it cope? Does it work together for a way out or destroy itself in anarchy? If Flood focused on the second possibility of the last question, Ark focuses on the first. A group of rich Americans in Denver (the new US capital) design and build an interstellar spaceship using the Orion concept (old Bang-Bang – nukes flung out the back of the ship blasting it into space) to carry its children to another star. My main annoyance with this book is that, like Methuselah’s Children (where the characters live forever anyway), it uses a faster-than-light drive when it needn’t – it takes 30 years to reach their destination anyway, why not just pick a closer star and stay within know physics? It drives me nuts! But the rest of the science is beautifully accurate, and the struggles of the child-voyagers as they age across the stars finding a new home to escape their drowning birthplace, forming and dissolving many different brands of society, is expertly envisaged. I found myself so engaged with the plot I continued to read the book in my Phuket hotel room while suffering from an eye infection causing excruciating pain whenever my eyes were open. Can’t beat that recommendation!
4.5*

Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
I’d been recommended this 19th century English novel by countless bookshop owners over the previous few months so I thought it was about time to give it a try. Unfortunately, although the romantic exploits of Bathsheba Everdene as she grapples with being an independent woman in a world that demands her to have a providing husband, were somewhat engaging, I found myself bordering on boredom for most of the book, without quite slipping into indifference. I think it suffered somewhat from being read straight after the super-engrossing Ark, and while enjoying the beautifully pristine beach of Surin Island National Park, some way off the western Thai coast. The brain-implodingly stupid illustrations that came with this Indian edition also did their part to attract my enmity.
2.5*

Reach for Tomorrow - Arthur C. Clarke
I read this whole collection of science fiction short stories from AC Clarke’s early years in the 40s (well before the Rama and 2000 series) while on the train to Bangkok, occasionally glancing out the window at karsts and coasts while struggling to accommodate two extremely large Thai women sitting on either side of me. The stories are all vivid and imaginative – true Clarke style. One about an alien race coming to rescue humanity from a supernova, only to discover it has already left… to conquer them. Another, an old academic abandoned in Oxford during a sudden ice-age listening to rescuers bombing their way towards him – suddenly realising the explosions are actually advancing glaciers. One about a team of paleontologists, following a Jurassic set of footprints, discovers their own lead-researcher fossilised at the point of consumption. Finally, there’s a story about a man flipped into his mirror image by an experiment gone wrong and then starving to death for lack of the correct-handed proteins – certainly the inspiration for an analogous scene in Anathem. Clarke sure was a brilliant and creative writer; it’s a shame to lose him.
4*

Anne of Green Gables - L M Montgomery
I’d been curious about this book ever since my cousin Rose read it as a youngster, and I’ve heard many other girls reminisce over it since. Reading this on the train from Bangkok to Chiangmai having bought it way back in Sumatra I instantly began to love Anne. She is so precocious, so energetic and so curious about the world I felt she instantly became a part of me in some way. The plot involves Anne being sent to a family from an orphanage, but, much to her new parent’s surprise, she turns out to be a girl rather than the prescribed boy. The writing-style is humourous and witty and describes Anne’s escapades on Prince Edward Island in Canada such that one cannot help identifying with Anne’s wonder at the world. What a shame she is brought up as a conservative! I wonder how many votes progressive parties have lost around the world because of her.
4.5*

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
Being one of the earliest ever science fiction books, there was no way I could avoid reading this classic, undertaken in Thailand’s Chiangmai and Pai. Unfortunately, the dodgy publishers made so many typos it was rendered almost unintelligible, with whole sections missing including the voyage to Atlantis (I had to fill them in using the internet). Other than that, it was certainly an exciting read following Captian Nemo and his submarine crew around the world on a journey reminiscent of Ahab’s from Moby Dick. I have to forgive Verne for his fantastical license of impossibility due to his ignorant era and his audience’s only nascent hunger for hard science. They must have been tumultuous times of discovery. I swapped this book for a grass tea in Pai when I’d finished it.
3*

The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins
What a great story! This is Dawkins at his best, and I should know because I’ve read almost all his other works. It lacks his usual antagonistic snake-poking atheism of The God Delusion, and instead focuses purely on how life evolved, what are its mechanisms and what a wonderful world we live in. In Moby Dick Ishmael tells us that whales are a type of fish. I scoffed at this at the time, but Dawkins has shown me that he was right – for all mammals a subset of fish-kind (and reptile-kind in turn). Why do humans look so unlike apes, but similar to infant chimps? Humans are merely Peter Pan-like chimps whole adult stage has been lopped off. It really is a fat book, told in the manner of the Canterbury Tales – a pilgrimage back through our ancestry – and it took me the rest of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and southern Vietnam to finish it, but despite being particularly frantic and sociable back then I was always excited to pick it up. Thanks to Auntie Su for sending it to the Bangkok Poste Restante!
4.5*

Emma - Jane Austin
I only made a serious attempt at this book when I began my solo cycle tour of Vietnam after my friends from home had high-tailed it at Hue – their conversation was too interesting to shun. I found Emma to be better than Austin’s Persuasion – Emma herself seemed to be a deeper character as she wrestled with her maturing ideas of herself, other people and the ways of the universe, from someone who thinks she knows who she is to someone who doesn’t. The story involves Emma trying to find a suitable match for her lower-class protégé, Harriet, but discovering herself to be more involved with the matches than she realises. In my Penguin edition the notes were so good they even attempted to triangulate the real-world location of the outdoor scenes from Austin’s description of the surrounding environment.
4*

The Gods Themselves - Isaac Asimov
I’d been looking forward to this book ever since I bought it in exchange for Ark in Phuket Town, being a big fan of Isaac Asimov and having read a good percentage of his total output during the endless summers of my school days. The central concept of this sci-fi is that a new method of power generation has been discovered by exchanging material from this universe with another governed by differing physical laws. Unfortunately, this exchange leaks the laws of each universe into the other, weakening our strong nuclear force and thus accelerating our sun’s burn-rate into the supernova danger zone. Meanwhile, the aliens on the other end of the ‘electron pump’ are losing power from their own sun through the opposing mechanism and dissident scientists from both universes try to communicate with each other to prevent mutually ensured destruction, against the wishes of their respective power-hungry majority. All well and good. My main criticism is that the story is divided into three equal and almost independent parts that is frustrating and confusing for readers easily emotionally attached to characters and settings.
3.5*

The Maracot Deep - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Doyle should stick to Sherlock Holmes I reckon. This thin book, read amongst karst mountains on my solo cycle tour through Vietnam, was a fairly poor cousin to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and all my criticisms of that book are exaggerated here: the main premise is that a submarine capsule lead by the brilliant Dr Maracot encounters sea monsters and then an ancient Atlantian city at the bottom of a deep ocean trench. It is even told through the narration of a poor dupe caught up in the adventure exactly like in Verne’s book. But here’s the killer: how do they survive the extreme pressures kilometres under water? “P=dgh has never been proved” says Dr Maracot. Come on!
2*

Claudius the God - Robert Graves
This sequel to Graves’ I, Claudius is just as good as the original. In some ways I thought it was better – since Claudius is now emperor rather than court jester and unwilling bystander there is scope for the horrible moral dilemmas and tragic consequences of trying to do good in a world of bad from a position of absolute power. Sure, Claudius in real life was quite different to this well-meaning old chap, but Graves expertly portrays the emperor’s delusional justifications for his despotic actions – all to bring back his beloved republic. Exciting, powerful and occasionally funny, in a tragicomic way. Thanks to Pip for donating the book via the cycle-tourists – a good read for my solo ride.
4*

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
This mega-best seller was given to me by an English couple I befriended in Laos, and it being about ‘issues’ and ‘people’ (blugh!) I had been a bit dubious. Reading it amongst the constant jack-hammering at the Hanoi Backpackers (everyone else there had read it too) and on my balcony at the hill town of Sapa, I came to realise the cause of its popularity. An interesting story of a boy (quite a spineless, unpleasant character really) growing up in Afghanistan, migrating to America, then realising that he must return to right an old wrong that had been playing on his mind all this time. The ending was a bit pulpy though – suddenly old characters have conveniently reappeared, and the violent scene at the end with the Taliban is just way too unbelievable. But it’s fun in a temporary way.
3*

Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
What a stormy read this was! I picked it up in Sumatra, began reading it in Hanoi and finished it on my solo cycle tour to the Chinese border, where the weather exactly matched the tenor of this book. It’s such a classic I had to read it sometime, but I must admit it was very different to my expectations, not least because of the frequent use of the word ‘slut’. Not one character engendered sympathy from me, all the main ones were either dead or you wanted them to die from the very first chapters, and, man, they had such ridiculous, over-the-top, destructive emotions I couldn’t get a grip on their obviously diseased brains! Catherine loves the foundling Heathcliff so she marries some other dope (!?) and dies, then Heathcliffe departs and returns a rich man devoting his life to the destruction of everything even remotely associated with her. What crazy shit had Brontë been smoking!? People say this is the greatest romance ever written – I say it’s the biggest emotional nuclear attack ever launched in the 19th century. I give it three stars out of sheer brain-bendingness.
3*

No Time Like Tomorrow - Brian Aldiss
There are some interesting ideas in this collection of science fiction short stories from the 1940s, but I found myself constantly comparing him to Asimov and Clarke from the same era and Aldiss just doesn’t cut the mustard. They’re all about aliens and time travel as though those things were new and exciting. In one a man finds himself stranded on a desolate moon after dark with a creepy alien carnivore, in another volunteers are sent hundreds of millions of years into the future to soothe humanity’s destiny as a race of ‘failed men’ and to ask why they have descended into such moroseness. Fairly interesting, as I sat on my Mon Cai balcony trying to figure out if my bike was repairable, but stretching credulity too far.
3*

Watership Down - Richard Adams
I’d been meaning to read this book since I was freaked out by the animated movie of it when I was a kid, and what a great book it is! I picked it up yonks ago in Malaysia and read it traveling through the southern Chinese cities of Nanning, Guilin and Yangshuo, mainly on trains in the rain. It follows the exploits of a brave but low-caste rabbit and his fearful soothsayer as they abandon their doomed warren and try to establish themselves somewhere else in the English country-side. I’d been forewarned that the second half of the book was inspired by the ‘rape of the Sabine women’ – the story of how cock forest Rome propagated itself into the sixth century B.C.E. – and came to find so many other Roman analogues I think of this now as a retelling of that city’s founding. Although a gripping tale written with great enthusiasm, it suffers from a cringe-worthy sexism that grates in this new enlightened millennium.
4*

Speaker for the Dead - Orson Scott Card
Having read its space-battle predecessor, Ender’s Game, I kept finding the third, fourth and first of these books in bookshops until coming across this one in Penang. I’d been saving it as a ‘reward book’ (for finishing a hypothetical future boring one) since then – and it largely met my expectations. The story is set centuries after the original, when Ender is a middle-aged man (yes, relativistic effects of near-light-speed travel – this book follows Ursula Le Guin’s compromise of slower-than-light travel but instantaneous communications) investigating a newly discovered alien race whose unique cultural differences include randomly eviscerating the internal working parts of people while keeping them alive and in extreme agony. Great characters and storyline, but man you should watch some of the dreams I had reading this! It certainly made the Tibetan-style hostel I was staying at in snowy ‘Shangri-La’ unnerving.
3.5*

Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts
Another book sent to the Bangkok Poste Restante by Su, and what a brick of a book to lug around since then! Especially after I discovered every single backpacker I’ve met has a copy they’re keen to offload. A sprawling epic about macho/intellectual Roberts’ escape from Pentridge Prison in Melbourne, his flee to India, life in a small Maharashtran village, adoption as a slum doctor in Mumbai, confusing involvement in an Afghani war, and finally his settling down to a quiet life of passport trafficking and mafia killings. Well written and engaging, keeping one guessing how much is really true (it’s not a biography as that would violate an Australian law against profiting from crime – how did Chopper manage it?), it presents Robert’s thoughts and feelings, loves and fears, and his rambling and totally stupid philosophy on life – often with frequent axes to grind which he wields bluntly. He reads like an evil Kim Stanley Robinson – getting right to the character’s soul in a chaotic universe, but instead of curiosity and world-building dreams we find a belligerent antagonism. It’s quite a tale, though, and great for long Chinese train rides. Interestingly, my auntie Ruth (thanks for the correction, dad) met Roberts while he was on the run from the cops – it’s nice to have a local connection.
3.5*

Men at Arms - Terry Pratchet
I’ve had this one for a while – I got it in exchange for Sophie’s World from a Dutch backpacker in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. I found it quite difficult to get into after the all-consuming Shantaram, but my gears soon engaged and I was plunged into a magical world of irony, social commentary and creative similes. All Pratchet’s novels seem to blur together for me, but I believe the plot involves an eclectic night watch of fantastical creatures trying to solve a murder mystery while looming political intrigues threaten the magical society. Chock-full of wry Pratchetisms and a fun ending, but a bit vanilla compared with its literary companions. I read the whole thing on the train from Chengdu to Lhasa.
3*

Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson
Yes! Stephenson again! This one’s quite different to Anatham, though, as it’s set in our very own universe, but in 17th century Europe during the enlightenment. I’ve been trying to find the time to hack into the gargantuan Baroque Quartet for years now and it was certainly worth the wait. I read this through Tibet and most of the Annapurna trek in Nepal. It’s a vastly intricate and complex (one could say Baroque) tale of discovery, intrigue, violence, romance and blithe curiosity about the world set during the bubonic plague, Great Fire of London, siege of Vienna, Royal Restoration and the invention of a clock’s second hand, whilst featuring such diverse historical personages as Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Whatshisname Liebniz and William of Orange. Brilliant and fascinating and, yes, very long. I remember standing in a Chiangmai bookshop for an hour trying to decide whether or not to buy the second installment – if only I had! Stephenson is clearly a genius. My only complaints are that the middle section gets a bit tedious, that the lead character, Daniel Waterhouse, is bland and wussy, and that (again!) there’s a description of eviscerating a live dog, instigating yet more horrible dreams on my part – well, those were the times… and it was for science. I guess.
4*

Hammer of God - Arthur C. Clarke
Rob and I went halves on this one at a bookshop while trekking, Rob having run out of books and me being a fan of Sir Clarke. As it happens this short and rather light novel had been adapted from a Time story on future scenarios – and it shows. Usual Clarke themes are invoked – space is colonised and becomes routine, religion evolves more hydra-like heads to threaten the stability of the globe, and the human race becomes entirely populated by stiff and characterless yet keen-as-mustard engineers. But suddenly an asteroid is discovered hurtling towards the earth! Will the available engineers be able to sacrifice themselves in time? Won’t Religious People somehow thwart their valiant efforts to save the human race? Will some obscure orbital mechanics phenomenon that only Clarke knows about suddenly affect humanity’s chances of survival? Read the book to find out!
2.5*

Revelation Space - Alastair Reynolds
I have a great memory of this sci-fi, borrowed from Rob’s collection on the trek, not least because it was read in the most scenic environment in which I’ve ever found myself: the Annapurna Sanctuary, but also because of its large scope, gripping and complex plotline and, most importantly, adherence to known physics (Reynolds is an astrophysicist by training). A brilliant and charismatic scientist and lead planetary colonist discovers an ancient alien civilisation and realises that its demise augers poorly for his own colony. Bussard ramjets accelerating at one gee to hug lightspeed as the complex mystery unfolds gave me the best education on special relativity I’ve ever had, to the extent that I now realise I never understood it at all. Great tough characters, all-absorbing plot-line and physics to salivate over certainly compensate for its byzantine plot and the increasing absurdity of the many concepts, already explored to their logical conclusions, towards the end.
4*

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
This book has been near the top of my reading list ever since I read Anathem. I saw it being sold in Bali in my first week of traveling, but was loathe to purchase it knowing that I could have picked up the copy sitting on a bookshelf at home a week earlier for free. The arrival of my dad from self-same abode extinguished this regret as he conveyed said book as part of my birthday offering. The novel is an interweaving of several characters’ lives in the 20th century (as in the style of Quicksilver) – some during the Second World War, and one, a Randy Waterhouse (presumably a descendant of Daniel Waterhouse from the Baroque Quartet) living in the 90s in the Philippines. Many themes featured in Anathem are used in this Celebration of Nerd as the characters explore concepts of WWII cryptography, its modern relevance to computer science and information security, and try to crack the seemingly undecipherable code by which women communicate. It’s written with Stephenson’s usual flawed and complex characters experiencing intricate and incredible adventures punctuating a wry, insightful narration. It had me grounded in my hotel room and gardens for the duration of its reading.
4*

The Greatest Show on Earth - Richard Dawkins
I’d been looking forward to this book, which I bought after the trek in Pokhara, ever since reading The Ancestor’s Tale, and watching Bill O’Reilly attacking it on YouTube. Although I found it interesting in parts, having read every other Dawkins book (okay, I couldn’t fathom The Extended Phenotype – I’ll try again someday) I found most of it too simple and tedious, repeating the same points I’d read in his other works. It’s mainly written for people who are antagonistic towards the whole concept of evolution, and although I certainly enjoyed Dawkins repeatedly bashing them over the head, I knew this book wasn’t written for me. However, it has is a terrific section on actual lab experiments witnessing mutation, reproduction and selection in real time – yes, even genetic mutation! I read most of the book at an empty rooftop café overlooking the great Bodhnath Stupa.
3.5*

The Dispossessed – Ursula Le Guin
Another book kindly donated by Pip from home and the first book I read at the Nepalese orphanage, this classic tale seems to be a sort-of prequel to the Left Hand of Darkness – also a top book – in which the technology that allows the ‘ansible’, the instantaneous communication tool in a universe (thankfully) constrained by the speed of light for matter, is invented. The physicist who comes up with the idea lives in a duple-planet system: his half being peopled by revolutionary anarchists ostracised from its more fertile, and super-capitalist, twin. In order to develop his ideas he must forsake his home and learn to cope on the more technologically advanced yet barbaric mother-world. Le Guin, almost unique as a female sci-fi writer, brilliantly marries hard science with believable and diverse societies, populated by real characters. And for once someone realises that you don’t actually need interstellar travel to portray intercommunicating civilizations in space – you can do with an interesting planetary system. None of this “He wanted to see a new society so he travelled to another star” overkill.
4*

Travels with Herodotus – Ryszard Kapuściński
Tim gave me this memoir on Kapuściński’s days as a Herodotus-reading foreign correspondent for a Polish newspaper, which he’d been telling me about for the last two years, for my Kathmandu birthday. I’m a big fan of the Herodotus’ Histories, it being the Western World’s first true written history, and having studied it at uni, but I’m sorry to say I was quite unimpressed with this book. The travel anecdotes described within it are fairly bland and humdrum (unlike my own fantasmogogical adventures of course), and their relevance to the interspersed Herodotus quotations was, well, borderline. The commentary on the Herodotus text itself seemed to involve repeating what he’d just quoted and then exclaiming “Wow, what about that eh?” Sorry Tim, I appreciate the thought of this birthday present, but the book didn’t grab me (but I managed to sell it for a whopping NRps 200 in Kathmandu – howzat?!).
1.5*

Footfall – Larry Niven and Gerry Pournell
Man – what an exciting book! From the moment it begins we’re launched into a world imperiled by a newly discovered alien spacecraft decelerating towards the Earth. Have they come in peace? Nope. The story of conquest and destruction amid orbital bombardment, airborne invasion and nuclear war is told through several dozen American, Soviet and alien characters who struggle to survive in the new order. For once humanity is enslaved by a, yes, inferior race, depicted as elephant-like herd animals (clearly a dig at Communism) who are eventually (spoiler!) defeated because they lack thumbs. Good ol’ Orion (that’s Dr. Bang-Bang to you) – science fiction’s favourite short-order heavy-lift launcher – lends a hand too; as does a crack team of sci-fi writers (typical of Niven’s gumption). This lengthy but absorbing novel generated much ill-feeling from orphans concerned I was neglecting them (they kept calling it ‘Football’). If only I’d read it during the years it’d piqued my curiosity from the bookshelf at home. One more anecdote I have to relate: when selling it at the Kathmandu bookshop, I accidentally called it a 'classic'. "Classics are cheap" the buyer exclaimed, waving a mere 50 Rps in my face. Foolishly I took it, knowing that sci-fis sell for multiples of that. Sure enough, upon returning to the bookshop, I saw it sold for nearly 300 Rps. I still haven't got over how badly I valued this worthy sci-fi!
4*

The Quiet American – Graham Green
I’d picked this book up at the Hanoi Backpacker’s hostel and it survived for so long because it was too short to make much of a weight difference. I’d been long recommended Graham Greene by my Auntie Ruth, and this particular story from having seen the film starring Michael Cane. Thomas Fowler is a British newspaper correspondent living in Saigon while the French fight for their colony against various local factions. Meeting an eager young ‘Quiet American’, Alden Piles, he finds himself in a complex relationship jockeying with him for the love of a local girl – until Piles mysteriously winds up dead after entangling himself in an enigmatic ‘Third Force’ between the French and the Communists. But what was his real cause of death? The main character in this short novel is Greene’s sardonic wit and humourous phraseology, however, Fowler is such a genuine person he evokes deep sympathy, emotionally binding one to the book in a manner rarely mastered. I have left the book at the Kathmandu Guest House to swap it with Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment.
4.5*

That Hideous Strength – C.S. Lewis
This book sucks. Sure, Lewis’ Narnia books were awesome (apart from that shockingly blatant Proselytizing one, The Last Battle, in which all the characters either become good ‘Christians’ or die horrible deaths) but this one fell flat. Badly flat. It’s the third installment of the Cosmic Trilogy (beginning at Out of the Silent Planet and continuing with Paralandra) but I haven’t read the earlier books, despite spending the eight months since I bought this one in Java searching for its predecessors. Maybe this made it far worse than it should be, but I found reading this book painful. The two atheist main characters are both so silly and annoying I just wanted them to fail in everything they did; and after some mediocre rising tension towards the end some magical stuff happens in a few pages and everything suddenly turns out fine. I grant that the early pages on media manipulation and corporate thuggery were fairly engaging, but some of the 1940s concepts about marriage and faith were so antithetical to me I felt like throwing up. I had to set myself a quota to keep my eyes on the page and get through the damned thing.
0.5*

The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
This biological revolution is one of the most important books ever written and it’s hard not to find your spine tingling when you read Darwin expostulate his world-changing theory. You can really see just how the world went from being a mysterious God-created entity to a materialist place we can understand, right in front of your eyes. Darwin’s reasoning is totally devastating, and I discovered reading it that he carried Natural Selection so far into its logical extremities that the superficial arguments of Creationists and ID theorists today had been answered in the 1850s – get them to pick up the book! The style is very approachable (although his sentences are punctuated by truckloads of commas in bizarre places) as he takes the reader on a world tour of the living Earth, into such familiar places as the Victorian Alps, Southwest Tasmania and the volcanoes of Java. I was lucky enough to pick up a first edition copy in Kathmandu, with fewer references to God (where you can almost hear Darwin coughing). Why don’t I give the book five stars? Well, it’s a subjective rating based on reading enjoyment, and I found some of the middle chapters hammered (now) obvious points home too tediously – the book is written to bludgeon over the head an audience that no longer exists: Victorian-era taxonomists. No thinking person now has not already taken a side in the debate.
4*

Expedition to Earth – Arthur C. Clarke
This is true Clarke! Here Clarke is at his early best. This collection of short stories from the 1940s, which I picked up in Pokhara as a bargaining chip for Dawkin’s latest book, is written with a passion rarely seen from Clarke. His ideas are no grander than his others, and the stories are driven from the situation rather than the usual twist at the end, but in almost every story my spine tingled from the awesome perspective. One story involves two astronauts deciding who should die so the other might like in an oxygen constrained spaceship; another about two cultures, one mastering abstract thought and the other dexterous ability, combining to revolutionise their world; and finally, The Sentinal, the inspiration for the Stanley Kubric film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, describes the first encounter with an alien artifact buried on the moon millions of years ago. Oh yes, and watch out for the hilarious vacuum tube computing action!
4*

The Earthsea Quartet – Ursula Le Guin
I was given this Ursula Le Guin classic also by Pip and read it within a few days at the Nepali orphanage. It’s a collection of the first four Earthsea novels written in the 60s and 70s. The first, A Wizard Of Earthsea, is definitely the best, about a boy becoming a wizard (like in Harry Potter) and embarking on a Search and Destroy of evil demons. The second is shorter story about rescuing a priestess from meaningless worship, the third a fairly good quest involving the reversal of magic’s diminishing powers in the world (a metaphor for the enlightenment perhaps?) and the final a long boring tale chiefly about how women are mistreated and misunderstood by men – although true it was hammered home so hard I found it a bit too tedious to rouse my indignation. The novels also seem to lack the enthusiasm and grandeur of Peake or Tolkien, and I was only fully engaged about half of the time. However, in the third book there’s an amazing scene depicting self-sufficient raft communities floating freely around the Indonesia-style archipelago world – it felt like something out of Kim Stanley Robinson or Stephen Baxter. I donated the book to the orphanage as some of the kids were keen to give it a go (good luck!).
3.5*

To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
I’d been meaning to read this Woolf stalwart ever since my dad once complained about how disappointed he was that the characters never actually get to the lighthouse. Those interested in a maritime adventure tale should probably look to books like Moby Dick rather than delve into the family relations of this introspective classic. A standard 1920s English family contemplates its impact on the world while planning a boat trip to a lighthouse. The theme of the book is Immortality: we must all die, but do we live on through our works or our children? Both options are depressingly portrayed (but at least Woolf is famous for her literary contribution, grrr). The dialogue is excellent, but can get tedious, while punctuated by poignant scenes of people forgotten, bringing our ephemeral nature into focus. However, I found myself getting a bit annoyed at the writing style sometimes – Woolf’s depression feels gluggy after a while. But guess what! They (spoiler!) really do get To the Lighthouse!
3.5*

Mansfield Park – Jane Austin
This completes the troika of the authress femme-fest I’d embarked upon. Of Austin’s works I now have only Sense and Sensibility to go, and this one is certainly among the best. Strangely, I accidentally saw the word ‘adultery’ in the blurb before reading it which caused me to view the novel as a Dostoyevskian catastrophe, rendering the first 90% exciting and tragic, and the last 10% ordinary and disappointing as I realised my mistake. Fanny Price, a low-class nine year old girl, is adopted into the family of her rich auntie and falls in love with her cousin. But her fate is already being decided by other men from the aristocratic society. Longer than usual, this novel is extremely readable and flows smoothly on the page (if that metaphor makes any sense at all), creating well-layered scenes through Fanny’s inner perspective. It was very enjoyable while I tried to zone out from the shouting orphans around me.
4*

Heretics of Dune – Frank Herbert
Finally! It’s taken me nine months to find the fourth sequel to Herbert’s spectacularly successful Dune and it was certainly worth the wait – I didn’t hesitate at its Kathmandu bookshop home, despite choking on the ludicrously expensive price-tag (four times Mansfield Park). I was bitterly disappointed in the preceding novel, God Emperor of Dune, a waffling wank, but Herbert has clearly taken the Dune books into sci-fi’s 1980s renaissance, with exciting and interweaved plotlines, characters I actually cared about and beautifully envisaged planetary settings (at last venturing beyond Arrakis). It still focused on the infighting of a few factional officials, as the rest do, but links them with a much wider world. 1500 years after the emperor has been ‘divided’ humanity has scattered throughout the universe, but Arrakis’ spice malange is still the currency of the old systems. A brilliant military commander; the recreated entity of Duncan Idaho; and a small girl who can control Dune’s giant worms all struggle for power in the new order.
4*

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Ah, it’s great to get back into another Tolstoy epic. I’ve carried this kilo of carbon ever since Yogyakarta when an American gave it to me on the proviso that I ‘pass it on’. The longest I’ve possessed any book on this trip it was also my first overseas acquisition. I brought it on my Vietnam cycle tour and even the Annapurna trek in Nepal. But finally, holed up in my Kathmandu hotel room after the orphanage, I spent six full days living inside this 800 page imagined world. The story follows two diverging 1870s Russian marriages – Anna Karenina’s disastrous break with hers as she falls for a young nobleman named Vronski, paralleled with the autobiographical Levin’s long courting of Kitty. The narrative spreads like a parasite through the aristocratic Russian society as characters are introduced and enmeshed into the web – many of whom spend a lot of time being charmingly befuddled, as though the book is infected by a plague of Hugh Grants. Is this novel better than War and Peace? AK is certainly more consistently readable – every couple of pages I came across a stunningly witty and insightful concept or phrase, and I never got bored as I did in some sections of War and Peace. But I still think Tolstoy’s earlier work is superior because some of its settings climb to vivid heights his later epic never reaches. However, it takes a lot to make me tear up during a book, but one scene in AK pulled it off. I also found myself quite despondent when I got to that point in the mechanics of paperbacks when the mass to the left of one’s thumb is noticeably heavier than the right. Although the final chapters on Levin’s idiotic (spoiler!) religious epiphany had me rolling my eyes at the page (he’s obsessed with knowing his ‘purpose in life’ – get over yourself!). I have now passed the book on to another American – maybe it’ll end up where it started.
4.5*

Farmer in the Sky – Robert Heinlein
After the fatness of AK (the book that is) this 1950 teen sci-fi was quite a change. I picked it up, like many of the books I’ve been reading nowadays, at Kathmandu’s best organised book shop. It follows a 15 year old boy who emigrates with his family to Jupiter’s moon Ganymede to be a farmer. The planet-sized moon has already (disappointingly) been terraformed by this stage so all they really have to do is escape the cold and the quakes and get on with the neighbours. For 1950 this novel is surprisingly accurate about what life on a tidally locked giant-hugger would be like, although some oversights are quite noticeable: the atmosphere is pure oxygen, clearly dating the book to before the Apollo 1 disaster; the 8 Rem per day of radiation bathing the surface has conveniently not been discovered yet; and Earth strangely appears as a pale 'green' dot. But the ‘By Jiminy’ Boy Scout style gets a bit annoying after a while, and the (spoiler!) alien stuff at the end feels totally out of place, but apart from that it’s an entertaining American pioneer story set beneath Jove’s unsetting gaze.
3.5*

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Hi hi hi there my old droogs! I’d been meaning to read this classic dystopic novel ever since seeing Stanley Kubric’s excellent film of the same name. For such a short book it sure is slow-reading: the language is so slangy and convoluted, employing hundreds of Russian words, that I found myself reading it at speaking-speed. Alex, a 15 year-old urban hooligan, metes out random acts of ultra-violence with his young ‘droogs’ until he is eventually captured and rehabilitated through conditioned response therapy. The main theme is morality and free will – can a person be considered ‘good’ if their goodness has been mechanically imposed upon them? In the original edition I read the answer is emphatically ‘no!’, but the edition used for Kubric’s film, without the irritatingly happy ending (Burgess complained bitterly about its removal), is more morally ambiguous. Being on the side of Determinism and as a repudiator of the concept of ‘free will’, the idea of what morality Alex would ‘choose’ ‘naturally’ is a bit lost on me – people don’t have intrinsic ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’, but are products of their environment (actually like Clockwork Oranges), so I had trouble grasping exactly what was so ethically repugnant about this hypothetical treatment (although I have practical reasons to be against it). But the moral consequences are well thought through and the infectious narrative is grotesquely vivid. However, I thought the music was better in the movie.
4*

Time Enough For Love - Robert Heinlein
I'd been looking out for this one ever since I saw it new in the KL super-bookshop several months back. A few days ago I got it in exchange for AK from the American girl in my Kathmandu hotel. Unfortunately, as I read the first few pages I realised I’d made a terrible mistake. Lazarus Long, the main character from Methuselah's Children, is, inexplicably, 2000 years old and living on a distant planet. The leader of this planet has foolishly asked the rambling old man to tell him random and stupid stories from his past, giving the lecherous bore an excuse to waffle on ad nauseum for the next, literally, 600 pages - way way way too long. And what a fruitcake this dude is! He seems to spend most of his life adopting baby girls and then sleeping with them once they reach puberty. Written in 1973, the book is full of the "Shut up woman or I'll paddle your fanny" seventies sentiment, as well as being a vehicle for Heinlein's obsession with nudity and cats. Its only saving graces are his amusingly outrageous aphorisms and a readable last 100 pages - where he goes back in time to WWI... and sleeps with his own mother (there is a LOT of incest in this book). At least it counteracted the signs on many of the Nepali buses I see here: 'No time for love'.
2*

The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
This 100 page novella seems pretty straight-forward: Old man, sea, old man at sea, etc. Even the introduction eschewed usual literary interpretation in favour of a blow-by-blow plot summary that rendered an actual reading of the actual book superfluous (always read intros after-wards). An unlucky old fisherman is abandoned by his young apprentice before catching the fish of his life, and spends many days and nights mano-a-mano with The Sea in order to allow its eating and sale (of the fish that is). The language is simple almost to the point of stupidity, winning it the Nobel Prize for Literature presumably in an act of reverse-snobbery, but the old man's thoughts and environment are evoked with a quiet vividness. I did find myself sympathising with the dude's monomania, Captain Ahab style (expressed in inverse verbosity), for his goal. I read practically the whole thing waiting interminably to vote at the Australian Embassy's one-person queue.
3.5*

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
“Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta.” I’d been meaning to read this book since… okay, pretty much every book here I’d been meaning to read for at least a decade (I can’t believe I’ve reached the age at which I can say this). But, yes, I’d been meaning to read this 1950’s controversial classic since watching the films of the same title. Continuing the theme not only of Stanley Kubrick adaptations but also incestuous hebephilia (two books back), I’d bought it before ensconcing myself at the Nepali orphanage but decided to hold off reading it until later (Chitwan National Park) for obvious reasons. At heart the book is a comedic American Road Trip novel, which might come somewhat as a surprise, underlying a plot concerning one Humbert Humbert’s obsession with young ‘nymphets’. His ‘fortunate’ acquisition of guardianship of one such nymphet – the eponymous Lolita – ensues a blackly humourous (black as night) tale of jealousy, desperation, sex and amusing observations of the American landscape and motel culture. Yes, this book is funny – laugh out loud funny. The quirky observations, dead-pan dialogue and imploring narration of Humbert Humbert are told with meticulous precision, extreme visual awareness and a lot of word jokes – it exudes a real love of language. I actually tried to read the book as slowly as possible to squeeze out every treacly word.
4.5*

Absolution Gap - Alastair Reynolds
Another fat Reynolds book - nearly 700 pages this time. I thought so well of Revelation Space that I bought this one in another Kathmandu bookshop just on spec. Unfortunately, I skipped the two intervening books in the series (backpackers can’t be choosy), infecting this one with in-references I didn't really get, but the narration was quite helpful. As humans expand to colonise the nearby star systems (still slower than light, thankfully) they disturb an ancient army of machines called the Inhibitors who seek to exterminate all intelligent life in the galaxy. One colony on the ocean world of Ararat finds an unborn messiah to lead their evacuation to a new star system exhibiting a vanishing gas giant that might hold the key to their survival. So yeah, pretty crazy plot – and, like Rev Space, it spins way out to weirdness towards the end. Quite gripping though, with a pretty fast-paced narration. It’s nice the way the galaxy is being over-run by Poms still armed with a range of modern British slang. Also, building on the concept of religion being a virus of the mind, one colony has to force its inhabitants to submit to an injected Indoctrinal Virus for them to keep their faith. Cute. Rev Space had slightly better physics, but this book was better written with a more comprehensible plot. A trekking read (Langtang this time) like Rev Space before it.
4*

The Secret Sharer/Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Everyone talks about Heart of Darkness, and not just Apocalypse Now fans. Sooner or later I had to read it so I could get in on all those 'depths of the soul' analogies one hears everywhere. Sadly, I couldn't quite get a grip on the actual source material - I can partly blame the astonishingly loud Hindipop blasting away right next to my hotel room in Gorakhpur for that, but I also point the finger at Conrad's unrelenting sombre introspection and the way the entire story is told through nested quotation marks. Marlow, a young captain, is sent upriver on a steamboat deep into the Congo wilderness where he encounters the bizarre Kurtz, the manager of the Inner Station who has gone savagely feral. The quite dissimilar movie was more enjoyable. The second short novel in this volume, The Secret Sharer, concerns another young captain who hides an escaped murderer in his cabin, but this secret impairs his captaincy. Easier to follow, this story is horribly stressful reading.
3*

Cradle - Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee
This book was totally unbelievable. I don't know what it is with Clarke in the 80s, but he just went psycho with his characters during this period (hard not to blame Lee really - alouthgh they were good in the Rama series). The first two thirds of this overlong novel goes into meaningless detail about the backgrounds of the various characters involved, and they're so formulaic - their personalities are derived from formulae whose only input are 'moving' emotional scenes from their past. It's as though the authors heard that sci-fis need 'character development' so they lifted a few chapters from a Mills and Boon novel. At least in the late 90s sci-fi authors began to realise that science and real people could actually coexist. Here a navy missile goes missing in the Gulf of Mexico and three treasure hunters, while looking for it, discover a ridiculously stupid alien spaceship under the waves. This one was read over the Ganges in Varanasi, but it did not engage me.
2.5*

Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austin
Having now read every one of Austin's novels I can say that although I think Emma is the best, this one is the worst. It may be because it was her first novel, or because I read it during a distracting time in Varanasi as I was getting engrossed in the Indian internet speed's ability to deliver me almost instant podcasts, or maybe it just wasn't very exciting. The plotline sags badly in the middle and the good characters are made of cardboard - luckily the foolish and nasty characters maintain some of the interest, and the dialogue is fairly precise and well-constructed. Two sisters, Elinor and Marianne, embodying Sense and Sensibility respectively, both fall for men who become ineligible for different reasons. Sadly, it wasn't enough to keep my mind from wandering, but at least it'll make a pannier lighter.
3*

Chapterhouse: Dune - Frank Herbert
Well, Herbert stuffed it again. This sixth and final installment of his epic and usually brilliant Dune series is the waffling wank God Emperor of Dune is, totally avoiding all the awesomeness advances his plot and characters made during Heretics of Dune. In fact the plot doesn't even begin until two thirds of the way through the book, the first 250 pages comprising smug introspective dialogues between pompous pseudo-characters. When stuff finally does begin to happen, the war between the all-female Bene Geserit and the all-female Honoured Matres (who have returned from humanity's recent scattering throughout the cosmos to destroy the Bene Geserit worlds for no visibly apparent reason), the action happens in such saltatious punctuations that all the important bits are described as already having happened! Grrragh!! And then the book, and thus the whole series, suddenly ends and I still don't know what exactly is going on. Since it was written just before Herbert's death I think that must have seriously affected his writing. Read on my awesome balcony in Varanasi overlooking the Ganges and continuing on my cycle tour beyond.
2.5*

The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
This book has a special meaning for me. This is the book that terminated Dad's regular evening book-reading to me and my bro Rupert 15 years ago or so, because we thought it was too boring. Plus my excellent friend Thomas Firth recommended it to me a few years ago. And it's hilarious! So many great characters and interesting ideas. An elderly servant who treats the book Robinson Crusoe as the Bible, an incredibly annoying proselytising pious Christian woman (Collins' Atheism really shows here) who is an absurd stereotype, and a man who has been educated in four European countries cycling his personality through each national identity in turn. An Indian diamond (the Moonstone) has been pillaged from the siege of Seringapatnam (a journey that mentions many Indian locales I am visiting now) and is bequeathed to a young lady in rural England. When the diamond goes missing during the aftermath of a dinner party, all the guests and staff are implicated. But who really stole the diamond? I can say that I picked it half way through, but the suspense is very well executed.
4*

Holy Cow - Sarah MacDonald
I finally gave in and bought this book in exchange for The Moonstone in Khajuraho - it's sold in big stacks everywhere in India. But the old saying that you can be so open-minded that your brain falls out certainly applies to this travel story. Former Triple J presenter Sarah MacDonald finds herself living in India while her boyfriend reports for the ABC and undergoes a spiritual journey that takes her through all of the various roads to religion from an atheist base. The book is excellently written and it employs my favourite literary device of alliteration and assonance with amusing abundance while describing the frustration of all the brain-boggling bureaucratic bungling and cultural craziness of the Land of the Hindus that I myself am experiencing. However, it's often just too credulous about the teachings of religion, failing to employ any of her sceptical faculties. "Wow, each of us has lived millions of previous lives because this guy says so, gee". Plus the abandonment of Australian spelling and metric units of measurement made me feel she'd sold out. But it an amazing story, told with excitement and honesty and featuring many of the places and experiences so familiar to me as I cycled from Gwalior to Delhi.
3.5*

Against the Fall of Night - Arthur C. Clarke/Beyond the Fall of Night - Gregory Benfold
This is really two books, but since they're crammed into one volume I'm being consistent and calling them one. I picked this up at that same awesome bookshop in Kathmandu and had been looking forward to getting stuck into them for a while, finally achieving this aim in Delhi and the Golden Temple at Amritsar. The first novel is a classic Clarke story written in the 1940s and set an unbelievable one billion years in the future (this must be some kind of record) after Earth has won and lost a galactic empire and is now suffering from the dessication wrought by its expanding sun. A boy called Alvin is bored being confined by Earth's single known city and discovers the remnants of Earth's lost civilisations. Beyond the fall of night is so different from Against that I'm amazed Benfold bothered to make it its sequel. This one involves a woman being chased around a newly rejuvenated Earth by a 'Mad Mind' and out into space via a biological orbital tether where she and a ferret-like being explore the explosion of space-based life-forms. Amazing ideas, like Benfold's other books such as Heart of the Comet, but the whole thing was way too rushed - he crams in about 500 pages of action and ideas into 170. The ending is resolved on the last page almost as an afterthought.
3.5*

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Wow - stressful book! I picked up this well-worn lump of moldy paper in it's final stages of life at the Kathmandu Guest House, replacing it with The Quiet American. Rodion Romanovich is an impoverished former student in St. Petersburg who has a theory that humanity is divided into 'Napoleons' and 'Normal People'. To prove to himself he's a Napoleon who's capable of transgressing moral rules on the road to greatness he murders two women - but finds himself horribly wrong as he descends into near insanity due to the horror of his crimes. The witty and conversational style is quite similar to Tolstoy, as is its focus on the failings of atheist protagonists (grrr). The novel's largely written from Rodion's point of view so of course you want him to escape conviction - but do you really?? And he's such an unpleasant person, why are so many people devoted to him? Running beneath the narrative is a gold mine of allegory and little jokes easy to miss. This exciting novel deprived me of much-needed sleep during my week-long cycle tour from Amritsar through Himachel Pradesh and back to New Delhi.
4.5*

A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
This book is fat! 1474 crammed pages. I'd been intrigued by it for many years, mainly due to its morbid obesity, seeing it sitting on my shelf at home and it being about India, a country to which I've been many times. Dad gave me the book from Rob, who was chucking it out, in Kathmandu and it's travelled with me over mountains and across country for thousands of kilometres, weighing down my backpack and panniers (and wrecking my pannier rack) all the way, finally being read on my two-week Delhi bludge. The book itself is vast, complex, heavily peopled and amiable, concerning mainly the search for a husband for the 19 year-old Lata as India holds its first general election in the early 1950s. I actually found the style and structure to be quite similar to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, although not as emotionally charged. It's very engrossing, and a page-turner, but I found the characters to be almost caricatures of themselves and often simple and difficult to identify with. I also found that the description of Indian life in no way matched my experience of it being here, with most of the educated characters speaking fluent English at home and adopting way too many English customs - but maybe they were like that in the 50s. In fact, I kind of felt the whole book was just to say that India is really a European country. On the other hand, it was difficult to put down (despite its pressure on my wrists), definitely absorbed me into its world, and was written in a style easy on the eye.
4*

Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
This book had so much promise: 'Most famous sci-fi novel of all time', a Heinlein classic, the 'reward book', bought back in Kathmandu, for finishing A Suitable Boy... but it failed so miserably! It began well with a man born on Mars just as his parents were killed in the first manned mission to that planet, being raised by Martians Romulus and Remus style until being 'rescued' 25 years later, and being imprisoned by the world government until rescued again... but then got SHIT. As soon as Michael Valentine Smith got out of his rescuers' home - a typical Heinlein group-marriage-affair, he went weird. Joining a circus because of his magical Mars powers (we all have innate telekinesis abilities only Martians have mastered) he soon starts his own utopian religion. Unfortunately, Heinlein's hard sell of this future cult - an adaptation of happy-clappy spiritualism and free-love (he dropped the ball predicting that future for religion) seems just as stupid and annoying as current religions. I cringed through this at the beginning of my Rajastani cycle tour.
2*

Dubliners - James Joyce
Another book acquired in Kathmandu - my last actually. This is my first step on my road to reading Joyce's Ulysses, a book my year 8 English teacher tried to foist on me in photocopied installments for some reason. It seemed tough to get through so I'll need some preparation. As for this one, it's a series of short stories about the lives and experiences of some select eponymous Dubliners, beginning at childhood and ending in death. Simply written, some of these are very emotionally powerful and really get into the characters' heads. Others were pretty incomprehensible to me, but I won't hold that against the book. The best part is that all the stories are quick and pithy, only a few pages each, allowing me to get through a story while waiting in a road-side gazebo for the rain to stop on my way to Jaipur.
4*

Middlemarch - George Elliot
I first heard of this book when reading the introduction to Moby Dick, which said it's is the greatest English novel (Moby Dick being the greatest novel in English). Then Virginia Woolf went on about it obsessively, saying it's the only English novel written for 'grown-ups' - so I had to give it a go, considering myself a bit of a grown-up in some ways. The plot focuses on two main characters in the town of Middlemarch during early 19th century England, the young ambitious doctor Lydgate and the pious woman Dorothea. Both find themselves in unsatisfying marriages and are soon surrounded by the spiralling catastrophe of a town scandal. The writing is excellent and witty, although it's pretty dialogue-heavy. I can understand Virginia Woolf's obsession with it, being about how we find meaning in life and being obsessed with detail, but I got the feeling that a lot of the interesting stuff happened quickly and outside the narrative of the book, while a lot of the slow viscous things took up too much of this fat-arse novel. Pretty good in a tragic way, though, being a bit of break from the light-hearted happy times of Jane Austen. This one took me from Jaipur to Mumbai. Oh, and George Elliot is actually a chick.
3.5*

Earth - David Brin
This book, frequently recommended by my excellent friend Rob Hutton, gets more and more ridiculous and implausible as it goes on. And it begins with a black hole being dropped into the centre of the Earth, left to orbit between the core's atoms' nuclei until it might eventually grow large enough to consume the planet. But wait! It turns out there's a SECOND, even MORE dangerous black hole down there - put there by... aliens!! Having said that, I have an amazing ability to suspend my disbelief - even in the face of physical impossibilities flying fast - especially after a team lead by brilliant physicist and black-hole creator Alex Lustig starts ejecting matter from the earth using a gravity 'laser'. However, this longish epic is actually more about geo-eco-political predictions of the year 2040, such as rising eco-awareness, rampant global warming and the full development of the internet. It's a very thoughtful and exciting book, even if it's thoughtful when you want it to be exciting and exciting when you want it to be thoughtful. It's great the way the entire Earth is explored, rather than just the thin surface layers like most books on Earth. I had a blast reading this on beaches on my ride to Goa from Mumbai.
4*

The Odyssey - Homer
Well I have actually read large chunks of this foundation-stone of Western literature of various uni subjects on Ancient Greece, but I'd never tackled it from end-to-end until now. Picked up at a Mumbai bookshop in exchange for Middlemarch I ploughed through this one, suitably, on my cargo ship journey from Mumbai to Salalah in Oman (although my own trip was somewhat less eventful than Odysseus'). To my surprise, the famous events of Odysseus' umm... Odyssey were compacted down into books about 6 to 12 of 24, and even then related off-hand to a random local. The rest of the book involves the Telemachy - the journey of Odysseus' son Telemachus, and a way over-long description of the great man gradually revealing himself to his family at home. This culminates in a massive slaughtering of his wife's suitors that will question modern readers' empathy for the storm-tossed man. Other than that, it was interesting to read the source of so many references from the modern world. A down-side was that Homer seemed to use the book as a platform for hammering home his theories of the guest-host relationship and the high status of bards. Since 2001: A Space Odyssey is my favourite flim, and I'm soon to begin reading James Joyce's Ulysses, I had to read this one. Oh, and coincidentally, the woman in the dorm bed next to mine in Mumbai randomly began reading the same book at exactly the same time as me - weird.
3.5*

The Dragons of Eden - Carl Sagan
This book had been sitting on my bookshelf back at home, beckoning to me, for many decades. After listening to about three different podcasts going on about how great Carl Sagan in (yes, he is a Dude) and then finding this book (along with The Odyssey) at that Mumbai bookshop I could not resist. Also read during my long sea voyage I intersperced the chapters of this book with the audio book of Dawkins' Greatest Show On Earth (which I'd read and reviewed in paper form earlier). Since it came out in 1977 I basically discounted everything written in it as 'out-of-date', but it still came up with some interesting ideas. Basically the premise of the book is how our neo-cortex, the 'human' part of our brains, competes with the R-cortex, the reptillian part evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. There are some excellent anecodotes and factoids here but I found the book lacked a real focus or narrative - although maybe that's a result of my comparison of it with Dawkins' books. I'm a big fan of Sagan's ideas and it's written very well and was pretty enjoyable so I certainly can't critisise it too much - maybe my expectations were just set too high. I swapped this book, along with The Odyssey, with White Tiger and a book on Seneca left on the cargo ship by two disembarking cycle tourists.
4*

The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca - Seneca
I grabbed this classical classic off the departing cycle tourists on the cargo ship and got through it during my long sojourn over Oman. I must say it felt a little like I was cheating by reading it in English, having had sections of Seneca thrust into my face during Latin classes some years ago. Seneca sure has a lot of opinions about things - religion, death, being a Roman. He even had a section there on travel, appropriately - it's pointless, he says, since you can never take a holiday from yourself and that's the real reason people do it. This collection of letters and essays was somewhat coloured by my knowledge of the man's death in which Seneca puts his money where his mouth is and does the necessary deed without fuss, accepting the inevitable. However, although I found many of Seneca's expostulations intriguing and often fairly modern (I can certainly understand the Christian interest in this ancient philosopher), I felt his writings dragged on a little, hammering the same point home for too long, and the editing seemed a little disorganised.
2.5*

A Civil Action - Jonathan Harr
When I met the Austrian cycle tourist in the UAE desert he begged me for some reading material and I apologetically told him that I had none to spare. Well once we'd parted I immediately thought of this book as perfect for him, given to me highly recommended by the Austrian couple on my Konkani Coast ride. On the other hand, I'm selfishly glad I didn't hand it over - it was a rivetting read. A courtroom drama about an environmental spill possibly causing the deaths of several New England residents, I raced through the 500 pages of this one in only two days, sitting in my Sharjah youth hostel in the UAE (Incidentally, I blame not finding out about the Iranian ATM failure due to being wrapped up in this book). The emotional impact is exacerbated by it being a non-fictional account of the actual trial. A young and ambitious lawyer, Jan Schlichtmann, spends nine years trying to fit the scientific method into the courtroom over this case, metaphorically banging his head into a wall. A very frustrating, although gripping, read that makes you realise how bad the court-system (in America) can be in deciding matters of science
4*

The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
Another pick-up from the cargo ship cycle tourists this book is the perfect antedote to A Suitable Boy. Rather than Vikram Seth's soppy fantasy-world of India, Aravind Adiga (also an Indian) sticks the knife in. There's a lot of stuff that's stuffed up about India and I found myself cheering the book's totally cynical take on the country I've spent so much time in. Balram Halwai, a.k.a. The White Tiger, is a poor uneducated villager who becomes a chauffeur for a rich New Delhian. Realising that life in India is like a chicken coop where your role is determined for you, he kills his master in order to break out of his dead-end destiny. The novel is written to the Chinese Premier explaining the nefarious secrets of success in India with excellent wit and dry black humour, picking apart all the negative aspects of the Indian psyche. An excellent short read in the rain as I rode from Bandar-e-Lengeh up to Lah in southern Iran.
4*

Ulysses - James Joyce
Man, what a trudge this was! I'd been meaning to wade through the gelatinous pool that is this book ever since my year eight English teacher shoved the last 50 photocopied pages of it at me to say I don't use enough punctuation in my writing. Since then it's always held a certain fascination for me, and over the last couple of months I read Joyce's earlier Dubliners and the original Homeric Odyssey in preparation. Picked up at a footpath bookshop in Mumbai this novel focuses on Leopold Bloom's 16th of June, 1904 as he wakes up, goes to work in advertising, contemplates his wife's infidelity and has a sordid evening with his new wannabe intellectual friend and protege, Simon Daedalus (Telemachus in the Odyssey). The punctuation in this book is truly awful and I can't escape the conclusion that Joyce is just trying to show off how smart he is. Saying that, there are real moments of clarity and realism as we follow the characters' every thought real-time. The final chapter, an unpunctuated soliloquy of Molly Bloom, I found incredibly moving in the context of the rest of the book. I swapped this physical wad of paper for its electronic version once my eBook reader finally coalesced with me in Esfahan (thanks again Su!). If you try this one, make sure you have a couple of weeks riding solo through the desert with no other English-speaking company or you'll lose concentration.
3*

The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells
What a Sci-Fi Classic! Gouged out of my new eReader, I chose this book because in Yazd I was talking to German backpacker about how many times the word ejaculates is used here. The answer is a lot. Usually in response to the Martian tripods tearing people's homes apart. An unnamed first-person English narrator observes projectiles being launched from Mars and their subsequent arrival on Earth. What follows is a gripping account of running away from laser-wielding Martians who eat people and wreck their cities. People flee the country, society breaks down, different opinions of how to survive in the new world order are proffered and abandoned. It's all pretty brutal, with a description of people getting trampled to death while fleeing London going into way too much detail. It's also extremely pessimistic, with authorities being incompetent to the point of absurdity in dealing with the situation. The ending is kind of disappointing, though, with the (spoiler!) Earthly environment killing them off to complete the book's analogy with colonialism, but it's an exciting read - especially for long desert rides in Iran.
3.5*

The Importance of Being Ernest - Oscar Wilde
The wit oozing out of this Wilde play is smoother than the BlueBand margarine we get here in Tanzania. Another book preloaded onto my ebook and read during my ride through Iran, finishing it in the exciting city of Tehran, the action centres around the identity of an English... ummm... dandy purporting to be named Ernest. The book focuses on the disconnect between expected social behaviour in upper-class Victorian England and how people with no real job and plenty of money really do behave. The two main characters, friends Algernon and Jack, both invent alter-egos they employ to get out of boring family engagements. The whole house of cards begins to topple when both friends decide to marry people unsuitable for one or the other of their constructed counterparts. A fairly simple and light plot it left me feeling like I'd been tantalised but not satisfied, but Wilde's incredible wit certainly kept me entertained throughout these few pages. So many quotable lines!
3.5*

The Secret Adversary - Agatha Christie
Read in Tehran and on the train to Istanbul, this extremely light and somewhat childish novel disappeared into the 'Finished' section of my ebook in no time. I think I missed the bandwagon with Agatha Christie - for years when I was younger I'd been planning to read a few of her books since everyone seems to rave about them, but now I just can't quite appreciate them. In this novel, two out-of-work friends of opposite sex, Tommy and Tuppance, seek adventure and financial gain by infiltrating some strange conspiracy. They make friends along the way, get captured and interrogated, and engage in car-chases. Admittedly, there are a lot of twists in the plot, and I certainly failed to anticipate a lot of them, but I found that the crazy adventures these characters went through were just too unbelievable and, well, pat. This was especially true as I was suffering from some of my own excitement in Tehran I'll describe in my real blog.
2.5*

Minding Tomorrow - Luke Burrage
This is the first real new use I've made my ebook reader - rather than reading the electronic version of a book made of trees I actually read a book published for free the internet. In this case it's a novel written by the famous juggling extraordinaire Luke Burrage (also presenter of the Science Fiction Book Review Podcast). I was quite surprised at how good his first online book turned out to be too - quite a page turner (if pressing a button counts as turning a page). The book is written out of chronology about a guy who finds a way to travel back in time and relive his life in new ways. Each life is relived over a 20 year period in a different way but with knowledge of the future. It explores how one might change the future, the moral dilemma of fooling your past self into becoming a host for your future self and the mechanics of bringing other people back with you. Quite a few good ideas, fairly well written, but could certainly use a good spell checker. I read this one while travelling by train from Tehran to Istanbul, still smarting from my kidnapping experience.
4*

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
This book totally surpassed my expectations. It's been mentioned to me pretty frequently when I put my ear to the literati ground, like when I saw the excellent musical, 'Keating!', and the eponymous had his career compared to his eponymous counterpart (does that make sense?), so I had to read it at some stage. My new ebook reader afforded me this opportunity and the novel was consumed snug from the snowy weather of Istanbul. Full of outrageous witticisms, as one expects from Wilde, the story focuses on the Narcissistic young Dorian Gray from when his portrait is taken by a friend. His beauty now apparent, Dorian wishes that his portrait, rather than himself, should bear the brunt of age. Over the years, his beauty and youthful innocence intact, Dorian's wish becomes reality - with terrible consequences. The portrait reveals the twisted and grotesque nature of Dorian's soul that his appearance masks. Full of pithy and hilarious observations on life, this novel also holds so many powerful ideas on how we see ourselves and our mortality that I'm forced to include it in the list of the best novels I've ever read. It's a fairly quick read too!
4.5*

The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell
This book was read after a long delay from the previous one. Arriving in Africa I was surrounded with travelling companions to stave off boredom. I was also affected by the loss of my ebook reader through a mugging and I didn't have any physical books as backups. Luckily, Steve, one of my companions from home coming along for the ride, relieved me of this dearth of reading matter by finishing and donating this book. A great gift too - I'd been curious about it ever since Dad had read it years ago, and I loved the authors' 'Footfall' which I read in Nepal. Anyway, the book is about an interstellar human empire a thousand years in the future encountering their first intelligent aliens. The aliens, although seemingly more advanced than the humans, have yet to acquire the human's interstellar drive and are found traversing through space the slow way. Much of the novel concerns the mutual discovery of the civilisations' respective cultures and whether each is a threat to the other. Quite a gripping tale with some of the awesome space engineering concepts for which Niven is famous. The main downside is the seventies-ness of the writing: constant 'tossing off' of scotches, painfully out-dated attitudes to women and relationships, and totally bizarre predictions of future technology (telegrams in the 3000's!? Interstellar drive by 2008!?). It does turn pages though.
4*

The Andromeda Strain - Michael Crichton
In my last book swap of the trip I picked up this famous tale along with the next book from a backpackers in Livingstone, Zambia, in exchange for Sasha’s Shantaram and Steve's The Mote in God’s Eye. Reading it on the bus to my flight from Lusaka, and on the subsequent plane, I found the book quite difficult to put down. In a nut-shell, a nasty, possibly extra-terrestrial strain of a lethal virus is unleashed on a small American town after a returning space probe is cracked open. A group of five crack scientists is assembled in an atomically armed underground bunker to figure it out and find an antidote. Of course, if there is any contamination the bomb will go off, giving the narrative that extra level of anxiety. The book is quite medically technical and informative, following Crichton’s background, but seems to express the same suspicion of science and scientists as Jurassic Park and Crichton’s later climate scepticism. If a scientist can make an error, he does, and with the most catastrophic consequences. Apart from that, the scientists are definitely ‘good guys’ and have some actual character devoid in a lot of contemporary sci-fis. The ending was pretty uninspiring, though.
3.5*

Three Singles to Adventure – Gerald Durrell
Dad had been pressing me to read Durrel’s My Family and Other Animals for many years, but I could never get into it. This book, found at the Livingstone backpackers, was short enough to commission my interest. It was actually a very appropriate book to read for me, as I kept comparing it jealously with my blogs. It follows the author and his friends’ capture and collection of wild animals in South America and described is vivid detail all the many humourous animal anecdotes associated with these adventures. The language is my favourite kind of verbose, with descriptions of scenes so well-worded it made me want to read them aloud. Half-way through, though, having arrived back in Australia, I found it difficult to re-engage with the narrative – the stories don’t really lead into each other and are more stand-alone. The title seemed pretty non-grammatical but there's an explanation for that.
3.5*

Anglify

The bus ride out of the Annapurna Trekking Zone with Rob and Dad was an enjoyable trip for me: I sat listening to all the good songs on my ipod, watching the mountains receding around the horizon. And not a moment too soon – what an exhausting trek! Back in civilisation we furrowed our brows with serious intent getting to work chilling the hell out. This proved to be of some difficulty in our cramped three-bed sweltering mosquito den hotel room, which we hired out of shear brain exhaustion, but the easy-going atmosphere, beautiful scenery, somewhat cheaper beer and the many interesting bank queues of Pokhara helped assuage our nerves.

Having book-bought, re-visa-ed, plugged ourselves back into the digital universe and had my camera fixed again (it just won’t die!) we ticked off some real tourism: biking around town, visiting Devi’s Falls (named after a Swiss tourist who, not content with plummeting to his watery grave alone, dragged his girlfriend in after him) and failing to find a cheap swimming pool. In this context Rob and I discovered a spectacular geohash actually inside a river some distance out of town, so we hastily hired a motorbike and submerged ourselves for one of the world’s more exciting geohash locations – sadly, the ride home was just as exciting: acquiring a flat tyre and monsoonal rains simultaneously.

But the question I was dying to ask had its answer back in Kathmandu – how ride-able was my bike after its crazy adventures in the Postal Universe? Black hole Roche limits can play havoc on unwary young bicycles, not to mention the constant asteroidal bombardment out there. The results were not good: after ascertaining that the back wheel hub was so muddy from Vietnam it could only be used as a fixy, we tried to install the new metallic brake pads kindly couriered by Tim, only to discover that my brakes’ discs resembled Dali’s clocks. Luckily, a bike shop fortuitously installed next door to our guest house set it all to rights with surprising ease.

Dad departed soon after these escapades, and, in the next few days, so would Rob – like drowning sailors lost at sea. But not before a token tourism jaunt in the form of a walking tour, Dhurbar Square appraisal and hill-topped Swayambhunath meander: exhibiting fine views of the Kathmandu Valley, ancient votive sculptures and procreating monkeys. Ticking off ‘tourism’ from the list we got down to the serious business of exploiting free wireless cafes to upload our vast photo collections from the trek and, naturally, a detailed critique of all endemic beer varieties.

This left me alone and with, finally for the first time in… ever, no stressful deadlines. I had a beer with dinner on my first night alone for months, but that has been my last alcoholic drink since that time now five weeks ago (breaking my Sumatran record). Alcohol is great for uninhibiting social situations and facilitating conversations about how awesome the Terminator movies are, but when you’re trying to grasp a book’s detailed reasoning or intricate plotline, or simply to sit around contemplating the world, it’s just annoying.

And I certainly did a lot of that stuff: I basically parked myself in my new (and much cheaper) yet deserted hotel, as recommended by a cheese-making Aussie expat on the bus from Pokhara, reading another excellent and embroiling Neal Stephenson book entitled Cryptonomicon, more Dawkins and an Ursula Le Guin sci-fi, and occasionally watching a movie on HBO. Apart from devouring every article the world has written about Julia Gillard’s ascendancy and a day of semi-tourism riding to a stupa, my main activity during this week-long book bludge was leeching off the facilities of my fancy old hotel, the Kathmandu Guest House. I’d made sure I checked out in uncharacteristic clothing so the staff wouldn’t recognise me mooching off their computer systems, free drinking water, safe bike parking, exquisite gardens and, yes, hot showers. Mwah ha ha!

Seeing a phone number in a restaurant set me onto a path that would land me teaching English in an orphanage in a small village outside Kathmandu, via handing over US$120 to an agency to do a ring-around. Arriving with my bike laden with pack and panniers I introduced myself to my new community – I am the first volunteer they’ve ever had and the first white person many have ever met. The place is a cream-coloured three storied building that looks like it was abandoned rather than completed (like these blogs), but with stupendous views over Kathmandu and its surrounding mountains. I was told it is financed by a Dutch foreign aid group as an orphanage, but some parents seem to have somehow snuck in their unorphaned children.

This is the time to get into real Nepali life. A typical day begins at five a.m as I’m woken by the TV of one of my room-mates. He’s an ex-Nepal army dude who, apart from his occasional duties going to town as the designated Communicator With The Outside World, seems to watch his TV turned up to 11 as a biological necessity, so as to repeatedly prove to the neighbours that he has one. My bed itself is a thin blanket wrapped around a not-quite-Felix-sized block of wood, so rousing myself is never a difficulty.

The next five hours are spent by the 54 kids frantically preparing for their day at their respective schools. I spend most of this time helping with their English the small rotating band of kids who only require four hours to prepare.

Joining some of the students heading to a nearby state school I then transform myself into English Teacher Extraordinaire and take up to five classes a day, ranging between grade 6 and year 10. Upon my return to the orphanage I usually take a break sitting on the rooftop overlooking the diverse biota of the valley below. Selected, naturally, as a fitting environment for reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

I then spend a few more hours teaching the kids English and Maths (the two languages I can understand), helping them with their homework, learning Nepali, eating the second Dhal Bhat meal for the day (it never gets boring!), various cultural bungling and then going to bed at about 10 p.m. – trying to read while I wait for the eardrum puncturing TV to be turned off. My reading is always met with looks of complete perplexity, as though I’m trying to scoop my eyeballs out with a spoon.

The kids themselves, ranging from age 4 to 14, are outrageously cute and friendly, full of irrepressible giggling and hesitating shyness. Their appearance occupies the full ethnic spectrum from Tibetan to Indian (it’d be interesting to line them up that way) with a gender ratio suitable for interplanetary colonisation seed-stock. Some surely have interesting stories behind them that I’m too tactful to tease out – one sweet and smart girl wears a prosthetic leg and sports nasty scars on her remaining limbs. Some are boisterous and loud, while others quiet and subdued. Some largely ignore me, others queue up to fawn over me. They’re all obsequiously polite and eager to help: serving me food and tea, washing my dishes and showing me around – I have to fight for my right to clean my own clothes. The establishment’s sole tap gives the place an iron-age tribal feel, overlaid by a ‘Communism for Kids’ organisational structure.

They live in an environment that would not be tolerated in safety-conscious Australia: playing with Frisbees on the top floor of the building, whose handrails must have fallen off prior to installation; exposed reinforcement and poorly strewn hacksaws litter their school grounds; and the orphanage’s facilities are shared with an assortment of some of the largest snakes I’ve ever seen. The huge populations of rats and mosquitoes are of more annoyance to me, but an upside to their commune with nature involves a nightly neon invasion of flashing fireflies floating through the open-air rooms.

As part of the deal I involve myself in their various religious observances: touring the local deities incarnated as shrines and sculptures, consumption of Shiva’s Body (what kind of religion requires the eating of its own god?), regular application of a forehead tikka, and, my absolute favourite, Thursday night chanting to Krishna. The girls sing with infectious passion and are demons on the madal. I’ve been forced to learn some Nepali dance routines, but show little promise.

My Nepali language is slowly coming along though. I’ve pretty much learned how to read (although Devanagari ostensibly has 432 characters they follow such obvious patterns it's easy to pick up), but understanding the words is a different matter. At least I’m now in the Indo-European language family. ‘Nam’ is ‘name’, ‘tara’ is ‘star’ and ‘aht’ is ‘eight’. Also, my seven years learning Latin have finally born fruit, it employing a similar grammatical structure to the Indo- languages, not to mention their overlapping vocabularies. Unfortunately, Nepalese is a second-language to most of these guys too: each valley, and even every caste within each valley, cannot intercommunicate in its native tongue.

During the day, six days a week, I’m teaching (the Saturdays off are spent playing with the kids, being taken on walks and, yesterday, sneaking off for more geohashing). On my first day at school I was confronted by a piece of chalk proffered by the retreating regular English teacher informing me that, “Today’s year ten class is on the past participle and the passive imperative. Go.”

“Ummm… okay… Good Morning class. Okay… the ahh… the passive imperative is, well, you know, one of those things…”

He was kind enough to lend me a grammatical text book – it was in Nepali. However, in little time those seemingly frivolous years memorising arcane grammatical constructions for Latin came once more to the rescue, and I’ve since been giving the classes a pretty damned robust education in proper English composition (blogging errors are to be denounced in the comments section below). For the lower classes I’ve been given comprehension passages to read out and discuss, and here some small cultural insights can be unearthed. I cringe when I have to read that “The Gods made the trees” (this is a state school!); creepy example conditional sentences such as “If you’re friends are involved in evil activities, report them to your seniors”; and a disturbing number of stories involving the protagonist beating his wife. Their dictionary cutely defines ‘Good-formatting’ as ‘A useless person’, but I let through a claim that dolphins are fish – cladistically, we reptiles are all just a type of fish. Many more moral dilemmas arise from the uncanny density of grammatical, typographical and spellafical errors liberally adorning the texts – do I detach their dependency on text-books or enunciate a tongue-twisting typo?

However, in most respects I’m given a fairly free hand. I’m starting to get a real kick out of the attention of captured audiences (and wielding of despotic power). Having spent my many months alone in resuscitating songs and poems from my memory (the internet helps too) I can now teach them Waltzing Matilda (a big hit), Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven (channeling Bart Simpson they reckon it’s boring) and the odd show-off Gilbert and Sullivan tune. I also satisfy their ardent demand for insights into Australian culture, even beyond describing the Melbourne/Sydney divide as the ultimate battle between Good and Evil. One of the English comprehension passages, that coincidentally happened to concern Australia, stated that Australians never wear formal clothing. I was about to correct this gross (yet typical) generalisation when I realised that, despite the school’s almost military dress code, I was in shorts and t-shirt. Another time, when informing the class that Australia is an island, I actually felt a tear welling up in my eye – these land-locked youngsters have never seen the ocean.

Between classes I chat to the other teachers in the staff room, answering such questions as, “Are you of high or low caste?”, “What is your annual income?”, and the always awkward, “What is it like to live in a country where sex is easy?”. My fellow teachers are fascinated by Australian male/female relations. They almost fell off their chairs when told that our Prime Minister‘s boyfriend is a hairdresser and she has never been married.

I have befriended the school’s regular English teacher, Jay, who has taken me to eat mangoes at his uni-student flat in Kitipur (he’s studying for his Masters degree). He’s an interesting character: a 27 year old top-caste Brahmin and heir to a profitable mango plantation yet also a hard-core communist – large Mao and Lenin posters stare down from his walls with steely resolution (it occurs to me that just five years ago he and my military room-mate might have been trying to kill each other). Naturally, this unusual combination has interested him in a later political career, but at the moment his main project is selecting a suitable wife. Having identified three key parameters (beauty, intelligence and cultural standing) for the several dozen applicants he is seeking my advice for their relative weightings.

But the last month hasn’t been all singing and smiling, reading stories and waging thumb wars – it’s a hard darned life. The kids are full of energy and I have to be in an almost permanent state of extroversion – actually wanting to be alone occasionally is an alien concept to these social beings and there’s nowhere to hide in the communal compound. Of course, the place is populated by the usual bragging, competitive boys and needy, insecure girls, but these guys have really made me feel at home and I’ll certainly miss them all when I leave. I’m not even sure I’m making any real difference here though. They are, after all, among about the poorest people on the planet, but there are a few kids here whose English skills will get them a little bit further in life, and some seem destined for a bright future. At least they now understand the true age of the universe and the cheapest way to build space elevators. Plus they’re slowly acquiring slight Australian accents, so mission accomplished!

Party in the Himalayas!

Man. 27 years old. Who'd have thought that by this stage in life I'd have no job, no girlfriend and no home. What a loser. At least I have a large assortment of bikes with which to measure my life's success.

The 21st of May marked a few kilometre-stones for me: I had after all reached the formidable age of three cubed, not quite as triangular as 3^3^3 but as good as I could rustle up on short notice.

It also marked the first time on my trip I'd left the Eurasian Plate, getting myself over the scraped up subduction zone of the Indian Plate (and managing to be neither scraped up nor subducted in the process!).

Another interesting kilometre-stone was that this was the time I finally had less money than when I started this trip back in October last year. What's this? Have I been selling my body in Bangkok to horny Thai girls? Nooooo... As it happens I started my trip with five weeks of paid leave and that, along with the odd squirt of bank interest (praise be to rising rates!), has lasted me these seven months traveling in Asia. The moral of the story: don't travel in Europe.

But all these kilometre-stones would have to be appreciated over time, for now I had just walked into the Kathmandu Guest House with Helio, my companion from the Tibet tour. I was just wondering how I would get in contact with Dad and Rob who were supposedly already here when I saw them walking to greet me. It was my first meeting with Dad for seven month and with Rob for over a year.

The next two days were fairly frantic – packing for the upcoming Annapurna trek, buying gear and meeting up with my excellent and dedicated friends Tim and Rhonda (who, like Rob and I, formed a small exodus from the Engineering Music Society’s cello section for the following night’s concert – good choice guys!). Reacquiring my bike from the Postal Universe – one whose physical laws seem to permit a high density of black holes (I lost my brake pads and beer magazine sent on from Hanoi to one of those black holes) – was another major priority. This was particularly nerve-racking: after disappointment at the reception of KGH where I’d sent it I was beginning to lose hope – until Helio spotted a notice for me on an obscure board. I had to visit eleven desks in five rooms at the sprawling General Post Office to get my hands on it, having pieces of paper stamped, money paid and documents signed in triplicate (Nepal’s bureaucracy is legendary – you can even read epic novels dramatising adventures within it). After stuffing the awkward bike box into a taxi and negotiating the tight twisting streets of Thamal I had to lug it the last couple of hundred metres on my head, following the natives’ lead. I would wait until my return from the trek to explore the extent of its intactness (excitement to come!).

However, I had other concerns now, for it was my birthday.

The evening began as advertised months in advance at the Jatra Bar in Thamal where I bought everyone a round of longnecks for making the effort to turn up – that should be sufficient incentive to travel thousands of kilometres to meet me on my birthday. There were six of us there to congratulate me on my great age, dispense presents and well-wishings and laugh at my jokes (as all good birthday party guests should). No large contingent of clandestine Melbournian or backpacking invitees presented themselves having booked flights on a whim without telling me, and they needn’t have with the excellent company I already enjoyed.

The rest of the night accelerated into a blur of two-for-one cocktails, a frenzied funky Israeli restaurant and Nepalipop dancing at a nightclub into the small hours – my drunken dancing skills would become the butt of jokes for many days to come.

Getting up the next morning for the trek was painful and difficult – I wondered why I’d bothered to go to bed. Saying goodbye to Helio who was staying behind to await his flight home we embarked on a halting and abortive journey to meet our bus to Bhulbule. After getting lost, trying again and then being taxied by the bus company to the actual depot, then lost again, we were finally on the bus and our way – all eight hours of it. Not good for hangovers.

The bus ride’s presentation of the epic Marsyangdi Valley did its best to bring me back to health, as did the haphazard traffic rules and a thorough update on the missed goss’ from home. Finally, we had landed at Besisahar and sat for geological ages on a sweltering and drastically cramped oversized “jeep” awaiting the one extra passenger who would make the driver’s trip to Bhulbule worthwhile. When the crowded jeep finally did depart we all wished it hadn’t as it jangled our concertinaed legs towards total uselessness. But the views and hospitality of the lodge at Bhulbule, overlooking the Marsyangdi River and underlooking the eight kilometre high Manaslu Range, dissolved the painful memories of the journey there.

And the next morning we were off! The participants:
The stoical unstoppable Rhonda;
The avuncular Tim with his knowledge historical;
Rob - doyen of bushwalking Southwest Tasmania;
Sandy, faithful father, fit beneath his years; and
I, Felix, who came up the idea in the first place.

This marked the beginning of for some of us three weeks of almost continual trekking. On that day I dealt the group a bad portent when I misstepped while appreciating the disappearing cloud cover and thus fine views of mountain-hemmed villages and fell several metres off a cliff. Miraculously I landed onto an adjoining path upright and completely unharmed, pumping with adrenaline, despite having to support and balance an eighteen kilo pack. I used to criticise Tim’s sure-footedness: he’s so tall the electrical impulses take too long to get from his brain to his feet, lacking the advantage of a second brain in his hips like a brachiosaurus. But this trek has proved my critique outdated (has his lower spinal ganglion inflated?).

Over the next few days we learnt that we had chosen an excellent time of year to go trekking – perfect weather as the monsoon had yet to hit but, not willing to risk it, no crowds. From the few trekkers we did encounter we found ourselves to be in an extreme minority for opting out of both guide and porter. One French trekker we discovered later had employed both, like the motorcade of a presidential outing. Unfortunately, we were all versed in independent Australian bushwalking rather than teahouse trekking and lacked the ability of some European trekkers to keep their packs in the five kilo range. I managed to bring about five kilos of books alone (okay maybe two), not to mention a one litre glass bottle of port and 750 grams of salt (for oft-threatened but non-eventuating leeches).

The end of the first day was marked by lunch at our lodge of sleep – the only day this was to be the case – under the auspices of a spectacularly tall waterfall and an equally spectacular thunderstorm (two of my favourite water phenomena, excluding comets and tsunamis of course). Here we laughed ourselves to sleep at the hilariously inept PhotoShopping on a poster of a Bangladeshi bridge in our rough yet cosy bedrooms. We would later look back on that day as an age of innocence before we knew of the destructive effects of road building upriver.

Luckily, the next day’s annoyance at the horrible scar on the landscape wrought by picks and jackhammers, belying the remark in the guidebook, after promising ancient wooden galleries to negotiate some steep rock faces, that “They’ll never get a road through here” (a wry phrase we used sardonically throughout the trek), became great excitement as we were stopped by the army so they could blast the opposing cliffs with dynamite. The awesome spectacle was enhanced by the long delay between sight and sound, entirely unlike Hollywood special effects. As it happened, after the third day’s forced clambering around both working jackhammers and undetonated dynamite while perched precariously over a sheer cliff (one trekker was nearly wiped out by a falling boulder – if my work’s health and safety officer saw this he’d explode), the road construction ceased interfering with us. This road building stuff is a real tragedy – the teahouses upriver lobbied for it so they could sell cheaper beer to trekkers (so far it’s hauled in using frequently encountered mule trains) but I don’t think they realise what a disaster it will be for business, as others have discovered all too late.

A few days into the trek the real stuff began. Climbing higher into the Himalayas we passed through beautiful rhododendron forests (I’m told the flowers are a vivid red), around a curved, sloping and smooth glacial wall the size of a dangerously angled city, through sleepy villages of the Tibetan culture (prayer flags, sutra wheels, chortans and gompas vying for our irreverent attention) and beneath the ever-present gaze of the Annapurna Range’s ice capped behemoths, scraped up from the Tethys Sea to just below the maximum height our planet can sustain – if you want more go to Mars. Yes, the group being entirely comprised of engineers resulted in a constant stream of Nerd Talk. Quantum physics, genetics and a group-effort calculation of the gravitational acceleration on the Earth due to the sun dominated the conversation – I’d been missing nerds.

And on the seventh day we rested (the seventh from Kathmandu that is) for purposes of altitude acclimatisation. Or we called it resting. In actual fact the non-Rhondonians got up early in the regional centre of Manang for a day walk to Milarepa’s Cave. This involved a lot of scrambling uphill and arguing over directions, but for our troubles we received a cultural experience in a Tibetan Buddhist gompa and, our curiosity getting the better of us, a further climb to 4400m altitude to watch from close-range a gigantic glacier groaning and grumbling, tumbling and tinkling under its own weight.

It was during the surprisingly exciting audiovisual experience of the glacier (its face was in view but the rest was buried in cloud) that we heard a distant, deep rumble. Over the seconds it enloadened into a violent roar like thunder or a low-flying 747. We all looked at each other nervously: an avalanche.

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” someone shouted, possibly inside my head. Dad and I legged it uphill obeying the old principal that where the interests of good photography and life preservation coincide you should always follow your instincts, but Rob and Tim were too cool to do anything except adjust the focus on their cameras, as though for them Death by Avalanche was a typical Friday afternoon. When the rumble died away without consequence I was so relieved and disappointed I laughed until my brain ran out of oxygen.

That evening we celebrated our survival by socialising with some fellow trekkers over a few momos and seabuckthorn juices. One Dutch girl called Veronique who we’d been bumping into sporadically over the last few days enlivened us with tales of her bizarre trekking companion, an old American man, Douglas by name, whose physical capabilities seemed to lie well below the threshold required by this trek and was slowly going insane from nicotine withdrawal. They each had separate guides so they could split up meiotically, as they were doing then. Another pair, an English duo, were running out of money so badly they were forced to share meals – our group had been visionary enough to extrude wallet-warping wads of cash from the digital ether before our departure. All these companions were a sort of ephemeral community, crystallising and dissolving from the trekker-pool.

Day 9. The Ascent over the Thorung-La Pass. Rob is feeling poorly due sipping untreated tap-water (I need not describe the symptoms). The group is nervous but excited, somewhat short tempered. It has been snowing the previous night. The target elevation is 5416m with Rhonda fronting the assault. Tim has made the ultimate sacrifice. He is taking up the rear to ensure that any injuries are treated with a humane rock-to-the-back-of-the-head.

As it happened the actual ascent was not that tough. But it was spectacular – we were ascending to almost rival the surrounding peaks: teetering cornices towering above fluted snow faces, snaking moraines evolving from the rock/ice landscape with the Himalayan Griffin nonchalantly peering down at our puny party. At 5000m we heard a distant rumble and turned to this time actually witness a vast avalanche falling about a kilometre, reshaping an opposing mountain-face before of our eyes at the deceptive speed best known to astronomers.

At the pass we celebrated the highest altitude ever reached by any of us (from sea-level, not from the Earth’s core) by passing around the port for Port on the Pass (traditionally known as Port on the Hill, but one must be flexible). This communal offering deeply excited a pair of Spanish girls as the brand I’d lugged up here was a local favourite of theirs at home, luckily they got to it before the Nepalese porters got a chance – the porters’ gluttony of the drink is surely an etymological clue.

Strangely, having managed to largely avoid altitude sickness so far (apart from the odd headache), the descent from Thorung-La sent some of us into waves of nausea. I myself was inured thanks to my Tibetan escapades, but I happily took part in the group-snooze half-way down on a neat patch of grass at some ancient ruins. From here we could see a whole new set of mountains, towering above a bleak valley.

The next few days saw growing realisation on the part of Tim and Rhonda that their expedition was soon to end. We stayed in a passive/aggressive hotel called Bob Marley – a truly strange experience not easily described, toured the temple complex of Muktinath where Dad stripped to his jocks to purify his soul beneath 108 water-spouting gargoyle bulls (here we also rediscovered Ross, an English buddy of ours who’d been abandoned by his otherwise charming ‘friend’ Luke on the wrong side of the pass after exhibiting signs of altitude sickness), and made our way towards the oasis town of Kagbeni. This journey was harrowing in every sense of the word: deep bull dust, violent winds, then a combination of the two resulting in an onslaught of airborne missiles. I got one in my eye, ruining my views of 3000 year-old Buddhist caves and monasteries nestled amongst the eroded badlands.

A rest day in Kagbeni, our first real chance at recuperation, saw us eating, sleeping, reading and exploring the local ‘Yakdonalds’ prior to a day ambling our way to Jomsom – racking off point for Tim and Rhonda. Unfortunately, the subsequent day the monsoon finally struck, grounding their plane and forcing them into an epic series of bus rides, an enormous taxi ride and a fuel fail as they limped and struggled towards the airport at Pokhara. Rob, Sandy and I were ignorant of this adventure at the time as we negotiated the Kali Gandaki river valley for our circuitous route to the Annapurna Base Camp.

Our own experience of this sudden weatherosity involved a nearby footbridge being washed away, another bridge on the main road almost suffering the same fate (Rob heroically helped some workers escape with their gear from the flash flood) and a landslide that threatened our planned bus departure from the town of Tukuche. Luckily this did not eventuate and so the next day we executed Project Wuss-Out and skipped two days of walking along the Kali Gandaki road. Our wussing out, however, was only partially successful as we decided to walk some of the way to Tatopani through an explosion of fertility and, allegedly, the world’s deepest gorge.

Here an evening of male bonding greeted us over a few beers while we marinated our tired bodies in the eponymous hot springs during a thunderstorm. We needed all the relaxation we could get for on the morrow we were to embark upon an arduous 1800m climb to Ghorepani. The valley on the way up was almost insultingly green. But what a view from the top! A four o’clock rise the next morning got us up to the summit of Poon Hill which, being 3200m high, would be called a mountain anywhere but Nepal. The sunrise over Daulagiri and the Annapurna Range was an awesome terrestrial syzygy (try using that word in Scrabble) – fingers of eclipsed light torn from the jagged peaks – and a superb backdrop for Port on the Hill (or Poon on the Poon!).

The Annapurna Sanctuary trek, beginning here, was everything the Annapurna Circuit trek was not: rather than rock-strewn landscapes scraped bare by glaciers we encountered damp jungles of plant-life fighting for every cubic millimeter (while competing with steep paddy terraces and frequent landslides). Instead of glaciers and ice lakes we had waterfalls and hot springs (complete with water nymphs!). Losing Tibetan Buddhism we found Nepali Hinduism. Rather than European trekkers we met those from the British Commonwealth (don’t ask me to explain the reasons for that). Although, as exceptions, we did encounter the Spanish girls and Veronique again – the latter had last seen a severely weakened Douglas crossing Thorung-La on horseback.

The four days’ ‘ascent’ to the Annapurna Base Camp at 4130m felt like a cruel joke – constantly climbing hundreds of metres only to descend again. Our total verticality for the trip worked out to nearly 25 kilometres (in 236 horizontal kilometres) and most of that knee-bending was achieved here (what a way to celebrate Rob’s 31st birthday!). But the views were seriously excellent and no more so than at the base camp itself: here we witnessed another mountastic sunrise while completely surrounded by the fishtailed Macchapuchhare and three Annapurnas (keeping clear of a vast flowing glacier beneath us). Unfortunately, I’d dropped my camera some days ago so could not record the scene (continuing the sprawling Camera Saga), but I recommend Rob’s brilliant photography. At evening-time I consumed three serves of Dhal Bhat, our staple food, which shocked even the local porters (but I sure got my money’s worth!). Heading back to civilisation we sprinted at twice the advised speed, stopping only for a deeply appreciated semi-rest day at the spur-perched Jhinu Dhanda, before finding ourselves standing in the sun, bleary eyed and awaiting the bus to take us to Pokhara. What a trip!

7 Days in Tibet

As I recall, I left my gentle readers poised precariously on the cliff-hanger ending of whether or not I would make it all the way back through China to Hong Kong so I could collect my pack and then find some way of getting back through China and into Nepal in time for my 27th birthday party meet-up. In order to relieve the otherwise unbearable tension during this blog I will now reveal that yes, I did make it.

The journey back from 'Shangri-La' east was much faster than coming the other way. Paivi and I took a bus to Jiangxi and then, after an afternoon heeding Chinglish warnings against 'irrational shopping', appropriated part of a sleeper bus back to Kunming. The beds on this bus were just about long enough for the decapitated body of a white male of average height and contained no more carry-on luggage capacity than might be secreted in swallowed condoms. However, I slept far better than the only other sleeper bus ride I've taken - India, 2001, in which I'd spent the whole night throwing up over the Western Ghats while avoiding having my height adjusted by oncoming trucks.

Arriving back in Kunming I immediately booked the next train (departing that afternoon) for Guangzhou near Hong Kong. Paivi was also desperate to get out of the city as she was in serious danger of missing her flight back to Finland from Beijing. Like most Chinese cities Kunming guilted me into feeling like I should get a life, find a job and be productive for the Progress of The Nation, thus the day went by like a picnic held during an air raid - you want to join in the frenzy but you've just uncorked a bottle of wine.

The train ride to Guangzhou was one of my best yet - 28 hours in a largely empty train, reading 'Shantaram', a huge foundation stone of a novel written by a Melbournian ex-crim, who's sort of like an evil Kim Stanley Robinson, and engorged as a right-of-passage by almost every backpacker I meet.

On the train I met a friendly young Guangzhou local named Kyo in possession of excellent English skills and a charitable desire to establish me in a hotel. This ended in a quest far more involved than for which I was prepared as we traipsed across the entire city in the dead of night employing the extensive metro system, multiple taxi rides and kilometres of foot-work, bypassing acceptable cheap digs is search of a hotel that satisfied both Kyo's requirement for a place worthy of my imagined social status and my requirement for absolutely anything costing me less than $50. This was not helped by a massive conference on African development that weekend filling the city's hotels with stylish black businessmen.

But the next day I was out of the city and on my way to Shenzhen, taking one of the 200 km per hour bullet trains in which China is now being enmeshed - the fastest I've ever traveled on land (with respect to that land - I'm not getting into a discussion on galactic divergence).

Eager to know if my pack had left Postal Space and now existed in the familiar dimensions of our own universe, and also because the bullet train dropped me off right on the border, I delayed the tour of Shenzhen until my way back out and once again went through the interminable procedures of leaving one country and entering another - an experience somewhat more irritating than usual because Hong Kong is now a part of China and so I wasn't technically crossing any national borders at all. Since this terminated my Chinese visa I had to stay in Hong Kong long enough to get a new one - three days since it was a Friday afternoon. Impeccable timing as usual. Nicely, Hong Kong's metro joins right into Shenzhen's, a system designed specifically for failed cycle tourists lugging heavy inward-leaning panniers.

I'd been hearing all sorts of things about Hong Kong on my trip, some positive and most negative. Somebody told me it's like Blade Runner - all the rich people living in high-rises trying to escape from the poor people at street level. Whatever the truth of it it's a cool image and certainly had some resonance with my experience living in the Chungking Mansions - a vast cubic firetrap crammed with tiny cell-like rooms with windows overlooking ventilation ducts like Bespin's Cloud City from Star Wars, every conceivable ethnicity in roughly equal proportions inhabiting the rooms, queuing for lifts and haggling over samosas. I got a real buzz out of this crazy place despite paying $15 for a room that could charitably be described as a coffin a few sizes too big for me.

Other than that, the horror stories I'd heard about the prices in Hong Kong seemed to be a phurphy. Things are the same price here as the same things in China, there's just more overt availability of very expensive things. On the first night I went to a classy Vietnamese restaurant perched near the top of a glass ovoid-shaped building and paid just $7 for a full meal. On the other hand I was forced to clench my face in an attempt to lock out emotional displays, my left eyelid flickering with the strain, as the bill came in for the round of beers I had shouted the Hanoi Backpacker's Hostel's barman's friend and his girlfriend for allowing me to send my pack to them (and for it's reunification with me) - they'd recommended an expensive rooftop bar above the main pier so we could watch the sun set through the haze, it's path punctuated by the crowded skyline.

Considering the amount of time available I managed to do a pretty thorough job on Hong Kong. I wandered through the city streets on both sides of the channel, familiarised myself with all forms of public transport (including dirt-cheap ferries, metro, buses and even trams), spent long hours watching the afternoon fade into evening with the accompanying laser show erupting from the tops of dozens of buildings while sitting on the end of a Prohibited Entry pier (AND not getting arrested!), had nights on the town with both British descent and Chinese descent locals - acquaintances of different backpacking buddies, and visited the major peaks of Hong Kong's two biggest islands. The first one being 'The Peak' on 'Hong Kong Island' - a wealthy green utopia in the clouds, like the way books from the 70's depict the perfectly landscaped habitable surfaces of orbital ring colonies - and the second being Lantau Island with its giant Buddha statue near the summit. When the gondola cost and queue proved too much for me to withstand I got up there the old fashioned way - every hour I asked someone how far a walk it was to go and each time they gave me an answer twice as long as the previous person, like an inverse Xeno's Paradox. The girl I met just twenty minutes before reaching the top reckoned I'd never make it.

On Monday morning, visa in hand, I took the metro and left the country, touring Shenzhen (a poor cousin to Hong Kong I must say - China likes to spread its cities out a lot, buildings edging away from each other in mistrust) meeting Kyo in Guangzhou again for a night of beer and pool, and then embarking on a long and spectacular train ride to Chengdu - launching pad for Tibet. An Annoying Incident boarding this train occurred as I was listening to an Atheist podcast on my ipod (I'd been really getting into podcasts). I had to put my panniers and newly acquired pack down on the metal detection conveyor belt but accidentally got my headphones hooked in my pack straps. I tried to free myself but my major luggage item, already in the grip of the conveyor belt, began to pull me into the jaws of the metal detector - no doubt to a terrible fate of radiation poisoning, acquisition of super powers and an eventual stand-off with an evil mastermind planning the enslavement of humanity. Since my hands were occupied holding my panniers I had to clumsily roll myself off the conveyor belt - snapping my headphones cable in the process and cutting off the podcast mid-sentence, trapping it inside my ipod. Clearly it was a message from the Atheist God telling me He does not exist (but due to my lack of faith I refused to believe Him).

This is where the real work began: I was pretty set on checking out that new train line to Lhasa, had been interested in Tibet since my Tintin days and wanted to keep up my aversion to flying (it being a fairly cop-out way to travel the world) - but for some reason the Chinese government doesn't trust us nice tourists to be in Tibet on our own, as though we'll tell the world what nasty bastards they are up there (or worse: tell the Tibetans). So I needed to be on a package tour - something I'd managed to avoid so far. Unfortunately, a package tour to get from the train station at Lhasa down to the Nepali border costs about $1500, so I needed at least one person with whom to share the exorbitant cost. Chengdu's Mix Hostel was exactly the place to find such a person so I spent a week there, slowly running out of time, finding possible companions and being abandoned by them, finishing 'Shantaram' and visiting a panda zoo. My lamentations of failure were eventually overheard by a British dude called Helio who was a) keen on seeing Tibet, b) didn't mind handing over the vast wad of cash required for a visit to said autonomous zone and, crucially, c) was happy to go with my somewhat condensed absolutely-must-be-in-Kathmandu-on-the-21st time-frame.

But, since time was already short, plus with the Tibet permits taking three days to acquire, as well as the train taking a week for the booking, this was no guarantee of success - the hostel informed us that there were no tickets left that would suit us but that they'd check later if someone canceled. I despaired at our chances and took a sad walk through the streets of Chengdu, but upon my return I was informed that yes! Miraculously, two people had in fact canceled! We were going to Tibet! I had had no idea before then exactly how much I was emotionally dependent on that outcome: instantly my spirits elevated right into the stratosphere and I had a mega-enjoyable afternoon (but by the next day my body had used up all its available endorphin reserves and I came crashing back down again until it could manufacture some more).

The next few days we spent waiting for our permits and train, seeing the town and the construction of its new metro system, wrestling with banks to get enough money out for the tour and in the evenings hitting the town. The most noteworthy night was when thirteen of us (we'd conglomerated with Mix's backpacker community by then) stormed a nightclub with a suspiciously high girl/guy ratio. It was after the tenth Lady Ga Ga song came on that the guy component of the backpacker group began to nod knowingly at itself - this was not a normal bar. Of course, it took until the girl component was the victim of successive waves of female instigated arse-grab attacks for it to realise that this was, in fact, a local lesbian bar and so stormed out, disappointment from all parties left trailing in its wake.

I could devote a whole blog to Chengdu and its crazy night life but we had a train to catch so I must move on.

The first day of this 48-hour train ride was quite uneventful, except for admiring the profusion of altitude warning signs and oxygen supply nozzles coating the walls. Helio and I were assigned not only different beds (cramped top beds too) but different carriages, so our interactions mainly revolved around endless rounds of the ubiquitous card game Shithead, all while listening to three tracks inescapably played over the sound system on repeat: Beethoven's 'Fur Elise', Celine Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On' (Geez - Titanic came out in, like, 1997!) and a Propaganda speech describing the Happiness of the Tibetan People. I was foresightful enough to bring along two bottles of red wine and a corkscrew for the journey, but Helio over-ruled me with his sensible consideration of altitude sickness (grrr...).

And altitude was a real worry - that night we left the deserted landscape of north-western China and the Silk Road (we had traveled as far north as the latitude of Beijing) and started climbing solidly up to 5027m above sea level - the highest I'd ever been on land and so it would be again until the trek in Nepal. I slept very soundly despite two annoyances: firstly the Chinese guy next to me snored so loudly and spasmodically I almost launched into giving him an emergency tracheotomy with my unused corkscrew, and secondly someone seemed to have decided to open one of the windows for a smoke during the night, evacuating roughly half of the atmosphere in the previously pressurised train.

But when we awoke - What. A. View. I don't know how those Chinese did it but they put a train line across the vast frozen plateau of Tibet, five kilometres above sea level. I hear they have to pump cooling fluids through the piers of the 167 kms of bridges so they don't sink into the gradually warming permafrost - yet another reason why I had to take this journey now. The only way I can really describe this landscape is to compare it with the cliche of the frozen northern latitudes of Mars. Little grew out here, blasted by constant snow storms even during summer, and the only objects to punctuate our views of the half-frozen lakes, vast desert plains and snow covered peaks were the occasional shelter, community or wandering horseman.

The line terminated in Lhasa where our tour guide failed to meet us at the station as planned (not a comfortable place to be left alone - shotgun toting Chinese military personnel in full riot gear grace every street corner in the capital). This set the tone for our relationship in the following days as he later failed to book us tickets for Lhasa's star attraction of the Potala Palace, in our itinerary for the next day, forcing us to stand outside the ticket office for an hour begging them to let us in, and finally, despite us paying his company over $400 per day, excusing his total ignorance of our tour's surrounding geography with the fact that this was his first time beyond Greater Lhasa. As I never tire of hearing, 'you get what you pay for'... (no, I'm being sarcastic - apart from the straight-forward rip-off, there are too many variables valued too differently by different people for prices to be a real universal measure of subjective worth).

But Helio and I couldn't complain too much, our guide was an alright bloke and could translate the driver's extensive familiarity with our surroundings. Plus he told us such interesting facts as that Tibet is suffering under the effects of a fifteen year drought because "Scientists say the Universe is getting hotter", and that another scourge wreaking havoc on Tibet is that the farmers have all seen the movie '2012' and hence have stopped tending to their fields because they fear, of all things, that they are in immanent tsunami danger. I had just been thinking that it would have been a convenient time for a four kilometre high tsunami to sweep the globe and was on alert for a sudden inner-ear pressure change announcing the wave's approach.

Our guide did, however, have an excellent knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism, taking us to many fascinating and beautiful temples and monasteries in Lhasa and southern Tibet. I must say though, I've always had a bit of a soft-spot for this peaceful and compassionate religion, but now I'm not so sure. The more I learned about it the more I was aware of its pre-enlightenment backwardness. Like, rather than concocting practical solutions to their drought problem they feel their best interests are served by either constant prayer or the invention of machines that can pray for them and so allow them time to install messy-looking prayer flags everywhere. Plus, when we visited the solid gold tombs of the previous Dalai Lhamas, each weighing hundreds of kilos, our guide blithely mentioned that all that gold had been extracted from the peasants. What??!! What WERE those methods of extraction!?

However, the Tibetan landscape was incredible. On our way out of Lhasa in a completely unnecessary Land Rover (all the roads were Prince's Highway standard, grrrr...) we encountered a large lake at 4400m or so with distant peaks poking above it - I know, I'm as surprised as you that Tibet has beaches (after a brief swim I can report that, yes, the water is frikkin' freezing). The towns are all mud brick, weathered and ancient - blending seamlessly into ruins that could be thousands of years old. Towering glaciers greeted us at roadsides, vast rivers negotiated ancient canyons, occasionally isolating decrepit forts clambering above the waterline, while just over half the atmosphere remained to shield us from the glaring sun. Our view would often open up to reveal infinite wind-blasted deserts punctuated by whistling mesas and, sometimes, fertile oases where yaks in immaculate headgear would till the land.

I only experienced mild altitude sickness, staying in the city of Shigatse (supposedly the highest city in the world at 3800m, but I have my doubts), where I got a day-long headache definitely NOT cured by the Chinese Medicine foisted on me by a local pharmacy (I didn't even get the placebo effect!). I was almost tempted to wuss out and buy one of the prolific oxygen canisters sold in every conceivable context (expensive restaurants and hotels, rather than advertising AC, would advertise O2) but settled for a random selection of drugs containing codeine from my first aid kit.

Apart from the obvious satisfaction in seeing Mount Everest on Day 2 of the drive (we didn't go to the base camp because the tour operator told us it was "crap"), the highlight was certainly Day 3, the final day, in which we reached the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Now you'd probably imagine that the edge of the plateau would be something like reaching the end of a tall sharp-edged table: the Himalayas poking up beyond it with views between the mountains into the vast haze of the Indian Subcontinent. And you would be correct - that's exactly what it was like. A brown flat bit of land 4.8 kilometres up suddenly giving way into nothingness and a straight line of eight kilometre high mountains receding into the distance like the perfect formation of an unreasonably large alien invasion force. It blew our minds. I have photos on Flickr, but, like most of this stuff, they don't do it justice.

After that it was only a matter of executing a steep descent between two mountains into Nepal, stopping at the mandatory fifty million military checkpoints per milimetre along the way, celebrating our final night in Tibet with our guide and driver over my last remaining bottle of wine in Zuegma, allowing our bags to be searched by the Chinese border to the extent of having each of the 900 pages of Neal Stephenson's excellent book 'Quicksilver' scrutinised by paranoid customs officials (undoubtedly looking for the secret plans for China's new Death Star, naturally I'd hidden them in my underpants), crossing the Friendship Bridge into Nepal, finding an old shack off the main road dispensing $100 three month visas for Nepal (if we hadn't seen it I would still be at large in this country), catching an awesomely scenic bus into Kathmandu and...

...Meeting up with all my friends and family who had made the trip out here for my birthday!

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.

Mud

The worst thing about cycle touring is that there's so much that can go wrong.  When backpacking or bushwalking the worst that can happen is you miss your bus, or your legs get tired or you contract syphilis.  When cycle touring you've got to watch out for your tires being pumped, the gears to be aligned, the drive chain not worn, the seat position to be correct, your brakes to stop you (but not all the time), your knees to work properly, your physical condition to be not exhausted, your spokes tuned, your bike not to be on fire and for you to be heading in the right direction.  And you have to be aware of all of these all of the time. 

That's what the first few days of my time in Ha Noi was all about. I got my pannier rack welded back together, gave my drive train a general service and allowed my left knee some rest before the next stage of the ride.  But before I could head off I had to wait for my Chinese visa to be granted and my spare brake pads to arrive from Australia.

Some of this time was spent in the hill town of Sapa.  I took the long and scenic day train and mini bus to arrive at a viewtastic hotel room.  Walking around town the next day I encountered an official demanding to see a ticket.  "What for?" I asked.  "Tourist Mountain" was the response.  'Tourist Mountain'.  Who goes to a place with a name like that?

I was tempted to climb Mount Fansipan - a REAL mountain, and the highest in Vietnam - but my twin excuses of a sore knee and terrible visibility forced me to wuss out.  Plus my friend Tom has climbed it so I knew it couldn't be much of a challenge.  Instead I went on a two day guided trek along a rice-paddied valley.  Nice as it was, my group soon discovered that our tour guide was actually rushing through interesting river beds, rice paddies and local villages in order to get to our home-stay so she could watch a Korean soap opera on TV.

Despite this annoyance I had an excellent time.  My small trekking group met up with a bunch of other groups and proceeded to ensconce ourselves in a Big Night involving copious beerings and the ever popular game of 'I Never' which quickly got out of hand, as it's supposed to.  One other advantage of the trek was being given a first-class sleeper train ticket back to Ha Noi by a generous American who had decided to go to Laos instead.  It was luxury.  I felt so American.

Back in Ha Noi I discovered that the backackers' I was staying at had morphed into a construction site while I was away and the constant drone of jackhammers chipped away at my sanity.  Still waiting for my Chinese visa and spare brake pads I occupied my time by searching for the internet cafe where I'd left my camera, agonising over whether or not it was worth getting up early to see the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh and trying desperately to get to what eventually turned out to be the world's worst river-front.

On the plus side, being surrounded by tourists I honed my new-found skill of being able to pick from their accents which V-Line district Australian tourists grew up in (it's safe to assume that any Australian tourist here is Victorian).  Oh, and also showing off my Vietnamese language skills: if you bargain with a local by hurling out numbers the tourists around you think you're speaking fluently.

I also bumped into my old friend Mel from Laos.  The last I'd heard of her she'd got some sort of flesh wound on her leg and a local witch-doctor had treated her by blowing dust on the affected area, the healing of which she had boasted about endlessly.  The post script of this story turned out to be that her leg got infected and she had to see a real doctor.

Finally, after several days of being told it would be ready tomorrow, my Chinese visa arrived.  I decided to abandon my spare brake pads and beer magazine being sent to me by my old housemate Tim.  This would not end well.  A brief stop off at the post office to send the bulk of my luggage on to Hong Kong and my hotel key back to Sapa (whoops!), and I was away.  Following the coast towards China.

The first day of the ride was like most first days cycle touring: pretty uninteresting.  I very gradually extracted myself from the extenuated suburbs of Ha Noi and clung desperately to the feebly offered hand of the wilderness - a hand that would later grab me and refuse to let go.  An eerie sight presented itself in this awkward interface: a modern township that had been completely abandoned with the roads ripped up and given to pastures.  Couldn't get my head around it.  Ironically, I saw there was a storm coming and so found a hotel early in the afternoon to avoid it.  This storm was to last for the rest of my trip.

The next morning saw me riding off into the maelstrom towards Halong Bay, which started as gentle rain and soon became a torrential downpour.  It was lucky that the hotel staff at my last stop had generously built a mudguard for my bike (they're like that, the Vietnamese) or I would've had to ride the whole way with my eyes shut.

Halong, the town at Halong Bay, was a pretty dead town - in both senses of the term.  Half-constructed dripping skyscrapers and empty streets soaked with rain.  My hotel was quite nice, with a viewy balcony, but it suffered from having a terrible mouse problem: after a few half-sleeping hours of battling it over control of my left-over food it eventually took the offensive and attacked my hair (presumed to be the enemy's high command).  When I tried to complain about this to the young receptionist in the morning she thought I wanted to exchange email addresses ('a mouse', 'emails' - same same).  I eventually gave up and went along with it to prevent embarrassment.  Bad move.

Halong Bay was amazing.  Very rainy and foggy, but very awesome.  It was like global warming had flooded Pandora (yes, this country reminds me of Avatar a lot).  Thousands and thousands of densely vegetated karsts jutting vertically from the ocean.  Initially I was annoyed that I could only get a four hour boat tour, but it soon became apparent that a pair of rich Koreans had bribed the tour operator to give us all eight hours.  To keep my schedule I ended up having to ride to the next town into the night to the point where finding a hotel became a desperation.  I eventually found one in the guise of a decaying block of Soviet-style flats.

The next few days got worse and worse.  I initially rode 20 kms along an island that, contrary to my map, turned out not to be connected to the mainland at both ends, forcing a long and dispiriting backtrack.  To make matters worse, the mainland road I had to take, the highway, became mud within a few kilometres.  Although there's humour in every situation.  Every now and then a crazy dog would rush out onto the road and bark at me.  It got so muddy here that one dog couldn't stop itself and slid straight into my rear spokes, nearly toppling my whole bike.  I laughed for kilometers.

After cycling consistently for a few weeks you tend to extend your nervous system beyond your biological body and into the machine you rely on for transport (nerds: yes, just like in Neon Genesis Evangelion - but without having to fight alien monsters).  Every clicking sound, grinding feel, oily smell, loose sight and greasy... taste... is part of your sense of self and problems with these are equivalent to pain.  Getting off this beautiful and well-roaded island I suddenly sensed what I'd been dreading: the metallic scraping sound of naked disc brake.  My rear brake had worn through and I'd have to remove it.

Still, I had my front brake - two is just for redundancy right?  Well, riding along this muddy, rocky, wet, winding, undulating highway I needed all the braking power I could get my hands on.  Typical of Vietnamese road-building, they first tear up the old road, then wait five years for the paperwork to come through, then slowly start work on the new road.  And the traffic!  Huge Chinese freight trucks passing back and forth, sometimes getting bogged in the up to 300mm deep mud ruts and occasionally backing up for hundreds of metres at a bottleneck.  If I could stay on the road when they went past they would spray a thick waterfall of mud at me.  Although I knew it was futile I would still have my bike cleaned in every town, just to give my gritty chain a few metres' rest.  I was a mess.  But in the midst of all this, one Chinese truck driver gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up, as if to say "Hey - that's cool!" - it was a welcome revelation that however bad things got here, nothing could detract from that.

However, the next day really sunk the boot it.  My front brake wore through.  This was the one that had had plenty of wear left in Ha Noi - the abrasive mud scourers all.  I was forced to hobble the next 80 kilometres with no braking ability whatsoever, suffering the shame of walking my bike down the hills (for those not used to dealing with hydraulic disc brakes - the pads are practically unique).  My aim:  Mon Cai on the Chinese border - the only real population centre for the 200 kilometres of this jungle-encroached 'road'. 

Thankfully, the knowledge that there was no way I could continue riding to Hong Kong released me from all my worries about my bike, the constant driving rain and the road conditions: I became happier than I'd been in days and was suddenly able to enjoy my surroundings - and they were amazing!  I eventually rolled into Mon Cai to the tuneful screeching of my front brakes (they seem to clamp shut when worn through) where I found a hotel that allowed me to take my bike onto the balcony.  I cleaned and repaired it one day and posted it the next.  The destination: Nepal.  The only place I knew I would be in the next few months.  The postage cost $370.

On the other hand, I was now a backpacker again and welcome to rejoin polite society.  Although, as I walked across the border into China, I realised that I was more accurately a 'pannier-er', and those things are pretty damn hard to carry around.

Oh yes, and those spare brake pads?  They'd arrived in Ha Noi two days after I'd left.

The Solo Tour

I spread out the tear over my cheek so it would dry faster.  I'd just seen the backs of my four cycling comrades anonymising amongst the railway crowds.  From now on, I was alone.
 
Getting back to my hotel the first thing I did was consume an evening meal consisting entirely of a can of stout, a litre of milk and a kilo of chocolate ice-cream while I watched a chick-flick marathon on HBO (that's the sort of stuff I wouldn't be getting away with in a pack of guys... well maybe the stout).
 
There was one thing keeping me in Hue: my camera.  I think now is as good a time as any to indulge myself in the tale of my camera's quest to stay alive.  For the first month of its existence in my possession the memory card refused to fully recognise its union with the hardware until I gave up and bought a new card.  Clearly in retribution for all this stuffing up I began to treat it badly.  Firstly, I crashed my bike with it on the road to Dam Rong, filling it with dirt and breaking the battery cover.  Then in Da Nang I dropped it onto concrete, bending the extended zoom to comically resemble the leaning tower of Pisa.
 
As it happens, my camera was still not quite destroyed: it could be rebuilt - we had the technology.  I Found a guy near the station to repair it and he finally showed me the result after two days, several attempts and $15 (the distended but still operating camera channeled Robocop 2) during which time I had been cycling around to the sights of Hue (the best way to see a city is to get lost and then try to get home again).  When I finally got it back I was too nervous to use it for a few days - and sure enough, the auto-focus cog had disengaged.  Magically, it clawed back to life after a bit of tinkering and so far continues in that state.  As an addendum, in Ha Noi a couple of weeks later I left it at an internet cafe for two days.  After searching for hours for the establishment's location I discovered they'd kept it for me all that time.  The battered camera limps on to this day.
 
The first couple of days of my solo tour have been blanked out of my memory - the most fascinating thing about them was that they were so boring, riding along the shoulder of Highway One for hundreds of kilometres with nothing much to look at.  But when you're riding solo you do get into an interesting state of mind - you lose yourself in your thoughts, and your emotions are free to spin off unchecked by people or activities.  Alone with the Universe.  And 90 million Vietnamese.
 
On the ride I started to categorise the Vietnamese responses to my presence, it being so much more overt than when riding in a group.  There's the stunned staring; the polite "Hello?"s (you have to reply in exactly the same tone or they won't understand you); the uncontrolled laughter - probably by people who think Westerners only come in packs of tourist bus; the stop-what-you're-doing-and-look-confused look (a personal favourite); school boys clapping each others' backs and laughing haughtily when they get a response, coupled with school girls collapsing in embarrassed giggles; the dreaded "Hey!" which strongly resembles the 'Hey' as in "Hey!  You're pannier's fallen off!/You're bike's snapped in half!/You're heading towards a tsunami!" but instead intended to mean "Hey!  You're white!"; and finally, the worst of all (other than not getting a response in the game 'Hey Cow'), the delayed 'Hello' - you can see it on their faces: they're stunned for a minute, then they chase after you shouting... but you're too far ahead to respond easily and have to choose between being rude and straining your neck.  Always the former.  They had their chance.
 
As the days went on I got so into the rhythm of cycling I lost interest in stopping during the day, pretty much at all.  When I was with the others we'd find any excuse to rest for an hour, drink coffees and talk crap.  But on my own there's only the prospect of language wrestling with curious onlookers, asking the same questions they always do, to entice me to put on the brakes.
 
Also, the true extent of my stinginess came out, not in money, but in conservation of momentum: with heavy panniers it takes some time slowly accelerating up to full speed and I didn't want to waste that.  I'd ride for up to 70 kilometres in three hours or so without even slowing down.  Combine this with 6am starts and you go a long way, on many days up to 150 kilometres.
 
Finally, I reached the seaside resort of Dong Hoi and parked myself in a hotel with a balcony overlooking the beach.  It being a hot day I went for a swim, losing my one good (Caucasian-skin-coloured and hence sand-coloured) knee brace in the process.  This would have later consequences.  Afterwards I went for a meal, that, like most meals cycle touring, didn't quite satisfy, so I went elsewhere for another.
 
Do you ever get that fear in restaurants that don't have prices on their menus that when the waiter produces the bill it's for 3 trillion dollars?  "But that's more than Brazil's GDP!" You protest.  "I'm sorry sir," he replies, "But we are an exclusive restaurant, I do hope you enjoyed your meal.  We have a no refund through regurgitation policy of course, but most customers prefer to pay it off as a loan."  So there you are having to quickly build a drug and arms empire from the ground up to raise the $7 billion a month interest repayments until you get enough capital to finance the extrusion of a space elevator and mine the asteroids (actually that sounds kind of fun).
 
Well that's (sort of) similar to what happened at this place.  The first restaurant charged 15,000 dong (reasonable), the second 180,000 (unreasonable) with barely anything to distinguish them and served on plastic chairs outside a garage on the street.  It was like paying $200 for a pub parma.  It's the only time I've considered doing a runner, but my bike was in the guy's garage (conveniently).  This put me in a bad mood for most of the next day.
 
This mood was finally broken when I intruded inland and almost instantly found myself surrounded by the most epic karst mountains I've ever seen - here I stopped every two minutes to photograph them (see them on Flickr!).  They emerged majestically from a sea of mist, like when you watch Avatar standing on your head.  Tragically, most were in the process of being dismantled for their limestone, so I'd check them out before they're all leveled (challenge: can humanity flatten the earth faster than it's uplifted?).
 
A few days of clemently overcast weather allowed me to cover even greater distances by removing the need to seek shade during the heat of the day.  I still had to have lunch though, and one thing about lunch in central Vietnam is that it invariably involves a lot of rice-wine.  For nearly a week I had shots forcefully offered to me by groups of drunk men, while their women-folk looked on shaking their heads in shame.  Does the male half of Vietnam contribute anything to its economy?  And rice-wine is such an inefficient drink - you get drunk without the pleasure of drinking.
 
When the weather cleared for a day I made an error of judgement.  The previous night I'd been up at all hours finishing off Jane Austen's 'Emma' (which I think is the best Austen novel, and I've read most of them now - it really gets the reader into Emma's head), and so the next morning I foolishly drank a Thai Red Bull to compensate (far more potent than the western rip-off).  This had the effect of making me deliriously happy, like most energy drinks, and I spent the day listening to Fat Boy Slim on my ipod as I rode through iron-age villages and around buffalo-ploughed rice paddies - safely, the only other traffic on the road was other cyclists.
 
When school finished at lunchtime (the rotters), all the kids were out on their bikes and, as usual, wanted to race me up the hills.  This time, high on Red Bull and House Music, I took up the challenge and left them and their un-panniered bikes in the dust... but wrecked my newly unbraced left knee in the process, forcing me to hobble up to Ha Noi very carefully for the next three days and ruining my dreams of cycling to the hill town of Sapa.  It is STILL recovering.
 
At last I reached Ha Noi and was congratulated by the Australian owners of my backpackers with a free beer.  I'd ridden 1,980 kilometres in 28 days.  Suddenly I was thrust back into touristland, meeting an Australian buddy I met in Laos, and Kye and Emma from the Mekong Delta Tour.  Waiting around for my knee to repair, for my spare brake pads to arrive from Australia and for the Chinese bureaucracy to grant me a visa, I began to realise that I have an inner need for progress, and without the tangible experience of knocking off kilometres on a map I feel like I'm wasting my life.  I had to get back on my bike...