The Dice Game

Shanghai :: PRC(Note: published late due to GFWoC issues)

Climbing the only mountain the weather would allow. Stupid snow.

Places: Qingdao, Laoshan, Hangzhou & Shanghai

Coolest thing I did: Rode a bike the whole circumference of the West Lake in Hangzhou in one lazy day.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: People buy beer right across the street from the factory in Qingdao and take it away in plastic shopping bags. You'd *really* want to check it for holes first.

Back in the 19th century it became apparent that if you wanted to be a proper European colonial power you really had to have a city somewhere in China to call your own. The British had recently won a war to force the Chinese to buy their drugs through Shanghai and got Hong Kong as a bonus. The French & Russians had stakes in Shanghai and even Portugal (PORTUGAL!) had a colony in Macau. A recently unified Germany seemed to think they were getting a short deal in Asia and decided they wanted in on China. So they rocked into a little town called Qingdao and took it over with that Teutonic military single mindedness the rest of Europe was going to struggle with during the following century.

The Germans being the Germans decided that they needed some beer around the place and seeing as the Chinese really didn't do beer they started a brewery. They named it using the town's Western spelling, and with that Tsingtao was born. Now the Chinese love their beer, and if you've ever been to a Chinese restaurant on planet Earth you've probably tried it too. It's inoffensive, it's about 4 1/2% ABV and it's pretty much available everywhere in China. What's not to love?

The thing that I recall most about the Tsingtao brewery (on the appropriately named Beer Street) is they have a Siemens motor that's over 100 years old that still runs that used to be used to mix the mash. Apparently Siemens discovered this not too long ago and offered to buy it from the brewery for over $1m USD but the request was denied. I can see why the Germans would want it, it's hard to get advertising of reliable engineering better than that.

The town of Qingdao still retains some of it's colonial past, but like most of the cities in China that's rapidly being overshadowed by multi-lane roads and high rise. At least in Qingdao much of the original German buildings have been left alone and have decided to start a new town further along the coast. You have to pass through all this to get to Laoshan, the most properly Chinese looking mountainscape I managed to climb on the whole trip. Its what you expect Chinese mountains to look like, with large expanses of limestone jutting out of the forest and temples dotted around the place. Due to the unexpected cold snap that accompanied the whole trip the attempt to climb other sacred mountains in China was foiled twice by there being a foot of snow on the summit but this one allowed itself to be climbed.

Laoshan is famous in China for being one of the early homes of Taoism and pretty much all the holy sites are Tao-related in some way. The very highest point that can be reached using the trails is home to a temple built around the cave of a Taoist hermit who used to live in a cave there and on a less misty day you might have been able to see all the way down to the sea from there, but it was still impressive. The cave is still there but I imagine if you were a recluse you'd have been annoyed by all the monks hanging around your cave and building a temple there, so I assume said hermit has moved on quite some time ago.

At the base of the mountain is a Temple which apparently translates to The Purity Palace, which is like a Taoist Disneyland. It's ying-yang signs and statues of Lao Tzu (he of the Tao Te Ching) all over the place and seems quite popular with the Chinese tourists. My favourite thing there was the young Kung Fu team that were out stretching before practise. It was just like they were a football team or something, warming up in their tracksuit pants and the old grumpy coach watching over them like he'd never seen such laziness and poor flexibility in all his years of coaching. I liked to imagine him having a broad Australian accent "You're kicking like a bunch of poofters! You call that tiger style? I've seen better kicking from my grandmother, you bunch of girls!".

The strangest thing about Qingdao was the weddings. Walking along the many beaches set aside for swimming (you know this because they are labelled "Swimming Beach No. 1", "Swimming Beach No. 2" and so on. Got to love that communist marketing prowess) you might notice a young couple and their photographer having their wedding pictures taken. Then you see another. And Another. There must be something about having your pictures taken on the beaches and rocky outcrops on Qingdao, because there are people doing it everywhere. It's also freezing cold. So you see the brides wearing hoodies backwards to protect their exposed shoulders between photos, and quite often they are wearing jeans under their dresses. They also seem to be rentals as most of the grooms are wearing suits that were already out of fashion in 1972. Either that or Chinese retro fashion is a decade or so behind our retro fashion.

The train trip between Qingdao and Shanghai (on the way to Hangzhou) was the longest of the whole journey and it had everything you eventually come to know and love from Chinese train journeys. There's always an argument about the placement of luggage, always, and one of the best thing about the Chinese people is these arguments usually result in pushing and shoving. I guess when you live with 1.3bn people you give up any hope of having a private disagreement so you'd best embrace it with all your might. The other thing is you get a close quarters how the Chinese babies go about their business. Pretty early on you notice that most toddlers in China wear pants with a bit split from front to back between the legs and no nappies. Apparently if the baby needs to evacuate anything down there the parents simply hold their legs apart and away they go, be it in the park, into the gutter, wherever. On the train this becomes quite urgent if the baby starts, so you get to skip the ever present toilet queue if you are carrying a baby that has already started to push one out.

Besides their obvious superior speed to trains in Australia, Chinese trains are blessed with flowing hot water in every carriage. If you want tea or pot noodles, it's right there. Why doesn't everyone do that? In yet more proof the Chinese have no issue with capitalism the best selling item on the train platforms was pot noodles, I guess to people who hadn't planned ahead for a 10 hour train journey and had been looking at the hot water tap going "if only...".

Hangzhou was like travelling forward in time when compared to practically everywhere else in China so far, including Beijing. Everything is geared towards getting as many tourists to look at it's lovely West Lake as possible, and it shows in things being very clean and working. It was like you'd accidentally gotten of the train in Japan or something. They don't only have bikes for rent, but they have bikes for rent with a proximity swipe card that comes out of a kiosk that runs on solar power. It's like the future, just like Japan.

West lake is as attractive as you would expect, cut along the edges by causeways that allow little arched bridges to be built and give boats somewhere to moor and allow their captains to harass tourists for a trip. As had become the norm the attempts to get white people into the boats were fairly lazy, seeing as most of the captains had English that extended to "boat". The big money was obviously in getting the fatter looking Chinese people into your boat, yet another example of how the new Chinese middle classes are spending their new found money at home, due to the fact they can't get out of the place. We had a lazy day of cycling around the lake, visiting temples and pagodas and generally enjoying the ambiance with about 1.5m of our closest friends.

If you are a woman the done thing would appear to be to go to Hangzhou, get dressed up to the nines and get your picture taken reaching up into a cherry blossom tree in a provocative style. My guess is it only happens in cherry blossom season, but I have no hard data to disprove that.

At the far end of the lake from the town is the Leifeng Pagoda, the town's most famous though only reconstructed in 2002. To show just how up-to-date they are, the pagoda now has a set of escalators to get you right up to the base of it. This apparently didn't just amuse us, most of the Chinese tourists needed a picture riding up it as well. The Leifeng Pagoda is famous because of the Legend of White Snake, which apparently has nothing to do with the 80s rock band. It's the timeless story of Bai SuZhen, a demon who dreams of turning into a goddess by doing good deeds, her human beau Xu Xian who forgets her existence on his return to the human world (which is basic science, really) and a sorcerer FaHai who reckons demons are rubbish and should be destroyed. You know the one. Apparently Bai scares Xu to death by revealing her true self, then brings him back to life with magic herbs but then when everything looks tops FaHai comes along and imprisons Bai in the pagoda for all eternity. The Chinese just love a happy ending.

For me the best spot to view the lake was from one of the hilltops that surround it. If nothing else most of the masses can't be bothered with the whole climb so you get an occasional glimpse of that rarest of commodities in China: a little bit of time without being in line of sight of another human being.

While we had expected Qingdao to be THE place in China for drinking beer, however it was far too early in the season for the tourists to be reaching it. Instead they seemed to be holidaying, and drinking, in Hangzhou. Due to the lack of Mandarin we never managed to find out why they are all out drinking, but beer is what they drink and they do it totally at the mercy of a dice game I could not for the life of me work out. It's so popular the bars provide special shelves under the tables to hold cups and dice but it's inexplicable. Everyone shakes their dice, bluff a bit, look at their dice sneakily, look at each others dice, quite often shake again and repeat. At some point someone will feign disgust and everyone else will cheer and the loser (I assume they are the loser) drinks beer. This goes on all night and everyone ends up drunk and happy. This is probably due to the fact you can buy an entire plastic keg and have it at the table so you can pour your own beer without having to resort to going to the bar or talking to waiters. You also have to plan in several unit lots as to how much more beer you plan to drink. Which many people seemed to be failing to judge.

Hangzhou has been a Western tourist destination in China for as long as there have been Western tourists. Literally. Hangzhou's first visitor from the West was Marco Polo, who like what he saw and went as far as to say it was the most premium of all cities he saw on his travels. The Chinese like this story so much they put a statue of him near the lake and didn't tear it down during the darkest days of communism. However the inscription is in English and most Chinese people walk past it without looking twice.

For all my complaints about getting around without speaking a bit of Mandarin, imagine how hard it would have been for Marco. There wasn't a Lonely Planet back then, there weren't even maps! It's also unlikely they had picture menus at the restaurants.

Peking Duck

Beijing :: PRC(Note: published late due to GFWoC issues)

Replacing history with a concrete facsimile of history, one block at a time.

Places: Beijing & Mutianyu

Coolest thing I did: Not only walked and climbed along the Great Wall of China but also rode a wheeled toboggan back down to the car park, like those ones at Jambaroo.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Chinese followed the Soviets lead and decided to preserve their glorious leader under glass in the middle of town. It's a pity Mao isn't as in good shape as Lenin these days, perhaps Russian mortuary technology is more advanced.

When you live in the capital of modern China you face such dangers as uncross-able roads and air that could only be described as viscous. Back a few hundred years ago the big issue was Mongols. Horse back mounted barbarian archers running about the place looting and pillaging makes going about your daily business difficult, and despite a few attempts at building defences to keep the buggers out by about 1600AD it was getting beyond a joke. So how do you keep out Mongols? You build a bloody great long wall along the north border of your country. Did it work? Well, all I can say is the whole time I was in China I wasn't harassed even once by Mongols, so I guess the proof is there.

The Great Wall of China. What can you say about it that people don't already know? It's very photogenic, slithering along the mountain tops and as a result, you've probably already seen pictures of it. It's really long, it's got turrets and watch towers and, as we've already discussed, it's the most effective anti-Mongol defence system ever devised by man. Like most really famous things, it's covered with large Americans panting their way up and down it, and for some unfathomable reason, lots of French people too. It's very steep in places and walking along the wall was probably the best work-out I got the whole time I was away. I liked the bits that haven't yet been restored, with trees growing out of the top of the wall, but for sensible reasons you aren't really supposed to walk along those bits. You know, in case you break the wall or fall off it.

The Great Wall was the only thing we visited by tour, however it was a pretty casual tour. There was only three of us so we went with a driver who spoke no English except the names of NBA basketball teams and players and a guide who spoke quite good English but didn't really waste our time with all that guiding nonsense. We drove out to the section at Mutianyu, which as a chair lift to take you up to the wall itself and, more importantly, wheel toboggans on a metal track, like at Jambaroo Recreation Park to take you back down to the car park. There's nothing like taking a historical relic and turning it into an amusement park ride.

Beijing itself bears the scars of a city that has recently hosted an Olympics, with everything having recently been demolished and replaced with the kinds of streets that project the image the hosting city wants the world to see. The traditional alleys that surrounded the Forbidden City in the middle of Beijing, the hutongs have mostly been razed to make way for straight, wide streets and the process seems to show no signs of abating. Some of the old streets have been kept for the tourists, with the people being moved out to live in high rise further out and the houses being turned into shops. It's given the whole place an inhuman scale, the stories of everyone getting around by bike replaced by the facts on the ground, with the car firmly in control of central Beijing now.

The most visible legacy of the Games in 2008 is the Birds Nest stadium, a short subway ride from the middle of town. Having been to a few things out at Homebush I can say without a doubt that the stadium built for the Sydney Olympics is dull and uninspiring when compared to Beijing's. At every angle, from both inside and out, the criss-crossing girders make the Birds Nest a much more interesting building to look at. Right across the road is the Water Cube, the pool used for the games which is basically a big cube textured with a blue honeycomb pattern, which is also an impressive building. I take it the Chinese looked at Sydney and went "we can top that", and in both cases they did.

The strangest thing at the old Olympic site was without a doubt the wax museum of the Secretaries General, past and present of the Olympic movement. Why anyone would want their picture taken with a lifelike statue of Jacques Rogge or Juan Antonio Samaranch is beyond me, but it's still got Chinese people lining up for a photo.

There are touts in Beijing, which we hadn't seen anywhere else in China, but they really don't put in much effort when compared to their Egyptian or South East Asian counterparts. I amused them all greatly by waiting until they'd walked right up to me and then putting on the big left foot step and running away at top speed. They thought it was hilarious and forgot they were supposed to be selling me kites.

The various Emperors maintained a couple of residences in Beijing, the Forbidden City right smack bang in the middle and the Summer Palace, a fairly arduous subway ride away. Both are oversized and impressive and take half a day to get around. The Summer Palace is set on a lake that was resized at great effort by a whole load of Chinese peasants and has an impressive view of all of Beijing, mostly because Beijing is really flat. I can just imagine the Emperor standing on his terrace, looking out over the city and saying things like "I got a crook stomach from some dumplings from that place in district 7, go burn district 7 to the ground", and then being able to see it was being done.

The Forbidden City is known as such because back in the day you couldn't get in there unless you were the Emperor or part of his entourage of ministers, concubines and the like. You don't really get a feeling for the size of the place walking around it, that's better done by looking down on it from the pagoda at the top of Jingshan Park, preferably at sunset. That gives you a view of the whole thing in one sitting, and out over Tienanmen Square to the the immediate south of the palace. However walking through Fob City from the North Gate has you going against the general flow of traffic and makes the whole thing a lot easier - especially if you, like us went a bit silly in the bars Sanlitun the night before and weren't in the mood for fighting with the crowd.

If you're like me, and you're too young to really remember the Cold War and spent your very formative years growing up during the collapse of communism and wondering what the whole fuss was about, then Tienanmen Square only really conjures up one image, that crucial moment when the Chinese Government discovered how bad a look it is to drive tanks over student protesters. Funnily enough there is absolutely no indication that ever happened, the same government having mastered projecting the image they want overseas in the meantime while keeping complete control over what the local populace get to see and hear. The north border of the square is dominated by the south gate of Fob City, the quite wonderfully named Gate of Heavenly Peace, and the massive poster of Chairman Mao hanging over it, and right in the middle is the mausoleum that holds big Mao's earthly remains.

Visiting Mao's body, which is out on display under glass is an experience so full of irony that I can only assume the Chinese have an Alanis Morissette view of irony. On your way into the mausoleum you have to pass a stall selling bunches of flowers to put in front of the Chairman's grave, which look suspiciously like they're being gathered up and being resold. Then, on the way out there is so much Mao-based merchandise you have to wonder how a man that spent his entire life trying to drive capitalism and all it's works out of his country would make of it all.

At some time in the past everyone in the West called Beijing 'Peking', for some reason involving French Missionaries I don't quite understand. As a legacy of this the most famous food that comes out of the mean streets of Beijing is Peking Duck. I had two shots at eating this while in town, once at the 5 storey Duck megaplex owned by the oldest chain in the city, Quan Ju De and once from the more modern interpretation at the Da Dong Restaurant. While I did enjoy eating in a place that allowed you to pay extra to pick your own duck, I don't know if the extra condiments and, more importantly, the extra lean duck was the way to go. I liked eating the crispy skin dipped in sugar and the option of more than just Hoisin sauce and spring onions in your pancake but the authenticity of feeling your arteries harden due to the high fat content that may have made Quan Ju De's a better duck overall. You want to lose weight? Peking duck might not be the food for you.

Due to an unusually long time spent in Beijing, as opposed to every where else I stay in China, I had time to spend an afternoon seeing what people do in the park on a lazy Saturday afternoon. The park surrounding the Temple of Heaven seems to be the place to hang out if you've got nothing else to do. There's people in their 70s kicking around a shuttlecock (and doing it far better than most young people at home would), people singing in big groups and lots of people playing that Chinese instrument with one string that makes all songs sound sad. Even Twist-n-Shout would come out sad. Every time I went past one I wanted to say "play us a happy song!" but realised it probably can't be done. My favourite was the old bloke with a long brush doing calligraphy on the footpath in water. There's nothing that says you're in it for the transient art than the fact the mark you've just made on the world is going to evaporate in the next few minutes.

That's something you notice about the Chinese in general: they tend to get out of the house a lot and socialise. I guess because up until now they've lived in such tiny spaces that getting out into the street and chatting with the neighbours saves your sanity a little. We saw numerous groups of people practising dancing and playing instruments in the streets all over the country, with varying level of talent and skill, but you do feel like it kind of beats TV. Especially if all that's on is communist propaganda and basketball.

Beijing was also the first place since the Hong Kong Sevens that going out and drinking with the kids was an option. The bar district of Sanlitun looks unpromising on the surface, with the first spot you see a long string of bars with what can only be described as bad Chinese karaoke. It's not until you drop back into the narrow streets behind the Sanlitun Village (which looks a lot like it's been transplanted from California - same shops and all) you start to find bars with cheap beers and a comfortable mix of ex-pats & Chinese students. What I like most about drinking in China is the fact they never take the bottles away after you finish. If you, like most of the Chinese kids, decide to stay at the same table all night it's possible to see how drunk you are in 3D.

As happening as Sanlitun was on a Saturday night I built up a bit more of a soft spot for the redeveloped hutong just north of the hotel, Nan Luo Gu Xiang (or NLGX). For some inexplicable reason you can drive cars down it, meaning on a Saturday afternoon it's rammed solid each time a taxi tries to make it's way down, but it's full of food you recognise, little bars that wouldn't look out of place anywhere else in the world and has a fairly high proportion of young Beijingers, as opposed to white people. It's a fair bit more low-key than Sanlitun but it doesn't look as planned, which is a nice change where absolutely everything in the country actually is planned. It was the place we became acquainted with Chinese hipster fashion, which strangely enough seems to involve wearing big black geeky glasses with no glass in them. You get the nerd factor without the crazy side-effect of actually being able to see any better.

Something that I never quite got about China was the need for Chinese people to have their picture taken with you. I was quite chuffed the first time it happened, when I got my picture taken with a whole group of Chinese school girls, but it became a strangely common occurrence. I had my picture taken with husbands, wives, grandparents, kids, whole families, everyone you could possibly think of. I can only imagine how many times I've been tagged on Chinese Facebook as 'lanky looking white bloke'.

Keep digging

Beijing :: PRC(Note: published late due to GFWoC issues)

Looking at stuff made out of rocks.

Places: Xi'an & Luoyang

Coolest thing I did: Made up for not seeing about a dozen terracotta warriors in the British Museum by seeing about 1,500 of them instead.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: There's also a tomb of the first Emperor of China near Xi'an which they haven't dug up yet. Only a absolute dictatorship could stop archaeologists from digging something like that up.

So it's the mid-70s and you're a Chinese peasant out there in your field with a few mates digging a well. Pretty normal day, as being a Chinese peasant goes, until you hit something hard, and work out it's a head made out of the same stuff as your roof tiles. You keep digging and work out there's an entire scale model of a bloke in armour attached to it. You do the right thing, tell people more important than you and before you know it they've dug up rows and rows of the bloody things. I take it you have to dig your well somewhere else, not to mention having archaeologists walking all over your cabbages. Still, you get a pretty unique story out of it. Probably never have to buy your own Tsingtao again.

Xi'an is a town of some 4 and a bit million souls, and it's a pretty standard looking mid-sized Chinese city. It has both a drum and a bell tower (as you find out after a while they all do), surrounded by 4 lanes of traffic. It does still have a wall, but that wall has pretty obviously been restored and creates total traffic chaos. It has air you can see, which is why after a couple of days there you start to sound like you've been smoking a pack a day. It's putting up high-rise at a scary rate, and on you bus ride out to the only reason you'd ever visit the place you pass through a landscape that is flat and dominated by coal-fired power stations and high voltage power lines. Really, had the previously mentioned anonymous Chinese peasants not chosen that particular spot to dig a well you would have very likely never heard of the place, but it was well worth all these things to see it's main attraction.

Basically about 2000 years ago China wasn't actually China, but a whole lot of small countries peopled by Chinese people and run by warlords who spent most of their time making everyone fight each other. Then one of those warlords, a bloke called Qin came out on top and united everyone in the core of the first Chinese state. If you don't want to read about it, then go and watch the movie Hero, which is just like history only with Jet Li and heaps more martial arts and sword fighting.

Like most rulers at the time Qin decided that he needed a pretty damn impressive burial so he got a whole bunch of the most talented sculptors around and got them to spend decades making a scale model of his actual army, including their horses and (quite confusingly) acrobats. They estimate there was a total of 6,000 statues buried down there, and as of this time they've dug up about 1,500 or so. At the current rate there will be jobs for graduate archaeologists for quite a few years yet. In fact, on the day we were there, there were a whole bunch of blokes digging one up while we watched.

Xi'an is a pretty harsh place, cold in winter, hot in summer and generally living under the haze of pollution so the Chinese decided that the best thing to do was build an aircraft hanger over the whole site to protect the excavation site from the elements. You walk into something the size of St Pancreas in London and see row after row of happy terracotta men, all about 5 and a bit feet tall and every one with their own unique face and hair style. This was in the days before mass production and some bloke would have had to sat down and mould each one by hand. I especially liked the fact that the officers were a bit fatter than the soldiers and the generals were a bit fatter again. Nothing like a bit of honesty in art.

I also liked the fact they put a big arrow over the spot where the well was, right at the front of the first rank. It's amazing to think that if they dug that well about 10m to the left they might have missed the whole thing.

On the road between Xi'an and Beijing is a town called Luoyang, which is much like Xi'an in it's scary wide roads and rapidly breeding high rise buildings and is only really visited by tourists because it's a good base for exploring a couple of really old sites nearby. The first is the White Horse Temple, which tradition has it is the spot where the first Buddhists settled in China itself. It's a sprawling site full of open fronted shrines and statues of various important people in the Buddhists Parthenon (there's a whole load of them apparently, not just the big B), and right at the back the stelae that supposedly are the oldest copy of the Buddhists scriptures in all of China. Which is pretty cool. Apparently the blokes that brought Buddhism to China brought them in riding white horses, hence the temple's name and the rather tacky fibreglass white horses outside you're supposed to get your picture taken on.

However the reason pretty much everyone comes to Luoyang is to go and see the Longman Caves. I'd never heard of these before I came out to China, but it's basically a cliff face over a river where people started carving statues of Buddha and his mates in various sizes into the rockface and didn't stop for about 500 years. There is one cave where 1,000 tiny Buddhas have been carved into the wall, but the showpiece is the roofless Fengxian cave where the figures all stand about 17m tall. It's amazing to walk up the steps and see these massive heads looking benevolently down at you, you know, because Buddha always looks at people benevolently. He's that kind of guy. It also taps deeply into that Australian love of going on holiday to places where the only landmarks are big things, like bananas, and rocking horses.

Since the Taliban blew up all the similar caves in northern Afghanistan about 10 years back this site has taken on even more meaning, one of 4 similar sites in China but by far the most accessible for us Westerners. You simply get on the same bus that people take to work, or bring their groceries back from the shops on and go right to the end, and there it is. I liked that about China, you really didn't have to bother with tours, the government just put on the local buses to take people to these kinds of places. I guess that is in part because there were definitely more Chinese tourists than Westerners, which isn't something you often see in the third world. I would put that down to the fact that the Eastern parts of China that I saw were mostly looking far more middle-class than most 3rd world countries I've visited. I'm sure there are like a billion poor people west of where I visited but I got the feeling that China has crossed a boundary into being no longer poor. Seeing as most Chinese people aren't allowed to go overseas lots of them seem to be spending their new found disposable income on seeing their own history.

I generally have been pretty cavalier about travelling around countries where I don't speak a word of the local language and surviving the experience, and generally China wasn't too much of a problem. Sure practically no-one spoke English but lots of restaurants have menus with pictures of all the food and I've always found that if you're trying to spend money in people's shops they go the extra mile to make sure you can. The exception to this rule was train stations. Trying to buy a ticket with the masses was pretty much impossible. The Chinese generally don't have a great respect for queueing but at the ticket counter it's every man for himself. By the time you've elbowed your way up to the window, boxing out people cutting down the side of the key for the sneaky rebound along the way, you'd better have what you want written out in Chinese otherwise they'll just wave you away. I would normally have considered it a defeat to have to resort to hotel staff or finding someone that spoke English to help out, but there was simply no other way to get on a train in the whole country. I was literally starting to have nightmares about trying to buy train tickets.

The peak of train chaos we saw was changing trains in Zhengzhou on the way from Luoyang to meet the overnight train to Beijing. It was the start of a 4 day long weekend and the massive square out the front the station was packed with people, due to the fact they couldn't all fit into the station itself. And just to show how quickly they're taking to capitalism there was blokes walking through selling little collapsible chair so you don't have to sit on the cold concrete. Not bad for people who grew up without a functioning market economy.

It was also another example of how white people generally get away with anything out there. Everyone gets their bags x-rayed, get metal-detected and ID checked before getting into the station but we were waved through. That kind of thing happened alot. I guess they don't have a problem with ex-pat extremists quite yet, most Westerners that care that fanatically about Tibet being too busy acting in Hollywood to cause many problems at Chinese train stations.

One comment Dee made which hit me was on the bus ride into Zhengzhou, in between trying not to notice the bus driver overtaking people by driving on the wrong side of the road, quite often while texting on his phone. She said China looks like a war torn country, all along the multi-lane highways you see buildings that have been smashed to pieces, roofs missing and windows knocked out. The difference is, most of them are scheduled to be replaced with several identical blocks of flats. The rate of change the country is seeing is amazing, every city was a construction site. I think the thing that kind of scares me is not how much they've already built, but the amount they've got to keep building, just to keep up. And no-one there seems interested in just keeping up.

Chinese sleeper cars on night trains smell strongly of cabbage soup.

A good good night (Mazeltov!)

Hong Kong :: Hong Kong

Rugby in very tiny pieces.

Places: Hong Kong

Coolest thing I did: Experienced the madness that is the South Stand during the Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: One of the theme songs of the tournament is Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones. I mean, come on, The Ramones!

Even though I barely knew the rules of Sevens Rugby before I started planning my China trip, the decision of when to go revolved totally around being there for that tournament. I'd been hearing rumblings of how good a time it is to be in Hong Kong from various random people for years and when I flipped a coin and chose China over South America for a big trip this year then I was always going to try and be there.

What I wasn't really expecting was to end up yelling at people for crowd control about two hours after I landed. It's unsurprisingly hard to get people who have been drinking for 8 solid hours to check to see if they have a band around their wrist letting them in for free, or to get them to successfully fish money out of their pockets to pay an entrance fee. My choices on arrival at Dee's place on Friday night were to either sit around and wait for her to finish volunteering to work for her rugby club's beer tent, or to put on a polo shirt to mark me out as a Steward and get free beer afterwards. Really wasn't much of a choice. I also now am the proud owner of a polo shirt that says Steward on the back that is big enough for three of me to wear. I don't quite have rugby shoulders.

So if, like me, you did no research into the tournament you wouldn't have known that the South Stand of Hong Kong Stadium is converted into a lunatic asylum for 3 days. Or that the vast majority of them with show support for their national team by getting dressed up in fancy dress that does nothing to identify who they are going for. I, instead, wore my Wallabies jersey. With hindsight I now know this was just going to direct torrents of hate at me. I suppose I should have guessed that in a former British colony most of the ex-pats wouldn't be barracking for either us or the Kiwis (there were a surprisingly large number of South Africans there though) and as I'd clearly marked myself out there was going to be a whole lot of yelling in my direction. Quite thankfully after about 1pm I couldn't really understand much of it, and to be fair most of them probably couldn't understand what they were saying either. I did get a fair amount of beer spat in my direction though.

The costume thing does add something to it, I guess it's kind of permission to go a bit more stupid than you would have otherwise. Dee and her women's rugby team were dressed as construction workers and I got one of those insights most blokes never want to have when they end up alone in room full of women getting ready: they spend quite a bit of time planning how they will eventually wee while wearing a harness, when the time comes.

So once the South Stand is full everyone's task becomes to drink beer served in 2-pint plastic cups until they feel ready to roam the stands and make new friends at random, have joyous reunions with people they haven't seen in a couple of hours, and if you live in Hong Kong, bump into people you don't recognise because they're dressed as Jesus and they don't usually wear a fake beard to work. There are only really two other things that are mandatory - to sing like you're playing Wembley Arena when one of various pre-chosen theme songs come on (Hey Ho! Let's go!) and to yell and scream like you've got tourettes syndrome when the Hong Kong team plays. The rest of the day is really your own free time to engage in drunken antics.

My favourite costume of the day was the bunch of blokes dressed as the guy from The Hangover with the baby strapped to his front. Of course they all had fake babies and by late afternoon the game had become to give the baby a punch if you walked past one of them. The day after I had to try really, really hard to remember not to do that in real life. It would be seen as far less funny.

Truth be told the party itself is far more interesting than the actual rugby, and with the 7 min halves quite often you get distracted and when you next look at the field there are two new teams almost finished their game, quite possibly with another game in the middle you didn't even notice had taken place. Very few people seemed to be there to experience the pinnacle of Sevens Rugby. While the fragments I actually watched were very fast and high scoring, to be honest I think you have to be from the Pacific Islands to really appreciate it. The big guns from both hemispheres are replaced by places like Fiji and Samoa in the global pecking order in this form of the game, which adds a whole lot of unpredictably as to who is going to win. Once you add into in the fact there are at least three tournaments taking place on one field, each with their own trophy and I'll be buggered if I could work out what was supposed to be happening most of the time.

On the Sunday there was a bit more wandering around to see if sitting elsewhere in the stands would work, but most of the seats on the other three sides of the pitch are either corporate boxes/seats of various plushness or non-drinking sections, I guess for people who actually want to watch the rugby or not expose their kids to several thousand rabid fans of being drunk and wearing fancy dress in public. The atmosphere in the stadium was always good, thanks I guess to it being only 40,000 capacity and having big curving roofs on two sides to channel the noise onto the pitch, but I suspect the roar you could hear was mostly coming from the south. It was better to be able to feel that noise splatter right on you and run down your back than it was to hear it from a distance.

Best pitch invasion was the guy dressed in a teddy bear costume who managed to not only evade all security but managed to climb the goal posts and stand on the cross-bar. When you think of how it is to climb goal posts while a) drunk and b) wearing a bear costume then it's highly impressive when you can combine the two.

The nights seem just as big as the days, my trusty Sherpas making sure I managed to get out to the designated drinking zones of Wan Chai and LKF after the matches on different nights to experience the crowds. I remember Hong Kong being far more fun to be out at night in than Singapore in the days I used to go to both for work, but I never remembered it being as packed as it was on the Friday and Saturday nights for the Sevens. One thing I learned about Hong Kong is you can not only buy beer from 7-Eleven and drink it in the street, but you can also take those beers in a taxi cab and drink them on the way. You can even take jugs, though the taxi driver will ask you to not attempt to pour from the jug to the cup while the taxi is in motion. Which is fair enough.

So on this trip to Hong Kong, I did nothing you're supposed to do as a tourist. I didn't climb Victoria Peak, go shopping or visit Macau. Which was exactly what I wanted, because I'd hated to have missed a second of the Sevens. It was with heavy heads we passed through Shenzhen airport on Monday morning into China proper, the result of way too much fun compacted into such a short space of time.

I'll just at this point mention all these China posts came much later than they were actually written due to the fact The Great Firewall of China (GFWoC) blocks most blogging sites and fairly regularly most web-based email as well. The Chinese Government is famously heavy-handed with their attempts to control information and having people being able write whatever gibberish comes into their head kind of goes against that.

3x3 Animal Style

Redwood City :: USA

I ain't getting out of my damn car for no-one!

Places: San Francisco Bay Area

Coolest thing I did: Found out that there was a whole garden full of Rodin bronzes in the grounds of Stanford University. UTS didn't even have grass.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: You can buy an iPod from a vending machine. You know something is a commodity when you can get it out of the same machine that sells you M&Ms and bottled water.

Due to some wonderful wrinkle in how training gets organised at my company I managed to get myself a 4 day trip out to the San Francisco Bay Area, not knowing I was going on Tuesday and landing on Sunday. It’s pretty easy to say ‘yes’ to these kinds of things on the spot when you don’t have spouses or kids to worry about.

It’s interesting to come back to this part of the world, which was my first taste of America and pretty much how I saw the country in my head for years, a nation completely made up of low-rise office parks and freeways. As a tourist you probably would never venture this far south of the city, except perhaps driving through on your way to Los Angles and to tell the truth you wouldn’t be missing much. Silicon Valley, that stretch of the east side of the bay between South San Francisco and San Jose is what I thought America was. It’s been almost a decade since I first came here, at the height of the dot-com boom when people actually walked the streets with the initials ‘MOP’ on their T-shirts (Millionaire On Paper) and the banks would lend people money against their unvested stock options and right now as a second boom comes to an end (for the whole country this time) the mood is nothing like it was back then. For the second time in 10 years there seems to be some questioning of whether working constantly for the promise of stock that may be worth something by the time you can sell it instead of having a life is a good trade off.

This trip was really too short to spend more than a little time in the fine city of San Francisco itself, having only a single jet-lagged Sunday to be a tourist before having to spend three days in the office. I took the hire car out to Half Moon Bay, where I went to last time I was out here but have since learned overlooks Mavericks, one of the world’s heaviest (in the sense of volume of water, as opposed to 80s surfer talk) waves. The wave breaks offshore, over some rather pointy looking rocks that give it the nickname “the meat grinder” so it’s hard to see but looking before I left on Google Maps I reckoned you could drive right up to the headland and look down on it. The trouble was the day I showed up was completely flat, enticing no surfers out that far and the bluff overlooking it is also a US Air Force missile tracking station, crowned with massive golf-ball antenna. You could kind of see something that might have been waves crashing over rocks, but it wasn’t all that spectacular. It looked better on YouTube. However, it was a very nice afternoon and lunch at the microbrewery set me up well for a long afternoon of trying not to fall asleep at the wheel.

I’d forgotten how stupidly small the micro-climates are, the fact that it could be 30 degrees at the hotel in Redwood City, 25 at Half Moon Bay and 19 and foggy in the city. I decided a good way to stay awake would be to drive up and have another look at the Golden Gate Bridge, because you know, that’s what you do here. By the time I’d driven up to the Presidio, parked the car and walked up to where I should have been able to see it there was fog so think you could consider it a landmark. I then got back in the car, drove under the bridge to the other side and the sky was blue again. Behind me you couldn’t make out the bridge, but the fog seemed to be fairly heavily sticking to it. I imagine if this was the first time you were seeing it you’d be as annoyed as I was when the only time I was in New York they had scaffolding over the Flatiron building and a picture of it painted on a canvas hung over it.

Sydney is a city that is rapidly being rebuilt around the car, however the Bay Area has been like that forever. Bar the inner city of San Francisco itself I have no idea how you’d even attempt to get around on public transport. Having said that, the city is a bit of a nightmare to get around when you’re driving an unfamiliar car, on the wrong side of the road and in serious need of sleep. I kind of decided on skipping all remaining sightseeing opportunities before I got pulled over for drunk driving while sober.

I had made a promise before I left that I would attempt to keep burgers and chips out of my diet for as much as possible, kind of as a challenge. This forced me to dig around in Google a bit for places to eat that weren’t the hotel bar and I got to look at some of the other towns in the Valley, most of the best places I found keeping me returning to Palo Alto and the area around Stanford University. Palo Alto is kind of like a Disneyland version of America in the 1950s. It’s disgustingly clean, the concrete is white, the roads are a contrast of flawless jet tar with perfectly straight lines painted on them. There’s no rubbish, no gum stuck on the footpath and the trees are all identical. While I imagine if you were teleported there from a village in Africa you’d have think you had actually died and gone to heaven I kind of found it a little creepy.

It’s the same kind of creepy that all those perfectly manicured business parks have. The Openwave office is in a complex at the end of 3 miles of salt flats and the port of Redwood City, however it juts out into the bay with its polished glass and exactly 1 inch long lawns. There’s a beach volleyball court, gym, pool, basketball court and countless other leisure activities I can’t quite bring to mind right now because there are simply so many of them. The hotel I stayed in was in a whole bunch of similar parks, EA being right over the road and the imposing towers of Oracle’s headquarters being the first thing you look out over at breakfast. I went running around the place and it was the same thing, lawns that look like they’ve never had touch or soccer played on them, empty basketball courts. It’s like the companies are saying “if you become a fat slob because you’re at work all the time don’t blame us, there’s a tennis court right out the window”. You really do accept that work is going to be your entire life when you come to work on these campuses, and the scary thing is they’ve attempted to export this model overseas. The Sun campus they were building in Surrey while I was working there worked on the same principle, with the only problem being no-one wants to play volleyball when it rains 9 months of the year.

With all this technojiggery going on you forget that long before the nerds spread out from Menlo Park and Stanford all of Northern California was the domain of the counter-culture revolution. Occasionally you’re reminded, like when you’re in a restaurant where steaks are $40 a go and two 60 something ladies are all overjoyed to have just discovered that they are both Virgos. Another time I overheard a slightly younger bunch of high powered business type women have a serious conversation about how someone wouldn’t work on their project team because he was a Sagittarius. I wonder if you can take them to court for unfair dismissal for Zodiac-based discrimination.

When you travel for work and you’re the only out-of-towner you do spend a fair bit of time sitting at bars to eat. At the hotel on the night I checked in there was a wedding going on and occasionally the guests would come out to the hotel bar to jump the queue at the actual wedding bar. Not one of them ordered beer. I think this is why we don’t understand the Americans as drinkers, it’s all those heavy spirits they insist on drinking. No wonder they only have two speeds, sober and drunk – without beer it’s very hard to take a meandering journey towards being blotto. It probably doesn't help that the vast majority of their beer is, as the French would say ‘merde’.

You can do everything in a car here, get coffee, pick up your dry cleaning, even get money out of the ATM. Add to this the fact that McDonalds are currently advertising a 1/3rd pounder (no, really) and the mystery of why the average American is large than the average Frenchmen becomes apparent. Having said that, I did break my no fries rule for my last meal on this trip in order to experience In-N-Out Burger. It’s a California-only burger chain with practically nothing on the menu. You can have a cheese burger or a double cheese burger. Unless you know the secret code. One of the guys in the office told me to go in and ask for a 3x3 Animal Style with Onions. It’s as wonderfully filthy as it sounds and I suspect I might be skipping the first 2 meals on the flight back. Any chain that lets you pick the exact beef patty:cheese ratio on your burger is strictly for the discerning, you won’t get that happening at Burger King.

So my one real cultural experience came by accident. During one of my crazy awake-at-strange-hours-of-the-morning periods I was flicking through the supermodel-thin guide to the highlights of being a tourist in the San Jose area. Wedged in between the descriptions of restored historical down town areas and shopping centres (which apparently double as tourist attractions here) I saw that Stanford University has a whole garden full of Auguste Rodin bronzes, including his famous Gates of Hell, the original backdrop for The Thinker. I've managed to see quite a few of these before around the traps (most notably at the Rodin Museum in Paris) but they're always pretty good and there's something different about seeing them outside in that soft Californian light, totally different to mid-winter London or Paris. Some people get a bit annoyed to discover that Big Rodes' (as he was known to his mates) work was copied fairly liberally and there are actually several copies of the big name works like The Thinker or The Burghers of Calais (which I personally like better) around the various art galleries of the world, like they aren't looking at the original but "just a copy". You get the same thing with Edvard Munch's The Scream but I guess both these dudes came up at a time where mass production was already the norm in industry and publishing, so why not art? Big Rodes was a genius full stop and it's always pretty damn cool to see his stuff out in a park somewhere. You miss that kind of stuff in Australia.

Leaving London

London :: UK

The Home Office decides it's time for me to go home.

Places: London

Coolest thing I did: Spent the last night living it up in the Waldorf. It's been a long time since I stayed somewhere and been called 'sir'.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: London can still snow like it's 1991. I personally blame global warming.

It’s somehow fitting for your last day in London of have the soggy consistency of a chewed up cigar butt. If you averaged out the weather in London whilst I’ve been living in the city then cold, constant drizzle would probably be the closest possible. In a week that saw a couple of days with weather more suited to Switzerland than the South East of England it was a better reminder of the time here. Luckily, I was never here for the weather.

In both the weeks I’ve been back here (with the exception of that week out in The Real England) I’ve spent a fairly large chunk of my time wandering around various parts of the city and looking back through the photos on my camera I have been muy touristico. That was never my intention, I guess now that I’m faced with the fact that I will very likely not be back to this city I’ve called home on and off for almost a decade I wanted to just get out and feel the texture of it under my feet again. I don’t doubt I’ll be back one day, as this place has had a disproportionate effect on who I am, but I might be quite old by then.

I have actually been surprised at the places I’ve ended up, some of which I never thought necessary to visit even when I was last living here. The jaunt through the pubs around Hammersmith and Brook Green opened up a whole lot of important memories for me, as the year I spent living in an over-crowded house of Aussies on Blythe Road was probably one of the happiest years of my life. Even though it’s gentrified out of sight in Ws 6 & 12 in the intervening 6 years the memories still lurk around every corner, just waiting to jump out at you. I imagine walking around Dublin or Toronto would be very similar experiences.

The Mayor of London recently likened reading the Financial Times to spending an hour with a doomsday suicide cult and you do get a far greater feeling of depression here than has been true watching the collapse of global finance from the warmth of a Sydney summer. Walking down from Liverpool Street into the heart of the city feels a bit like visiting the ruins of a defeated empire, some of the flashier bars and restaurants are empty, even on Thursday lunchtime. Some are even shuttered for good. That’s not something you would have seen a couple of years ago. Even if it is just a mood, something that may not be reflecting the actual facts you do feel the London of the Russian Oligarchs and the Hedge Fund managers may have been and gone, with what’s replacing it more suited to grey skies and cold rain. I’m still waiting to watch them burn the chairmen of HBOS and Barclays at the stake at Charring Cross, but I might have to leave before that happens.

The fact I’m thinking like this makes me believe I’ve been watching the BBC too much since I got back.

As I said, I was never here for the weather. London over the last decade has been incredibly good to me, and through my tastes in nightlife may have morphed from Walkabouts and super clubs to gastropubs and proper food this is a city that still has a variety that hasn’t been matched by practically any other city I’ve been to (the only possible exception being New York). No matter what you’re into, be it art, culture, nightlife, food, poetry readings, whatever it’s possible to find it here. (OK, I admit if you’re into wind surfing that may be a bit of a stretch…). If I have one complaint to make about returning to Sydney over the last 6 months it’s been how completely stagnant it feels, as if no one has had an idea and opened a new pub or restaurant in the last 5 years. I know that’s not 100% fair, but compared to how constantly shifting London’s scene is Sydney may as well be the same as it was when I was at Uni.

Visitors to this great city often go looking for the traditional, trudging around in the grey rain, looking at grey buildings, eating grey food and drinking warm beer. You know, in search of The REAL London. The trouble is, the real London for me is the living one, the one that can accommodate both the British Museum and a tiny gallery in Bethnel Green displaying pictures of pierced eyebrows to the sound of whale song. That’s the same London that can serve up fish and chips in a pub that hasn’t seen a lick of paint since the 1940s as one that dishes up food from every country in the world, and some that are found nowhere else and quite often at prices found nowhere else. It’s the same city where you can find old me in flat caps grumbling about football into their pints of warm beer in a pub named after the head of some dead royal right around the corner from private clubs filled with mass produced Eastern European models still angling for a partner from that rapidly shrinking pool of bonus-fuelled City boys. It’s simply a city like no other, one you couldn’t re-create if you tried.

This is why I’m in two minds about my Home Office-incompetence-enforced exile from this great land. This city has been very good to me, offering me somewhere ever impressive to live combined with the money and location to travel far beyond what I could have achieved had I never left Sydney. I’ve always maintained that I’d always return to Sydney one day, but the trouble is, that one-day has always been at least 12 months down the road. Perhaps this is that push I may have required to try my hand back in Australia again, to see if am just calling Sydney home out of habit or if that’s where I really belong. It’s hard to see how it would have happened otherwise. I guess we’ll have to see what tune I’m singing if the Home Office do actually turn around and grant me a work permit after all, whether I’m tempted back.

This is England

London :: UK

A lucky escape in Postman Pat country.

Places: York, Middleham, Semerwater, Aysgarth, West Burton, Swaledale, Hawes & Hubberholme.

Coolest thing I did: Sat looking over the glacial lake of Semerwater out towards the snow-covered peaks of the Pennines.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Vikings didn't have horns on their helmets. Apparently they were buried with their drinking horns and when the Victorian archaeologists found them they put 2 and 2 together to get 5 and decided they'd just fallen off.

During my on and off time living in the UK over the last decade I've been telling people at home that I've been living in England. While this is strictly true in a geographical sense, I've really been living in London. London may as well be a different planet to the rest of England and while I've visited quite a few of the provincial cities in England in my time here, I've never really seen much of the countryside. This doesn't seem to bother anyone from London itself, but if you ever meet people from the land outside the M25 (not a given by any means if you restrict yourself to the capital) they will be aghast that you've never seen THE REAL ENGLAND. So now that it looks very likely like my stint in London is over, I've been and gone to see the Yorkshire Dales, which I'm reliably told is part of said Real England.

For the English, England is a land of green hills, pubs with fireplaces and sheep. This is pretty much the description of the Yorkshire Dales. You look out a softly sloping valleys of pure green divided by the unnatural harsh lines of stone walls used to keep sheep eating the particular grass you want them to be eating. Off in the distance you see the snow-capped peaks of the Pennines, a low range of mountains (though I'd imagine most Europeans or North Americans would call them tall hills) that cuts through southern Scotland and much of England. It's all very pretty to look at, and it fulfils the English idea of what their country looks like.

That idea that the real country is where your farmers live is an idea that's shared by lots of Western nations, Australia being no different. Even though most of our population lives in cities on the coast we go and make movies called "Australia" and fill them with drovers and farmers and the like. The English, like us, also seem to be an urban population who yearns for a rural setting, until of course they realise that there's no amenities and walking around in the rain and mud isn't all that much fun.

Having said that, there was a lot of walking around in the rain and mud. From our base in Middleham, a horse breeding town with far too many pubs than necessary to water the local population, we struck out on several day trips into the Dales themselves, climbing hills, walking around lakes and dodging sheep. For someone from Australia, where walking mostly involves National parks and well marked tracks through the bush, walking in England can take a bit of imagination. Most of the time the footpaths you're following don't really exist, they're just agreed routes you can take through someone's farm. Stiles and gates have been provided where possible to allow you to climb over stone walls without knocking them down and letting sheep test the theory of whether the grass is greener but if you, like us, have trouble following the maps then you can sometimes find yourself crossing paddocks full of sheep trying to find where the bloody path went. And sometimes climbing those stone walls you're not supposed to anyway.

Having said that, the scenery is as beautiful as you're led to believe. We were exceptionally lucky with the weather, with a few days of mild fog, one of light rain and even one of blue skies and warmth (!). The day we tried to cross the hill between Keld and Muker the fog was so thick up there that once we got past the road we really couldn't see more than 50 or so metres ahead of us. This meant that while the view was probably spectacular, on our trip it was more spooky. There was also quite a bit of snow up there, which wasn't something I'd expected.

On the return to London just how lucky we were became apparent. It was freezing over Saturday night and Sunday morning and right now (Monday afternoon) I could be looking out the window at Canada. It hasn't stopped snowing for 24 hours or so and is probably far worse up in Yorkshire. We had a freakishly warm week for this time of year and I'm thankful for it.

York itself is one of the oldest cities in Britan, having been founded by the Romans and variously been in the hands of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Normans and the rest. It's restored walls are an anomaly in modern Britan, though the traffic in York itself is a testament to why walls went out of fashion quite some time ago. Unlike most other smaller English cities I've been to it has a certain level of affluence meaning the menace that can sometimes come with gangs of young unemployed men hanging around the middle of your town is missing to a certain degree. It's maintained it's cobbled centre and due to some threatening looking traffic controls (our hire car was almost impaled on a post rising out of the ground to block a street once the bus in front of us had passed) it's almost car free. It's one of those places you'd find full of Americans in summer wandering around yelling "ISN'T IT PEACEFUL?!?!?!" at the top of their lungs. However, in winter they seem to be out of season and it really is ye olde and peaceful.

We did some cultural things but I can safely recommend avoiding both the Viking Centre (complete with costumed staff and faux-time machine) and the Castle Museum. I don't really want to go to these places to listen to manikins moan about the woes facing them in their day-to-day lives. I really couldn't care if Yorik the Blacksmith stiffed you on some horseshoes, as you are made out of plaster-of-Paris and don't exist.

I did like the York Minster, especially going up on the roof and looking down at the city below. I think I've discovered I have a bit of a problem with needing to take every opportunity to see cities of the world from a high vantage point. Perhaps I burnt too many ants with magnifying glasses as a kid and require therapy. Anyway, I've seen shed-loads of churches over the last decade of my life but I must have been in a bit of a lull over the last half year or so, because I'm surprised at how impressed I was by the one in York. It's big, which is always good, has loads of stained glass windows and could probably hold more than a couple of thousand people when there's a blockbuster sermon going on. I'm not 100% sure how having to leave through the gift shop and camels-through-the-eye-of-needles co-exist but they did have some nice gargoyles for sale.

My biggest failure of the week was taking 5 days to finally get a proper fire going in the fireplace of the cottage. It was only on day 5 I discovered kindling in the outhouse, meaning I no longer had to attempt to get it going with wet logs and pack upon pack of fire-lighters (the place reeked of kerosene by the end). Lucky there were lots of nearby pubs that could do so much better.

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.