Before coming to South East Asia everyone I talked to would tell me that above all else I absolutely had to go tubing at Vang Vieng. It was for this reason that I was dreading the end of the bus ride to get there. It's not really my kind of thing but but I felt a sort of duty to at least be able to say I'd done it. I was imagining it would be full of hundreds of western bogans spending the day fluctuating between two high levels of inebriation. I was right. But I soon realised that that was okay because I was one of them.
For those yet to experience the psycho-weirdness of tubing at Vang Vieng, the idea is to float down the town's river in an inner-tube stopping at various crazy riverside bars full of pumping music, rhythmically-challenged dancing, free-flowing alcohol and people throwing themselves at the mercy of Laos' nascent medical system by 'zip-lining' into supposedly deep pools in the otherwise shallow river, all set amongst beautiful but barely noticed karst mountains. There are also landmines.
Turning up alone I soon ran into a couple of Irish buddies from the boat trip and suddenly I was in the mood to party. Skolling a few half-litre cans of BeerLao plus some free shots to bring us up to at least the lower quartile of inebriation we quickly got into the swing of things by joining a game of mixed mud volleyball. Surprisingly, we all decided to play the game seriously and my team ended up not only winning decisively but also avoiding serious injury resulting from the many sharp shards of glass nestled in the more viscous levels of the mud. By the time it was all over it was almost dark and the further three kilometres of rapids still to be negotiated by our inner tubes forced us to discuss the very real possibility of hypothermia.
Not to be deterred, later that night we ordered a large $1 bottle of whiskey over dinner that turned out to be only 20% non-alcohol and let the night of parties, dancing and buckets (the fluid goes out of them, not into them) fade into amnesia. I woke up suddenly at 8 a.m. and knew that I had to leave that place. Immediately.
The bus ride to the Lao capital of Vientiane was eventful only in that I managed not to throw up. Now when I hear that Vientiane is like something out of a Graham Greene novel I know it's not a joke. It's a bit like that previously mentioned sci-fi genre with the suspiciously quiet daytime and excitingly lethal night - but with the night instead also being suspiciously quiet. I sat on the Mekong's riverfront for a few hours trying to understand some inexplicable construction activity and consumed the occasional baguette (Oh ho ho! Baguette!). I soon made up my mind to move on.
And what a move! The eleven hour bus trip was one of the best yet: I realised here that I have the stomach to read on buses after all and was entertained by the enthusiasm of Richard Dawkins to the ambiance of an epic Mekong thunderstorm. I paused for a night in Savannakhet where I discovered the joys of being evil as I wielded an electric tennis racket in my hotel room and committed a mosquito holocaust that must never be forgotten.
A far less satisfying bus ride to Pakse introduced me through shared misery to another cool English couple and two Canadian blokes called Matt and Troy (who would definitely hit back if referred to as a couple) with whom I searched for a hostel and had some riverside beverages. The next day I hired a motorbike and rode 170 kilometres to explore the Bolaven Plateau.
This was the first time I'd ever (legally) ridden or driven on the right side of the road and it did take some getting used to. I kept thinking, "Hey, this feels kind of natural. Maybe that sinister Napoleon was right to have invented dexterous driving after all" and then realising that I was actually back on the left with a truck bearing down on me.
But the destination made it all worth-while. At Tadlo I was given directions to three spectacular waterfalls by an American backpacker named Amber which involved a lot of rock scrambling to get to an extremely tall fall, and information on how to avoid the annoying pleas for money from the local village children for two huge wide falls.
Another failed attempt to travel down the Mekong by boat rather than bus brought me to Don Det, one of the famed Four Thousand Islands. This island is an amazing gravity well of cool (and may I say extremely handsome) young backpackers such as myself. Here I rediscovered, bit by bit, my old friends Teresa the German beautician I'd met in Pai, Matt, Troy and the English couple from the Pakse bus and Morgan and Shane, my Irish buddies from Vang Vieng and the boat trip. We instantly became a cohesive group and a large subsection chartered a boat for the next day.
This trip was a spectacular tour of many of the eponymous four thousand islands such as beach islands, water buffalo islands and an over-excited school children island. This was all capped off by the usual Felix-generated beach bonfire (the best kind) on Don Det in which the utilisation of bamboo as fuel ensured an explosive experience. However, my satisfaction of these evenings was somewhat tempered by late-night calls for my Australian de-vermination skills (I knew that show 'Crocodile Hunter' was a bad idea). I was even contracted out to deal with a scorpion found in the bed of some French backpackers.
One of the many things I'm seeking on this epic trip of mine is a certain level of craziness. For things to go a bit out of hand. A pub night becomes a beach party becomes a tribal jungle festival and all of a sudden I'm leading a small colonising expedition to a long period comet (that's why '2001: A Space Odyssey' is so awesome - it starts off like a normal movie with apes and stuff and then goes psycho towards the end). The final day of Don Det was nothing like that, but it reminded me of it.
I and the group that had congealed around me (yes, I have that effect on people) all hired bikes to ride around the serenely rural Don Det and neighbouring Don Kong (Connected by an old rail bridge) to see a waterfall and have a swim in the Mekong. Afterwards we visited a hot-sand beach that required a zen-like trance to avoid feet burns by using levitation and decided to charter another small boat to see the endangered Mekong dolphins on the Cambodian border.
Having consumed a few bevos on the journey we stopped right on the aquatic border and spotted the snub noses of a fair few fresh water dolphins as they flaunted international boundaries. Miraculously, half an hour of broken Lao coaxing and eventually beer bribes convinced our pilot to land the three of us in my boat on the Cambodian shore. Here we watched the sun set over the Cambodian hills from a Cambodian beach shack drinking Cambodian beer and learning our first Cambodian words from the Cambodian family living there. The daring boat ride back up through the rapids (the somewhat tipsy pilot was showing off) only enhanced our excitement at having committed our first illegal crossing. Luckily, on the pitch-black bicycle ride home over dodgy dirt paddy tracks we weirdly bumped into Amber from Tadlo who escorted us home with her presciently acquired bike light.
The next day I went to Cambodia the proper way.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Crazy Laos
Pai for breakfast. It's a small backpacker village in the highlands of Thailand, north of Chiang Mai. The drive up was pretty spectacular with a lot of the mountainous terrain covered in jungle, despite there not being any national parks around - non-use of land is something I have trouble comprehending. It was here that I finished listening to all the songs on my four gigabyte iPod in alphabetical order. I started on the buses in Malaysia - the buses in Indonesia are too interesting for one to be incommunicado.
My first activity in this town was discovering an amazing and cheap bungalow right on the river. And then one of those great things happened that all backpackers secretly yearn for: I randomly bumped into my old friends Tom and Lisa with whom I'd shared many lazy days watching movies months ago in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. And this English couple is a great one to bump into twice so we instantly hit Pai's bar scene (a scene barred from a mere individual like me due to awkwardness, as in my Surabaya experience).
As a couple, Tom and Lisa tell me they find it hard to meet people while traveling as everyone around them doesn't want to impose on their symbiotic mind-meld of true coupledom (like pan-dimensional beings of pure energy). I tell them it's just as hard as an individual but I guess everyone just needs to be more socially engaging.
The rest of my time in Pai was spent drinking beer on the river watching the fire lanterns rise to their altitudes of equilibrium, riding a mountain bike to a waterfall and then on into the hills - waaay too far, as a thunderstorm caught me on the way back, and celebrating Australia Day with the only other Australian in town. I woke up covered in Australian flag stickers.
The next day was a work of timing genius. I got to the bus station at a random time in the morning, just making it for the trip back to Chiang Mai, where I walked straight into the dentist's for my second appointment without putting down my pack, then driven by the plush Dentistmobile back to the Chiang Mai bus terminal in time for the last bus to Chiang Rai. The Dentistmobile was so classy they needed two dental workers in the car - one to drive and one to open the door for me at my destination.
Now, my timing hasn't always been the best in Thailand - I arrived days after the full moon - the only one for about 280 years with a decade turnover in it - and left days before the next one, nicely bypassing the notorious Full Moon Parties. But there is one department in which my timing has been impeccable: milk. The very month in which I was inhabiting Thailand was the very month in which 830ml milk bottles were on special at 7/11 and I can tell you I spent a fair whack of my budget on them.
As an asside, I've learnt that tolerance to lactose is one of the most recent evolutionary changes in humans, or at least those with an ancestry of pastoralism. but there is an even more recent change: colour vision. After the dinosaurs died out our newly diurnal ancestors regained colour vision by making use of a parasitic strand of DNA that accidentally duplicated the code for our eyes' cone cells. But in the last few thousand years, due to the lack of selection pressure in the wild, colour blindness is increasing dramatically as this parasite is being removed. The upshot of all of which is this: as a colour-blind milk lover, I am the pinacle of human evolution.
I'll just wait for all the biologists to stop throwing up at this appalling evolutionary logic.
Okay. Chiang Rai is similar to Chiang Mai in name only. The town itself seems devoid of life in the metaphorical sense but is surrounded by beautiful hilly country all the way up into Burma. I didn't get that far but was close after having hired a motorbike to see waterfalls, hilly villages, lots of cool snakes, hot springs, tea plantations and French tourists on 4WD tours.
Now I had this big plan of getting to the border town of Chiang Kong and settling in for the night at an internet cafe to video in to the awesome party at my old share house, but I got swept along with this general movement to cross the Mekong into Laos, then onto a two day slow boat to Luang Prabang.
This boat ride was so incredible its ramifications have lasted several weeks into the future (as in 'right now' in Felix time). Almost everyone I met here I've come across again and again everywhere else I go. Laos is one of those long skinny countries taht funnels the backpackers into one main route. I quickly formed a group and we sat on the back of the boat drinking beer and playing guitar (not me, I've lost that ability) and admiring the river villages of the Mekong. When we stopped for the night in a small town it took a while to come to terms with the fact that it had no internet and I would miss my party at home. Unfortunately, I shared a room with an American guy and spent the next week running into him and forgetting to pay him my half of the room cost. For a while after that everyone I met I ask to look out for him.
Laos is a funny ol' place. For one thing they drive on the wrong side of the road, and I was disappointed I didn't get to see the crazy loop-over interchange they'd have to implement in order to link up with us lefties (I made the crossing by boat you see). The border also marked the moment I left the Free World for the last time until... do you count Nepal? On the plus side, it's my first fully landlocked nation I've ever visited (most have actually been sea-locked) - and my last until... Nepal? Hmmm. Cutely, the Lao people don't seem to be aware of their relationship with the sea, as they refer to their borders as 'coasts' and talk about going 'overseas' when they take the bus to Hanoi.
I've always thought of Laos as the bits that all the other South East Asian countries left over after they'd had their pick. It doesn't have any coasts, no famous mountain ranges, nor major rivers (whoops! The Mekong). But there really is something about Laos that's incredible. The place is stunningly beautiful, the people are all awesome and, most importantly of all, it's a massive backpacker hub.
I arrived in Luang Prabang after another day floating down the Mekong hanging out with world backpackers (sinisterly for me, we call ourselves 'Boat People') and instantly found myself in a situation of having to maintain my integration with too many social groups, all of which seemed to have crystallised from the super-saturated solution of the Boat People (I like to think I was the nucleation but I tend to think things like that).
During the day we achieved little - we went to an amazingly beautiful emerald-coloured waterfall, saw a temple and... er... yeah. This took three days. Weirdly, at the waterfall I again randomly bumped into Tom and Lisa for the third time and nation. But the nights out was what it was really about. On one night we found ourselves at a Lao club where even old women danced with leather-clad youngsters to the music of Britney Spears. That night later ascended into immaculately choreographed line dancing in which we ineptly took part.
Other nights focused on the age-old problem of beating the 11pm nation-wide curfew, usually by finding out-of-town clubs and er... bowling alleys?... that must have had Laos People's Party links. On one of these nights I spent over an hour stumbling randomly home lost in the darkness, and others managed to have even more extreme Odysseys that stretched credulity.
Now I don't usually like to whinge into my blog (whinging to fellow-travelers at least alows them to fight back), but I'll make an exception for one annoyance: banks. Every time I get money out I'm charged by [leading Australian bank] to the tune of $5. Then they charge me another few dollars because I'm doing it overseas. Then another 2% or so for an intercurrency conversion, and then, if I've survived all that, a $5 monthly fee. All so I can have to privalege of lending them money. But the worst part is that a lost of the ATMs over here also have a fee of about $5 to take money out, to a maximum of... $80. This means I pay about $15 to use an ATM, or up to %20 of my total expenditure. There must be another way! I mention this here because in Laos I accidentally typed 4 digits of kip instead of 5 and got socked with a double charge that took the fun out of the whole day.
Viang Vienne was next after fleeing Luang Prabang's banking nightmare on an impressive karsty bus ride. The town itself is beautifully set on a river amongst towering mountains, but it's really now only famous for one thing: tubing. I was actually dreading having to float down the 3km river on an inner tube stopping at all the crazy drunken bars on the water all alone, but like most places I've been I met some people I knew from the slow boat: Morgan and Shane from Ireland.
After jumping off the bus, hiring a tube and being dropped off up-river I experienced one of the most outragious and almost grotesque phenomona on the backpacker circuit... but that's anather story.
My first activity in this town was discovering an amazing and cheap bungalow right on the river. And then one of those great things happened that all backpackers secretly yearn for: I randomly bumped into my old friends Tom and Lisa with whom I'd shared many lazy days watching movies months ago in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. And this English couple is a great one to bump into twice so we instantly hit Pai's bar scene (a scene barred from a mere individual like me due to awkwardness, as in my Surabaya experience).
As a couple, Tom and Lisa tell me they find it hard to meet people while traveling as everyone around them doesn't want to impose on their symbiotic mind-meld of true coupledom (like pan-dimensional beings of pure energy). I tell them it's just as hard as an individual but I guess everyone just needs to be more socially engaging.
The rest of my time in Pai was spent drinking beer on the river watching the fire lanterns rise to their altitudes of equilibrium, riding a mountain bike to a waterfall and then on into the hills - waaay too far, as a thunderstorm caught me on the way back, and celebrating Australia Day with the only other Australian in town. I woke up covered in Australian flag stickers.
The next day was a work of timing genius. I got to the bus station at a random time in the morning, just making it for the trip back to Chiang Mai, where I walked straight into the dentist's for my second appointment without putting down my pack, then driven by the plush Dentistmobile back to the Chiang Mai bus terminal in time for the last bus to Chiang Rai. The Dentistmobile was so classy they needed two dental workers in the car - one to drive and one to open the door for me at my destination.
Now, my timing hasn't always been the best in Thailand - I arrived days after the full moon - the only one for about 280 years with a decade turnover in it - and left days before the next one, nicely bypassing the notorious Full Moon Parties. But there is one department in which my timing has been impeccable: milk. The very month in which I was inhabiting Thailand was the very month in which 830ml milk bottles were on special at 7/11 and I can tell you I spent a fair whack of my budget on them.
As an asside, I've learnt that tolerance to lactose is one of the most recent evolutionary changes in humans, or at least those with an ancestry of pastoralism. but there is an even more recent change: colour vision. After the dinosaurs died out our newly diurnal ancestors regained colour vision by making use of a parasitic strand of DNA that accidentally duplicated the code for our eyes' cone cells. But in the last few thousand years, due to the lack of selection pressure in the wild, colour blindness is increasing dramatically as this parasite is being removed. The upshot of all of which is this: as a colour-blind milk lover, I am the pinacle of human evolution.
I'll just wait for all the biologists to stop throwing up at this appalling evolutionary logic.
Okay. Chiang Rai is similar to Chiang Mai in name only. The town itself seems devoid of life in the metaphorical sense but is surrounded by beautiful hilly country all the way up into Burma. I didn't get that far but was close after having hired a motorbike to see waterfalls, hilly villages, lots of cool snakes, hot springs, tea plantations and French tourists on 4WD tours.
Now I had this big plan of getting to the border town of Chiang Kong and settling in for the night at an internet cafe to video in to the awesome party at my old share house, but I got swept along with this general movement to cross the Mekong into Laos, then onto a two day slow boat to Luang Prabang.
This boat ride was so incredible its ramifications have lasted several weeks into the future (as in 'right now' in Felix time). Almost everyone I met here I've come across again and again everywhere else I go. Laos is one of those long skinny countries taht funnels the backpackers into one main route. I quickly formed a group and we sat on the back of the boat drinking beer and playing guitar (not me, I've lost that ability) and admiring the river villages of the Mekong. When we stopped for the night in a small town it took a while to come to terms with the fact that it had no internet and I would miss my party at home. Unfortunately, I shared a room with an American guy and spent the next week running into him and forgetting to pay him my half of the room cost. For a while after that everyone I met I ask to look out for him.
Laos is a funny ol' place. For one thing they drive on the wrong side of the road, and I was disappointed I didn't get to see the crazy loop-over interchange they'd have to implement in order to link up with us lefties (I made the crossing by boat you see). The border also marked the moment I left the Free World for the last time until... do you count Nepal? On the plus side, it's my first fully landlocked nation I've ever visited (most have actually been sea-locked) - and my last until... Nepal? Hmmm. Cutely, the Lao people don't seem to be aware of their relationship with the sea, as they refer to their borders as 'coasts' and talk about going 'overseas' when they take the bus to Hanoi.
I've always thought of Laos as the bits that all the other South East Asian countries left over after they'd had their pick. It doesn't have any coasts, no famous mountain ranges, nor major rivers (whoops! The Mekong). But there really is something about Laos that's incredible. The place is stunningly beautiful, the people are all awesome and, most importantly of all, it's a massive backpacker hub.
I arrived in Luang Prabang after another day floating down the Mekong hanging out with world backpackers (sinisterly for me, we call ourselves 'Boat People') and instantly found myself in a situation of having to maintain my integration with too many social groups, all of which seemed to have crystallised from the super-saturated solution of the Boat People (I like to think I was the nucleation but I tend to think things like that).
During the day we achieved little - we went to an amazingly beautiful emerald-coloured waterfall, saw a temple and... er... yeah. This took three days. Weirdly, at the waterfall I again randomly bumped into Tom and Lisa for the third time and nation. But the nights out was what it was really about. On one night we found ourselves at a Lao club where even old women danced with leather-clad youngsters to the music of Britney Spears. That night later ascended into immaculately choreographed line dancing in which we ineptly took part.
Other nights focused on the age-old problem of beating the 11pm nation-wide curfew, usually by finding out-of-town clubs and er... bowling alleys?... that must have had Laos People's Party links. On one of these nights I spent over an hour stumbling randomly home lost in the darkness, and others managed to have even more extreme Odysseys that stretched credulity.
Now I don't usually like to whinge into my blog (whinging to fellow-travelers at least alows them to fight back), but I'll make an exception for one annoyance: banks. Every time I get money out I'm charged by [leading Australian bank] to the tune of $5. Then they charge me another few dollars because I'm doing it overseas. Then another 2% or so for an intercurrency conversion, and then, if I've survived all that, a $5 monthly fee. All so I can have to privalege of lending them money. But the worst part is that a lost of the ATMs over here also have a fee of about $5 to take money out, to a maximum of... $80. This means I pay about $15 to use an ATM, or up to %20 of my total expenditure. There must be another way! I mention this here because in Laos I accidentally typed 4 digits of kip instead of 5 and got socked with a double charge that took the fun out of the whole day.
Viang Vienne was next after fleeing Luang Prabang's banking nightmare on an impressive karsty bus ride. The town itself is beautifully set on a river amongst towering mountains, but it's really now only famous for one thing: tubing. I was actually dreading having to float down the 3km river on an inner tube stopping at all the crazy drunken bars on the water all alone, but like most places I've been I met some people I knew from the slow boat: Morgan and Shane from Ireland.
After jumping off the bus, hiring a tube and being dropped off up-river I experienced one of the most outragious and almost grotesque phenomona on the backpacker circuit... but that's anather story.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Bangkok Nights
It's a lot harder to get off a moving bus than it looks - the main thing you've got to remember is that even though you jump out of the bus backwards the ground is still trying to push you over from the bottom at the speed the bus is traveling. Even at 15 kms per hour this is quite a push and I'd be lying if I told you I'd remained upright.
Arriving back at Patong Beach I was invited by my English buddies Paul and Karl to cram into their small but luxurious hotel room whose remaining floor space was almost entirely inhabited by their giant friend Will - but we made it work. All that remained was to hit the town with the reckless abandon only Phuket can elicit.
Now, when I progressed through the ascending stages of technological advancement of Indonesia, Malaysia and then Singapore I was half expecting to be transported next to a brightly-lit techno-utopia with skytubes and floating screens. Similarly, after emerging from Sumatra, my brain prepared me for an encounter with a post apocalyptic zombie wasteland. Patong night-life is a hybrid of both of those visions. It was a scene of pumping music, huge distracting LCD screens, arrogantly drunk white tourists lumbering through the streets (not us of course) and cheeky prostitute girls (or at least very good imitations of girls) whose recognition of our personal space eviscerated the crotch area.
After a few buckets - a litre mix of whiskey, coke and Thai red bull - and drinking games with some Australians who had congealed from the crowd, we rediscovered the ancient art of buying cheap beer from 7/11 and storing it in our stomachs for slow release during dry bar visits. My last memories of the night involved us sitting on the beach helping some Thai prostitutes improve their (already excellent) English skills - although I'm fairly sure now they were actually after some help with their student fees.
The next day the three of us took the bus to Khura Buri for our subsequent boat trip to Surin Island. This little town was at the time hosting what they called the 'Watermelon Festival', which was really just a huge food-fest (but with no watermelons).
Speaking of food, I've noticed that it's changed significantly since Indonesia, in gradations small enough not to notice at the time. In Java I basically just alternated between Mie Goreng and Nasi Goreng (which were delicious), supplementing my protein diet by grazing on nuts during the day. In Malaysia the cuisine is either Chinese or Indian, depending on which part of each city you're in. In Thailand things are more complicated (I'll refrain from mentioning that I think Thai food in Melbourne is better than in Thailand itself) and I've found it harder to avoid meat. I've always been a bit suspicious about a food that when not cooked in exactly the right way will turn around and kill you. Also, I swear that I expend more energy extricating bone shards from my tongue than I get from the nutritional value of the meat. But at this festival I found the perfect alternative: fried insects. They contain no bones except a crunchy exoskeleton and I've certainly never heard of anyone dropping dead from a salmonella-infected locust. We were all insectivours not too long ago, maybe we were onto something.
The speed boat ride to Surin Island was a nasty affair. We'd actually bought a slow ferry ticket to save money but it turns out there is no slow ferry - the proprietors just like to divide up the market for greater passenger numbers, almost like the manufacture of hard disc drives. This trip taught me that anti-nausea pills warning of drowsiness are actually sleeping pills with an anti-nausea side effect: those of us who had taken the complimentary pills all managed to fall asleep sitting up and flailing around. This knowledge would later come in handy.
Surin Island is a remote and spectacularly beautiful tropical island national park. Paul, Karl and I rented a tent right on the high tide line of the beach and spent three amazingly relaxing days luxuriating by the water. Here my activities included reading a Thomas Hardy novel, lying aimlessly in a hammock all afternoon and making some serious head-way in ameliorating my fifteen year long disappointment at having been born into an age lacking cities floating in the gas giants and space elevators flinging passengers between the inner planets. This is, after all, the age of beaches. Soon to end.
Another day-consumer was snorkeling. I have never seen so much amazing stuff under water: endless intricate coral structures, vast schools of large blue fish unconcerned by a human joining their number, a probable mating-ritual between two tropically coloured flat fish swimming around each other in impossibly tight circles and a vertiginous abyss whose depths could be fathomed by sight into receding blackness. I spent a lot of my time perfecting a technique in which depths of about ten metres can be reached: find a spot at the right depth, breathe out all the air in your lungs and stay as still as you can - you drop like a stone to the bottom and you don't need as much oxygen while you're not trying to fight against buoyancy (just remember to leave enough energy to kick your way back up again). Unfortunately, this caused extreme pain in my sinus glands from the pressure (I should have been breathing out all the way down) which can probably be blamed for my sudden development of a cold. I find it ironic that in this region of fearsome tropical diseases I contract the common cold (self-diagnosed) - the only other illness I've so far experienced is one severe hangover (two if you count the one I brought from Melbourne).
Returning to the mainland we all took the night bus to Bangkok - twelve hours away. I ended up being so concerned about missing out on the scenery that I got off at a town called Chumpon, walked most of the very long distance to the train station and slept the night there through the most unpleasant stage of my cold, attacked by a constant swarm of mosquitoes and woken up every hour an a half from trains turning up. This is where my new sleeping pill discovery came into its own.
But the train ride was worth it all - local of course (it took a lot of effort to convince the ticket office that I actually wanted to go slowly), sharing the seats with the real denizens of Thailand, watching the beaches and karsts fly by along the narrow spindly bit of the isthmus and, importantly, reading through a few more grams of the column of books I've now accumulated (I feel like a caryatid). Before Thailand I was reading at an average rate of three millimetres per day but here it's slowed to just over one millimeter per day - a mere seven times faster than India is crunching into China and only twice as fast as the top land-speed record for a continent - so I have a lot of catching up to do.
At last, Bangkok. A new world. Or at least lots of different worlds squished in together and forced to get along. I spent most of the diminishing daylight hours (I've traveled north a fair way now) navigating the Chao Phraya River by local ferry and visiting various wats (Buddhist temples) around the city. I also made an excursion to pick up several more kilos of books kindly donated to me by my Auntie Su through Poste Restante. From here I also undertook a grueling cross-city expedition to replace my purple-smearing camera, which I luckily retained for sentimental reasons as my new one turned out to be just as buggy in its own special way. The next day I managed to get myself all over Bangkok using almost every mode of public transport available: ferry, bus, subway and skytrain. One interesting encounter was a whole linear community built over a functioning railway line, using small rail carts as goods transport but having to disperse several times a day.
The evenings were a different matter. The biggest night involved my old re-acquaintances Paul and Karl and some of their new co-travelers in a Khao-San Road bucket-filled booze-up. I ended up mysteriously possessing a couple of buckets the next day but we put them to good use. Earlier on in the evening we witnessed a white guy being brutally beaten up and even repeatedly tasered by a bunch of bulky Thais in a popular restaurant, which was pretty distressing. I'm sure it was drugs related.
On my last night I met up with a mixed group of local Thais and Queenslanders I'd met on the bus and we went to a great club with a live band playing a jazz/traditional Thai fusion. I'd arranged to meet up with a young co-worker from the Westgate Project here but I must have missed him by mere minutes or metres.
Chiang Mai was next after a long but (sorry 'and') terrific train journey. After an epic quest finding somewhere to stay I wound up at a huge and central wood paneled hostel with bay windows overlooking the city. After a quick and, importantly, successful geohash (Thailand's first) I got down to the serious business of dental tourism. Here I got a few cheap and professional fillings and decided to one day have a wisdom tooth out. It's quite sad to abandon a seemingly permanent part of one's own body, particularly as a result of one's own negligence. I'll run it into the ground first.
The next day I visited some of the thousands of wats around the city. Fading tiles on crumbling stupas next to sparkling new gold-clad Buddhas. A sentence without a verb. Pretentious really.
I leave you on a sad note. Within the grounds of one Buddhist monastery - yes, inside a monastery - I left my hired single-speed bike unlocked outside a temple while I had a peak inside. Of course, returning after a few minutes I found it gone. Gone in that typical way a bike is nicked (I'm used to it now) where you're left wondering if you ever even had a bike in the first place. Now I know you're all going to say "Well you should have locked up your bike then, hmm?". But I actually remember thinking as I mulled over the decision to get the lock out, "I know the situations in which bikes are nicked. This isn't one of them. I'm an expert". Hubris I guess.
I quickly alerted the monks and they took me to room full of giant-screen audiovisual equipment to search the security cameras. I found the yellow-robed techno-monks (they were also the security staff) so incongruous I took a photo of them telling me they'd run out of free disc space just before the theft (see it on facebook!)
Well I could have easily left Chiang Mai, which I was doing in a few hours, without alerting the totally disorganised hirers but instead I handed over 3000 Baht for the bike. Although this is only about $100, to put it in perspective I could have stayed at my hostel for three weeks with that.
I was so depressed the other guests at the hostel took me out to the weekend night market and shouted me a few beers. I'm still getting over it.
Arriving back at Patong Beach I was invited by my English buddies Paul and Karl to cram into their small but luxurious hotel room whose remaining floor space was almost entirely inhabited by their giant friend Will - but we made it work. All that remained was to hit the town with the reckless abandon only Phuket can elicit.
Now, when I progressed through the ascending stages of technological advancement of Indonesia, Malaysia and then Singapore I was half expecting to be transported next to a brightly-lit techno-utopia with skytubes and floating screens. Similarly, after emerging from Sumatra, my brain prepared me for an encounter with a post apocalyptic zombie wasteland. Patong night-life is a hybrid of both of those visions. It was a scene of pumping music, huge distracting LCD screens, arrogantly drunk white tourists lumbering through the streets (not us of course) and cheeky prostitute girls (or at least very good imitations of girls) whose recognition of our personal space eviscerated the crotch area.
After a few buckets - a litre mix of whiskey, coke and Thai red bull - and drinking games with some Australians who had congealed from the crowd, we rediscovered the ancient art of buying cheap beer from 7/11 and storing it in our stomachs for slow release during dry bar visits. My last memories of the night involved us sitting on the beach helping some Thai prostitutes improve their (already excellent) English skills - although I'm fairly sure now they were actually after some help with their student fees.
The next day the three of us took the bus to Khura Buri for our subsequent boat trip to Surin Island. This little town was at the time hosting what they called the 'Watermelon Festival', which was really just a huge food-fest (but with no watermelons).
Speaking of food, I've noticed that it's changed significantly since Indonesia, in gradations small enough not to notice at the time. In Java I basically just alternated between Mie Goreng and Nasi Goreng (which were delicious), supplementing my protein diet by grazing on nuts during the day. In Malaysia the cuisine is either Chinese or Indian, depending on which part of each city you're in. In Thailand things are more complicated (I'll refrain from mentioning that I think Thai food in Melbourne is better than in Thailand itself) and I've found it harder to avoid meat. I've always been a bit suspicious about a food that when not cooked in exactly the right way will turn around and kill you. Also, I swear that I expend more energy extricating bone shards from my tongue than I get from the nutritional value of the meat. But at this festival I found the perfect alternative: fried insects. They contain no bones except a crunchy exoskeleton and I've certainly never heard of anyone dropping dead from a salmonella-infected locust. We were all insectivours not too long ago, maybe we were onto something.
The speed boat ride to Surin Island was a nasty affair. We'd actually bought a slow ferry ticket to save money but it turns out there is no slow ferry - the proprietors just like to divide up the market for greater passenger numbers, almost like the manufacture of hard disc drives. This trip taught me that anti-nausea pills warning of drowsiness are actually sleeping pills with an anti-nausea side effect: those of us who had taken the complimentary pills all managed to fall asleep sitting up and flailing around. This knowledge would later come in handy.
Surin Island is a remote and spectacularly beautiful tropical island national park. Paul, Karl and I rented a tent right on the high tide line of the beach and spent three amazingly relaxing days luxuriating by the water. Here my activities included reading a Thomas Hardy novel, lying aimlessly in a hammock all afternoon and making some serious head-way in ameliorating my fifteen year long disappointment at having been born into an age lacking cities floating in the gas giants and space elevators flinging passengers between the inner planets. This is, after all, the age of beaches. Soon to end.
Another day-consumer was snorkeling. I have never seen so much amazing stuff under water: endless intricate coral structures, vast schools of large blue fish unconcerned by a human joining their number, a probable mating-ritual between two tropically coloured flat fish swimming around each other in impossibly tight circles and a vertiginous abyss whose depths could be fathomed by sight into receding blackness. I spent a lot of my time perfecting a technique in which depths of about ten metres can be reached: find a spot at the right depth, breathe out all the air in your lungs and stay as still as you can - you drop like a stone to the bottom and you don't need as much oxygen while you're not trying to fight against buoyancy (just remember to leave enough energy to kick your way back up again). Unfortunately, this caused extreme pain in my sinus glands from the pressure (I should have been breathing out all the way down) which can probably be blamed for my sudden development of a cold. I find it ironic that in this region of fearsome tropical diseases I contract the common cold (self-diagnosed) - the only other illness I've so far experienced is one severe hangover (two if you count the one I brought from Melbourne).
Returning to the mainland we all took the night bus to Bangkok - twelve hours away. I ended up being so concerned about missing out on the scenery that I got off at a town called Chumpon, walked most of the very long distance to the train station and slept the night there through the most unpleasant stage of my cold, attacked by a constant swarm of mosquitoes and woken up every hour an a half from trains turning up. This is where my new sleeping pill discovery came into its own.
But the train ride was worth it all - local of course (it took a lot of effort to convince the ticket office that I actually wanted to go slowly), sharing the seats with the real denizens of Thailand, watching the beaches and karsts fly by along the narrow spindly bit of the isthmus and, importantly, reading through a few more grams of the column of books I've now accumulated (I feel like a caryatid). Before Thailand I was reading at an average rate of three millimetres per day but here it's slowed to just over one millimeter per day - a mere seven times faster than India is crunching into China and only twice as fast as the top land-speed record for a continent - so I have a lot of catching up to do.
At last, Bangkok. A new world. Or at least lots of different worlds squished in together and forced to get along. I spent most of the diminishing daylight hours (I've traveled north a fair way now) navigating the Chao Phraya River by local ferry and visiting various wats (Buddhist temples) around the city. I also made an excursion to pick up several more kilos of books kindly donated to me by my Auntie Su through Poste Restante. From here I also undertook a grueling cross-city expedition to replace my purple-smearing camera, which I luckily retained for sentimental reasons as my new one turned out to be just as buggy in its own special way. The next day I managed to get myself all over Bangkok using almost every mode of public transport available: ferry, bus, subway and skytrain. One interesting encounter was a whole linear community built over a functioning railway line, using small rail carts as goods transport but having to disperse several times a day.
The evenings were a different matter. The biggest night involved my old re-acquaintances Paul and Karl and some of their new co-travelers in a Khao-San Road bucket-filled booze-up. I ended up mysteriously possessing a couple of buckets the next day but we put them to good use. Earlier on in the evening we witnessed a white guy being brutally beaten up and even repeatedly tasered by a bunch of bulky Thais in a popular restaurant, which was pretty distressing. I'm sure it was drugs related.
On my last night I met up with a mixed group of local Thais and Queenslanders I'd met on the bus and we went to a great club with a live band playing a jazz/traditional Thai fusion. I'd arranged to meet up with a young co-worker from the Westgate Project here but I must have missed him by mere minutes or metres.
Chiang Mai was next after a long but (sorry 'and') terrific train journey. After an epic quest finding somewhere to stay I wound up at a huge and central wood paneled hostel with bay windows overlooking the city. After a quick and, importantly, successful geohash (Thailand's first) I got down to the serious business of dental tourism. Here I got a few cheap and professional fillings and decided to one day have a wisdom tooth out. It's quite sad to abandon a seemingly permanent part of one's own body, particularly as a result of one's own negligence. I'll run it into the ground first.
The next day I visited some of the thousands of wats around the city. Fading tiles on crumbling stupas next to sparkling new gold-clad Buddhas. A sentence without a verb. Pretentious really.
I leave you on a sad note. Within the grounds of one Buddhist monastery - yes, inside a monastery - I left my hired single-speed bike unlocked outside a temple while I had a peak inside. Of course, returning after a few minutes I found it gone. Gone in that typical way a bike is nicked (I'm used to it now) where you're left wondering if you ever even had a bike in the first place. Now I know you're all going to say "Well you should have locked up your bike then, hmm?". But I actually remember thinking as I mulled over the decision to get the lock out, "I know the situations in which bikes are nicked. This isn't one of them. I'm an expert". Hubris I guess.
I quickly alerted the monks and they took me to room full of giant-screen audiovisual equipment to search the security cameras. I found the yellow-robed techno-monks (they were also the security staff) so incongruous I took a photo of them telling me they'd run out of free disc space just before the theft (see it on facebook!)
Well I could have easily left Chiang Mai, which I was doing in a few hours, without alerting the totally disorganised hirers but instead I handed over 3000 Baht for the bike. Although this is only about $100, to put it in perspective I could have stayed at my hostel for three weeks with that.
I was so depressed the other guests at the hostel took me out to the weekend night market and shouted me a few beers. I'm still getting over it.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Escape from Singapore
It seems that the more stuff I get up to the more there is to write in my blog, but the less time I have in which to write it. Another of nature's annoying positive feedback loops.
I'd just left Deon's flat in Singapore with a list of complicated instructions on how to get to Johore, the Malaysian town on the other side of the border. It involved catching about 3 buses and a train, and on the final bus I had a massive miscommunication with the driver and got off about three kilometres too soon. "No worries" I thought, "I'll walk it". This was to be a little more arduous than anticipated.
After about an hour of negotiating freeways and figuring out if I could more accurately be described as a bus or a motorbike for emigration queues I at last had my passport stamped as No Longer In Singapore and to celebrate decided to continue my walk across the causeway into Malaysia.
I think Singaporeans and Malaysians have different ideas to each other about footpaths - along the two kilometre or so gap between the two countries the footpath just sort of petered out until I was walking on the road, hoping my bulky backpack would provide some protection in case of vehicular impacts. Pretty soon this road became a freeway, and I still hadn't entered Malaysia. After another kilometre or so I came across a construction site for a new set of flyovers and the engineers there (probably sensing they were among a kindred spirit) politely waved me through towards my destination of Malaysia (I wonder who pays for freeways between countries?), which was by now encapsulating me in a tall barbed wire cyclone fence.
After squeezing my way along the 30 centimetre wide shoulder I walked underneath an overpass (hanging in Malaysian airspace) upon which a heavily armed policeman was shouting directions at me (which amounted to "Pretend you're a bus, not a motorbike - it's easier to go round corners"). I was pretty relieved he was friendly, but of course this Malaysian cop couldn't actually get to me as I was not under Malaysian jurisdiction - I was in Limbo Land, which didn't seem to have its own police force.
On these sorts of occasions it does occur to me to wonder what Normal People do when they try to get between two widely separated national borders without resorting to motorised transport. These sorts of experiences just don't seem to crop up in other travelers' accounts.
Eventually I got through and into Johore, another urban-prairie/gleaming-city so fashionable in Malaysia. I booked a night train and spent the afternoon wandering around overgrown shopping malls and abandoned waterfront resorts, smelling fennel and admiring vines as they jealously embraced their rotting rafters.
As I sat on the platform waiting for my train a sudden feeling of horror filled me. I had realised that I was about to take a train all the way up to the Thai border, sleeping through the ancient rainforest of Taman Negara and associated highlands that everyone seems to rave about. I checked my guide book to make sure I wasn't missing anything but I got a cold dread when I read that one would have to be a moron to take the 'Jungle Train' at night. I felt so bad I considered abandoning my ticket and not getting on board at all, and when I did reluctantly board I spent most of the night squeezing my face against the window in a vain attempt to see something cool.
Sometimes I find myself thinking I'm living in some kind of Panglossion Paradigm - 'All is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds'. I know it's not very atheist of me - I'll have to pay penance to the patron saint of atheists for that - but I suppose it means I'm an optimist at heart. In this case I soon decided that making my way to Thailand as fast as possible (delayed only by having to take two more busses and another train as well as walking across another border - more easily done this time) was quite a good thing - Malaysia is actually a lot more boring than Thailand. Sorry guys, you tried.
On the train through southern Thailand I finally finished reading 'War and Peace' and hefted it around triumphantly at the other passengers. It really is an amazing book - a vast epic with hundreds of complex but flawed characters and incredibly vivid scenes. Not once was I bored reading it, except for at the end during the very long second epilogue which was a snore inspiring dissertation on the forces of history (including a big whinge about Tolstoy's contemporary Charles Darwin - he obviously upset old Leo's religious sensibilities).
Once I'd finally looked up from the pages of the book I noticed some things about Thailand that are distinctly different from Malaysia - firstly it's much more yellow, Thailand's favourite colour. Secondly, I discovered I could no longer read. This was a bit of a problem as I was used to knowing at which station I needed to alight (although luckily I've retained the ability to decipher information derived from my own world). Another observation is that this was the boundary where the Dutch tourists fade out and the French tourists fade in - vestigial colonialism at work. Finally, I noticed that the usually sharp definition between the sexes is in this country... somewhat indistinct.
After spending the night in Phatthalung - the train line's closest approach to my destination on the coast (I like to macro-navigate by compass when there's a lot of public transport) - I headed to Krabi, a karsk formation environed sea-side town. After finding an appropriate hotel with a balcony overlooking the ocean my first act was to check what geohashes were going that day - there was one 25kms to the east (a 70 km ride in all) - right on the boundary of accessibility for three pm. Nonchalantly I decided to go for it, but after several hours riding a hired mountain bike to exhaustion, being chased by wild dogs and finally failing the geohash by 1.4kms due to a missed turn off and impenetrable jungle I had to admit that it had out-epic-ed my expectations.
The following day, despite my natural aversion to guided tours, I went on a sea-kayaking trip. This was pretty awesome. The highlight was dragging our kayak along several kilometres of deep mangrove mud because of a king-low-tide. My guide kept saying "This is your trip, it's your choice if we push on or turn back now". I've always had trouble with that choice. In the end he told me he'd never attempted doing that before and was amazed that it was even possible.
While kayaking I met two English guys called Paul and Karl and for the next couple of weeks we'd frequently separate and rejoin like a flat stone skimming across a still pond, or more accurately (and awesomely), like a B-52 bomber armed with twin 40 megaton thermonuclear devices being refueled mid-air while continuously circumnavigating the territories of the Soviet Union... but without any of the sexual connotations. We were to meet again the next day for a chartered long-tail boating expedition to some nearby islands.
This day turned out to be one of the highlights of my whole trip. Exploring beautiful deserted beaches shaded by rainforest, climbing overhanging sea cliffs, snorkeling through sea caves and wandering along narrow spindly beaches as they were submerged by the tide on both sides before our eyes, the water so glassily transparent above the sand it looked like bad computer graphics.
On our return we decided to hit the bars along Ao Nang beach, playing pool and drinking buckets (I think I'll have to explain that one later). I had to conscientiously check the time in order to catch the last bus back to Krabi and, not having much experience having to catch the last of anything, missed it. As it happened there was an aboriginal girl from Carlton with us who was on a month-long rest day while cycle-touring from Chiang Mai, and she graciously let me borrow her bike for the night. My bed in Krabi was over 20 kms away.
After a couple of wrong turns (I didn't have a map and had left my compass in Krabi) I slowly threaded my way towards home along a road through the jungle and between looming karst formations. Within a few kilometres of my hotel I relaxed a bit and let the gravity well of Krabi pull me in. Unfortunately, like a frog being slowly boiled after being submerged in a bucket of cold water, it failed to occur to me that I had got so far off the beaten track that I had become lost, roadless and lightless, in a plantation forest. Awoken from my daze by a pack of wild dogs I had just enough time to see the humour in being chased on bike by wild dogs through a dark plantation forest twice in a little over two days before I legged it under the influence of a previously undiscovered reservoir of adrenaline. But the worst part was that I had to ride the bike back in the morning.
My next destination was Phuket. A town so dead and lifeless it had me wondering if I'd got on the wrong bus again. I spent a day reading two books that both coincidentally featured the extinction of humanity by oceans - one, 'Ark' by Stephen Baxter, because the sea levels inexplicably rise by 20 kilometres, and the other, 'Cat's Cradle' by Kurt Vonnegut, because the oceans suddenly turn to ice - I had a lot of trouble separating fiction from reality in that town. Nice architecture though.
The next day I checked out of my hotel and took a local bus to Patong beach. I looked around and warily observed the sinister atmosphere and disphasic inhabitants. I got the distinct feeling I was living in that popular science fiction genre where a planet is discovered in a complex orbit around a multiple star system, but when an eager yet inexperienced batch of young colonists arrive just before a rare period of darkness they realise, naturally to their horror, that the planet's unobserved nocturnal biota is not as benign as its diurnal. I had to get out before nightfall.
I spent the afternoon lazily at the beach, dread still tingling in my lymph system. Succeeding this time in catching the last bus out of there I got a call from Paul. By this stage I was hanging by one arm from the back of the comically overcrowded bus, torqued precariously by my book-loaded pack as the vehicle roared up a hill in first gear a few kilometres away from Patong Beach. Paul and Karl were staying there and wanted to know if I'd care to join them. My curiosity was piqued.
Well, there was no way I could fight my way through the crowd to tell the driver to let me off there, but the bus was traveling at a sedate 15 kms an hour or so, and there was no traffic to speak of behind it, so there was an alternative...
I'd just left Deon's flat in Singapore with a list of complicated instructions on how to get to Johore, the Malaysian town on the other side of the border. It involved catching about 3 buses and a train, and on the final bus I had a massive miscommunication with the driver and got off about three kilometres too soon. "No worries" I thought, "I'll walk it". This was to be a little more arduous than anticipated.
After about an hour of negotiating freeways and figuring out if I could more accurately be described as a bus or a motorbike for emigration queues I at last had my passport stamped as No Longer In Singapore and to celebrate decided to continue my walk across the causeway into Malaysia.
I think Singaporeans and Malaysians have different ideas to each other about footpaths - along the two kilometre or so gap between the two countries the footpath just sort of petered out until I was walking on the road, hoping my bulky backpack would provide some protection in case of vehicular impacts. Pretty soon this road became a freeway, and I still hadn't entered Malaysia. After another kilometre or so I came across a construction site for a new set of flyovers and the engineers there (probably sensing they were among a kindred spirit) politely waved me through towards my destination of Malaysia (I wonder who pays for freeways between countries?), which was by now encapsulating me in a tall barbed wire cyclone fence.
After squeezing my way along the 30 centimetre wide shoulder I walked underneath an overpass (hanging in Malaysian airspace) upon which a heavily armed policeman was shouting directions at me (which amounted to "Pretend you're a bus, not a motorbike - it's easier to go round corners"). I was pretty relieved he was friendly, but of course this Malaysian cop couldn't actually get to me as I was not under Malaysian jurisdiction - I was in Limbo Land, which didn't seem to have its own police force.
On these sorts of occasions it does occur to me to wonder what Normal People do when they try to get between two widely separated national borders without resorting to motorised transport. These sorts of experiences just don't seem to crop up in other travelers' accounts.
Eventually I got through and into Johore, another urban-prairie/gleaming-city so fashionable in Malaysia. I booked a night train and spent the afternoon wandering around overgrown shopping malls and abandoned waterfront resorts, smelling fennel and admiring vines as they jealously embraced their rotting rafters.
As I sat on the platform waiting for my train a sudden feeling of horror filled me. I had realised that I was about to take a train all the way up to the Thai border, sleeping through the ancient rainforest of Taman Negara and associated highlands that everyone seems to rave about. I checked my guide book to make sure I wasn't missing anything but I got a cold dread when I read that one would have to be a moron to take the 'Jungle Train' at night. I felt so bad I considered abandoning my ticket and not getting on board at all, and when I did reluctantly board I spent most of the night squeezing my face against the window in a vain attempt to see something cool.
Sometimes I find myself thinking I'm living in some kind of Panglossion Paradigm - 'All is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds'. I know it's not very atheist of me - I'll have to pay penance to the patron saint of atheists for that - but I suppose it means I'm an optimist at heart. In this case I soon decided that making my way to Thailand as fast as possible (delayed only by having to take two more busses and another train as well as walking across another border - more easily done this time) was quite a good thing - Malaysia is actually a lot more boring than Thailand. Sorry guys, you tried.
On the train through southern Thailand I finally finished reading 'War and Peace' and hefted it around triumphantly at the other passengers. It really is an amazing book - a vast epic with hundreds of complex but flawed characters and incredibly vivid scenes. Not once was I bored reading it, except for at the end during the very long second epilogue which was a snore inspiring dissertation on the forces of history (including a big whinge about Tolstoy's contemporary Charles Darwin - he obviously upset old Leo's religious sensibilities).
Once I'd finally looked up from the pages of the book I noticed some things about Thailand that are distinctly different from Malaysia - firstly it's much more yellow, Thailand's favourite colour. Secondly, I discovered I could no longer read. This was a bit of a problem as I was used to knowing at which station I needed to alight (although luckily I've retained the ability to decipher information derived from my own world). Another observation is that this was the boundary where the Dutch tourists fade out and the French tourists fade in - vestigial colonialism at work. Finally, I noticed that the usually sharp definition between the sexes is in this country... somewhat indistinct.
After spending the night in Phatthalung - the train line's closest approach to my destination on the coast (I like to macro-navigate by compass when there's a lot of public transport) - I headed to Krabi, a karsk formation environed sea-side town. After finding an appropriate hotel with a balcony overlooking the ocean my first act was to check what geohashes were going that day - there was one 25kms to the east (a 70 km ride in all) - right on the boundary of accessibility for three pm. Nonchalantly I decided to go for it, but after several hours riding a hired mountain bike to exhaustion, being chased by wild dogs and finally failing the geohash by 1.4kms due to a missed turn off and impenetrable jungle I had to admit that it had out-epic-ed my expectations.
The following day, despite my natural aversion to guided tours, I went on a sea-kayaking trip. This was pretty awesome. The highlight was dragging our kayak along several kilometres of deep mangrove mud because of a king-low-tide. My guide kept saying "This is your trip, it's your choice if we push on or turn back now". I've always had trouble with that choice. In the end he told me he'd never attempted doing that before and was amazed that it was even possible.
While kayaking I met two English guys called Paul and Karl and for the next couple of weeks we'd frequently separate and rejoin like a flat stone skimming across a still pond, or more accurately (and awesomely), like a B-52 bomber armed with twin 40 megaton thermonuclear devices being refueled mid-air while continuously circumnavigating the territories of the Soviet Union... but without any of the sexual connotations. We were to meet again the next day for a chartered long-tail boating expedition to some nearby islands.
This day turned out to be one of the highlights of my whole trip. Exploring beautiful deserted beaches shaded by rainforest, climbing overhanging sea cliffs, snorkeling through sea caves and wandering along narrow spindly beaches as they were submerged by the tide on both sides before our eyes, the water so glassily transparent above the sand it looked like bad computer graphics.
On our return we decided to hit the bars along Ao Nang beach, playing pool and drinking buckets (I think I'll have to explain that one later). I had to conscientiously check the time in order to catch the last bus back to Krabi and, not having much experience having to catch the last of anything, missed it. As it happened there was an aboriginal girl from Carlton with us who was on a month-long rest day while cycle-touring from Chiang Mai, and she graciously let me borrow her bike for the night. My bed in Krabi was over 20 kms away.
After a couple of wrong turns (I didn't have a map and had left my compass in Krabi) I slowly threaded my way towards home along a road through the jungle and between looming karst formations. Within a few kilometres of my hotel I relaxed a bit and let the gravity well of Krabi pull me in. Unfortunately, like a frog being slowly boiled after being submerged in a bucket of cold water, it failed to occur to me that I had got so far off the beaten track that I had become lost, roadless and lightless, in a plantation forest. Awoken from my daze by a pack of wild dogs I had just enough time to see the humour in being chased on bike by wild dogs through a dark plantation forest twice in a little over two days before I legged it under the influence of a previously undiscovered reservoir of adrenaline. But the worst part was that I had to ride the bike back in the morning.
My next destination was Phuket. A town so dead and lifeless it had me wondering if I'd got on the wrong bus again. I spent a day reading two books that both coincidentally featured the extinction of humanity by oceans - one, 'Ark' by Stephen Baxter, because the sea levels inexplicably rise by 20 kilometres, and the other, 'Cat's Cradle' by Kurt Vonnegut, because the oceans suddenly turn to ice - I had a lot of trouble separating fiction from reality in that town. Nice architecture though.
The next day I checked out of my hotel and took a local bus to Patong beach. I looked around and warily observed the sinister atmosphere and disphasic inhabitants. I got the distinct feeling I was living in that popular science fiction genre where a planet is discovered in a complex orbit around a multiple star system, but when an eager yet inexperienced batch of young colonists arrive just before a rare period of darkness they realise, naturally to their horror, that the planet's unobserved nocturnal biota is not as benign as its diurnal. I had to get out before nightfall.
I spent the afternoon lazily at the beach, dread still tingling in my lymph system. Succeeding this time in catching the last bus out of there I got a call from Paul. By this stage I was hanging by one arm from the back of the comically overcrowded bus, torqued precariously by my book-loaded pack as the vehicle roared up a hill in first gear a few kilometres away from Patong Beach. Paul and Karl were staying there and wanted to know if I'd care to join them. My curiosity was piqued.
Well, there was no way I could fight my way through the crowd to tell the driver to let me off there, but the bus was traveling at a sedate 15 kms an hour or so, and there was no traffic to speak of behind it, so there was an alternative...
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Christmas in KL
Feeling guilty about having spent so much time not really doing anything in the Cameron Highlands I took a bus south to Kualar Lumpur where I spent an equal amount of time doing an equal amount of not really anything. The bus drove down a rainforesty road that wound its way through the mountains, and when it got to the flatlands offered spectacular views of some crazy droog things (yes, droogs! Look them up!).
And guess who I found in KL - my old pal Jasper! He was on his way back to Europe after some crazy times in Bali and needed to do some Christmas shopping. So Jasper, a Dutch girl called Margot and I spent the next few days exploring all KL had to offer - its malls.
In the first mall we came to we discovered a small bookshop somehow enclosed within which was an estimated cubic metre of Mills and Boon romance novels. Naturally we had to avail ourselves of this bountiful resource by buying the one with the stupidest title: 'The Ruthless Greek's Virgin Princess' (actually, they were all about that stupid). The hostel's rooftop garden and its views between the city skyscrapers were the setting for an evening of reading aloud the erudite tome but the others lost interest between the sex scenes. Come on guys - you've got to appreciate its literary style!
Other activities in KL included hanging out at the Beatles Bar, which played the same 20 Beatles songs on repeat, arguing over the rules of the card game shithead, singing karaoke with varying degrees of talent and success, looking up at but not from the Petronas Towers (Malaysia's proudest achievement in its 50 thousand year history), not forking out for an indoor rollorcoaster ride after an epic search for it, and seeing 'Avatar' twice because it was friggin' awesome. I actually stayed an extra night in this mall city just to see it for the second time.
Christmas was spent ten pin bowling at midnight (Jasper's superior skill and uncanny luck won him every game), searching for an open bar at 2 am, and during the day in a brief phone call to the family at home and then churning through 'War and Peace' in my hotel room.
I miss Sumatra: the chaos, the gritty reality, the brash cultural idiosyncrasies, the cheap food. Malaysia is all so... easy. Things run on time, people speak English, there aren't any surprises and fewer catastrophes. Malacca, my next destination, with its grungy Chinatown, awkward suburbia sprawling from its historical centre and subsequent identity crisis is a reminder of what I'd left behind. Here I visited four musea in one day and ate at a self-deep-fry restaurant (where I skewered my thumb so deeply with the tail of a prawn that our whole table got free beer). I even tried to see the real Malacca by hiring a dual suspension mountain bike but I ended up just heading to the nearest non-oil-refinery-contaminated beach, which turned out to be about 35 kms up the coast.
The next stop was Singapore, the setting for the greatest cyclo-battle in world history. I can't help barracking for the Japanese whenever I hear about that one. As soon as I entered my dorm here I knew that my time in Singapore would be dominated by partying when a group, already frenetically drunk, immediately absorbed me into its immanent town hitting expedition. We traveled via the exquisitely efficient metro system to a bar called Zouks which turned out to be so packed with hundreds (thousands?) of people that I experienced a rare feeling of claustrophobia, and, not having a Singaporean SIM card at this stage, lost everyone almost instantly and spent the next 40 minutes struggling impolitely for the door. Baulking at a taxi-ride home in Singaporean dollars (which are about the same as Australian ones) I chose to run it. At every turn locals responded with my pleas for directions with the qualifying addendum 'But you'll never make it'. Needless to say that I did.
Singapore is expensive. It's not so much that individual items in Singapore are individually more expensive than elsewhere, although they are, it's more that staying in a place like Malacca one can get a feel for the town by living cheaply. In Singapore one can only get a feel for the town by living it up - I was spending $100 per day for my week here, four times more than average. On one night out on the town I contributed to the purchase of a $50 cocktail - an 'intravenous drip' at a medically themed bar. At another bar - from which we with difficulty escaped wallets intact - a jug of ordinary Hoegaarden cost $120 (but, as the waitress explained sympathetically, if we bought two we could get a third for a measly $40).
Happy hours are often great value though. After I'd been taken under the wing of my orchestra's harp player and girlfriend of my replacement at the Paint and Wallpaper, Deon, we steeped ourselves in an afternoon of happy hour beer at a waterfront brewery. It turned out that sitting right next to us was my friend Lucia, a viola player also in orchestra. Small microbrewery-in-a-large-city world.
But the main event here was New Year's Eve. In fact, that's really the whole reason I came down to Singapore in the first place. The Welsh persons and French Canadians from my dorm and I headed down to the super-commercial Sentosa Island during the afternoon, which one reaches by monorail, for some beach party awesomeness. I was initially quite disappointed, the weather was gloomy and there was an evident lack of fun people. I mainly amused myself during this time by visiting the purported 'Southernmost Point of Continental Asia' - i.e. the furthest south you can go without gravitationally disconnecting yourself from land, although they didn't express it like that.
But pretty soon the party got started. Thousands of people were thronging the beach, initially only pretending to be drunk to save money but soon falling into mutually reinforced enjoyment. As things ramped up towards the big moment we all got pretty wild about some of the bars along the beach: one had a swimming pool that was swamped in foam such that it made everyone wet and slimy - it's been a while since I've had so much fun at a bar. In fact this fun was so all-encompassing that it took me some time to figure out why everyone was shouting out in unison single digit integers in reverse numerical order.
At about 5 am I decided it was time to pack it in. I'd lost my companions to homeward urges long ago and so decided to wait it out until the trains started in the morning by asking for a garbage bag from one of the Aftermath Crew and sleeping in it on the beach - those things don't really breathe well.
But Singapore isn't all fun and parties, there's a serious side to it too - it is, after all, a police state. At one point I saw about a dozen cops in riot gear marching purposely down a well-behaved shopping street at five metre spacings toting fully automatic weaponry - their fingers poised precariously on the triggers and their faces sporting expressions of hardened determination as though preparing to massacre a band of gum-chewing miscreants. Despite the fact that Singapore has so many excessively strict laws I'm pretty sure I managed to obey all of them during my time there (except of course public urination, but we're all human). And yes, the trains do run on time.
A beautiful city though. It has some spectacularly massive buildings spanning all architectural eras of the last two centuries: Neoclassical, Victorian Colonial, International Style and Whatever The Next One Will Be Called. One vast Art Deco monumental skyscraper adorned with sombre high altitude male caryatids looked like an evil vision of the future - if the year was 1936 and the future was 1963.
For the last couple of days I had accepted Deon's extremely generous offer for me to stay at her flat in what Singaporeans affectionately misnomer The Heartland (what we would call suburbia) - I think a more anatomically correct term would be Skinland, or at least Muscle-Tissue-Land. In order to visit the Singapore Botanical Gardens (which I found, like many things, to be inferior to Melbourne's) I ended up having to take seven buses. However, Deon's place was amazing - I spent a non-negligible amount of time enjoying her huge swimming pool and learning to play her harp (and doing pretty well too I might say). She has three generations of women living there: grandmother, mother and herself. We capped off my stay with a rambunctious video chat involving my old household, the Paint and Wallpaper, over a couple of... over a reasonable number of beers.
The next day I extracted myself from Singapore knowing not my destination but only a direction - north. My departure would prove to be a little more involved than might be assumed.
And guess who I found in KL - my old pal Jasper! He was on his way back to Europe after some crazy times in Bali and needed to do some Christmas shopping. So Jasper, a Dutch girl called Margot and I spent the next few days exploring all KL had to offer - its malls.
In the first mall we came to we discovered a small bookshop somehow enclosed within which was an estimated cubic metre of Mills and Boon romance novels. Naturally we had to avail ourselves of this bountiful resource by buying the one with the stupidest title: 'The Ruthless Greek's Virgin Princess' (actually, they were all about that stupid). The hostel's rooftop garden and its views between the city skyscrapers were the setting for an evening of reading aloud the erudite tome but the others lost interest between the sex scenes. Come on guys - you've got to appreciate its literary style!
Other activities in KL included hanging out at the Beatles Bar, which played the same 20 Beatles songs on repeat, arguing over the rules of the card game shithead, singing karaoke with varying degrees of talent and success, looking up at but not from the Petronas Towers (Malaysia's proudest achievement in its 50 thousand year history), not forking out for an indoor rollorcoaster ride after an epic search for it, and seeing 'Avatar' twice because it was friggin' awesome. I actually stayed an extra night in this mall city just to see it for the second time.
Christmas was spent ten pin bowling at midnight (Jasper's superior skill and uncanny luck won him every game), searching for an open bar at 2 am, and during the day in a brief phone call to the family at home and then churning through 'War and Peace' in my hotel room.
I miss Sumatra: the chaos, the gritty reality, the brash cultural idiosyncrasies, the cheap food. Malaysia is all so... easy. Things run on time, people speak English, there aren't any surprises and fewer catastrophes. Malacca, my next destination, with its grungy Chinatown, awkward suburbia sprawling from its historical centre and subsequent identity crisis is a reminder of what I'd left behind. Here I visited four musea in one day and ate at a self-deep-fry restaurant (where I skewered my thumb so deeply with the tail of a prawn that our whole table got free beer). I even tried to see the real Malacca by hiring a dual suspension mountain bike but I ended up just heading to the nearest non-oil-refinery-contaminated beach, which turned out to be about 35 kms up the coast.
The next stop was Singapore, the setting for the greatest cyclo-battle in world history. I can't help barracking for the Japanese whenever I hear about that one. As soon as I entered my dorm here I knew that my time in Singapore would be dominated by partying when a group, already frenetically drunk, immediately absorbed me into its immanent town hitting expedition. We traveled via the exquisitely efficient metro system to a bar called Zouks which turned out to be so packed with hundreds (thousands?) of people that I experienced a rare feeling of claustrophobia, and, not having a Singaporean SIM card at this stage, lost everyone almost instantly and spent the next 40 minutes struggling impolitely for the door. Baulking at a taxi-ride home in Singaporean dollars (which are about the same as Australian ones) I chose to run it. At every turn locals responded with my pleas for directions with the qualifying addendum 'But you'll never make it'. Needless to say that I did.
Singapore is expensive. It's not so much that individual items in Singapore are individually more expensive than elsewhere, although they are, it's more that staying in a place like Malacca one can get a feel for the town by living cheaply. In Singapore one can only get a feel for the town by living it up - I was spending $100 per day for my week here, four times more than average. On one night out on the town I contributed to the purchase of a $50 cocktail - an 'intravenous drip' at a medically themed bar. At another bar - from which we with difficulty escaped wallets intact - a jug of ordinary Hoegaarden cost $120 (but, as the waitress explained sympathetically, if we bought two we could get a third for a measly $40).
Happy hours are often great value though. After I'd been taken under the wing of my orchestra's harp player and girlfriend of my replacement at the Paint and Wallpaper, Deon, we steeped ourselves in an afternoon of happy hour beer at a waterfront brewery. It turned out that sitting right next to us was my friend Lucia, a viola player also in orchestra. Small microbrewery-in-a-large-city world.
But the main event here was New Year's Eve. In fact, that's really the whole reason I came down to Singapore in the first place. The Welsh persons and French Canadians from my dorm and I headed down to the super-commercial Sentosa Island during the afternoon, which one reaches by monorail, for some beach party awesomeness. I was initially quite disappointed, the weather was gloomy and there was an evident lack of fun people. I mainly amused myself during this time by visiting the purported 'Southernmost Point of Continental Asia' - i.e. the furthest south you can go without gravitationally disconnecting yourself from land, although they didn't express it like that.
But pretty soon the party got started. Thousands of people were thronging the beach, initially only pretending to be drunk to save money but soon falling into mutually reinforced enjoyment. As things ramped up towards the big moment we all got pretty wild about some of the bars along the beach: one had a swimming pool that was swamped in foam such that it made everyone wet and slimy - it's been a while since I've had so much fun at a bar. In fact this fun was so all-encompassing that it took me some time to figure out why everyone was shouting out in unison single digit integers in reverse numerical order.
At about 5 am I decided it was time to pack it in. I'd lost my companions to homeward urges long ago and so decided to wait it out until the trains started in the morning by asking for a garbage bag from one of the Aftermath Crew and sleeping in it on the beach - those things don't really breathe well.
But Singapore isn't all fun and parties, there's a serious side to it too - it is, after all, a police state. At one point I saw about a dozen cops in riot gear marching purposely down a well-behaved shopping street at five metre spacings toting fully automatic weaponry - their fingers poised precariously on the triggers and their faces sporting expressions of hardened determination as though preparing to massacre a band of gum-chewing miscreants. Despite the fact that Singapore has so many excessively strict laws I'm pretty sure I managed to obey all of them during my time there (except of course public urination, but we're all human). And yes, the trains do run on time.
A beautiful city though. It has some spectacularly massive buildings spanning all architectural eras of the last two centuries: Neoclassical, Victorian Colonial, International Style and Whatever The Next One Will Be Called. One vast Art Deco monumental skyscraper adorned with sombre high altitude male caryatids looked like an evil vision of the future - if the year was 1936 and the future was 1963.
For the last couple of days I had accepted Deon's extremely generous offer for me to stay at her flat in what Singaporeans affectionately misnomer The Heartland (what we would call suburbia) - I think a more anatomically correct term would be Skinland, or at least Muscle-Tissue-Land. In order to visit the Singapore Botanical Gardens (which I found, like many things, to be inferior to Melbourne's) I ended up having to take seven buses. However, Deon's place was amazing - I spent a non-negligible amount of time enjoying her huge swimming pool and learning to play her harp (and doing pretty well too I might say). She has three generations of women living there: grandmother, mother and herself. We capped off my stay with a rambunctious video chat involving my old household, the Paint and Wallpaper, over a couple of... over a reasonable number of beers.
The next day I extracted myself from Singapore knowing not my destination but only a direction - north. My departure would prove to be a little more involved than might be assumed.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The Straits of Malacca
Crossing the Straits of Malacca from Indonesia to Malaysia changed my environment drastically. While I was on the 'fast-ferry', a vessel that lurched awkwardly between the air/water interface as though it was trying to rid itself of its passengers (if not their lunch), I met a guy from Malvern and instantly put him into my debt by drugging him up against an impending motion-induced hurl. Our duo was soon augmented by the introduction of an English girl, with whom I ran my usual joke about how Australians believe they're so English they still think they have to go to Europe for their holidays, despite Australia being nearly three orders of magnitude further away from it than Britain is.
The ferry ride itself was amazing enough to make up for it being twice the cost of the equivalent plane trip - we saw a plethora of flying fish, dolphins, the wary sharing of the waters between massive container ships and tiny fishing boats, a terrific sunset and eventually the specter of approaching land.
During my final weeks in Indonesia I'd been carefully avoiding learning too much of the language, knowing that I'd need to make room for the next language I'd be encountering. My skills in this department had been progressing fairly well despite the fact that I found that communicating complex ideas could actually be achieved through the judicious employment of exaggerated facial expressions and carefully choreographed mime displays. I'd mastered the numeric system, times and dates, transport and distances, food, money and "Go away" - all the important stuff. I'd even learned a few verbs but was too afraid to use them in a sentence. I think my greatest achievement was having a political discussion in Indonesian: "SBY good?", "Yes, good", "Megawati good?", "No, Megawati bad".
But when I'd landed in Malaysia I discovered to my horror that that the Malaysian language is practically identical to Indonesian! I'd been forgetting all that language for nothing. However, this frustration proved premature as it turns out Malaysians only ever really speak Chinese or English, so I haven't actually had a chance to use it here.
You know, I've never understood the name 'Indonesia' - 'Islands of the Hindus'. Indonesia is full of Muslims, Hindus live in India, which means 'Land of the Indus River', which is actually in Pakistan (a nation named for an acronym of states, not all of which it actually controls). At least 'Malaysia', or 'Bad Asia', is straight-forward about itself.
The major change I noticed traveling between these two countries, apart from an increase in Starbucks encounters and my newfound ability to attract no attention to myself, is the national mood. Indonesians are more depressed than Malaysians. In Indonesia, the Asian Tiger crash of '97, terrorism and separatism, the tsunami and other natural disasters, the advent of cheap airfares erasing the tourism industry of most medium-sized towns and then another economic collapse in the form of the GFC seems to have imbued the population with a resignation of their future that ambushes one like a street party in a sleeping gas attack... or the Grand Final played by koalas. People spend so much of their time lying around! Most businesses are so used to not getting any customers that all the staff spend the day watching TV and eying passes-by with suspicious glances. Things always happen 'tomorrow' but are 'not worth it' and I was always asked what I was doing there in the first place. Saying that, the people do put on a brave face and are extremely friendly, smiling and laughing a lot of the time but hiding a general feeling that there is nothing to hope for. Heartbreaking.
Malaysia seems to be the exact opposite. In every person I meet I get the sense that they are on the cusp of great things, live in exciting times and have big plans and ambitions that will change themselves and the world for the better. This positivity is a breath of fresh air.
The island of Penang was my first encounter with Malaysia. Taking a break from constant travel I spent four days hanging out with my Melbourne buddy, enjoying my first beer in almost a month (a Royal Stout, naturally), going to the beach, picking up a free two-month Thai visa (they're on special right now) and seeing the movie 'Zombieland'. I also discovered that my premature ejaculation from Sumatra (there are probably better ways to express that) resulted in some embarrassing reading material. 'Sopie's World' and 'Anne of Green Gables' are good books to read locked in a hotel room 500kms from one's nearest co-Westerner, but reading them in a dormitory full of curious and literate judges of personality is another matter - especially when the covers are bright pink with girly handwritten titles. I quickly moved on to the more masculine 'War and Peace' which brings impressed glances and sympathetic nods (undeserved of course - all 560,000 words are engrossing). My gradual progress through this paper brick is followed by everyone around me.
Penang is like two cities inhabiting the same area. One is the gleaming skyscraper city of the present and the other the decaying British colonial remnants of the past. This latter city is largely left to rot out its existence independently of its successor. Huge mansions hosting collapsed roofs and trees tearing its walls apart, whole rows of terrace houses with vines twisting window frames loose and clinging onto bricks before they can fall to the street below. It's a reminder that the wilderness is always out there, waiting for us to look away for just a second before it regains its mastery over our environment. In a war with nature we can never win, only destroy ourselves.
I took the bus over the bridge to the Cameron Highlands on the peninsula. Here I loudly declared to my dorm room that this was the first night I'd ever spent on the Eurasian Super-continent, forgetting for a moment that I've actually traveled for three months in India which is connected to Eurasia via the not inconsiderable land bridge called the Himalayas. I tried to amend the definition to mean the Eurasian Tectonic Plate, but that includes annoying islands I have also visited like the UK, Singapore, Japan, Penang and, well, Indonesia. Anyway, I could at least declare that I was now just a stroll away from Nicholas Sarkozy, something one misses when inhabiting Australia.
I think all the energy reserves and sleep deprivation quotas I'd been expending in the last... four years?... finally hit zero and demanded a recharge here. Major attractions in the Cameron Highlands include beautiful tea plantations, towering rain-forest canopies, the preserved culture of the local tribes and the world's largest flower. I skipped all of these in preference for hanging out in the dorm's common-room which overlooked the rain-soaked valley, reveling in the company of English-speakers, playing scrabble, reading War and Peace, consuming a 1.7 litre tub of icecream and watching dozens of hours of Hollywood DVDs. I spent a whole week here - five days longer than planned. I did go on a couple of short walks around the local hills and ate at some Indian restaurants a few times - I think that counts as environmental and cultural tourism.
After a while I followed a bunch of travelers on a bus to Kuala Lumpur for another week of extreme chilling out - this time in the local environment of malls.
The ferry ride itself was amazing enough to make up for it being twice the cost of the equivalent plane trip - we saw a plethora of flying fish, dolphins, the wary sharing of the waters between massive container ships and tiny fishing boats, a terrific sunset and eventually the specter of approaching land.
During my final weeks in Indonesia I'd been carefully avoiding learning too much of the language, knowing that I'd need to make room for the next language I'd be encountering. My skills in this department had been progressing fairly well despite the fact that I found that communicating complex ideas could actually be achieved through the judicious employment of exaggerated facial expressions and carefully choreographed mime displays. I'd mastered the numeric system, times and dates, transport and distances, food, money and "Go away" - all the important stuff. I'd even learned a few verbs but was too afraid to use them in a sentence. I think my greatest achievement was having a political discussion in Indonesian: "SBY good?", "Yes, good", "Megawati good?", "No, Megawati bad".
But when I'd landed in Malaysia I discovered to my horror that that the Malaysian language is practically identical to Indonesian! I'd been forgetting all that language for nothing. However, this frustration proved premature as it turns out Malaysians only ever really speak Chinese or English, so I haven't actually had a chance to use it here.
You know, I've never understood the name 'Indonesia' - 'Islands of the Hindus'. Indonesia is full of Muslims, Hindus live in India, which means 'Land of the Indus River', which is actually in Pakistan (a nation named for an acronym of states, not all of which it actually controls). At least 'Malaysia', or 'Bad Asia', is straight-forward about itself.
The major change I noticed traveling between these two countries, apart from an increase in Starbucks encounters and my newfound ability to attract no attention to myself, is the national mood. Indonesians are more depressed than Malaysians. In Indonesia, the Asian Tiger crash of '97, terrorism and separatism, the tsunami and other natural disasters, the advent of cheap airfares erasing the tourism industry of most medium-sized towns and then another economic collapse in the form of the GFC seems to have imbued the population with a resignation of their future that ambushes one like a street party in a sleeping gas attack... or the Grand Final played by koalas. People spend so much of their time lying around! Most businesses are so used to not getting any customers that all the staff spend the day watching TV and eying passes-by with suspicious glances. Things always happen 'tomorrow' but are 'not worth it' and I was always asked what I was doing there in the first place. Saying that, the people do put on a brave face and are extremely friendly, smiling and laughing a lot of the time but hiding a general feeling that there is nothing to hope for. Heartbreaking.
Malaysia seems to be the exact opposite. In every person I meet I get the sense that they are on the cusp of great things, live in exciting times and have big plans and ambitions that will change themselves and the world for the better. This positivity is a breath of fresh air.
The island of Penang was my first encounter with Malaysia. Taking a break from constant travel I spent four days hanging out with my Melbourne buddy, enjoying my first beer in almost a month (a Royal Stout, naturally), going to the beach, picking up a free two-month Thai visa (they're on special right now) and seeing the movie 'Zombieland'. I also discovered that my premature ejaculation from Sumatra (there are probably better ways to express that) resulted in some embarrassing reading material. 'Sopie's World' and 'Anne of Green Gables' are good books to read locked in a hotel room 500kms from one's nearest co-Westerner, but reading them in a dormitory full of curious and literate judges of personality is another matter - especially when the covers are bright pink with girly handwritten titles. I quickly moved on to the more masculine 'War and Peace' which brings impressed glances and sympathetic nods (undeserved of course - all 560,000 words are engrossing). My gradual progress through this paper brick is followed by everyone around me.
Penang is like two cities inhabiting the same area. One is the gleaming skyscraper city of the present and the other the decaying British colonial remnants of the past. This latter city is largely left to rot out its existence independently of its successor. Huge mansions hosting collapsed roofs and trees tearing its walls apart, whole rows of terrace houses with vines twisting window frames loose and clinging onto bricks before they can fall to the street below. It's a reminder that the wilderness is always out there, waiting for us to look away for just a second before it regains its mastery over our environment. In a war with nature we can never win, only destroy ourselves.
I took the bus over the bridge to the Cameron Highlands on the peninsula. Here I loudly declared to my dorm room that this was the first night I'd ever spent on the Eurasian Super-continent, forgetting for a moment that I've actually traveled for three months in India which is connected to Eurasia via the not inconsiderable land bridge called the Himalayas. I tried to amend the definition to mean the Eurasian Tectonic Plate, but that includes annoying islands I have also visited like the UK, Singapore, Japan, Penang and, well, Indonesia. Anyway, I could at least declare that I was now just a stroll away from Nicholas Sarkozy, something one misses when inhabiting Australia.
I think all the energy reserves and sleep deprivation quotas I'd been expending in the last... four years?... finally hit zero and demanded a recharge here. Major attractions in the Cameron Highlands include beautiful tea plantations, towering rain-forest canopies, the preserved culture of the local tribes and the world's largest flower. I skipped all of these in preference for hanging out in the dorm's common-room which overlooked the rain-soaked valley, reveling in the company of English-speakers, playing scrabble, reading War and Peace, consuming a 1.7 litre tub of icecream and watching dozens of hours of Hollywood DVDs. I spent a whole week here - five days longer than planned. I did go on a couple of short walks around the local hills and ate at some Indian restaurants a few times - I think that counts as environmental and cultural tourism.
After a while I followed a bunch of travelers on a bus to Kuala Lumpur for another week of extreme chilling out - this time in the local environment of malls.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
The Storm Out
Just after the Kerinci Valley the architecture becomes awesome in Sumatra. All the buildings look like they're extreme parodies of 'Asian Style'. Almost like exaggerated Sydney Opera Houses jutting out of them, the roofs curve upwards at the ends to points that are almost vertical, sometimes with several layers set inside one another. If I ever build a house I'm telling whoever is cohabiting it with me now that it's going to have a Sumatran roof, got that?
...And then in the city of Padang a new architectural feature: destruction. I was only there for one night but it was enough to get a glimpse of a range of indiscriminately collapsed buildings from the earthquake a few months ago. Luckily the place was now mostly functioning. I met a local on the bus (the buses here all sport spoilers by the way - they look hilarious) and had my evening occupied by a tour of many of the local student share houses, as well as some interesting collapsed buildings. This topic was always brought up awkwardly, and it was embarrassing to answer. "Err... well... yes. Yes I do. I want to see your beautiful city crushed by nature's destructive fury".
For this impudence, the gods decided to spite me by inserting a piece of grit in my eye while I was being ridden around town on a motorbike - the next 24 hours were so painful I naively made all sorts of vows about how much I would appreciate being a healthy person from then on.
Bukit Tinggi was next on the agenda - an awesome hill town with a cool traveling scene - albeit without the travelers. The only exceptions were two Americans, my first westerners in Sumatra, allowing me the opportunity of my first real conversation in English for almost three weeks. Here I was staying in a hotel room overlooking such an awesome view, and conveniently located near a museum of stuffed Siamese twin farm animals, that I decided to stay three nights - but I found myself checking out after the second night. I'm too restless.
I got on a suitable seeming bus about lunchtime to go to Lake Toba, touted in Wikipedia as being a super-volcano formed with a 'Volcanic Explosivity Index of 8' or 'Mega-Colossal'. My one additional requirement was that the bus stop on the equator (as defined by me) which took a surprising amount convincing (come on - it's THE EQUATOR!)
Not long after taking off, winding through totally spectacular hilly jungle scenery, we arrived at this geographic marvel. I sat at the front of the bus counting down the seconds of latitude from my GPS to let the driver know when to stop and upon reaching zero hurriedly ran out to take some shots. Of course the 'official' equator was a few metres to the north of that designated by my GPS but whatever, the Northern Hemisphere can have that dumb ribbon of land. I wasn't going to build a space elevator on it anyway.
Having crossed the equator, the world seemed different. Not only did it get a lot more landy, there being more of that stuff in the north, but suddenly it got colder, no doubt because I was plunged into winter having previously been enjoying the summer months. I also felt a lot more important, cohabiting the hemisphere with the likes of Socrates, Shakespeare and Kevin Rudd - let me know if any of you Southern Hemispherians want me to use my Northern influence for anything. I also distinctly felt myself change elevation suddenly - after all, the two halves of the world can't be expected to match up exactly.
It is also worth noting that at that very instant I reached my greatest ever land speed record: 1675km/hr relative to the Earth's core. I had thought that it was my greatest speed relative to the core ever, having largely traveled west when flying over the equator, but annoyingly, the addition of the velocity vectors coming home from India by plane over the equator several years ago would have made me faster - I wasn't even aware of the occasion.
However, I did stay up to midnight for what I thought was an even more awesome personal record smash: my fastest speed relative to the Sun: 30.47km/sec. This award had to wait for midnight because that's when the rotational and orbital vectors of the Earth combine to the greatest determinant.
But suddenly I thought of something! What was my speed when I was sleeping on Gunung Kerinci? Struggling to remember my high school geometry I plugged in my elevation at midnight on Kerinci (3060m plus the distance the core) and the equatorial radius of the Earth (6380kms) into the sides of a right-angled triangle and found that my Kerinci camp would have to be less than 199kms from the equator to exceed my current speed. Crap. My GPS told me it was only 189kms south of it - I'd been 79m/hr faster on Kerinci and didn't even think to celebrate it (for pedants, my 50km distance from the equator at midnight on the bus was canceled out by my 200m elevation). I'd better work out my top speeds relative to the galactic centre and Virgo Supercluster so I don't miss those too.
The rest of the bus ride carried on into the night and then well into the next day (although the mental geometry did burn a few hours), but I was never actually bored. The first part of the ride was really spectacular as we crossed the Sumatran highlands - towering hills covered in rainforest and deep valleys etched out by paddy terraces. But even during the long flat later sections dominated by endless palm oil plantations (damn you bio-fuels!) I enjoyed the warm glow of camaraderie that inevitably develops in these situations: when the bus broke down or got stopped by a fallen log we were all in the shits together. I feel more comfortable subversively traveling techno-blasting 'ekonomi' through leafy Sumatran suburbs than pompously reclined and flat-screened 'eksecutif' through the slums. Luxury insulates you from real life.
But that's not to say this massive and crammed bus ride did not elicit any nail-biting moments. I had my GPS out for a lot of the trip (often a curse on bus rides because they wind around so much) and during the morning I saw Lake Toba 140kms ahead, then 100kms 45 degrees to the left, then 80kms 90 degrees to the left. When it started to peel away to 135 degrees and then 180 degrees off, with the distance increasing at an increasing rate, I knew something had gone very wrong.
"Danau Toba?" I asked the passengers around me. Polite nods and nervous grins were the reply. This was not a good sign. To increase the tension, the bus driver played the same 10 songs on repeat through the extremely loud sound system, and heroically managed to stop and let us out only once during the entire trip (I was so dysphasic here that I thought we were at a buffet and served myself from the restaurant's kitchen - I was the laughing stock of the whole bus). This almost unbroken driving effort was despite having to navigate the dodgy unsealed four wheel drive track calling itself the 'Trans Sumatran Highway'. Finally, what clinched it that I was going the wrong way was when the supposedly 17 hour epic bus ride turned into a 30 hour mind-mangler.
I ended up in the city of Medan on the east coast. Just before I alighted, the bus driver revealed knowing all along my intention to go to Lake Toba by telling me I should get off here and catch a bus heading hundreds of kilometres in the opposite direction. This was clearly not a very efficient way of getting to Lake Toba, but it had allowed me to hand over RPs 140,000 to that bus company.
To top it all off I left one of my sandals on the bus. Did I then find it in my pack after I'd thrown out the other one? No. The universe is not that cruel, merely indifferent. Heartless bastard.
Standing in Medan, Sumatra's largest city, I quickly decided to cut my losses and immediately go to Malaysia - I can check out Lake Toba along with Aceh on the next trip. I took the first bus to the city, then the first bus to the ferry terminal, slept in another expensive windowless mosquito den and stormed out of the country the next morning. I left behind the beautiful Sumatran wilderness, my celebrity status as a white guy and two unused flights from Medan.
...And then in the city of Padang a new architectural feature: destruction. I was only there for one night but it was enough to get a glimpse of a range of indiscriminately collapsed buildings from the earthquake a few months ago. Luckily the place was now mostly functioning. I met a local on the bus (the buses here all sport spoilers by the way - they look hilarious) and had my evening occupied by a tour of many of the local student share houses, as well as some interesting collapsed buildings. This topic was always brought up awkwardly, and it was embarrassing to answer. "Err... well... yes. Yes I do. I want to see your beautiful city crushed by nature's destructive fury".
For this impudence, the gods decided to spite me by inserting a piece of grit in my eye while I was being ridden around town on a motorbike - the next 24 hours were so painful I naively made all sorts of vows about how much I would appreciate being a healthy person from then on.
Bukit Tinggi was next on the agenda - an awesome hill town with a cool traveling scene - albeit without the travelers. The only exceptions were two Americans, my first westerners in Sumatra, allowing me the opportunity of my first real conversation in English for almost three weeks. Here I was staying in a hotel room overlooking such an awesome view, and conveniently located near a museum of stuffed Siamese twin farm animals, that I decided to stay three nights - but I found myself checking out after the second night. I'm too restless.
I got on a suitable seeming bus about lunchtime to go to Lake Toba, touted in Wikipedia as being a super-volcano formed with a 'Volcanic Explosivity Index of 8' or 'Mega-Colossal'. My one additional requirement was that the bus stop on the equator (as defined by me) which took a surprising amount convincing (come on - it's THE EQUATOR!)
Not long after taking off, winding through totally spectacular hilly jungle scenery, we arrived at this geographic marvel. I sat at the front of the bus counting down the seconds of latitude from my GPS to let the driver know when to stop and upon reaching zero hurriedly ran out to take some shots. Of course the 'official' equator was a few metres to the north of that designated by my GPS but whatever, the Northern Hemisphere can have that dumb ribbon of land. I wasn't going to build a space elevator on it anyway.
Having crossed the equator, the world seemed different. Not only did it get a lot more landy, there being more of that stuff in the north, but suddenly it got colder, no doubt because I was plunged into winter having previously been enjoying the summer months. I also felt a lot more important, cohabiting the hemisphere with the likes of Socrates, Shakespeare and Kevin Rudd - let me know if any of you Southern Hemispherians want me to use my Northern influence for anything. I also distinctly felt myself change elevation suddenly - after all, the two halves of the world can't be expected to match up exactly.
It is also worth noting that at that very instant I reached my greatest ever land speed record: 1675km/hr relative to the Earth's core. I had thought that it was my greatest speed relative to the core ever, having largely traveled west when flying over the equator, but annoyingly, the addition of the velocity vectors coming home from India by plane over the equator several years ago would have made me faster - I wasn't even aware of the occasion.
However, I did stay up to midnight for what I thought was an even more awesome personal record smash: my fastest speed relative to the Sun: 30.47km/sec. This award had to wait for midnight because that's when the rotational and orbital vectors of the Earth combine to the greatest determinant.
But suddenly I thought of something! What was my speed when I was sleeping on Gunung Kerinci? Struggling to remember my high school geometry I plugged in my elevation at midnight on Kerinci (3060m plus the distance the core) and the equatorial radius of the Earth (6380kms) into the sides of a right-angled triangle and found that my Kerinci camp would have to be less than 199kms from the equator to exceed my current speed. Crap. My GPS told me it was only 189kms south of it - I'd been 79m/hr faster on Kerinci and didn't even think to celebrate it (for pedants, my 50km distance from the equator at midnight on the bus was canceled out by my 200m elevation). I'd better work out my top speeds relative to the galactic centre and Virgo Supercluster so I don't miss those too.
The rest of the bus ride carried on into the night and then well into the next day (although the mental geometry did burn a few hours), but I was never actually bored. The first part of the ride was really spectacular as we crossed the Sumatran highlands - towering hills covered in rainforest and deep valleys etched out by paddy terraces. But even during the long flat later sections dominated by endless palm oil plantations (damn you bio-fuels!) I enjoyed the warm glow of camaraderie that inevitably develops in these situations: when the bus broke down or got stopped by a fallen log we were all in the shits together. I feel more comfortable subversively traveling techno-blasting 'ekonomi' through leafy Sumatran suburbs than pompously reclined and flat-screened 'eksecutif' through the slums. Luxury insulates you from real life.
But that's not to say this massive and crammed bus ride did not elicit any nail-biting moments. I had my GPS out for a lot of the trip (often a curse on bus rides because they wind around so much) and during the morning I saw Lake Toba 140kms ahead, then 100kms 45 degrees to the left, then 80kms 90 degrees to the left. When it started to peel away to 135 degrees and then 180 degrees off, with the distance increasing at an increasing rate, I knew something had gone very wrong.
"Danau Toba?" I asked the passengers around me. Polite nods and nervous grins were the reply. This was not a good sign. To increase the tension, the bus driver played the same 10 songs on repeat through the extremely loud sound system, and heroically managed to stop and let us out only once during the entire trip (I was so dysphasic here that I thought we were at a buffet and served myself from the restaurant's kitchen - I was the laughing stock of the whole bus). This almost unbroken driving effort was despite having to navigate the dodgy unsealed four wheel drive track calling itself the 'Trans Sumatran Highway'. Finally, what clinched it that I was going the wrong way was when the supposedly 17 hour epic bus ride turned into a 30 hour mind-mangler.
I ended up in the city of Medan on the east coast. Just before I alighted, the bus driver revealed knowing all along my intention to go to Lake Toba by telling me I should get off here and catch a bus heading hundreds of kilometres in the opposite direction. This was clearly not a very efficient way of getting to Lake Toba, but it had allowed me to hand over RPs 140,000 to that bus company.
To top it all off I left one of my sandals on the bus. Did I then find it in my pack after I'd thrown out the other one? No. The universe is not that cruel, merely indifferent. Heartless bastard.
Standing in Medan, Sumatra's largest city, I quickly decided to cut my losses and immediately go to Malaysia - I can check out Lake Toba along with Aceh on the next trip. I took the first bus to the city, then the first bus to the ferry terminal, slept in another expensive windowless mosquito den and stormed out of the country the next morning. I left behind the beautiful Sumatran wilderness, my celebrity status as a white guy and two unused flights from Medan.
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