Merlions aren't real

Sydney :: Australia

It's still a little bit dull in Singapore

Places: Singapore.

Coolest thing I did: Rediscovered the city from scratch, because it appears I didn't remember anything from 10 years ago. Except it's still a bit yawn.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Brits used to swear by importing Sikhs as policemen all over the empire. No other Indian religions, just Sikhs.

I had mixed feelings about coming back to Singapore, a city I should know better than most of the ones I've visited in Asia as I used to come here for work quite a bit back in the disco days of the IT industry. I thankfully found walking around for about half an hour that I don't remember any of it, save for the night safari at the zoo, which I didn't do this time but recall as being good. This meant I could discover a whole new city without having to worry about it being different to last time I was there.

I do remember Singapore as being dull as far as nightlife went and it didn't disappoint, but that may have been more due to the fact that people were all partied out from the Grand Prix the previous weekend. It was interesting to be able to walk around the old colonial district of town without having to worry about cars running you over but you did have to dodge the ruins of a Grand Prix as you went. There were big groups of mostly Indian labourers doing their best to pull down grandstands, fences and temporary walkways, meaning quite often you were walking down the track between two fences looking for a gap that would let you get out.

The weather was unpredictably tropical, going from brilliant blue sky to torrential downpour in what seemed like minutes. This meant I spent more time indoors than I have anywhere on this trip. In Singapore that means one thing: shops. If the KL-ians shopped for recreation the Singaporeans seem to shop all the time. You can walk through most of the downtown or the CBD without having to worry about not being able to buy something. There's also a persistent feeling of dejavu about the whole experience as the brands and shops tend to repeat fairly rapidly, giving a broken fun house mirror feel to the place. Things are amazingly un-cheap, which is definitely different to how I remember it, anything that is branded and can be compared was roughly on par with Australian prices, electronics included (which used to be much cheaper).

Still, all this shopping is probably due to the fact that commerce is woven into the cities DNA, resulting from it being the meeting point of the two big Asian monsoons, bringing ships from China and India to meet at the point of the Malay peninsula and swap stuff. The potential for this to become the linchpin of the Asian subsidiary of the British Empire became the obsession of the first big name in Singapore's history, Stamford Raffles. Raffs (as he was known to his mates, trust me on that) was built in the mould of a proper Victorian gentleman who happened to believe that by getting control of both Melaka and Penang and founding a colony on the island of Temasek at the point of the peninsula (which would become Singapore) the Brits would control all of Asia's maritime trade and become the most complete and powerful empire in the world. I imagine Queen Vic liked the sound of all that and he got to create the free trade haven of Singapore and import all the Indian & Chinese coolies he wanted to.

I especially like the statue of Raffs next to the old Empress Building which has him standing in a b-boy stance with his arms crossed and one shoulder up (you got served!).

The Singapore river used to be the heart of Asia's trade, with the three races (Chinese, Indians and Malays) each playing a big part in the running of the place through private enterprise. In the Asian Civilisations Museum there's a model of how the Chinese coolies used to live, with walls covered in bunk beds and communal eating/cooking areas in the middle. I wonder what they'd think of backpackers living the exact same way now. Only with more booze involved.

In the 1980s the government redeveloped the heavily polluted and legendarily stinky river to allow massive skyscrapers to be built along it to house the industry that would come to live along sea-borne commerce in Singapore's future, international banking. The chop houses are gone, replaced by the big names in world banking but a glimpse out over the bay to the forest of cranes tells you that Singapore's sweet spot at the mouth of the Melacca Straights still gives it a pivotal role in moving stuff around by boat, even today.

Singapore's modern landmarks pale in comparison to such colonial gems as the Raffles Hotel and Cricket Club but since I was last here they've built a concert hall/theatre on the Esplanade which the locals refer to as "The Durain" as it looks like two big spiky balls. While I could point out that putting a funny shaped concert hall (or opera house if you will) on your waterfront has been done before I do like the look of the building, given the number of basically similar square towers on the Singapore skyline it really does stand out. It's much better to end up with only one or two modern architectural oddities on the skyline rather than become the shambles that Shanghai has, with every building looking different.

Well, I had to come back from Asia so I've landed back in Sydney to do a bit more waiting for the UK government to give me a work permit. It was a good way to eat up 7 weeks of waiting though.

Mono-doh!

Melaka :: Malaysia

Is there a chance the track could bent? No on your life my Hindu friend!

Places: Kuala Lumpur (KL) & Melaka.

Coolest thing I did: Walked on the skybridge, that bridge between the Petronas towers. I also learned Petronas is the best company in the world.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: I apparently look like a TV actor in the Philippines. I'm not sure what his name is and searching for "Looks like Stevil" came up with zero hits in google. Damn google.

KL is officially the only city I've ever heard of that has a monorail that actually goes somewhere. This is hard to imagine for someone from Sydney, whose monorail is about as useful as the one in North Haverbrook.

I think KL is the kind of place that could grow on me, it's far better compared to Singapore or Tokyo than it is to proper 3rd world Asian cities like Jakarta. It's got transport that works, shiny buildings, no shanties and inhuman scale advertising almost everywhere. It's also practically impossible to walk around as you have to navigate overhead walkways crossing several lanes of traffic that want to do their best to funnel you into shopping centres. It does all these things, only on a smaller scale than Tokyo, and with noticeably less neon.

It does still look poorer than either of its peers though, and nestled in the shadows of the skyscrapers there are still night markets run by the three main ethnicities (Malay, Chinese and Indian) selling street food that fulfils my love of cheap and good. The Malay Sunday market (which is confusingly held on a Saturday) had some of the best Malay food I've had here, laid out buffet style but was slightly denuded of people, all due to the fact that we're into the very tail end of Ramadan. It's dogged me all through this trip, only it's been more noticeable for sucking all the people of out KL in the time I was there. I didn't really get to see the nightlife because most of the bars and clubs were either closed or closing early in the weekend I was there. Which is probably good for my bank balance in a country where beer costs so very, very much.

As you get out into the sticks you also notice that the shiny new blocks get slowly replaced with concrete in what can only be public housing. It's far better than the favela-style accommodation the poor have in the rest of urban Asia, but like everywhere the fruits of growth aren't evenly distributed. You do get the idea that people have their priorities right as these blocks bristle with satellite dishes and split cycle air conditioners all randomly placed, leading you to believe these are new additions.

I did the touristy things you're supposed to do in KL, including the Petronas twin towers, probably the only iconic building in the city, if not the country. You can only go up to the skybridge between the two of them (at the 30 something-est floor) and to do so you have to be subjected to a short film about how bloody awesome Petronas is and how they're fixing all the 3rd world's problems. I even walked out thinking "maybe sucking oil out of the ground and turning it into petrol is the way to fix the world's problems". They were very persuasive.

I did like the view but I have to say the building is far more stunning from the outside, especially when they light it up in stages in the evening. I'd hoped to see this spectacle from the bar of the Traders Hotel across the park, which was in a copy of Wallpaper that happened to be lying around the guest house in Langkawi (I read all their magazines whist waiting for the rain to stop). It's got a pool inside and a view right over the towers. It's also closed for Ramadan, which I only found out after walking for about 30 mins, which in KL means ending up wearing a kilo of your own sweat inside your shirt, even at night. Damn you Ramadan!

I also got to notice that despite having beautiful parks to act as the lungs of the city most people would rather shop. On the Saturday I walked around the lake gardens above the city and only encountered the gardeners. However, later on that day when I was walking through the shopping centres (which is pretty much unavoidable as you go through the city) the places were rammed. This country seems to do nothing but shop. I guess that's why it feels so modern.

I did like the Islamic Arts Museum, which shows that when you're a rich(er) Muslim country you can buy lots of stuff from other Muslim countries that a poor (or more likely Petronas just repossessed it all when the Syrians or Turks owed them money). They have a room that goes through the history of Muslim Architecture and has models of all the major mosques in the world. I've been to a surprising number of them, but looking at the ones from Iran and Central Asia I thought I'd love to see those too. The big ones in Saudi are off limits to infidels apparently, and I really can't be arsed converting just to see them. Too much work involved with all that faith stuff.

I left this morning for the ruins of a town that was once so important the world's most important natural sea lane is named after it: Melaka. It was once the powerhouse of trade between India and China and since it was made into big news by a renegade Indonesian Hindu prince it's been held by the Portugese, Dutch and finally ended up in the hands of the British around a similar time as Singapore was being founded. The British at the time were worried that they'd have to give it back to the Dutch in a peace settlement (as was the style of the time) so they went about demolishing heaps of stuff. The city was already in decline so this helped end it's run as a trading outpost, with Singapore, Batavia (now Jakarta) and Penang hogging the glory.

What's left is mostly Dutch and mostly heavily restored. It's a little strange to see the same style of roof you see in central Amsterdam between Chinese shop houses but the whole city is a bit of a stylistic amalgamation. There are apparently Euro-Malay people here who speak a creole based on Malay sentence structures with lots of Baroque era Portuguese mixed in for good measure. There's also the oldest Chinese community outside the country itself, dating back to the Ming dynasty (which I guess was aaages ago) who have food styles that are from both and neither culture.

All this is good because it takes seriously about an hour to see all the tourist stuff here, unless of course the stamp museum or architecture museum are your thing. I'm glad I've decided to take off for Singapore tomorrow, having carefully avoided the night Grand Prix I didn't know was happening.

As a footnote I reckon the Malaysian government are criminal masterminds for taxing booze so highly. It's a Muslim country, so the tax is seen as only hitting the rich Westerners here, which no-one would complain about as being wrong. Then of course lots of Muslims drink all the time anyway, but none of them would dare complain about the tax because they're not supposed to be drinking in the first place. Genius. You can raise the tax all you want and none of the actual voters will complain. Damn them.

Paradise (now with crap food & expensive beer!)

Kuala Lumpur :: Malaysia

Let's talk diving.

Places: Langkawi, Palau Perhentian Kecil & Kuala Lumpur (KL).

Coolest thing I did: Adopted a 1.5 metre monitor lizard who lived on my porch. I named him Mitch, as in Mitch, the Monitor Lizard.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Kids are allowed to celebrate the end of day fasting by throwing fireworks around unsupervised. It makes walking around a night interesting.

So the rain continued to do it's best to frustrate my having a good time in Langkawi and I decided to go through a torturous series of boat, taxi and night bus rides to cross the peninsula in order to get to the dry side. I only really had time left to spend a few days at one of the islands on the east coast renowned for diving so I chose the Perhentians, as that seems to be the Lonely Planet approved island chain of choice for this year. Arriving just after sunrise was well worth it, with the speed boat skimming over flat water towards a pair of islands that look like tropical islands should do, with jungle and palm trees giving way to perfectly white sand beaches (you may have noticed that I'm really running out of beach metaphors this year. I'll have to go somewhere else soon...).

I chose to base myself on the smaller, less classy of the two, Kecil (which I think means, small, as opposed to the other island) and immediately found my self with no need for thongs anymore. There's one long beach (called Long Beach) and one bay overlooking coral (called Coral Bay) and that's it, so you can pretty much get around barefoot everywhere (well, that's until you're on the boat back and someone tells you about the snakes that get about in the dark. Wusses).

From the second I got to the jetty at 6am fresh from the night bus all the conversations around me revolved around diving. It's the same in snowboarding or surfing towns, but I'd say there's only so many times you can have the "have you been to perfect location X to dive?". "Yeah, it's amazing." "I'd love to go there". "You Should". Repeat. You also form little cliques, each based around which of the dive shops on the island you've completely randomly chosen to go out to the reef with. For some inexplicable reason you become mortal enemies with everyone else and won't hesitate to defend your own dive shop, even if they've got crap equipment and dive masters who don't speak English.

The diving is really very good, but I have to say that having already seen the Komodo Islands, and the fact that the rains are starting to churn up the water so making the visibility really poor it wasn't the best I've ever seen. Still, ticked off all the big stuff like turtles, sharks and moray eels and especially at shallow depths there are gardens of coral hiding massive schools of everything from little Nemos to Barracudas to make it all worth it. A couple of the sites had awesome underwater crevasses and swim throughs but due to the changeable currents and aforementioned visibility issues I don't think I got the full effect. I'd love to return at a better time of year, perhaps with an Advanced ticket so I could dive their crown jewels, two wrecks just off the coast.

The water temperature is worth mentioning, because dive computers show 28 degrees at about 12m there. That's bloody warm. When you go out into the shallows just off the shore towards the end of the day it feels like a bath up until your ankles. You don't mind everywhere has cold showers, you kind of need it to cool down.

The other thing worth mentioning is the food is uniformly shit. I hope I've stopped myself from whinging when I'm just having a bad day, but the ramdom mess of horrible "Western" food mixed with expensive but bland "Local" food was a big problem on the island. I'm wondering if they just think backpackers want to eat as cheaply and as badly as possible but I was hankering for Penang. There were people who came south from Thailand just to dive the Perhentians and I'd hate to think their entire knowledge of Malaysian food was this place. I just can't see why someone can't bring over some of those stall holders from the peninsula, pay them 10 times what they make at home and they can cook the same food? There, listen to me, problem solved.

So another boat and overnight bus has brought me back to the West of the country (I'm getting to avoid most of the place expect for islands I think) to KL, it's thriving heart. I've only had a short day to walk around, much interrupted by the same storms that I assume come south from Langkawi, but from what I've seen so far it's a lot less poor than either Bangkok or Jakarta. There's far less touting and hustling going on and there's not been a shanty in sight as yet. Thinking about Malaysia in general, it has seemed to be as prosperous when compared with it's neighbour as I first thought in Penang.

The food is great again, too. The islands seem to be a fluke.

Today I took in mostly the colonial buildings, that for whatever reason the English decided really should like they come from North Africa or Andalusia, all with Moorish arches and skinny minarets. Forget the fact that's only the other side of the world but I guess you have to give them points for attempting to be slightly culturally sensitive to the fact they aren't Christians here. Even the main train station looks like the Alhambra, only gone to pot a bit due to lack of care.

That's a noticeable thing here, everything appears to have been built in the last 60 years, and everything that hasn't has mostly been left to rot. They seem to want to be seen as modern and don't have our hang-ups about preserving buildings to somehow use it to entrap the culture that's being lost elsewhere. I did notice something similar in big city Indo too, that it's not just the young people that are embarrassed by their traditions, which they see as being entwined with poverty, people of all ages, once they have some money go out of their way to differentiate themselves, to make themselves look modern. I've said before how I think it's not for us to decide how other people should treat their own cultures, but it would be nice to keep some old buildings on occasion.

I've yet to go up the Petronas Towers, or even photograph them, so that's a priority for tomorrow. Due to my recent addiction to Megastructures on the Discovery Channel (which probably has a suspicious correlation with my recent unemployment...) I know all about them being built and I'm keen to see them in the flesh. Well, concrete and steel.

Sweet, sweet Laksa

Langkawi :: Malaysia

Why bicycles are for chumps.

Places: Penang & Langkawi.

Coolest thing I did: Slid down waterfalls on my bum, like they were waterslides.

(un)Coolest thing I didn´t know: Beer costs more money in most of Malaysia than it does in London. That's amazing in a country where you can get a bowl of noodles for about 1 quid.

I'll start with Penang, as it wasn't at all what I expected. I looked at the map and saw it was an island, so expected all the usual island stuff, like beaches and climbing mountains to look at beaches. What I found instead was a heaving multicultural city in Georgetown and very scary roads to ride down on a bicycle. You see, I had the crazy idea that because the British government have my drivers license that I should hire a push bike and ride up to the Ki Lok Si Temple, which is up the top of a fairly steep hill. The problem is that the roads are all set up for multiple lanes of traffic and the spaces on the edge are controlled mostly by mopeds who have a suspect grip on the road rules. It took at times 15 mins to cross a road if I wanted to go the other direction and quite often I was having to cross things that would have been considered freeways at home.

Still, the ride was worth it in the end, as the Ki Lok Si Temple is an amazing Buddhist shrine in what is pretty much an Islamic country, with all the types of Buddhas represented, one even as a gift from the King of Thailand. It's also a work in progress, with the rich Chinese of Penang contributing money to build a massive shrine to the goddess of mercy, Kuan Yin. I'm not sure where goddesses fit into the whole Buddhist thing, but it was an impressive statue none the less, even if there is scaffolding all around it to allow the building of the pagoda around her/it. I also liked the statues of all the animals in the Chinese horoscope, but my picture next to the snake (my year) didn't come out very well. Luckily I think all that stuff is a load of crap anyway.

I also rode up to the funicular that goes up Penang Hill only to find it closed for Ramadan. I've since found most times I've wanted to go up some ski field form of transport (chairlifts, cable cars, etc...) it's been closed for Ramadan. I've as yet not gone up any hills in Malaysia as a result.

The city of Georgetown itself was a happy revelation. It has thriving Chinese, Indian and Muslim Malay communities and as a result the food is awesome. I'd have rice for breakfast, Indian for lunch and maybe Malay for dinner. They do a fish Laksa based on a Tamarind paste that is sweet and very, very tasty. The food was probably the highlight of the place, but it's a very livable place to stay for a few days anyway. It only really takes a morning to walk around and look at all the colonial relics the Brits left and then you've got time to wander around Chinese market stall for regular snacking, past Bollywood video stalls that smell like incense and listen to the constant arguments of hungry Muslim money changers passing the time outside their shops. It's full of life and decaying old trading houses inter sped with temples from all the faiths.

It was important to the Brits, as it was their first toehold on the Malacca Straight, probably the most important natural sea lane in the world. It would take them 100 years to take control of Melaka itself and to found Singapore so for a long time Penang was top dog. The governors of the place were also some of the world's early free trade enthusiasts, putting into practice some of the ideas of some enlightened Scots and allowing people from all over Asia to come and do business. The result was the ethnic mix that now prevails and the mostly happy co-existence of various incompatible faiths all in one small island. Seeing as they were all there for commerce anyway, it pointed the way things were going, and helped choke off the Portuguese and Dutch influence in the area for good, both of whom were avowed monopolists.

I didn't actually realise it, but Georgetown was founded about the same time as Sydney, and Singapore came much later. I'd just assumed they were older than Australia. I'd just assume everywhere was older than Australia.

So I took a fairly pleasant ferry ride directly to Langkawi, which really is a beach island. People come here direct from Europe just to lie on the beach and where I'm staying, Patai Cenang is the most built up at all. Which isn't saying much, as it seem quiet, but I'm thinking that's the result of this being the low season and the tail end of Ramadan. On the plus side, it's a duty free zone, meaning beer costs the same as it did in Indonesia, which is rare in Malaysia. I've got a feeling that when I get to KL there won't be massive party nights out at these prices.

I again decided that the best way to see other parts of the island was to hire a bicycle. I rode to the much smaller beach of Patai Kok and then onto some waterfalls that double as waterslides up in the hills above it. Not only was it a nearly 40km round trip in the heat, but the hills were constant and steep once you got half way there. There was also the rather annoyingly long ride around the airport runway, usually with a plane screaming in overhead every couple of minutes. Still, it was nice to get a white sand beach to myself, as in the couple of hours I was there the only other people to show up were construction workers coming in to eat lunch watching the water.

I'm writing this instead of being out on a boat around the islands today because it's bucketing down with rain at the moment. I was all ready to go this morning when the heavens opened and they said we'd probably end up at the bottom of the ocean if we decided to go out in that. I've decided to cut across the peninsula to the Perhentian islands on the east coast (because I haven't blown enough money on diving yet apparently) on the night bus tomorrow night, so I may be able to do it in the morning if there's time.

Every which way but loose

Penang :: Malaysia

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Places: Jakarta, Medan, Bukit Lawang & Penang.

Coolest thing I did: Ate several meals under the gaze of hungry primates.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Orangutan means "people of the forest" in Indonesian/Malaysian.

In total I was in Jakarta for little over 24 hours, so I don't think I got a proper feel for the place. What I did see led me to believe that, like Surabaya it's an Asian 3rd world city with all the attendant inequality that goes with it, sucking up rural immigrants into the place in hope of the poverty of the surrounding countryside. It's big, loud and smells terrible most of the time. It's probably not as big or extreme as say Bangkok but it's a microcosm of what's going on in the world over in the poor world.

I didn't get a feel for the scale of the place until I was on my way out, and as the airport bus rolls onto the overhead freeway out of town you can see miles of shabby lean-tos and shanties punctuated by the occasional mosque leading high-rise office blocks and hotels in the distance. You see commuter trains from the nearby villages and suburbs so full that there's people clinging to the roof while ducking overhead power lines. The Dutch, being the Dutch, left canals everywhere but the murky, grey, garbage filled water can only truly be appreciated at ground level, where you get the olfactory hit of an open sewer. The remains of old Batavia, the Dutch East Indies trading capital is in ruins, only one square of immaculately kept buildings remains for the tourists and outside the ultra swanky Batavia Cafe all that remains is old colonial buildings turned into motor mechanics and rice wholesalers. It's a city that buried it's past under concrete and dirt a long time ago.

Having said that, it's got an energy that's just not present anywhere else in Indonesia. At night the streets bloom with food stalls, especially now that most of the population is having it's first meal at sunset. Trendy looking young kids are hanging out pretty much everywhere, lounging on traffic islands or blasting past you on their motor scooters. People aren't so interested in tourists here, you don't get the touts chasing you nearly as much as in Yogya, as it seems like everyone's got better things to do.

The starkest contrast can be seen as you move away from the water, towards the high rise hotels, office blocks and shopping centres to the south. Walking through these immaculate white marble shops with all the luxury brands of the world on display I felt a bit out of place, unshaven in my dirty clothes and thongs, as the sparse weekday crowds seem to be all dressed like they've shopped there already. I definitely caught shop attendants openly staring, wondering what the hell I was doing there. The doormen didn't hold the doors open for me like they did everyone else better dressed. I'd say had I not been white I'd not have even been admitted entry. It's amazing that in a city where you can get a bowl of noodles on the street for 50 cents (and I imagine I'm getting ripped off on those!) you can still buy a handbag for a thousand bucks.

So I flew out of Java into steamy Sumatra with one goal in mind, to see Orangutans in the wild. After a short flight, a taxi ride and then 4 hours on a bus along an 80km road that seems to resist all attempts to pave it (potholes the size of ponds, I swear) I arrived in the beautifully located Bukit Lawang. It's a tiny village on the elbow of a white water river with jungle encased hills surrounding it on all sides. It apparently used to be bigger but there was a flash flood in 2004 (unrelated to the Tsunami) that wiped out most of the town and they've only been able to rebuild as quickly as they earn tourist dollars. It's remoteness means that's been hard, and the ruins of old hotels and bungalows still line the flood plain below the town.

The Orangutans live in a national park just north of the town and are said to number in the low 500s at this moment. The primates range from completely tame to completely wild, depending on where they were born and how much human interaction they've had. There's a feeding platform that is used to dole out extra nutrition to pregnant or nursing Orangutans as the area in the national park isn't quite large enough to sustain a wild population as big as it has. This means there is a whole load of semi-wild creatures roaming the place who are quite used to handouts from human being that happen to pass by. Some people complain about this but I'd see it as a much better option that extinction, which was on the cards before they started trying to rehabilitate the population in the 1970s, due to shrinking habitats brought on by unrepentant logging.

I ended up taking a 2 day combination trek, camping and rafting trip out to see the Orangutans deeper into the national park, as the idea of seeing them at the feeding platform was a bit too zoo-like for my tastes. It wasn't exactly easy going, lots of climbing up muddy slopes holding onto vines or sliding down loose rock faces but it was loads of fun. The humidity was 100+ so it only takes you about 30 mins to end up drenched in your own sweat and you remain that way pretty much all day. The guide joked we'd all lose 5 kg but I reckon you could have probably wrung 3 of those out of my shirt by the end of the day.

In the morning we saw long-tailed macaques, or little grey monkeys, who also see quite taken by human handouts. They travel in packs with entire families and aren't too worried about people being 1 metre from them as they sit there fishing through each others heads for bugs to eat. They do all the climbing, jumping and somersaulting that monkeys are supposed to do, so they were very entertaining to watch. However, by lunchtime we hadn't seen any of the orange primates the place was famous for and the guides were starting to get a bit worried.

Then, we bumped into April. A female in her 30s, April was pretty keen to see us, a big ball of soft orange fir with gangly arms and legs crashing through the forest looking for something to eat. I'm amazed at how their feet have thumbs and they quite often hold a banana spare in one foot while the concentrate on eating another one with their hands. They're also quite sneaky, as one of the Dutch girls on our trip found out. She'd been having her picture taken in front while April was giving little sideways glances to her backpack. April sprung very quickly into action, grabbing a thong (flip-flop for you non-Aussies, not the other kind) with a mouth and two hands that was strapped to the pack. Some quick yelling from the guides managed to get her away, but the Dutch girl got some Orangutan teeth marks and saliva on a thong as a souvenir. They're not only quick, but strong too.

After that, it was Orangutans every time we stopped. We made two attempts at lunch because as soon as we opened up our rice parcels of nasi goering an Orangutan would come crashing down through the trees looking for a bit. We saw a nursing mother, a couple and another single female over our next two meals, one even coming to watch us eat breakfast at camp. After a while you forgot they were even there, the guides being on the guard while we ate, handing out bananas if the orange furballs got a little too close. Watching them, despite all the documentaries and zoos I've seen them in before, you can't help but be amazed by just how human some of the traits displayed are.

We rafted back to the village the next day on some inner tubes and then spent the next afternoon watching walls of water fall from the sky. This being the tropics the weather doesn't always follow the wet/dry seasons like it's supposed to and I was kind of glad we got all our walking done the day before. Climbing some of those muddy hills with gushing torrents of water coming the other way wouldn't be much fun.

So another 4 hour bus ride and taxi through Medan (which didn't look like all that much of a town) I bought myself a plane ticket and got myself into Penang in Malaysia 24 hours before my Indonesian tourist visa expired. First impressions of the place is the contrast couldn't be more stark to Indo, but then again I do know that Penang has a thriving high tech industry so perhaps it's not indicative of the rest of the country. Still, it's nice to be in a place where the buses work.

You want more (temples)...!?!?!?!

Yogyakarta :: Indonesia

The last shadow puppets.

Places: Solo, Yogyakarta, Prambanan & Borobudur.

Coolest thing I did: Sunrise (sort of) over the largest Buddhist monument in the world.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Cockfighting is apparently banned during Ramadan. Man, fun police or what?

Solo didn't particularly improve in my mind with the last day I was there, though I did enjoy spending the last night eating on mats on the pavement from the little stall holders that ply their trade on most city streets in Java. One thing you learn really quickly here is the people are all tiny and the portions of food match. I think most nights I have a starter and 2 or 3 mains. This lends itself well to eating from the street vendors as they all do one thing really well and you can go to a few of them on your way home, noodles at one, fried chook at another. It works very well. They also think the sight of me sitting cross-legged on the ground with the little Indonesians is a funny, funny sight. Kids just giggle their arses off at me.

The one thing I did learn is every time there's sectarian unrest Solo is most likely to be the place it happens. It's also the home of Jemaah Islamiyah, the Nasi Goering of the global Jihad movement. Most people not from Java were seriously confused as to why the hell I went there. I have to agree with them a little. Damn you Lonely Planet.

Yogyakarta is far more of a city than Solo is, despite their being founded at the same time for roughly the same reason. As I brushed over last time the Dutch really couldn't be bothered with that whole empire running thing like the Poms, they just wanted the money from the spice trade. They split up the Sultanate in Java into two parts and allowed each of the Sultans to found a city, build a palace and do whatever they wanted so long as the nutmeg kept flowing. One city became Solo and the other Yogya, both with the requisite palace (or kranton, as they're known in these parts).

Lets make no bones about it, both palaces are a bit shit. When I think of Sultans palaces I think of Topaki in Istanbul or something like the one in Bangkok, with giant gold Buddhas and such. The ones in both cities here look very low rent and a bit scruffy looking. That's because the sultans all went into politics when the civilians took over and don't really have much money left these days. With hindsight missing both palaces wouldn't have been a great loss. And unless you're really, really into horse carriages, the museum attached to the one in Yogya can safely be avoided.

I did like Tamansari though, the Sultan's old water castle. What's a water castle, I hear you ask? It's a place where the Sultan can perve on chicks swimming in his pools, pick one and have them come to his private pool for a swim and a "relax". He did this every day apparently. There was an earthquake sometime in the not too distant past that knocked the thing over so they're busy rebuilding it as we speak. This means that part of it looks like a pile of rocks and part of it looks brand new. The effect should be better when the whole thing is fixed up.

Next to Tamansari is the bird market, Pasar Ngasem, which I liked because it was a little different. Besides your standard racing pigeons and fighting cocks (as I said, off due to Ramadan) you can buy all sorts of non-birds. You want snakes, geckos, mice, rats? No problem. How about crickets, grasshoppers and locusts? All there too. Apparently if you boil up bats they're good for curing asthma. I declined drinking the python blood, telling them I was already virile enough. Even though they said it wasn't too bad with Redbull. I think I'll stick to vodka thanks.

As far as I know I don't have H5N1 yet, but I can certainly see how it came about. You want to smell the combined output of thousands of birds in one small space. I think the guy with the best business sense was the bloke selling birdseed. I reckon he was raking it in.

All this ye olde stuff is good and well but it's not what Yogya is all about. Stretching down from the main train station is the street confusingly named after the patriarch of the Churchill family, Jl Marliboro, which is shops all the way down. Mega malls rising out of a metropolis of stalls selling fake everything, this is where you find most people who look Indonesian in town. Hipster kids in Vans and skinny jeans brushing shoulders with Batik clad old grannies hauling their loot home, it seems like shopping is the only time you see Indonesians doing stuff besides hassling you to buy stuff you don't want.

Due to Ramadan most of the students have left town and the rest are not doing the things they shouldn't be doing all year, like drinking and smoking, meaning the nightlife here is currently non-existent. You can get a beer, but you'll only see other white faces as you do. This meant I did something cultural at night for one, I went to see Wayang Kulit, which means shadow puppets. They do look cool, and are accompanied by a full Gamelan orchestra, but they invariably act out scenes from the Ramayana, with the voices and singing in Javanese. Apparently the Ramayana is a Hindu epic about some dude Rama, who does some stuff. All I know is it's really long and confusing, especially in Javanese. Again, only white faces in the audience and everyone was too polite to be the first one to leave. Lucky for them I broke after 35 mins and I swear 3 quarters of the room followed me out. I did like the fight scenes however, which were like the kung-fu scenes in Team America, with two puppets flailing at each other in mid-air.

Java has been colonized by waves of Eastern types before the Dutch stumbled upon them, the first of these being the Hindus and Buddhists from India. Both left the legacy of an awesome temple just outside Yogya and it's about half a day to see each one.

The Hindus left Prambanan, a complex of temples spread over several kilometres but focused mostly on a temple to Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu, the Boston Celtics back-court of Hindu gods. Even as you cross the plain towards the site you can make out the jagged shards of temple in the distance, which on closer inspection are covered in carvings telling all sorts of (I imagine) Hindu type stories. No nudie bits though, which I've been told are quite common on the ones in India. I got led around by an eager student whose English teacher makes them walk up to white people and tell them about the temple for practice. The lad in question was going to work for a shipping company in the Netherlands so I'm sure his intricate knowledge of all the English words surrounding Hindu architecture will put him in pole position for that.

The Buddhists left their biggest monument on Earth at Borobudur, which I took an overnight trip out in order to see at sunrise. It's a multi-layered temple, with carvings going from mundane human things like eating, shagging and animal husbandry all the way up to the top, which represents Nirvana (insert Kurt Cobain joke here). As you climb it you get carvings all the way up, with niches holding Buddhas in various states of repose looking out at you. Once you get to the top the Buddhas are these bell shaped cages called stupas, of which there are 72. It's possibly one of the most impressive bits of architecture I've seen anywhere and I've looked at a hell of a lot of old buildings in the last few years.

Unfortunately, it rained. A lot. After paying 4 times the asking price to get up to the top of the temple to catch the sun rising over the mountains to the East we got little more than a sliver of red in a grey sky. It was still a good time to be up there, as the hordes pouring in at the official opening time of 6am attested to but looking at all those postcards of sunrise over the temple it does feel a bit like a lost opportunity. The pictures will probably come out quite well though, with everything having a sheen to it because of the wet and the rice paddies and mountains in the background all covered in mist and cloud. Still an amazing site.

So I'm back in Yogya today waiting to catch the night train to Jakarta tonight, which I'm informed by the Lonely Planet (and other tourists pretending they heard it from somewhere else) that it's lovingly known as the big durian, spiky on the outside and stinky on the inside. Can't wait!

Sandwich come with chips

Solo :: Indonesia

Sampling all of Indonesia's public transport in a very short space of time.

Places: Labuan Bajo, Denpasar, Surabaya, Probolinggo, Cemoro Lawang, Gunung Bromo & Solo.

Coolest thing I did: Watched a perfect sunset over the Komodo Islands from the lobby of a half constructed hotel overlooking Lubuanbajo.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Ramadan really isn't a pain in the arse here like it is in the Middle East. All they do is put curtains up in the windows of the restaurants and everyone eats anyway. Including women in headscarves. Hmmmm.

I've seen quite a few volcanoes this year and the experience I had with marshmallows over molten lava in Guatemala was always going to be hard to top. Still, I'm glad I went two days out of my way in order to climb the crater of Gunung Bromo (from here on in just Bromo because it's too long to type the real way) to watch the sunrise. The town you stay in, Cemoro Lawang is actually sitting right on the outer crater of the original volcano and you can look down over a sea of black sand to see the two remaining peaks, one active with a smoldering crater (Bromo itself) and one dormant (as opposed to doormat, which is what one Indo guide kept telling some Germans it was). It's an amazing visa, especially when the sun is either rising or setting and I got to see it from two vantage points, one at sunset from the outer rim and once at sunrise looking down into the steaming cauldron itself. It is a 4am start, and you have to walk 3km over black sand in the dark but there's enough other people doing it so you can pretty easily find your way by following the light of the other torches.

After 253 steps you reach the rim of Bromo itself and in the dark it's hard to make out the deep fissures releasing all the steam on the inside, however once the red dawn light breaks over the valley formed by the outer rim it's almost like looking into Tolkien's idea of hell. I also thought that covered in snow the outside would make a pretty decent blue run with a snowboard. It's very rare you get to see a volcano that looks like those volcanoes you draw when you're a little kid, but this is a wonderful exception.

I admire the Cemoro Lawangers for having the guts to build their village on the very edge of what is a pretty geologically hyperactive bit of real estate. They do cover their faces with bandannas when they're tiling the fields to try and breathe a bit less sulfur when the clouds come over in the afternoon and all the old people look like they're made out of beef jerky, but they seem to get on with their hot headed neighbor OK. I guess if you spend most of the day chain smoking a bit of sulfur isn't going to do much more damage.

The trip from Flores over a third of Indonesia to Bromo wasn't one I expected to make. I didn't really want to fly interior flights in Indo if at all possible but the scale of the place and the 30 day tourist visa has decided otherwise for me. I took a flight on a prop plane from Lubuanbajo back to Denpasar in Bali and then within 10 mins of landing I had another flight booked to Surabaya, Java's second city that same afternoon, for $45AUD. What a country. I ended up getting into Surabaya late enough to warrant a stay there overnight and then to get up early to make the trip to Bromo. On the flight over it was a perfectly clear day and you could see down into the man volcanoes dotting the length of East Java. It was kind of like looking at the moon, if the moon was red and had trees on it.

Surabaya is a shock. It's a real, working city, as big, unequal and polluted as any in Asia. As an added bonus it was also my first hot shower and aircon since I left Kuta so I slept there like a baby. Which is a good thing because it's big enough to ignore tourists altogether. I struck up a conversation with a marine diesel mechanic sitting next to me on the plane when I recognised his ringtone as being Black Holes and Revelations by Muse (as an aside, the young Indos seem to all be deeply into rock, bucking the global trend towards more R&B and Hip Hop) and he was a bit puzzled at my being in Surabaya at all. It has 3 lanes of traffic in each direction in the middle of town and no footpaths or crossings. I learned that you just have to walk out into the road and have faith the swarms of motoscoters will miss you. The Indos don't even look but I admit I have trouble with it. Touch wood I've yet to be run down. Surabaya also has shopping centres that are as much palaces of retail in white marble as anywhere in the world, only the scale is massive. Compared to the ramshackle shanties and food vendors carts that huddle in the mall's shadows the shopping centres themselves are inhumanly large. I had trouble getting inside one on foot, you really aren't supposed to go there unless you have a car. It really is the other Indonesia.

After a regular bus to the wonderfully named but armpit-smelling Probolinggo you have to get onto the public minibus that drives through the mountain villages up to the crater of Bromo. This sounds nice, but all these minibusses have had an extra row of seats added and the average Indo is about 3 feet tall. When you're rammed in for 2 hours with my gangly legs it's more than uncomfortable. Still, I managed to grimace nicely at everyone that got on. It's also a good way to see how these people operate. As most of them don't have cars even the business people use it to get their goods around. My favourite was this cunning old lady who would hang out the window at each village and buy a load of something to sell on in the next village up the mountain. Eggs, bundles of spring onions, a bundle of coriander the size of a prop forward's torso she slowly built up her profit margin the higher we got. Takes your mind off the fact you've lost all feeling to everything below your neck.

After the Bromo climb I was a bit drained for the ride back down but did manage to think nice thoughts back to Probolinggo, where I'd arranged to get a van with some other tourists (a bunch of French business school undergrads on exchange in Singapore who seemed to spend the trip playing some game involving stadium names until they fell asleep) that were going to Yogjakarta. We were setting off at 7pm, meaning we were going to drive all night and I'd his Solo at about 4am. I was lucky to secure business class (ie shotgun) and slept between sudden lurches and breaking waking me up, which was quite frequent. The driver kept eating little pills and overtaking 4 or 5 trucks at a time with suitably wild eyes on him. Lucky we didn't have seatbelts, otherwise I'd have felt really unsafe. Between that and being told Garuda airlines 737s have a habit of exploding I'm having to put any rational fears of transport in Indonesia in the back of my mind for now.

My impression of Solo is it's really a bit of a nothing down. It's got two palaces built by the remaining monarchs in central Java after the Dutch decided to let them remain in place as figureheads, so long as they didn't interrupt the spice trade (in the 1700s at some time). Both look a bit shabby and one of them was closed. There's also markets but, you know, there's markets everywhere in the poor world. One of these days I'm going to write to the Lonely Planet and ask why the hell they are so mad on bloody markets. Still, I'm only here to break up the maddening journey of the last few days before moving onto Yogjakarta tomorrow morning.

Poison saliva, cannibals and more fish!

Labuan Bajo :: Indonesia

Bintang Clan ain't nuttin' ta fa wif.

Places: Mataram, Perama Island, Satonda, Dougo, Komodo, Rinca & Labuan Bajo.

Coolest thing I did: Saw real live Komodo Dragons, some even lounging around after some dragon love.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: They're cannibals, even to the point where Komodo mothers will eat their own young.

In an attempt to stay off planes in Indonesia I decided that the best way out to Komodo and Flores from Lombok was to embark on a boat cruise through the islands to Flores. I booked it all very last minute so managed to have myself sleeping on the deck (which is a lot nicer on sailing boats than on ones with stonking great big diesel engines vibrating you to sleep at night) with 15 of my new closest mates. It's run by a company called Perama, which is pretty much the company that you go with if you want to travel around Bali and Lombok without thinking too hard. It used to be the exclusive preserve of the backpacker set, but our trip included families and some grey hairs too. It was a very international crowd, and people who spoke more than one language were in high demand, quite often with conversations involving several people to get a point across from one person to another via one or two other people. A nice bunch, however. I did feel sorry for the couple of German kids of about 10 or 11 who did look pretty bored on the boat.

When they started by putting us in a bus across Lombok which stopped at a place making traditional pottery I was a little concerned. Probably the factor I hate most about organised bus tours are the coerced retail opportunities. Thankfully the whole party seemed to of the same mindset so the time in these kinds of places were limited. The only similar attempt was to take us later off the boat to a traditional village so we could be mobbed by kids and watch the local football (as in soccer) teams playing on a dirt pitch. I'm never quite happy with walking around a village like it and all it's inhabitants are attractions in a zoo so I'm kind of glad that wasn't most of the trip.

The boat itself was a bit crowded but the food and company was good and the weather impeccable. We spent our time swimming off the boat or snorkelling on the shore when the boat wasn't moving and sunning ourselves on the deck when it was. It was a very good way to take in some spectacular scenery along the way, watching the archipelago change from jungle to barren rock as we progressed. I saw more sunrises than I have in a row than I have in my life, simply because when you're sleeping on a listing metal deck with vibrations of a heavy diesel motor and the associated fumes you tend not to sleep in.

The real reason for the trip was to take in Komodo National Park on the dry land before I spent the next few days under it's water. The main attraction are the Komodo Dragons, large lizards of up to 3m in length that have poisonous saliva and simply bite their prey and then follow them for 3 or 4 days until they keel over a die. They love to tell the story of the Swiss tourist who decided to go off walking on his own and all that was found of him was his camera and his spectacles. The ones on Komodo itself were a bit hard to see, because they're more interested in living in the dry scrub land where the tourists aren't allowed to go. We did see a few though, some up close as they waited outside the ranger's cooking hut taking in the smells. In between some diving I did go to the smaller island of Rinca, which also has Komodos but you can also get up close to their nests. There were also monkeys there, which you are well aware of my opinion of. Indonesia seems to have a very high monkey/land mass ratio.

I got off the boat as it arrived in the fishing village of Labuan Bajo, which is actually still a fishing village for the most part with the tourism yet to full take hold. They have rusty huts, crappy hotels and dirt roads, the kind of thing you'd expect from an Asian fishing village. What they do also have, however, is access to the diving in the Komodo National Park, meaning that tourism pretty much means diving in Lubaun Bajo. I spent three days getting up early, riding out of town on a land cruiser (a real, proper old one), getting on a big cruiser and watching the islands pass by on a gorgeous blue sea for two or more hours to the various dive sites. Very small groups and nice people and a crew of constantly giggling Indonesians. I have to say that the Indos involved with boats seem to be the happiest people. They also tend to rib each other a bit and even though you can't understand exactly what's being said you do realise they spend a lot of the day taking the piss out of each other.

The diving is world class, this being shark and turtle territory in a big way. The sites themselves are mostly rocks sitting off a bigger island with dramatic coral formations, crevasses, spires and the like to dive around. The big stuff like white and black tipped reef sharks, Napoleon fish and turtles are so in abundance it's hardly worth mentioning the massive schools of practically everything else. A word of warning to beginners, the currents are fierce and I'd make sure you have your buoyancy under control before you attempt coming out here. We had saftey stops hanging off the side of rocks, saw bubbles coiling around us like a washing machine. It can be fierce even for the pros. At one site we saw lots of divers coming up in ones and pairs as they were separated from their groups. Still, there's heaps of boats to pick them up and quite often you spend a bit of time swapping divers at the end so everyone gets home.

There was a case only a week before I got here where one of the companies here, Reefseekers lost 5 divers. They floated for a day before washing up on one of the islands and were found 3 days later by fishermen. The best version of this story I've heard is they survived by eating berries, drinking water out of puddles and staving off Komodo Dragons by throwing weights off their weight belt at them. As a result I chose not to go with Reefseekers.

I've had to bite the bullet due to time constraints and am now going to fly back to Bali tomorrow and off to Java hopefully on the same day.

Fishy, fishy, fishy.

Gili Trawagan :: Indonesia

Staying at the pub makes your liver hurt.

Places: Senggigi & Gili Trawagan..

Coolest thing I did: Saw a blokes fighting with sticks and shields in the street, and they were just members of the audience.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Komodo dragons can apparently kill you.

I'm assuming at some time in the not too distant past the town of Senggigi on the island of Lombok was a tourist hotspot, once the preserve of backpackers and other such lower forms of tourist life (yes, I include myself) but now with nice looking resorts sitting all along the beach. It has a beautiful collection of bays to walk along and you can snorkel right off the beach. There's a picturesque little temple overlooking the whole scene from the point and the sun sets right over the water. What Senggigi doesn't have is any tourists. It's deader than dead, and a little bit dull. Why the empty night club over the road chose to play music until 3am every night is beyond me, but I do like their optimism.

The staff in the shops and the touts and hustlers walking the beach seem just as confused as everyone else as to why it's so dead, making me think it's a recent phenomenon. There are load of half built shopping centres and bars that are boarded up so I'm assuming that is may have tried to expand upmarket too quickly and are paying the result from having neither backpackers or luxury tourists. I had lots of time to chat to the hustlers because they had nothing else to do and I was obviously not going to buy necklaces or fake pearls or pirate DVDs. As an aside one bloke did seem a little concerned when I told him you can download music and movies off the internet for free. Seeing as he has no real moral recourse due to the face that he's also pirating his material to sell I'd say he's looking for a new line of work.

There seems to be a constant contest between individual Indos in the place, everyone can organise any tour, transfer or activity you want, usually because they get a taste of the action if they bring in new customers. I spent a fair bit of time sitting around drinking the super thick gritty Indo coffee with a local bloke who is the caretaker of a villa owned by a real estate developer from Perth who only goes out there once or twice a year, hence this Indo bloke having loads of free time to try and organise tickets for people on the side. There were quite a few older Aussies who have bought up places near the beach there and are in semi-retirement. I ended up having beer with a boat builder my Dad's age (from Perth also) who makes his money selling catamarans all through the archipelago. When I asked him if he was worried about it being quiet he said he was delighted.

In stark contrast the Gili Islands are under-going transition from backpacker dives to upmarket designer hotels and bungalows for Europeans without too much tension, even if the prices are starting to bite a bit deep for the true shoestringers. The diving is a fixed price by agreement on the island and it's about double what I was paying in Belize in April. There are still a slew of grungy bars and beach front restaurants (including the pub located directly in front of my room, I just pay the guy every morning at the bar) but they're starting to look a bit lonely and there's a whole lot more being built all the time.

One day in the water will show you why. In one dive I saw two (!) sharks, half a dozen turtles, octopus, cuttlefish that change colour, all sorts of stuff. It all seems well run, even if I did manage to pick the dive school that cater mostly to French people (though I did learn today that digital camera in French is camera numeric). For the those who absolutely must surf there is a right hander breaking over hard coral but I'd say once the backpackers are driven out for good it won't really get ridden again.

For this whole slew of gentrification I lay the blame squarely at Oprah Winfrey's door. She hyped up a book a couple of years back called Eat, Love, Pray; which I admit I did read passages of and had to stop due to not being able to stomach the big heaping mound of pseudo-spiritual crap it was dishing up. You are now seeing a whole load of Americans reading their emails on their Macs by the beach with that book prominently placed in front of them. There are cafes with the word "organic" in their name and yoga classes on the beach. I imagine pretty soon the guys selling weed and mushrooms (who seem to congregate outside my pub) won't have any backpackers to sell too. I've been amazed that there's even a kickback system for drug dealers. If the guys behind the bar bring in customers they get a cut of the price. It also seems you can haggle over drugs too. Nothing in this country has a fixed price. However, price fixing seems to be on the rise. Getting off the ferry from Bali to Lombok was my first encounter with a taxi mafia in this country and they're fearsome. There was only me and a Dutch couple who had not arranged any onward transport from the ferry "port" in Lombok and after the first guy spoke to us no-one would speak to us or haggle for a price. We walked into the town and were about to get a guy to drive us in his car for half price when the taxi driver came over and threatened the bloke so he refused to take us. He also threatened me, saying he'd find out where I was staying. Nice start. Wonder why you don't have any tourists? We ended up having to pay the full price and he had the cheek to be offended when we didn't tip him on arrival to Senggigi.

I'm about to spend three days on my way out to the Komodo Islands to see the dragons and will base myself on the island of Flores where the diving is supposed to be even better than here. If that's the case then it'll be well worth the trip.

Same same, but different.

Ubud :: Indonesia

You'll never go broke putting beer logos on t-shirts.

Places: Depensar, Kuta, Ubud, Bedulu, Gunung Kawi & Tinta Empul.

Coolest thing I did: Stumbled onto a proper Hindu festival, Galungan, which in Ubud includes monkeys. My thoughts on monkeys are well documented.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: That people from Bali are actually Hindus or Buddhists or something. They're not Muslims, that's for certain.

The plane over didn't bode well for my liking Kuta Beach, the Costa del Sol or Cancun of the Australian package tourist. The bulk of the flight from Darwin to Depensar was either families with lots of kids or single males well into their 40s or 50s the wrong side of too much brown spirits. I was a little scared that I'd end up sharing the beach with lots and lots of Aussies doing their best to give us a bad name abroad, but I should have been warned by the presence of several French and Germans that we wouldn't completely own the place.

Your heart does break ever so slightly to see just how perfect the beach at Kuta and surrounds is, with kilometres of surf breaking in nice straight lines into a beach that is a salt-and-pepper mix of volcanic black and snow white. The hippies that first put it on the map in the 60s must have been gobsmacked to see it without any development and thus helped it on it's rise to fame. I can still remember when Thailand was a cool, edgy place to go on holiday but I can always remember south Bali being developed so I was kind of surprised that I didn't completely hate the place like I thought I would. I mean, there are tons of Aussies and some of them are as loud and rowdy as you would expect, but the converse is that the Balianese themselves are a very, very understanding and welcoming people. They would have to be. This does also seem to bring out the better side of lots of Australians and there does seem to be an actual cultural exchange, even if it is just watching the Aussies chatting with street vendors on the beach while chomping down on their Nasi Goering.

I think this is one example where even though the development has not been all that kind to the environment (just walking along that beach at sunset whilst garbage swirls around your ankles shows you that) it does seem to be appreciated well enough by both sides. Tourism is the industry here and the chance to buy t-shirts with the logo of the local brand of beer is something Aussies have always appreciated. I assume the Indonesians also love our inability to bargain without feeling like a prick.

Kuta is really about two things, surfing and nightlife. There has been an attempt to cater to upmarket Europeans, which can be seen further up the beach in Legain where you can see all these sprawling bungalow complexes where the Euros can sunbathe in view of the beach while still being separated from the touts by a low fence and security guards. However the nightlife was what I was most afraid would put my countrymen to shame, after all when we go overseas it's generally once we've had 9 too many that we tend to do things that would get us escorted from the suburb at home. There was a fair smattering of young surfers out drunk, but they seemed content to limit themselves to trying to pull the other young Aussies of the complementary sex and weren't even that fussed by the Indonesians. What was a little bit sad was the much older crowd, the tattooed greying men I'd seen on the plane over from Darwin. I'd say this had always been a location for older men, especially the aging, blue rinsed ponytail types, but no my single night out in Kuta I got into conversation with two separate large groups of Australian men old enough to be my father and the common theme in both cases was the commodities boom.

It seems that the resources boom at home has meant that there are a lot of single older men, either that way from the start or due to broken marriages resulting from long times appart from their families. The couple of guys I spoke to did seem to realise that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity and they had to make as much money as possible while it lasts, no matter how high the human cost. The thing most lacking from their workplaces, which also double as home due to their remoteness, is fun, especially the fun resulting from there being women present. Most of them are full of as much braggadocio as younger men in large groups are, only by the end of the night they seem to realise how unlikely they are to be going home with any 20 year olds from the Sunshine Coast. It's all a bit sad, and I suspect it's part of what keeps sex tourism alive in this part of the world, but I imagine months on end in the Pilbara can drive men to this kind of thing.

The whole place is mad for scooters, whether they are driven by white people or locals and you quickly get used to being nearly mowed down in narrow alleyways that should really only be for foot traffic. You can tell no-one really cares about such rules when you see that many of the small shops sell litre Absolute Vodka bottles full of petrol at a small mark up all up and down the small back alleys, called Gang for reasons I'm sure you'll find out if you're reading your Lonely Planet more closely than I am right now.

I think part of the reason I didn't get so scared the hell of Kuta was that I found myself living a classic backpacker slum between two Gang knows collectively as the Poppies. It's all cheap places to eat, alternating internet cafes, bars, t-shirt stalls (his: Harden the fuck up. hers: toughen up princess. My pride in my country knows no bounds...) and tourist information places, and despite myself I feel cozy and safe in these kinds of places. All I had to do was tell touts on the beach I was staying in the Poppies and they trudged off thinking it was a waste of time to try and sell whatever it was they were selling to a tourist more likely to have a less tight arse than mine. And what crap they sell. One bloke was hawking a bow and arrow set, which made me giggle at the thought of someone sitting on the beach picking off people as they came out of the surf. That wouldn't have been hard either, people actually wear helmets surfing out there due to the fact that any given wave is going to have about 20 people trying to catch it. My surfing isn't that great anyway, so I tactfully declined to embarrass myself trying to do so in front of that big a crowd.

So onto Ubud I came, up on the slopes of a couple of nearby volcanoes and so chock full of temples and whatnot that it's the very antithesis of Kuta. Except of course, it's just a geared up for tourists. They are a different breed, the ones that would rather take pictures of scary Gods they can't identify rather than stay in the tack of Noosa with Noodles that is south Bali. You do hear them pronouncing their superiority at times too, well I assume that's what they're doing because I don't speak passable French and that's what most conversations take place in here. For some explicable reason all of Paris appears to have upped for the summer and planted themselves here. I expected the Dutch if anyone from Europe, after all, they did own the place once.

Ubud is a nice place, with street names that tell you where you are. At the end of Monkey Forest Road is, well, a forest full of monkeys. I managed to rock up to town the day before Galungan, which I'm told by google is "celebration is the triumph of dharma against adharma (evil)", which of course it very well looks like. I was made to buy a sarong and scarf to wear around my head (making me suspect this is all some ruse to sell tourists more sarongs, I hear the sarong lobby has loads of clout in Jakarta) and wear it around all day if I wanted to get into temples and see secret stuff. Lots of people giggled at me, mostly children but I did get to see lots of ceremonies that I didn't understand. The women carry big boxes of food and stuff on their head to the temple, where they sit them on a big dais out the front. Then a bloke who I assume is a priest sprinkles holy waters on the offerings, then plays these bells for about 15 mins, then sprinkles lots of the people, then they all get up and have a good natter to each other while the next sitting comes in and does the same thing.

I took a day trip with my landlord around to lots of different temples throughout the day and saw lots of variations on the same theme, with everyone's kids giggling at the way I was dressed and having a good time. It's like Hindu Christmas or something. It was good to have the landlord and his co-pilot (who was his elderly neighbor, who's job appeared to be to chain-smoke clove cigarettes and grumble away in Indonesian the whole time) tear around the blind corners and sideswiping dogs and small children instead of trying to do it myself.

One thing they did was introduce me to the need for tourists to take pictures of rice paddies. Bali is stupidly humid so it's all wet rice cultivation and generations have gone out of their way to carve horizontal pools into the side of almost vertical hillsides to make more use of the limited arable land. It seems that taking a photo of rice paddies is good, but you get extra points for farmers, scarecrows, bicycles and farmyard animals somewhere in the photo too.

I liked that the kids have something to do in the whole festival. They get to dress up as the Barong, which is kind of like a Chinese dragon, only it only has two kids inside and has a pigs head. They go around to your house and if you give them some money they dance around a bit and get all that nasty adharma out of your house. There's a much bigger bunch of kids following the Barong around playing Gamelane instruments, which make lots of varying metal clanging sounds. I did see two Barongs meet in the street but they seem to pass without there being some kind of Barong-off, which would have been cool.

So I'm enjoying my forced exodus from the UK to wait for a work permit a whole lot better this week. More Indo to come as the next few weeks progress. Or until I get a work permit, whichever comes first.

Communism's like that

London :: UK

Cuba: When cars are big and rum is cheap.

Places: Havana, Santa Clara, Trinidad, Guardalavaca & Santiago de Cuba.

Coolest thing I did: Got chauffeured around the sites of Santiago in the back of a 1950s model Fairlane. From before Ford even made the car.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Che Guevara played Rugby Union at medical school.

I think of all the places I expected to visit on this trip I was looking forward to Cuba most of all. On the day I applied for my tourist visa to go there Fidel Castro announced he was stepping down in favour of his brother, Raul and the following weeks saw the papers reporting things were being liberalised over there at a rate unseen in the last 50 years. I expected to maybe see a little bit of history in the making, something that I always seem to be about a decade too late for in most places I end up.

The first thing that strikes you on arrival to Havana is things are actually as broken as you expect them to be. There's a lot of new model Peugeots that act as offical tourist taxis and things generally seem to work pretty well. The old part of the city, Havana Vieja is undergoing a massive restoration project so old colonial buildings are being turned into either 5 star hotels or classy restaurants, giving off a certain air or, well, affluence. I'd expected everything to be in ruins after years of neglect due to the lack of money since the collapse of the Soviet Union but it appears that the Cubans have made tourism their number one priority and are reinvesting the proceeds back into infrastructure and restorations.

It doesn't take you too long to see that there's only a very thin layer of sheen on the crumbling glory of what Havana really is. Once you go one street back from most of the tourist sanctioned streets you see the gritty ruins of Spanish colonial buildings and get a whiff of that mix of wet garbage and raw sewerage that you only really get in the developing world. You do see the glorious old Yank Tank cars that have been kept in working order (and sometimes in pristine condition) with what can only be mechanical sorcery since the 1950s when Americans stopped sending cars after the revolution but the majority of cars are still those Datsun inspired Ladas that Eastern Europe churned out in the 80s. You can get some awesome food but in most cases you get exactly the same meal (I can never look at ham and cheese on white bread ever again) every where you go.

All this can be put down to, despite all the work going into building a tourist industry, the fact that Cuba is at heart still a working communist country. After spending a lot of time seeing places in Eastern Europe where communism is kept safely locked in museums it's amazing to actually see a place where it still roams the countryside free. At first I thought it was cool that they pretty much only put ideas and slogans on billboards everywhere instead of advertising for products, but at the end of the day it's always the same idea and the entire course of the 20th century kind of proved it was the wrong one. In Cuba everyone is still guaranteed equality, just no one guarantees the quality of said equality. And without any kind of working democracy you're kind of stuck with it. Still, that's communism for you.

That being said Cuba is still full of people that are generally pretty nice and full of life and music. Music is a big thing here, and it's probably the first time I've ever felt a little bit disappointed that I don't know how to dance. You end up spending a lot of nights sitting around places with a band drinking rum based cocktails (Mojitos, Cuba Libres...that kind of thing), sometimes smoking cigars and watching bands play music. At random intervals the crowd will give up a few people willing to salsa or sing along and it's always pretty good fun. Similar to the beach days, where Cubans like to do nothing much more than sit on the sand and drink rum directly out of the bottle. Still if your life was shitty and rum was cheap you'd probably think that was a pretty good Sunday out too.

Like most countries with an unelected dictator in charge they like erecting statues of their heroes everywhere and the their favourite is a writer called Jose Marti, who seems to be on every corner, despite not playing an exceptionally big part in the countries history, so far as I can tell. He just seems to be a fairly uncontroversial figure that has a name that's easy to carve on a bust. For those of you who've been to Russia think of him as Cuba's Pushkin. I did, however, quite like the massive statue of Che above his mausoleum just outside the town of Santa Clara. Must be much more impressive than the airstrip the Bolivians stuck him under after the killed him in the 60s. I was actually also fairly impressed to not see a single statue of Fidel anywhere, which if you've looked a North Korea or any of those wacky Arab dictatorships in the Middle East is pretty rare these days.

My favourite tourist thing was the cigar factory tour just to watch the skill involved in what is still a fully handmade product. It's impressive to see all these (predominately) women taking rolls of tobacco and using nothing but big flat leaves and their fingers turn out one after the other perfect looking cigar. Due to the high estrogen heavy content of the work force the factory radio also plays novellas, or soap operas all day, meaning as you tour around you're constantly blasted with the voices of actors having affairs and dramas. I also liked the fact that once these women have moved up the food chain (I assume because they've got incurable arthritis) they become like pit bosses at casinos, sitting on high chairs all days smoking cigars and making sure no one is flogging the product to sell to tourists. Many of them smoke cigars all day and have no front teeth. As the tour guide told us, smoking cigars is better for your health, you only get mouth cancer. This means you'll look ugly but you won't die.

One thing I've missed out on (thankfully) over the recent years of travel to the rich world has been hustlers and in Cuba, they're rife. Fake cigars, women, taxi rides in 1950s cars, all sorts of services and scams come at you if you turn your head towards the constant hissing people do at you on the street. Most of this seems to come from the bizarre dual class system that the Castros have created with their dual currency. There are actually two kinds of peso in Cuba, one everyone uses called the peso and one that tourists and anyone that comes in contact with their filthy capitalist ways called the convertible peso, but which most people call the CUC, after it's currency code. Most Cubans aren't allowed to either spend CUCs or convert them at the bank into pesos so the government had thought this was a good way to keep communism intact while getting much needed hard currency from the tourists. The trouble is the Cubans, like most people, have found a multitude of ways around this. What this means is if anyone can get their hands on CUCs they can usually get someone to turn them into pesos at a good enough rate to mean everyone has a scam to get in on the action.

And there's the rub. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the Cuban people faced very hard times and had to do pretty much anything they could to get real money. Many of them either started illegally renting out rooms or feeding tourists in their front rooms. The former is called running a casa particular and the later is called running a paladar. Both were illegal but the government, until the late 1990s turned a blind eye because it stopped people from starving. They eventually legalised this and taxed it, meaning you had lots of casa and paladar owners who could change US dollars (then later CUCs) legally. This meant that these people became pretty important and lots of people opened their homes to either feed or sleep tourists. All this sounds dangerously like capitalism.

Going forward its hard to say what will happen to Cuba. Inequality between the service industry and the rest is becoming more common and it's hard to see how Raul will keep things together once they end up creating a middle class. He seems less wed to the ideas that brought Fidel to power in the 1959 but I'm not sure how the Cubans will react if they're told all the pain and suffering they've been through in the last half century turns out to be because one old man couldn't admit he'd made a mistake. Hopefully they'll take it all in their characteristic stride and adapt as they seem so capable of.

I'd say Cuba has been one of the most interesting places I've ever had the pleasure of visiting, it just gives you so much to think about. It's a pity that most people who go there just won't see it. It's become possible to now fly into Havana, be protected in your 5 star hotel, be bussed down to the beach resorts where Cubans aren't allowed to go and only encounter the people on a customer level. This is a little bit sad but does seem to be the way things are going. In a country where things are changing so fast who knows what you'll miss.

GrossenYank

Jaco :: Costa Rica

Into the Norteamericano's playground.

Places: Monteverde, Montezuma & Jaco.

Coolest thing I did: Got hurled around in the canopy of a cloud forest on an array of zip lines and ropes and whatnot.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: This place is so American you can get USD out of the ATM. Why they bother with a local currency is beyond me...

Monteverde is not at all what I expected. I'd read about eco-tourism and being founded by Quakers and thought I was in for overdeveloped hippy nonsense. I expected any place where the national park was founded by a sect of Protestant draft dodgers from the US to just radiate dream catchers and crystals and be covered in blocks of units (sorry, condos) by now. It turns out that those wacky Quakers are also anti-development and have not allowed the roads to either be straightened or paved up into the mountains. What this means is Monteverde is still off the tour path for most package tourists and has been left to the backpackers to enjoy. It's tiny, it's still cheap and when you look out the window in the morning you're looking down on the clouds. That's pretty hard to beat.

I'm not sure what the hell eco-tourism actually means, but it seems to have something to do with cold showers, toilets that don't flush properly and walking around in the dark harassing animals. Oh, and in Costa Rica for some reason it means ziplines, or flying foxes in some parts of the world.

I spent a morning dressed like I was going to chop down trees (helmet, climbing harness, etc) being attached to long lengths of steel cable and being pushed out over vast drops through the forest canopy. I assume this is so if you're really quick you can see the blur as birds scatter at the sound of your approach. It's got nothing to do with wildlife, but it is lots of fun. It's the first out of character thing I did this week because I'm a bit of a wus when it comes to being out in the open at height (though I seem to be better on chairlifts than I used to be). The best part of the day was the tarzan swing, which involves you being tied to a long rope and then pushed off a platform to drop 5 meters, swing out over a gap in the forest and then down to be caught in a contraption made of tire inner-tubes on a platform below. I went second and couldn't see what was going on so all I saw was the bloke in front of me drop off the edge and everyone below me would could see whoop and laugh (Americans love to whoop for some reason). When I saw what I was in for I did hesitate but the Costa Rican blokes just pushed me off the edge, and I despite breaking into full tourettes I did end up with a silly grin on my face after it was over.

The night time was all about looking for wildlife in the dark. When the guy spent the first hour pointing out bugs I did think we were in trouble, but we did manage to find a two toed sloth waking up from it's 18 hour sleep to scratch it's arse quite throughly (10 mins later it was still going) and to just catch a glimpse of a couple of tarantulas as they scuttled away into their nests. We also saw this hybrid monkey/cat animal whose name I'm informed is a kinkajou, but you'll have to take their word for it because I don't know what the hell it was.

After spending the first two thirds of my short time in Costa Rica in remote spots looking for animals (and plants I suppose, but who gives a damn about flowers when there's sloths!) I have decamped to the beach for the rest of the trip. I spent a couple of nights in Montezuma, which is a relatively sheltered black sand beach on the Pacific coast. They still have dirt roads and the jungle comes right up to the hotel porches so it does feel like Costa Rica is supposed to. There are a few too man y shops with the words "vibe" or "organic" in their names, and the requisite hippies selling trinkets by the roadside but besides that nonsense it's a very relaxed place to spent a couple of days.

You can hike a short distance out of town into the jungle to a series of waterfalls (well in some cases you rock climb to them, I really shouldn't have decided shoes weren't necessary) which are all fresh water and a nice change. Being waterfalls there's this unnatural need for the backpackers to jump off the things and the second one might have been as high as 9m going down into a pool 15m deep. I had no intention of jumping off it but the couple from New Jersey who I climbed up with both jumped off and if a girl did it then there's no way in hell I couldn't (even if she was an Italian girl from Sopranos country...still would make me gay if I didn't jump off too). I wasn't very graceful. The Joisey bloke was telling me to try and point my toes and keep my arms to my side so of course I ended up landing arse first and was in enormous pain for quite some time after I broke the surface tension of the water with my bollocks. I also learned you can fit a whole load of expletives in the second between leaving the rock and hitting the water (swearing underwater, on the other hand just creates bubbles). That was the second out of character thing I've done this week, but hey, that's what this travel malarkey is all about, isn't it?

I'm not spending my last night in the once remote surfing Mecca of Jaco, which is now erecting the concrete skeletons that will soon make it look like South Beach or the Gold Coast. It's another nice stretch of black volcanic sand with jungle coming right up to the water, only now that jungle has tower blocks sticking out of it. It also suffers from the classic smell of over-development: open sewer. It's good that the surf is still pristine and I even hired a surf board for the first time in about 10 years and had a shot out there. After an hour and a half of being smacked around by the waves I managed to catch one wave and call it a day. I'm already aching so it's a good thing I've got nothing to do but sit on a bus back to San Jose tomorrow. I think with more time and fitness I could get back into surfing a bit, but today was a little demoralising. New experiences you're crap at are ok, but if you used to be better at them then it's not so much fun.

Right, so Costa Rica is pretty much at an end now. It's Friday night now and by Sunday I'll be in Havana. Probably won't hear from me until I come out the other side.

There will be mud

Cariari :: Costa Rica

THAT´S why they call it a rain forest.

Places: Lago de Atitlan (San Pedro), Guatemala City, San Jose & Tortuguero.

Coolest thing I did: Saw a 1.5 Green Turtle nesting on the beach. Sorry, la playa.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The name of the national beer of Guatamala, Gallo, means "cock". It´s not 100% so calling someone a Gallo is going to confuse them rather than offend them.

My last couple of days in Guatemala were spend in fairly relaxing fashion in a little town called San Pedro, which is on the shores of Lago de Atitlan. The lake itself is a domrnant (they hope) volcanic crater full of water and surrounded by the spires of more volcanos. It´s really not much of a surprise that Guatemala is always in the news for natural disasters when you look at just how unstable the ground a lot of the country is built on.

Anyway, the area itself, like most of the places I went in Guatemala is stunning. I was fending off the flu I´ve been carrying since Antigua so I didn´t go too crazy on the physical activity stuff this time. I could have rode horses, paddled canoes around or climbed volcanos but I decided instead to let the fresh air do me some good and spent the afternoons soaking in "Solar pools". I think they mean thermal pools, as it wouldn´t be very impressive if they meant the pools were heated by sunlight, but who knows. End result, they were warm and soothing and that.

I did read much later in the Lonely Planet that one of the other villages I could have visited is home to Maximon, the Catholic/Mayan diety who is dipicted as always smoking and drinking. He gets set up in a different house in the village each year and you can go and leave offerings of rum or cigarettes. That would have been cool to see. Like an every growing list, that´ll have to wait until next time.

The cross over to Costa Rica on the plane was far more painless than anticipated. Copa Airlines, it turns out, is a branch of Continental and all very together in their operations. They fly Brazilian made planes (I didn´t know there was such a thing) that are just beefed up corporate planes, so they´re ultra silent and only 4 people to a row. The view of Costa Rica coming in is something else, all green hills and beaches as far as the eye can see. Like most countries, the international airports of both Guatemala City and San Jose are the most modern things I saw in either.

I decided that as I was in Costa Rica early in the morning I´d attempt to get to the most remote place I was planning to visit on the first day, there by making the rest of my trip easier. I didn´t realise just how remote Tortuguero would be. Two buses and a boat through the jungle were required to get there (there´s no road and getting boats up the rough Caribbean coast isn´t real easy) but it does boast some very good wildlife.

The village itself is tiny, wedged between the Caribbean and the jungle and you can walk the whole thing in about 5 mins. Good thing you aren´t there for the nightlife but the food isn´t half bad. It´s mostly Caribbean stuff, currys, jerk chicken and all that stuff. That´s good because from what I´ve been told by others so far the food in the rest of the country isn´t much chop. In fact, it seems very hard to find culture that´s Costa Rican. There´s no real handicrafts, music or any imprint left by the indigenous people at all. After all the tradition in Mexico and Guatemala it´s a bit hard to belive it when Spanish comes out of people´s mouths here.

Onto the wildlife. I hired gum boots (it´s almost knee deep mud in places so you can´t even go in hiking boots really) and went walking on the only track you can do yourself in the national park. In that first couple of hours I saw spider monkeys, lizards that run on the water and a green snake eating a bird whole. That´s a pretty good start without a guide and I would have been fairly happy with that. There was more yet to come.

Even though I´d spoke to a couple who had spent 3 hours walking in the dark looking for nesting turtles without finding any I did think that it had to be worth a punt in any town where they have the Spanish word for "turtle" in their name. During the peak breeding season in June and July this is why most people come here but we´re most definitely early now. Turns out I picked the right night. I was having a siesta after dinner waiting for the 9.30pm start when the guide starts banging on my window at 8.30 and yelling to get out of bed. He´s talking mostly on his mobile phone but manages to cram me together with a few other people and hire us a boat to get to the beach where he´s been tipped off by the park rangers a 1.5m green turtle is making it´s way upshore and has started digging in the sand. A bit more fixing and we get permission to go and watch so after a speedy boat ride and a run along the beach in the dark, we almost trip over a scene from Jurassic Park.

I´ve seen turtles nest before, but the ones here are so much bigger than in Australia. The old girl uses here rather ill-suited flippers to dig a hole and then squirts in well over a 100 ping pong ball sized eggs. Then she spends a huge amount of time trying to flick sand back over the hole by moving around in 10 degree increments anfd flipping sand behind her. It´s funny when people have sat a little close and get it in the face. They are allowed to show you this under red lights, but not normal flash lights, so you can see but sometimes it´s hard. Still the guides seemed to follow the rules and not uncover any eggs or block the turtle´s escape back to the sea so it was quite a scene to watch. Well worth it.

My last morning was a 5.30am start so me and a big black bloke could paddle a canoe out into the jungle to go looking for wildlife. This again, didn´t disappoint and I think starting early and not using a motor allowed us to get all the more closer. There were lots of birds (I especially liked the hovering ones, like the kingfishers and honeyeaters) but it´s the megafauna that does it for most people. We saw iguanas hanging off the ends of branchs, saw both howler and spider monkeys (well, we heard the former long before we saw them) and saw small crocodiles hiding out every now and then under the branches, despite the very high tide. I was promised wildlife and man, was I getting it. We did turn back a half hour early though, and I´m glad we did. Just as we got in sight of the village the heavens opened and pretty soon he was rowing and I was bailing us out. I looked like I had been standing under a shower about 1 min after the rain started and it pretty much rained the rest of the morning. Perfect siesta weather. As a plus side this brought all the frogs right into the village that night, including some rather colourful poisonous ones, but all my pictures didn´t come out so I´ll just have to remember them. I´ve decided I´m utter crap at taking wildlife photos.

So now I´m waiting for a bus (I´ve already been on one and a boat this morning) to take me back to San Jose so I can try and seem more of the country in the very few days I have left. Still, a most auspicious start.

Destroy the ring, Frodo

Antigua :: Guatemala

Saftey? Bah!

Places: Antigua, Pacaya, Lanquin & Semuc Champey.

Coolest thing I did: Toasted marshmallows on molten lava. Yes. Really.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The CIA has actually orchestrated the overthrow of this countries´ elected government on several occasions. Once to save banana plantations.

Guatemala has some absolutley top notch natural beauty to behold but part of the fun is having to put your Western sense of legal protections behind and realise you´ll be doing things that are inherently dangerous and if you get hurt there isn´t much come back. Lawyers don´t get much work on litigation claims here. I imagine if you´re from the US that must sound a bit like heaven.

Take Pacaya. It´s an active volcano (last major eruption waayyy back in the 90s) about an hour´s trip out of Antigua and is pretty much day trip de jour with the Lonely Planet toting masses here. You imagine when they say you´ll be climbing an active volcano that you might get close enough to take some pictures, not close enough to have your leg hair burnt. You get to the lip of the crater and look down on a blackened lava field that is pure Mordor (from Lord of the Rings) sans flaming eye at the peak then notice people actually a few metres away from what looks very much like molten lava and realise you´ll be doing the same thing. Words don´t describe just how expletive inducing cool that is, despite the fact I´m pretty sure my travel insurance won´t cover this kind of thing.

Walking on lava that´s only hardened days ago is a lot like walking on ice. It´s crunchy, hollow sounding and has massive cracks all the way through it. Every now and then you look down a fissure and see the glow of shifting lava a foot below your feet and in the split second before you realise how scary that is the only thing that goes through your head is "holy crap, this is cool!". So I did toast marshmallows on a 1.5m long stick and realised that was pretty much what everyone did, only the Mexicans (lots of richer Mexican tourists, which was a change) seemed to prefer slices of chorizo. Posh types.

I made a move from Antigua to the central highlands of the country to a place called Lanquin, which is famous for some caves (gutas! See how my Spanish gets better in leaps and bounds!) that I didn´t see. The trip up there takes you over a couple of hours of windy roads through coffee and maize growing country and it appears to be just before planting season. They love slash and burn farming in this part of the world and there were times the smoke was so thick over these massive valleys you couldn´t see the sun. It seems by going up on Saturday they were all trying to get through two days of burning before their day off on Sunday and you mostly saw the spectacle of entire hillsides ablaze. I know it gets better as my trip back through the mountains was on Monday morning and the sky was clear over green hills and all rather breath taking.

The reason I didn´t go to the caves at Lanquin (I did stay in the town though) was I´m feeling the walls closing in a bit and I prefered to go to Semuc Champey (SC from here on in), which has a much better rap. That was a wise move, it seems with hindsight. They put you on the back of a ute for the 12k winding drive through the forest to the site and again you know saftey is in your own hands. If you´re stupid enough not to hold on and fall off the back of the tray onto the road all the Guatemalans are going to do is laugh. I´m starting to like that devil may care attitude.

The first part of the day was into the caves at SC, which are small, narrow and mostly under water. They tell you not to wear anything but your swimmers and some rather nasty looking shoes they give you (mine were size 17. Zapitas grande!), not even to take your camera. They give you a candle and say to try and hold it out of the water while you´re swimming (!!!) and then it´s an hour or so of swimming between rock formations, climbing ropes, sliding down waterfalls on your arse and jumping off high rocks into murkey water. It was an amazing experience and one I´d strongly recommend. I even got good at doing breast stroke with a lit candle between my teeth and not setting any of my hair on fire. A skill I´m sure will come in handy one day.

After lunch the other part of the day was SC itself, which is a series of huge clear pools that cascade from one into the other and after a photo frenzy from the lookout high above you then swim in each one, sliding down waterfalls or diving off them to get to the next level. The place has repute (acording to the Lonely Planet, in case anyone thinks I´m getting actual knowledge from anywhere else) of being one of the most beautiful in Guatemala and I´d have to say from what I´ve seen so far I´d agree. It´s also prime chocolate growing country so the little girls from the village come up and see you raw cocoa pods, which are sort of creamy coloured, have a purple centre and a very sticky. I don´t think they taste much like chocolate but all the Europeans disagree so maybe their sugar beet flavoured chocolate is closer to the real thing than our cane sugar stuff. I´m still not converting.

So a few really good days of nature (punctuated with some horrible bus rides I´ll spare you from) and I´m back in Antigua for my next leg. I´ve only got 4 more days til I fly to Costa Rica and I really should go and learn something about the country before I get to the airport. My last stop here will be Lago de Atitlan, which is supposedly another natural gem. I could get used to this. As I´ve since seen that the cities are hell holes and the transport is utter crap it´s good to know there´s something worth seeing here.