Long Titles

I was realy excited when I bought “Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid” by J. Maarten Troost and not just because it would mean I could really up the word count of this post simply by pasting in the title of the books a few times!

The excitement was more to do with reading a book by an author I’ve enjoyed writing about a country that I loved.

How could I have been so wrong?

It’s like he went to a completely different country…

Maybe if I’d been to Kiribati, Vanuatu or Fiji, I wouldn’t have enjoyed his books as much or maybe because he wasn’t living in China but merely travelling through as an observer that he spent his time on the outside looking in.

He seems so critical of the country, he never seems to relax, it’s always him against the land and its people, everywhere people were only after his money, everything seemed negative, from the old ways of Mao to the attempts of the people to cast off the problems of Mao, nothing the Chinese did seemed to satisfy him.

Even in the most beautiful parts where even the most jaundiced eye will admit to beauty he always seemed to be looking for a “but”, perhaps that’s how he enjoyed himself?

Or maybe I live a charmed life but I loved my time in China yet along the way I would meet these people like Maarten who had problems in their travels and didn’t like China as much as I did,  I kept wondering if I was missing something….

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Greetings from …the side of the road

 

While there weren’t dramatic clouds of smoke or fire bursting from the bonnet, the car slowed to a stop and wouldn’t start. The driver disappeared underneath the raised hood. Each time his head popped out he only looked more worried.

Not knowing anything about cars we left him to it, we told stories, we joked and we bickered until we were fed up with the lack of the constant motion that had been our companion for days.

Restlessness was the new enemy there was nowhere to go, the land stretched out around us, we paced up and down, we gazed deep into the horizon, looking for answers, searching for some form of entertainment.

In all our time sitting here between somewheres, we learnt something about this land of extremes, not one car stopped to see if they could help.

The girls are now discussing between themselves which of them would be considered the most attractive to the local drivers and whether they should show a bit of leg….

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Save a Prayer

Cast your mind back in time, back to the eighties, back to a band named after a character in the film Barbarella, think of their song, “Save a Prayer”, now picture the video for the song….

Have you got the video playing in your head? Watching the video recently, it’s like watching a commercial sponsored by the Sri Lankan tourist board. You start off on the coast, the white sandy beaches stretching onwards forever, the sailing boats floating offshore and the unmistakably Sri Lankan fishermen balancing on sticks above the waves

Moving northwards there’s the broad expanse of World’s End, the jungles and the mountains, the elephants and the Rock, Sigiriya.

The tale of the rock fortress is one of murder and fear. The prince was tired waiting for the king to shuffle off this mortal coil and decided to help his far too healthy father along the way, he bricked him up into a roof and left him to suffocate. Problem solved.

Unfortunately his half-brother found out and fled to India to raise an army to avenge his father. The problem with a lot of the cities in Sri Lanka was that they were very difficult to defend so the prince searched desperately for a defensible position. He found Sigiriya, a huge rock in the middle of the island, build a fortress upon it and it was there that he lived in constant fear for the rest of his life…

But more importantly , back to Duran Duran, they get to play their guitars, sing with their arms outstretched in the air and generally pose on top of the Rock below the circling helicopters filming their antics.

Then it’s off to Polonaruwa for some more serious posing in front of statues of Buddha and as many pagodas as they can find…..

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Holy Footprint Batman!

It’s 2am, we’ve had 2 hours sleep and it’s time to get up. It’s like walking into a gale trying to get out of that bed, my body is quite attached to it but after much struggling separation is achieved, we wipe the barely deposited sleep from our eyes, pull on some clothes and head outside.

The streets of Dalhousie are quiet, only the occasional dog barking at the stars, it’s just us and the empty streets. Above us is Sri Pada, barely visible but for the little dots of light winding their way up the mountain.

Sri Pada is one of the most sacred mountains in Sri Lanka and during the pilgrimage season, pilgrims come to Dalhousie to climb the mountain to see Buddha’s footprint (Sri Pada means Sacred Footprint). Apparently there’s an indentation in the rock on the top of the mountain that’s shaped like a foot. It’s said to mark the last place on earth that the Buddha stepped before ascending to a better place.

When the British came they added their own interpretation to the mystical mountain, it became Adam’s Peak, this was the place where Adam first set foot on Earth after being cast out of paradise, so however you want to look at it, it’s a pretty special mountain…

It was the end of the pilgrimage season so the thousands who normally throng the mountain were safe at home, leaving just a dedicated few for the climb and a lot less crowds to fight past on the way up the mountain. It’s hard to imagine how busy it gets during the peak time, we had enough trouble finding somewhere to stay.

We ended up in a small dingy place which really didn’t look like much at all but what it lacked in prettiness it made up for in service. The little man who ran the guesthouse couldn’t do enough for us, he cooked up one of the nicest dinners we had in our whole trip around Sri Lanka, he seemed to be always there, ready to help, gave us a quick snack before we set off up the mountain and had a sumptuous breakfast prepared when we arrived back starving, it was like enjoying 5 stars at a no-star hotel!

As we got closer to the start of the walk, a few of the traders were up and about, ready to serve the pilgrims and our fellow hikers. Some have gone before us, some will come after us but all of us are going to one place, the Buddha’s footprint.

When I read about the walk and how during the pilgrimage season the path to the top is illuminated, I had this image of lanterns gently lighting our way. Sometimes reality has a way of disagreeing with your imagination, there’s no yellow lanterns, instead the lights on are bare fluorescent tubes casting blue light far up into the heavens.

All around the world, even when climbing sacred mountains, the pagan sunworshipper is always there, deep down, whispering, find the sun, embrace it, but first there must be a period of sacrifice, and so we climb in the dark, our goal, the top, and the chance to be the first to see the rising sun…

Despite all the other climbers there are times on the path when it’s just me, the empty steps leading up or down, the fluorescent bulbs buzzing above my head and beyond the stars twinkle for my attention. It’s quiet there on the side of the mountain, a moment to myself before the heads of the next set of pilgrims appear.

There are steps all the way up, about 5000 in total, doesn’t sound like much but the higher you go the steeper they get and what began as a nice stroll at the beginning requires more and more exertion. As the difficulty increases I find myself wishing that I’d started counting the steps, the path snaked ever upwards, below I could see the trail of lights that brought me here but all else was dark, I had no idea how far we’d come and how much was left to climb…

I took more and more breaks to catch my breath, topping up my water with supplies from one of the many shops along the track.

It’s still dark when we reach the top. All around us are crowds of people, a mixture of pilgrims and fellow tourists, all waiting for our star to perform its daily shy entrance…

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Mystery Dish

There are so many wonders to see and explore in Sri Lanka but none more exciting that the food that was on offer, every meal was an adventure, even when we ordered the same thing, we never had the same meal twice.

Coming from Ireland where most of our fruit travels for hundreds or thousands of miles to get to our shores, it’s a pleasure to eat fresh juicy fruit almost straight from the tree and there was plenty to sample – mangos, sweet bananas, papayas, mangos, melons, watermelons and pineapples.

Everyday when we sat down for our evening meal we were always given the same dinner. There was no other option in most places we stayed. The fun part was even though we always had the same thing, the selection always differed. In the centre of the table a huge bowl of rice would be placed and then arranged around the rice would be 6 or 7 dishes of food.

Each day we sat for dinner there was an unspoken objective, that one day we would finish every dish on the table. We never succeeded. There was always enough food for 4 or 5 very hungry people. Every day we had a different assortment of dishes, there were some we saw again and again but each day there was something new, a new taste to explore….

Some of the many dishes we got were:

chicken curry,
dhal curry,
spicy dry desiccated coconut,
potato curry,
aubergine chutney,
fish curry,
pappadams,
green beans curry,
mango curry
spicy soya meat,
banana curry,
onion curry

With the heat and the amount of food we were having for breakfast and dinner, lunch wasn’t much more than a couple of snacks. We usually had “short eats” which are a number of different types of pastries with curried vegetables but one day we did try a lunch packet on one of the days. A lunch packet is essentially a mini-dinner. You get a ball of rice and 6 or 7 little packages with dhal and curries, it can got a bit messy for us novices but still tasted gorgeous

It took us a bit longer to discover the Sri Lankan breakfast. Everywhere we went we were given eggs, toast and tea for breakfast, we didn’t even know of the existence of a different breakfast until we got to Ella. There we learnt all about it and why it was so hard to find. It’s not as easy to make as it needs to be prepared the night before and could be all wasted if the fussy western palate didn’t like it but once we sampled it, we didn’t look back, we had it everyday afterwards!

A typical breakfast for us was:

rotty (bread),
hoppers (a type of pancake like dosa/dosai),
string hoppers ( noodles with sweetened coconut inside),
milk-rice (rice cooked in coconut milk)
and a couple of curries for an extra bit of flavour!

It was hard to get on the plane and leave all that food behind…

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The Emerald Isle

Sometimes you visit a country by accident or because of an interest in its history and culture and sometimes you’re drawn there, you hear its call. You can’t explain why you want to go, it just feels right and so it was with Sri Lanka.

Part of the magic of traveling is going to places that no-one ever goes and for me Sri Lanka was on that list, it’s one of those forgotten places, overshadowed by a larger neighbour. It was only when I started talking to people about going that I heard about friends of friends who’d been there, and on their honeymoon too! Not quite the undiscovered land I’d been hoping for!

For years civil war has torn apart the island of Sri Lanka, then a few years ago peace happened, or at least the fighting stopped for a while. It was during this lull 3 years ago that I took a trip to the little tear-shaped island.

It wasn’t as quiet as I’d expected it to be. With the Tamils behaving themselves the rest of the population got back to fighting and hating each other, we got there just a day or two before the election. There were two main groupings, one supporting the president and the other supporting the prime minister and they really hated each other.

We were on a bus that had a picture of the prime minister inside, along the way we were passed by a convoy supporting the president and the whole bus just went quiet…

At the previous election there were battles between supporters of the two groups, even a riot. They were expecting the same sort of behaviour this time around so there was some tension in the air. We got out of Colombo the moment we arrived, to stay in the countryside while the election was going on and avoid the main trouble spot

The people were lovely and friendly. You didn’t get the same type of hassle as you would in other countries, sellers would stop hassling you after your first polite refusal, it was quite pleasant. Despite all the tension I never felt at danger, I got the feeling that if we were ever caught up in the middle of trouble the locals would lift us up and carry us away from the trouble as fast as possible…..

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Journeys to Anywhere – Bintulu

Tell any Malaysian that you’re going to Bintulu for a holiday and they’ll look at you with incredulity. The polite ones will gape a little before catching themselves and pretend to nod interestedly, while the others will look at you in horror, they’ll look at you as if you’re out of your mind, they’ll look like they want to shake you and ask why, why, why!!!

You can choose your friends but you shouldn’t really choose them based on where they live and so I found myself flying into the oil town of Bintulu…

Before I experienced Bintulu in its entirety, I did a bit of research on the net and as you might expect I didn’t find a lot of interest but one thing that caught my eye was that the airport was right in the middle of town and you could stroll from your hotel to the airport in a matter of minutes, it sounded perfect.

Sometimes I get all excited about a thing that I don’t think it all through so of course I never considered that an airport in the middle of town would be a bit noisy! However it turned out to be academic as I landed in a brand-new shiny airport, 20 minutes drive away from the town. So no strolling into town from the airport, talk about disappointment!

From my room you could see the old runway and it’s become a public space, by day you’ll see people strolling up and down or playing basketball or football, in the evening after it gets dark you’ll see motorbikes and the occasional car going up and down. It would be nice if it could stay in its present form, become a focus, the living heart of the town.

It’s a quiet town, after a day I was ready to escape, trying to find the quickest way to get away but as I stayed longer, the place started to grow on me. Don’t get me wrong, there’s absolutely nothing to do there, you just have to adopt a different attitude.

I even went to mass. The Catholic Church is the McDonalds of the religious world and like McDonalds it seems to be this huge unchanging monolith but if you probe deeper you find that there are local flavours incorporated in every country. It’s interesting to go to mass in other countries, to see what the regional flavours are, see if they are doing it right and by right I mean like we do it in Ireland!

For instance, most churches in Ireland are of the classic cruciform shape where as the one in Bintulu was hexagonal or octagonal. And then there was the music, all very sombre meaningful hymns, I didn’t recognise any of them, not too surprising really since I’m more used to folk groups and gospel songs at mass. The funniest part was after mass, the rush to get to the cars the completely unchristian way the driver forced their way out of the car park, being kind to your fellow man was not a consideration!

The sight to see, only comes out at night, you drive to the coast, park the car and look out across the bay at the lights of the oil and gas platforms….

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Fortune Favours the Bold

In a temple on Sun Moon Lake they have a little fortune telling machine. There is a nice smiley woman standing outside her house waiting to tell your all about your life, I could hardly refuse.

I put my money in, she quickly assessed me before scurrying into her little house to get the fortune that perfectly suited me. She emerges with the mystery fortune on her tray and drops it down the shute to my waiting hands.

This is it, my life, my future. I unfurl the scroll, it reads:

• Fame be failed
• Wealth be all gone
• Sickness be hardly cured
• Property be hardly in safe keeping
• Marriage be turned a flat refusal
• Litigation be not to give judgement

Do not lament for deferred travellers

So yeah, I’ll never be rich, famous or healthy, I’m going to be unmarried and robbed regularly, I guess it’s a life….

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A tale of a beautiful rucksack

While I walking along the street in Kuala Lumpur, I was stopped by a man who had taken a fancy to my rucksack, he wanted to know all about it, where I’d gotten it, how much it cost, he must have really loved my rucksack!

We finally moved on from endless questions about my beautiful rucksack and he asked me the usual foreigner question where I was from. And here’s the weird thing, as luck would have it, his sister was about to go to Dublin to work as a beauty therapist, so he had a fresh set of questions for me about life in Dublin.

We got through the questions and he had one final request, his mother was worried about her precious little girl going all the way on her to Big Bad Dublin, could I meet her and help reassure her?

Normally I would have been glad to help but this wasn’t really as genuine a request as it might seem, you see my rucksack is 20 years old, well-used and could do with a bit of a wash, it is not the type of rucksack that attracts admiring glances. In addition, while Ireland is welcoming plenty of immigrants, there isn’t such a national shortage of beauty therapists that we’d be throwing visas at any therapist we can find.

The main reason though why I was a tiny bit suspicious is that this isn’t the first time I’ve been lucky enough to meet people in Malaysia whose sister was just about to move to Ireland!

Back in January when I was bored and wandering around KL aimlessly with nothing to do, I met a father and daughter team whose sister was going off to Dublin to train as a nurse. The mother was frantic with worry and could I meet her and answer some questions. I said sure okay and so off we went to meet the mother and other sister.

We get to where we’re to meet them and we’d just missed them, the grandmother had to be brought to hospital for a couple of tests but will be back shortly. Waiting to give us this message was the man’sbrother-in-law. He worked in a casino in Genting outside of KL, so we got to chatting about gambling and playing cards.

After a while he asked if I wanted to know a good way to win at Blackjack? Now Blackjack is one of the few games in a casino where if you’re a good player you have a very good chance of winning in the long run, the other games will slowly leech money out of you unless you get very lucky.

I was unconvinced that there was an easy way so he showed me how it could be done. And yes it was a fairly effective way of winning at Blackjack but it wasn’t playing it was cheating.

In the Genting casino there are private rooms where normal level gamblers can play against high rollers, they only need to have a starting pot of about 250 euros, these are called VIP rooms and are frequented by muslims who don’t want anyone to know that they’re gambling. It also has no cameras so the casino management can’t see if there is anything untoward going on. Another key difference if that there is only one pack of cards which is shuffled between each hand.

The brother-in-law was a dealer in these VIP rooms and like most dealers is a dab-hand at card tricks, he could deal any card he wanted and he would always know what cards he dealt even if they were face-down. He showed me a system of hand and body signals combined with code words to indicate what cards were about to be dealt, what the other player held and how I should play the next move.

The strategy was that he would recruit tourists, i.e. people who would only be in town for a day or two and wouldn’t have any visible connection with him, they would be shown the signals and then go play for 20-30 minutes with the high roller, relieving him of about 250,000 ringget (about 60,000 euro). The winnings would be split and everyone would be happy!

It was all very fascinating but I didn’t want to help him cheat some rich man out of money so I declined his generous offer…. Within minutes of me refusing, the grandmother had suffered a relapse/ heart attack (something life or death serious), they bid me adieu and rushed off to the hospital!

And that should have been that but in July while I was again rambling along another Malaysian road, this time in Kota Kinabalu, I met a man who admired my hat, and he had a sister going to Ireland as a nurse, a worried mother, an uncle who worked in a casino and someone (this time the mother) who while on a routine visit to the hospital suffered a serious attack when I refused to play the game! What was fascinating was that it was almost the same script, word for word!

I feel guilty, twice I’ve refused and twice women have had attacks/seizures, I’m a jinx and this is the final reason why I didn’t go to meet the rucksack man’s mother, I was worried for her health….

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Reading Asia

One of the first things I did when I got out of Myanmar and arrived in KL was to read a book, not just any book but a book called “Video Night in Kathmandu”.

What was interesting about the book was that it went to a lot of the places that I’ve been to this year but was written 20 years ago so it was a way for me to compare how things might have changed in the time since.

Some of the places like Bali and Japan hadn’t changed all that much but the experience he had of travelling through China and Tibet were totally different to my time there.

I decided to wait until after my trip to Myanmar to read the Burma chapter. In some ways the country hasn’t changed at all since he went and in others so much has changed. He describes the travellers getting off the plane all with matching duty-free bags containing bottle of alcohol and packets of cigarettes, the guide book had recommended bringing them for negotiations with taxi drivers to into the city….

In some places there’s a book that you’re encouraged to read, in Vietnam, it’s “The Quiet American”, in Zhongdian, China, the only book in English is “Lost Horizon” and in Myanmar it’s George Orwell’s “Burmese Days”, which was a fascinating discription of the lives of British ex-pats in Burma and their attitudes towards the locals, it was awful to see the types of attitudes these British people had a mere 70 years ago.

There’s supposed to be a joke in Myanmar that George Orwell wrote not one but three books about Burma – Burmese Days, 1984 and Animal Farm, though being there and seeing how things are and it’s not such a funny joke at all…..

It’s almost as if the government have been using Animal Farm as a guide to governence, the government has a finger in every pie, owning companies that run the planes and trains, food and drink production, charging high taxes on hotels, charging people large sums for school education, the money keeps flowing inward but somehow it gets lost and doesn’t flow outwards on anything.

As I’ve mentioned before, the railways are pretty run down and generally take twice as long as a bus or car, the roads are a mess with pot-holes in the pot-holes, and the people seem to be getting ever poorer. At independence they were one of the richest and most developed countries in Asia and now they’re at the bottom of the league table.

While I was there a wedding video was leaked out onto the internet and I managed to see it on CNN in one of the hotels I was staying in. This was the wedding video of the daughter of one of the generals and it was lavish, with the best of everything on display but it was the gifts that made you sit up and notice, there were necklaces and jewelery holding huge diamonds and jewels, not just one but many while outside the yellow cheeked girls and the men in skirts struggled to make ends meet.

I talked politics with many people while I was in Myanmar, quite often in the streets or in the open and I was always nervous that this type of “Thought-Crime” would be discovered and they’d get into trouble. As part of these discussions, I would ask what could be done to make things better and it would always be the same response – nothing.

The whole population seems to have been beaten down into submission, they may think about change but no-one will do anything, they can’t risk it, it’s bigger than themselves, they have to think of their families, if the primary breadwinner becomes a rebel or gets arrested then who will feed their children?

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