George Wandering Asia

I've almost forgotten that I just spent the last few months travelling. Something about Birmingham imposes itself on me whenever I come back here and I no longer feel like the George who studies at SOAS and spent half of last year on Borneo. A daytime TV show would suggest the problem is I don't know who I am when I'm here.
That's bull. Partly it's being back at home with prepared meals and parents being parental, partly it's that nothing exciting happens here and the rest is the fact I have television and internet here so the hours slip by without anything happening.

It just seems so bizarre to me that one month ago that it was the same me who was by the beach in Thailand, two months ago in Cambodia being scared shitless by history and elephants and three months ago in the middle of the Borneo rainforest swimming with crocodiles and partying to acoustic Indo-pop. It's somebody else who did all that then showed me the pictures and told me all the stories.

The curse of the camera is that my memories are now defined by the photographs I took and what I wrote in the notebook I took with me (ostensibly to write Arabic in, but the work thing never really happened so it took on another role). I'm not even sure that this matters though.

I don't like it here. Yet I'm not that sure I want to be in London either. Maybe I should've carried on travelling. In Thailand I found an advert from somebody who had a yacht. He/she was looking for crew members to join an itinerary-less journey with the vague intention of at least circumnavigating Africa and probably carrying on to South America. Food and necessities to be the only costs incurred. I should've taken the opportunity. When will I have one like that ever again?

Since getting back I have (in no particular order):

1. Run away from Birmingham to catch up with Al and try a Leicester curry (sorry Al, not as good as a Brum balti, but still nice)
2. Agreed to buy a bicycle.
3. Drunk a cocktail at Jim's.
4. Planned a trip to Snobs for tonight by texting half a dozen people (most of whom seem to be abroad right now). If the trip proves to be abortive I will not be overly surprised.
5. Changed the desk in my bedroom to one that I inherited recently.
   

This is what I have to show for nearly a week back in England. It would've been better had I found myself a job, but I'm going to Northern Ireland with family on Monday and not even the friendliest employer would take somebody on for just over a week.

This is the rather unsatisfactory conclusion to my South East Asia blog. Unsatisfactory because I'm not actually in South East Asia so it's something of a misnomer. Unsatisfactory also because there can be no list of the lessons learnt or the experiences experienced.

I'm back in Birmingham. That's it.

My last day in Brunei and therefore in South East Asia. It's raining. Somebody has not explained to the great Victorian novelist in the sky that it's dry season here. Presumably the need for pathetic fallacy was so great that he decided to overlook such a minor detail as a two month drought when writing the novel of my trip.

This trip also shares the neatly circular character of a poorly crafted Victorian novel. I'm back staying in the Brunei Youth Hostel and last night I had a long conversation with the warden of said youth hostel about the Italian guy I was travelling with back in May/early June who I met at the hostel on my first day in S.E. Asia. Apparently he was a Japanese-crazed sex tourist. He seemed nice and I never noticed anything strange about him except that any time a girl was going for a shower he would offer to help her.

Mona took Bintangor by storm but now she's back in Finland and I'll be back in England very soon. I've gone a long way and spent a lot of money to see a lot of things just to end up back in the same place.

After the kayaking we did come up with a plan of action. Koh Tao - an island in the Gulf of Thailand with beautiful beaches, secluded coves and amazing coral. Unfortunately the journey to get there didn't go too smoothly as we were sold tickets for a night boat that didn't exist and therefore ended up spending a night in a travel agency in Surat Thani after spending the preceding few hours drinking whisky and soda with the people who worked there (and a surprising number of policemen who were all eager to show us their guns) then a bizarre few hours in a bar listening to a somewhat crap local band do covers of O-Zone and Thai rock songs.
Fortunately we were able to move out to the island the next day and it was fantastic. So laid back. We turned up the day after full moon, which wasn't too clever as people were flooding onto the island after going to the party on Koh Pha Nga so we were very lucky to find a cheap bungalow the three of us could rent. We went snorkelling and ate a lot.

From there we took the boat and bus back to Bangkok. After seeing Lilli off to the airport Mona and I went around the Grand Palace compound then got on our flight to Singapore.

I didn't really enjoy Singapore last year, but arriving from the hustle and bustle of Bangkok I actually appreciated the ordered traffic, clean streets and polite but slightly withdrawn people. We wandered around for two days looking at the city, eating the food and generally soaking up the atmosphere. At night we stopped for one of the most expensive pints I've ever had at a restaurant looking out onto the river but it was all very pleasant.

We then took the bus to Johor Bahru (in Malaysia) from where we flew to Kuching, on Malaysian Borneo. There we went to Bako national park (to see proboscis monkeys, macaques, monitor lizards, pitcher plants and many many types of ant), Semenggok orang utan sanctuary to see its residents (who were very obliging for photographs) and also wandered around eating ABCs (ice with jelly, sweet corn, beans and many different types of syrup), pancakes and roti canai. We stopped at the Sarawak museum to see dead animals in glass boxes. Not exactly my kind of thing but it was a hot day, the museum's got nice architecture and it's air-conditioned.

From there we took the boat to Sarikei (although the man on the boat tried to discourage us from dismounting there as he'd clearly never seen a tourist wanting to come to these parts before), stopped for lunch (notice a theme developing here?) then took the bus onwards to Bintangor (town from last year).

Here I've introduced Mona to lots of different cafés, foods, friends and crazy people. As we were eatig breakfast this morning the town's most noted crazy man, Hasan, treated us to a speech about the importance of forgiving the white man for his sins before World War II because of the fact the white man had helped Malaysians fight the Japanese.

Tomorrow we're going to Sibu, from where Mona flies to Kuala Lumpur, then Bangkok, then Helsinki and I'll take the bus up to Brunei and fly home.

It's been a while since I last wrote anything as I've been running about Thailand. And it's all been rather fun.
Flew Hanoi-Bangkok (for something like seven pounds) and met Kabir at the airport, where he'd arrived shortly before me. We proceeded to Bangkok town by the first vehicle we could find - an airport limousine: this cost almost exactly ten pounds. Oh well.
Spent the first night in a rather swanky hotel which a friend of Kabir had organised for us. We wandered Bangkok and found a very stylish restaurant frequented by the youth of Bangkok. Ordered a Thai salad ("A salad can't be too hot, can it?" - Me to Kabir when ordering) and burnt my mouth off.

The next day Jim arrived and we all found a room in the backpacker area of Bangkok, wandered around the temples and got thoroughly frustrated with the annoying tuk-tuk drivers. Every single one of them pulls the same scams.
"Oh my God, don't you know.?Today is 'Buddha Day'. The temple is closed. Why don't you see standing Buddha, black Buddha? Open only today. Only 10 baht and I take you anywhere you want to go."
If we'd believed them then we would've ended up in shops being forced to buy things we didn't want, paying admissions charges to sites we didn't want to see and generally getting screwed every step of the way. We did see many temples though, and the Royal Palace.

Kabir and Jim then headed down south to the beach whilst I met Lilli and Mona in Bangkok and took them on boat tours of the city. We agreed we'd meet again in Chiang Mai (in the north). After gathering the two Finns I headed up to Sukothai (2/3 of the way to Chiang Mai, about 8 hours by bus from Bangkok) and saw the World Heritage site there (the first capital city of Siam, the birth place of uniquely Thai culture). Then we got rather bad news that Chiang Mai was flooded and that Kabir and Jim had settled in the south and weren't moving. So we took the bus back to Bangkok the same day we'd arrived and missed the bus to the south by about 20 minutes.

Spent a night in a very cheap hostel in Bangkok, watched 'The Beach' in a restaurant on the Khao San Road then took the bus to Krabi the next night. 16 hours from end to end. Evil journey, not helped by the annoying bus company dumping us not at Krabi town or Krabi bus station, as you would expect, but at Krabi wharf. This meant the only transport to anywhere else was run by them. Thus ensued an unpleasant bout of attempted scamming of us by annoying minibus drivers followed by a temper tantrum from one of the scammers when we refused to give in. It was a proper hissy fit with him shouting "You stupid stupid" pointing at me and another English guy who was in the same predicament as us then he threw a map on the floor, said "No more talking" and marched off.

But we got there in the end. A small beach town called Ao Nang. White sand beaches, frisbees, good food, white water rafting, a nice hotel, friendly people. It's been fantastic. Kabir and Jim have both now headed back to Bangkok to fly home but it was great having a group of five here for as long as it lasted. Tomorrow we're going kayaking and trying to work out where we'll go next.

I've been having problems updating the blog, some internet cafes seem to dislike blogger.com and either won't let you in or will crash the second you click "Publish Post". Which was rather frustrating.

In Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon as everyone still calls it) I decided to take my love for the cyclo to new levels and spend half a day on the front of one going around the main sights. Very touristy but I was ill and couldn't be bothered with walking. I went to where the American embassy once stood, hoping to see remnants of helicopters, gates with tank track marks on them and angry mobs of Communists. Unfortunately all I could see was a wall with a plaque on it. And the plaque was written in Vietnamese.

From there I went to the 'Reunification Palace'. Which was the seat of the South Vietnamese government until it fell. Unfortunately the Politburo were meeting there so it was closed to tourists. The next stop was slightly more successful. The "War Remnants Musuem", formerly known as the "Museum of American War Atrocities"- but apparently in the new era of friendship between the two countries this name was deemed unsuitable. It contained a whole lot of captured American weaponry and exhibitions on the My Lai massacre and the use of Agent Orange. There were also plenty of photos taken by western war correspondents showing the suffering of both sides.

The Agent Orange exhibition was the most disturbing part though. First there were photos of horribly deformed people struggling to go about day-to-day tasks, then of the devastation wreaked across vast parts of Vietnam by the defoliation then napalming of vast tracts of land. At the end were two tanks containing a yellowish liquid. As I got nearer it became clear that a baby was being preserved inside each one. The babies were grossly deformed and were stillborns. One of them had a head twice the size of its body, and the head itself was only just recognisable as human due to the deformities.

That night I had a ticket on the 11pm sleeper train to Da Nang in central Vietnam, so I set out at 9.45 by walking confidently into the tourist area. During the day English speaking cyclo drivers abound there so it seemed the safest way of getting to the station without too much drama. Unfortunately I managed to find a cyclo driver who pretended to understand everything I said, set a price with me and set off confidently in precisely the wrong direction. I stopped him, tried out my Vietnamese "Ga Saigon" - Saigon station - which elicited only a blank look on his face. Then I tried "Station, I'm going to Hanoi" (Da Nang is just further along the same train line and it seemed to make more sense to name the capital and tourist mecca of the country rather than a small town a tourist might not be expected to visit). His face broke into a broad smile and responded "Hanoi, stasun. Yes I know. I know". Great. After a brief interruption from a motorcycle prostitute, who the cyclo driver sent on her way by saying something about Hanoi we were off. This time in roughly the right direction.
But the journey just took far too long. Then we crossed a river that I didn't know existed. And I knew perfectly well there were no rivers between central Saigon and the station. As I'd spotted two taxis parked up by the road I leapt off the cyclo, thrusting two dollars into the hand of the driver, he, in a rather confused manner, pointed towards the prostitute we'd met earlier, who was waiting for me outside the dingiest, nastiest, most blatant brothel I've seen and started yelling "Stasun Hanoi, I know, Stasun Hanoi there". I then grabbed a passing motorcycle taxi, gave him just over a dollar and told him to go to the station as fast as possible. I made the train with ten minutes to spare.

The next morning I arrived Da Nang nicely relaxed after a night on the top bunk of three in a cabin shared with a kind Lao family, who shared their snacks with me and laughed like hyenas every time I banged my head on the ceiling. Needless to say that happened a lot so it was a very merry journey.

From Da Nang it was a very pleasant 45 minute motorcycle taxi journey along the coast to Hoi An. Which is a very weird town full of tailors and tourists. It's a very traditional town with well preserved French colonial architecture and a strong Japanese influence. Absolutely beautiful. I spent a few days there and found a bar that played Habib Koité and which would sell me a cheap gin and tonic. I spent rather a lot of time there. I am also now the proud owner of a 17GBP tailor-made suit. I also spent a day at the My Son ruins - a kind of mini-Angkor Wat which was 60% destroyed by American bombing.

Took a bus to Hué, where I spent some time looking at the old Imperial Capital of Vietnam (until 1945), the citadel it was based in and the Forbidden City in the centre of the citadel. Much of Hué was also destroyed by bombing or fighting but what remained was incredible. My last day in Hué I had to swallow my backpacker pride and take a tour to the demilitarized zone which was once the border between North and South Vietnam and the tunnels which the Viet Cong dug beneath the border so weapons could be run from North to South under the heavily fortified demilitarized zone (somebody should explain to the Americans what demilitarized means).

From there I took another sleeper train to Hanoi, where I met Jim, Tamsin and Hannah, albeit briefly as they went off to Ha Long Bay yesterday. We went to the Temple of Literature, drank milkshakes by lake Hoan Kiem and drank beers in the rooftop bar of our hostel, which was a thoroughly pleasant day. The next day I went to the temple which is on an island in the middle of lake Hoan Kiem, watched some traditional water puppetry then had a massive dinner of squid fried with snails, rice and beer hoi (at about $0.15 US a glass). Now I'm waiting for the rain to subside before I walk to the shuttle bus stop to the airport, from where I will fly to Bangkok to meet Kabir.

Tomorrow (29th) Jim will arrive Bangkok, on the 31st Lilli will arrive and on the 1st August so will Mona. It should all be rather fun.

Yesterday I took the $4 bus from Phnom Penh (Cambodia) to Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam). Not very exciting but for the food poisoning my last meal in Cambodia gave me.
The border was relatively interesting, walking through no-mans-land towards the hammer and sickle/gold star flags.
Got to Ho Chi Minh City absolutely shattered and unable to eat so splashed out on an aircon room and slept for 13 hours to wake up feeling 100% again.

Have just spent the day wandering around the city with a very friendly Swiss guy, with whom I've been practising what remains of my French, and a rather bossy American who abides by pretty much every stereotype going about Americans, though I haven't asked him whether he has a gun.

As for the crazy cyclo (like rickshaw but with a push bike attached) driver. He followed me down the road insisting that I go to a "good clean girl" he knew for a blowjob. "Only $20 and clean, yes. No problem." Out of interest (I assume) Jimmy (Swiss guy) asked the price for a whole night. At which the cyclo driver looked disgusted and marched off.

Now I have to work out a way to get to Hanoi (36 hours travel away minimum) whilst seeing some of the rest of Vietnam and arriving Hanoi on 25th July.

From Phnom Penh I took a bus to Kratie. It's a tiny town by the Mekong where you can still see the Irrawaddy freshwater dolphin. Hired a boat, saw the dolphins. T'was fun. Thjen I ate algae soup and watched Italy beat France.
The next day I took a pickup truck to Sen Merodom. It's an even smaller town right by the Vietnamese border, up in the mountains. And it's cold. Like England summer cold.

But they had elephants, so that was OK. Went on a 5 hour wander through the mountains on elephant back. Unfortunately half way through the elephant and handler fell out - so the elephant decided she no longer wanted an annoying white guy on her back. 2.5 tonnes of elephant trying to shake you off is quite a scary feeling, but I was able to cling on so it worked out fine in the end. There was much whipping by the handler and trumpeting by the elephant. I was mainly laughing like a crazy man and swearing.

After the elephant my moto driver was late in picking me up from the Pnong village where I'd hired the elephant. Fortunately the locals took pity on me and gave me rice wine to drink and food to eat. This is where the apology to Suzy comes in. They gave me the food and I happily tucked in, then I got round to asking what it was. To much laughter they informed me that it was dog. It was really tasty too.

The next day I went wandering through farms, jungle and more Pnong villages. Which involved a lot more rice wine, some buffalo meat (not nearly as good as dog) and meeting some men who spend all day digging ditches for $2.50. For the day that is, not the hour. If they're really lucky they can hope to earn in one week what a spotty kid in McDonalds London can earn in two hours.

The journey back to Phnom Penh was a nightmate. It should take 8 hours in a pickup (the road to Sen Meredom is very bad - a dirt track at best, a river at worst). However, there were a few delays:

• 3 wheel changes
• 3 push starts
• 2 garage visits
• 2 police checkpoints
• 2 monsoon downpours
• 2 new wheel bolts
• 1 bribe paid
• 1 new battery
• 1 new hub for wheel

Now finally back in Phnom Penh for a few hours then it's a nice nine hour bus journey to Ho Chi Minh City tomorrow where, hopefully, Adam and I will meet up again. He's been in Siem Reap looking at Angkor Wat and the other temples that I saw last year.