Travels in E & SE Asia

Cycling & Dancing

2009-06-09T20:30:00.000-07:00

"Wow, I'm impressed. Nine hours cycling and dancing until 5:30 in the morning!"

These were the words of Bianca just before we decided to call it a night and head back to Nordenham after some clubbing (if you can call it that here...) down in Oldenburg. I was impressed too! In fact, this last week-and-a-half since starting my trip back I've had more late nights after a full day's cycling than I ever would at home, hence why I've been too preoccupied to update everyone.

So I'll just quickly run through a couple of things while I've got a spare few minutes. The trip's been going pretty well cycling-wise so far. I'm happy with the bike and my legs seen to be coping well. After stretching for at least ten minutes and starting off, the first hour or so is always the toughest but after that you get into the rhythm of things and just enjoy the ride. With the clothes I'm wearing my bum hasn't been hurting at all (that's a relief!) and I've been feeling nice and cool even when the sun was shining strongly last week. However, that does mean I have the most horrendous tan line ever seen (seriously, it looks rediculous!) and my main past-time has now gone from reading and composing to pealing off my skin :) I'm not exactly sure how much distance I've covered but what with getting lots a couple of times (a mixture of signs and maps sometimes not matching up and there being no landmarks around to orientate yourself with) it's been longer than I was anticipating. I'd guess it must be around about 400 miles (just over 600km), but that's just a guess.

Ostfriesland (East Fresia) was the area I was cycling around to begin with, which was much like I imagined Holland would be: flat as a pancake, lots of windmills, some towns and villages and lots of cows in the empty spaces. It's definitely dairy country, although disappointingly they don't have a local cheese... Then, when you get to the coast, things start to change. The dykes crop up and you finally see some sheep, as only they can handle the slopes. It makes a welcome change to see the sea rather than miles and miles of flat country, even if the strong crosswinds makes cycling much more difficult. I found Ostfrieslandians in general very friendly, greeting you with "Moin" when you cycle by or enter a shop. They're also quite obsessed with fish, their nickname apparently being fischköpfe (fish heads)! The Netherlands itself hasn't quite been what I'd imagined though. There's very little countryside here, just town after town, much fewer windmills and so far I haven't seen a single field full of tulips or a window with pretty wooden shutters and an outdoor windowsill full of flowers. Maybe this is just a cliche that doesn't really exist, but it would be nice to see them all the same.

A few times so far I've found myself in the right place at the right time. On my way down to Bremen from Nordenham I stopped at a town festival where they were erecting some sort of flower-covered pole with flower-covered bells thingy with a band dressed up in their traditional costumes and then when I went to visit Bremen itself I found myself in the middle of the party celebrating Werder Bremen's victory in the German equivalent to the FA cup. Literally 70% or so of everyone in the city was dressed up in the green and white kit and we were all standing outside the radhaus (town hall) dancing to the music coming from the loudspeakers, singing the Werder Bremen songs and trying to grap a flag, scarf or football that the officials were handing out for free or throwing from the radhaus balcony. Then, after a couple of hours' wait, the team arrived in their coach, went up to the balcony and lifted the cup amit raptuous cheering. Not that I've ever seen them play a single match or anything, but I'd definitely call myself a Werder Bremen fan from now on! In Papenburg I again happened to arrive at the right time. They were celebrating the biggest day in their town's calendar so there were stalls and music stages all along either side of the canal running through the main street. And in Emmen I was looking around the main square and saw a poster for a fado concert in the church starting in an hour, which I of course went to!

As always, it's been great to see and stay with ACers along the way and also to meet their friends and families. I arrived at Jacob's University in Bremen on Tariq's birthday, which was fun, although he'd more-or-less celebrated it the night before. Then in happenning Esens (!) I stayed with My and her family, eating authentic and delicious SE Asian food and watching Jane Austin films... One day I went for a trip to Langeoog, one of the Fresian Islands, which was pretty if rather touristy. I'm staying with Sam in Utrecht University College at the moment, although after a late night in their power-cut-prone Sosh last night he's decided to stay in the college to sleep (or watch Gossip Girl?!) while I've come to Amsterdam for the day.

So far Couchsurfing has been a big success. The four people I've stayed with have all been very friendly and accommodating and we've had a lot of fun each night - clubbing in Oldenburg with Bianca and her friends, a late nights and a good breakfast with Johannes in Wilhelmshaven, clubbing in Papenburg with Yvonne and her friends and then (because I needed an early night after all this!) a good chat and a good film call 'Brick' with William in Zwolle. Their own Couchsurfing experiences have only ever been positive too. William said that, actually, he considers it more safe than staying in a hostel because you only have one person to keep an eye on instead of everyone else in your dorm! Yvonne had the lovely idea of taking a poleroid picture of everyone she hosts and to have a guestbook for us to sign. I'll send everyone I've stayed with a postcard soon just to say thanks.

That's all for now folks. I'll leave it to some of the pictures to tell you more about what I've seen and been up to. Now I'm about to leave the amazing bibliotheek here in Amsterdam to have a taste of what its infamous nightlife has to offer ;) Tomorrow it's a daytrip to The Hague (really want to see the International Court of Justice there as I wanted to work there once upon a time!) then to stay with Dieteke in Amersfoort before heading south through the rest of this flat and waterlogged country.

Hedd in Europe. Eh?! Yup, that's right, and he's on a bike!

2009-05-28T14:16:00.000-07:00

Yo yo!!!!

So I thought I might as well blog about my latest trip a) to let you all know what cycling through Western Europe is like, b) 'cos I can use is as my own personal journal, and c) to stop pointless worrying by female relatives.

After a long but comfortable train ride, mum & I finally arrived in her & Ffion's hotel room placed half-way between the world's largest cylindrical aquarium and East Berlin's most famous church. I'd decided to stay in a hostel a 12 minute walk away - more familiar territory. I made a bet with mum to see which one of us could make more new acquaintances, the one staying in a huge hotel but isolated from everyone else or the one sharing a room with four strangers. I won, of course, but only by 2-0 (by the time I'd get back to the hostel most people were asleep anyway and I felt like joining them too!), meeting an Iranian-Canadian who was in Berlin for a topography and word-graphics conference (he'd ran out of business cards on the second evening so was up in the middle of the night trying in vain to do some make-shift new ones) and a Brayillian Guz (sorry, that's these silly German keyboards, but I'm sure you can work it out!) who was half-way through his 8 months of motor biking around virtually all of Europe. The only people they had a chance of being acquainted with in the hotel was a morbidly obese couple Ffion & I saw stark-naked in the hotel sauna!!

Berlin was fun, as usual (!) but hot for a change. We went on a river cruise, randomly found a huge party by the Brandenburg Gate celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Bundesepublik and sped through the Jewish Museum. Oh yes, and we also went to see Andrea Bocelli live in concert, but I thought that's not really worth mentioning... actually, he's the whole reason we were there in the first place, as was the case with what seemed like most people who attended the concert; none of the people I spoke to after it were from Germany. To be honest, I was more impressed with the South African bass than with Andrea - he's obviously accustomed to relying on a microphone (!) - but judging by the queue to say a few words to Andrea and get his autograph after it had finished I was obviously in the minority. Luckily for mum he stayed right until he'd seen everyone who could be bothered to wait which must have meant about 300 signatures and 300 times having his hand plonked in the right place on the programme by his fiancée.

I left mum & Ffion after breakfast on the Monday morning and headed to Prenzlauer Allee where Rahel lives. She'd given me a couple of tips as to where to find a bicycle and I was going to see if I could visit her family there after I'd found something. Unfortunately, after a good three hours of searching, I was still empty-handed, although I had a good idea of what I was looking for and the sort of price it would cost. There was no answer at her house when I called either so I got myself some Greek tidbits (which seem to be very popular here in Germany) and had a picnic lunch in the sun outside the planetarium before getting the bus to Hamburg.

I met Björn and his dad when I arrived in Hamburg and went to their home in a pretty suburb on the edge of the city from where you have the ideal spot to play ‘guess what airline is taking off from the airport’ and still be wrong. I found it very amusing how everyone in the house had such different English accents: Björn’s is still German but also quite British, his older brother’s is very American, his younger sister’s is Australian and then his parents’ are strongly German! After a chat with the family, a much-needed shower, some tasty lasagna, a catch-up with Björn and some strawberries with ice-cream, we were upstairs watching his Year DVD which brought back a lot of old memories. In one way it was nice to see my firsties in the video and remember the good times from last year but in another I couldn’t help thinking about leaving this time last year and about how now I don’t really have any connections at all still in the college – and once Brian leaves next year I really won’t have any at all!! Haven't really seen the yearbook yet (although what I have seen i.e. the cover is very good!) but I know I'll feel the same when I do. So to everyone who’s just left, I’m thinking about you and hoping you’re having a good time and keeping yourself busy – that’s the best cure. Oh, and I hope the poster I sent helped lift your spirits during the IB! Aqeela said she’d take a photo of it, but knowing her… :P

After buying supplies for Björn’s Vietnam Project in the funkiest outdoor adventure shop ever, we heading to the city centre where, after being given the infamous and apparently predictable ‘Björn’s Tour of Hamburg City Centre’ (I liked it anyway!) we met up with Tariq for lunch. I thought I’d ordered squid, and I had, but in true German style it was squid stuffed with pork and bacon!! Lovely all the same, if rather filling. We had your average prolonged AC dinner conversation: gossip, European elections, gossip, pros & cons of nationalising the education system over having a market-driven one, gossip… We walked about for a bit, sat by a lake watching the boats capsize and staring at the joggers going past, walked a bit more and then went to watch ‘Angels & Dæmons,' which was better than I was expecting! A lot of unnecessary explanations about the Catholic church and dubious quantum physics at the beginning and some totally unrealistic action scenes towards the end but enjoyable all the same with a few very funny laugh-out-loud moments. I want to see the new X-men film next if only to finally see on screen the best X-man of them all: Gambit!

I left on the S-bahn from Hamburg for a town called Stade, just the other side of the river Elbe, from where it would be easier to start my cycling tour and also where I hoped to finally buy a bike. It's quite an interesting town, a bit like a small Shrewsbury or Durham where the main old town is surrounded by a river/canal (haven't quite worked out which it is yet, it has locks but is definitely flowing!), full of old buildings that were obviously built before the spirit measure was invented. But the streets in this old town are deceiving: they look straight but they must all have invisible kinks and bends in them because it's impossible not to go round in circles! I've tried to navigate my way through at least eight times now and not once have I come out the other end where I was aiming for. I hadn't been able to find anyone to stay with in Stade so I checked into the youth hostel when I got here (well, after I'd gotten lost going round in circles a few times first actually) and was told that there was room in the cheapest dorm (€16.90 including a decent-sized buffet breakfast - a lot compared to £3.50 in the Cameron Highlands or Jen's £5 in Guanajuato, but there we go) as long as I didn't mind sharing with a load of 16 & 17 year olds. "It might be a bit loud," said the receptionist. I went for it anyway but it turned out that I would only be sharing the corridor with them whereas I had the whole six-bed dorm all to myself. Great in one way 'cos I could spread all my stuff about and get a good night's sleep but it meant I didn't get to meet any of my neighbours apart from in front of the telly watching the UEFA final, where our attention was concentrated more on the football than on each other. Oh well, there's always tonight instead.

This morning after my buffet breakfast and reading about why sea water is salty in 'Straeon ac Arwyr Gwerin Norwy' (Norwegian folk stories in Welsh - any Norwegians know the one about the rich farmer, his lazy brother and the hand mill that makes what ever you want it to?) I started my second hunt for a bicycle. It turned out that there's only one place that sells them in the centre here but luckily they had a pretty good selection of the type I was looking for. I found one that I really liked but then the shop was shutting for lunch so I left to think it over. I went to this huge music shop just by the train station to buy some manuscript paper (typical, I only get inspiration when I'm travelling alone and have things on my mind but that's the most inconvenient time of all the actually write a composition down!!), spend some time plucking mandolins and balalaikas for fun and playing some salsa on the electric pianos, then walked slowly back to the bike shop. I was thinking "hmm, should I really go for it? I mean, it's a good bike but brand new so a little pricey. Perhaps I should save the money and spend it on some cheap Air Asia tickets for a fortnight in sunny Malaysia in August instead!" But I went ahead and bought it anyway, went back to the hostel to change into my cycling gear and took it for a test-spin about ten miles in the direction I'll be travelling tomorrow and back again. And while speeding down the straights and overtaking everyone on the hills with ease I realised I'd made the right choice! Malaysia will have to wait until next Christmas or Spring instead!

So that's about it so far. I'm cycling to a town called Nordenham tomorrow, just the other side of the huge port of Bremerhaven, where I'll have my first couchsurfing experience with a woman who's first loves under her 'Personal Description' are music and smelly cheese, so I'm sure we'll get along well! Then it's down to Jacob's to celebrate Tariq's birthday and onwards and Westwards over the next four weeks ^_^

Speak soon. It's been a while!
Hedd.

P.S. Thought of changing the blog name to something like 'Berlin and Back' or 'Hamburg2Home' but can't think of anything catchy starting with 'Stade'... Any suggestions, or can we just pretend I'm in Asia like mum does with Italy?

One last night in Asia...

2008-12-20T07:35:00.000-08:00

So here I am back in Jakarta after a 29-hour coach ride from Denpasar in Bali. The coach ride wasn't as bad as it could have been: there were some empty seats at the back that the man sitting next to me moved to after finishing a couple of bottles of his Balinese spirit (half a bottle is enough to get anyone wasted but I guess he knew that two bottles would make the ride much quicker!) so that gave me ample leg-room; the food (included in the ticket) at the service station buffets was very tasty and filling; I chatted to two Canadian girls on their way to Sumatra, laughing at yet admiring the locals trying to converse with us in very broken Bahasa Inggris; and I was even given an old Balinese coin and a strange-looking ring from my drunken friend. Arriving in Jakarta wasn't even that bad as the Canadians, a very shy Frenchman (you could tell he was French a mile off!) and myself got a pretty cheap taxi to Jalan Jaksa – the backpacker's street – and I booked back into the same hostel I stayed at when I arrived seven weeks ago. Into the exact same room, in fact, and the owners were thrilled to see their "Thomas" back, almost as if they couldn't believe anyone would want to return there having stayed once.

Kuta was fun. I had my day in the pool of the Hard Rock Cafe followed by an all-you-can-eat buffet in their restaurant (I certainly got my money's worth!) followed by a couple of hours in their bar with the resident band and dancers, who can only be described as "diddorol-gwahanol." The sunsets on the beach were lovely and karaoke-ing the night away with a load of Aussies and Chinese in the clubs was definitely an experience – they especially liked my “Summer of ‘69” and “Green Grass of Home,” which I thought was especially apt.

And so I find myself with only 15 hours left in Asia. What do you do in that time? Well, I’ve already gone to the local record store and bought myself another five CDs to add to the five or six I already have (not only do I like Indonesian court music but its pop, folk and rock music is also very good) and tomorrow morning I’ll go and find some Indonesian fruit and sweets at the market to bring home – that’s if I don’t eat them on the plane first! After this I’ll head to the bar next door to the hostel where there’s a Rolling Stones tribute band performing, and just before leaving for the airport I think I’ll have a mini gorge on Javanese food – I’m thinking bubur (a type of porridge) to start, then soto (noodles and rice in a lemongrass soup), then sate (you should know that, it’s the one in a peanut sauce) and a whole load of gorengan (friend stuff) to finish. That should keep me going for a few hours at least!

On the coach I looked at my passport and totted up the days I’ve been away in different places. My passport now has 22 stamps, 2 visas and a sticker (That’s Japan trying to be hi-tech!). It tells me I spent a total of 23 days in PR China, 15 days in Japan, 5 days in Hong Kong, 69 days in Malaysia, 3 days in Singapore, 3 days in Brunei, 51 days in Indonesia, 4 days on a boat and (after tomorrow) 2 days in the air, making a grand total of 174 days. Wow! It’s gone fast, too, especially since arriving in Indonesia.

Whenever I tell people I’m about to go home after almost 6 months away they always ask the same question: “So, are you ready to go home?” I suppose it’s inevitable that a part of me doesn’t want to leave. I’ve learned a lot out here about the lives and cultures of the people around me and I’ve changed my mind on some important things such as politics and religion in the process; on the whole (taxi and becak drivers and prostitutes being the exception) I’ve been met with genuinely friendly faces who are always willing to try to have a chat even with their often virtually non-existent English language skills; through that I’ve learned how to understand what people are saying without words and can even just about understand the dodgy (which is putting it nicely) English subtitles on their DVDs; I’ve eaten delicious food every day (although I must say that I prefer Malaysian food to Indonesian food, there’s just more variety – there you go Shu Haur, you win after all!) and at a price you won’t find anywhere else in the world, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to taste anything at home anymore having added plenty of chili sambal to already spicy food for the last 19 weeks; and everywhere you go there’s enough familiarity to feel comfortable yet enough differences to always make the time interesting.

But I have a lot to look forward to for when I come home: having the whole family together and seeing friends in the village again; gorging on mum and dad’s delicious Christmas food (if I won’t be able to taste that then there must be something seriously wrong with my taste buds!); doing all the Christmas traditions we’ve always done – a chat and a sherry at Maldwyn’s followed by carol singing outside the village shop and hotel, plygains, sledging (if we’re lucky with the snow), playing countless board games (we should get a shield this year and start recording the winners of the tournament), watching a good film with a hot chocolate in front of the roaring fire and all the general coziness that comes with Chrsitmas; seeing my extended family and being smothered by my aunties (wait, that last one’s something I’m not looking forward to); then New Year’s in Prague and some serious catching up with ACers over a few pivos; celebrating My Dang’s birthday in Esens; a couple of days in London; then finally the Mari Lwyd in Dinas Mawddwy and a weekend in AC before I need to find myself a well-paid full time job (if you know of anything, let me know) and organise the summer project. Wait, I almost forgot the most important things of all – cheese, fresh bread with real butter, cwrw gaeaf and being able to flick through the radio or my collection of CDs and finding exactly what I want to listen to – I have my ten CDs from here, a load of Songlines and Introducing CDs waiting for me at home and a few on my Christmas wish list too, so I’ve got a lot of listening to look forward to.

So as you can see, I have a lot to look forward to. I think if I was coming home at the beginning of a miserable and boring February I would probably want to stay here at least until the summer months when things get fun at home. But as it is the bitterness of the bitter-sweet pill of leaving is going to be very much outweighed by the sweetness of being home for Christmas and seeing friends for New Year’s.

All that’s left for me to say is thanks for reading this and following me on my travels through E and SE Asia. Well done Japan for being the country you most want to visit (28%), and well done Hedd, Hedd, Hedd, Hedd and Hedd for being placed 1st to 5th respectively in the Poke-Stephen-in-the-Eye Game. This may be the last ever post on this blog – but maybe not, as I think “heddinasia” is an apt name for any blog of mine. After all, there’s always going to be a part of Hedd in Asia, wherever he is.

Quick update for Java and Bali

2008-12-14T09:32:00.000-08:00

I have one thing on my mind at the moment - I'm thinking what it must feel like to be smothered by a sweaty Adam Jones after 80 minutes of running... it would be an experience, that's for sure! I'm thinking that because I've just uploaded his picture and finished writing the last blog post, even though I started it two weeks ago. I was meant to talk about other things I've been up to too but I've been so busy sorting out lots of other stuff and procrastinating from writing on my blog that I kept putting it off. Anyway, I only have one more short week left after 24 weeks of being out here so I can't afford to put it off any longer. So here's a very quick update on what I've been up to.

The day after Prambanan (my birthday) I got up at about 5:30 am to catch the first bus to Borobudur, and ancient Buddhist monument not too far from Yogyakarta. In fact it's the largest Buddhist monument in the world and the largest monument of any kind in the Southern Hemisphere (that's right, I'm below the equator now). As you can imagine, it was pretty massive and impressive with lots and lots and lots of reliefs telling fables and the stories of the Buddha at different reincarnations. Ffion says that her prof at uni says that they're one of the best preserved reliefs in the world. It was a good job I came early to avoid the crowds as this is Indonesia's #1 tourist destination and I managed to go around all the levels in peace until I got to the sputa at the top, by which point all the school trips had arrived and all the annoying children wanted to have their photo taken with me.

Also on the grounds was a museum about Indonesia's nautical history which had inside it the boat someone build based on the boats on Borobudur's reliefs. He and a team used it to sail from Bali all the way round to Ghana to show that transportation, trade and contact was available between the two continents all those thousands of years ago, although in reality they never sailed further than Madagascar, whose people and language are actually decended from the Indonesian archepeligo and surrounding islands. Apparently, again according to Ffion's prof, the boats were only meant to go one way (from East to West), which proves that bananas originated in Asia and were introduced to Africa rather than the other way around. Later that day I arrived in Solo (or Surakarta, as it's properly called), another royal city in Central Java, and after dumping my stuff in my room went downstairs to play some gamelan after all this time.

The hostel itself used to be a batik factory, and not only did they have a whole gamelan orchestra but also their own small swimming pool and lots of interesting furnishings. One of the people I met there was an old Dutch man who used to live in Indonesia when he was a child, his farther being the owner of the country's second largest sugar factory. He's been back to Indonesia a few times but today was the first time he'd gone back to visit the concentration camp he and his family were sent to by the Japanese during their occupation in WWII. His father and elder brother were worked and starved to death there and he was almost about to die too until he was saved by the Japanese surrender, after which he and the other Dutch had to flee back to Europe. Over a million people - Indonesian and Dutch alike - were being worked and starved to death in the Javanese concentration camps at the time of the surrender. "The bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible," he said, "they took many lives. But many, many, many lives were saved. Many lives."

I got to know a few Brits in Solo, some students studying gamelan in the arts institute there. It was good to be able to speak English for once without having to slow things down to a snail's pace and to have conversations that went beyond trying to explain where Wales is. Incidently, I've had enough of saying "it's next to England," so I now say "it's close to Scotland and Ireland" instead. Hopefully they'll know who Ryan Giggs is though, then it needs no explaination. I met these people at the various gamelan latihans (practices) and wayang kulit shows we went to, which included two all-night performances from 7 pm 'till 4 am. One of them had a very useful simultanious English translation, about which Rachel Hand, one of the Brits studying at the institute that I got to know and who's a SOAS alumn, whose an article for the Jakarta Post, quoting me in it! You can read it online - http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/12/03/039wayang039-with-english-a-first-surakarta.html

David McKenny, another SOAS music alumn studying at the institute, is another guy I got to know and it was good to get lots of inside information about SOAS, the music course and staff and other nit-bits to put some of my concerns away. Now that I've finally finished the UCAS applications I'm only waiting for a descision from the universities - four out of five of which are in London - but after talking with David and Rachel I'll accept SOAS straight away if they want me. I spent quite a bit of time with David and Joe Lunar, my original contact for Solo that Nikhil Dally, the gamelan teacher from AC, put me in contact with and who's played at one of the gamelan concerts in the Glass Room there.

If you're reading this and haven't got a clue what gamelan or wayang kulit is, I suggest you search them on Youtube and have a listen and a look! They're both a pivotal part of Indonesian culture, especially so in Central Java and Bali, but their styles are very different. Another important aspect of Central Javanese culture is batik - literally "many dots," refering to the technique of putting lots and lots of wax dots on cotton or silk to make a design and then dying the material so that the colour doesn't dye the area that the wax is. It's all very simple in concept but the art and application itself is very difficult, as I found out myself when I took a day course in it. In Jogja, it was very tourist-orientated, with modern wall hangings being the thing to buy, but in Solo it was much more traditional with the small team of batik makers where I was doing the course behind a clothes shop were spending the whole day just covering certain areas of sarongs with bees wax. My attempts were miserable and I was getting drips everywhere, but I had fun and managed to make a couple of Christmas prezzies along the way.

After twelve days in Solo I headed for Surabaya, Indonesia's second largest city. There wasn't much to do here though - the only reason I wanted to go was because this is where Alice grew up - but it did have an excellent zoo by Asian standards and some enormous shopping centres by anyone's standards, which meant I was able to top up on a few essentials like tissues for toilet paper and shampoo. I also watched an interesting film called 'Twilight', a kinda teen vampire film that really doesn't make much sense but it was either that or Disney.

After Surabaya I headed to the Bromo region. Gunung Bromo is an active volcano surrounded by a few other sleeping volcanoes in a large crater which is in turn surrounded by volcanoes - well, they do call this the 'Ring of Fire'! Actually, as impressive as Gunung Bromo itself was - which is the main thing people come to see and has about 240 steps leading up to the top - I prefered to jalan jalan (wander about) along the crator rims of the other volcanos. At least they didn't stink of sulphur! I woke up at about 3 am both days I was in the region, the first time to climb a mountain on the edge of the large crator that Bromo and the others were lying in (known as the Sea of Sand, for obvious reasons) in time for sunrise and the second in time to climb Gunung Bromo itself in time for sunrise. Walking along the ridges from an active volcano to a sleeping one gives a very strange scenery: it's as if you were walking through Russia at the transition of winter and spring, that is to say that one moment everything around you is barren and dead, a wasteland of sand and black rock, then suddenly you turn the corner and you're in the middle of a lush green landscape with a thick forest below. The morning mist, which fortunately didn't rise above the ground for the whole time I was walking, added a lot to the mood, and I got lots and lots of good photos. But now I want to visit the Caucasus instead to see if it really does look like how I imagine it. How about a family holiday in Georgia and Armenia this summer, eh?

What with two very early mornings and then a sleepless nightbus to Bali, I had a rather confused body clock by the time I rached Ubud, a town in central Bali that's been known as a very artsy place ever since the German artist Walter Spies moved there in the 1920s, with many foreign artists following suit ever since. So after finding a very friendly homestay and eating some honey on toast and fruit for breakfast, I slept for the rest of the day. And because it was raining I slept most of the next day too! But don't worry, by the next day I was out and about again, jalan jalan-ing through some of Bali's signature terraced rice fields and popping in a few galleries along the way. I stayed in Ubud for a week all together, trying to get as much Balinese 'culture' in me as I could before heading to the beach. So I went to a lot of museums and galleries, temples (one of which houses the world's largest kettledrum, cast in the 2nd century BC) and shows and dances. On Sunday night there was an all-you-could-eat traditional Balinese buffet at my homestay, which was really tasty and finally brought some people to the place, as it had been dead all week. All you could eat and only for 30,000 rupiah, which sounds like a lot, and for a meal that it a lot, but it converts to just under 2 pounds!

One of the best things I saw was actually in this temple with the kettledrum: the temple is a bit out of the way so I rented a push bike for the day, and when I arrived there was a ceremony about to begin. I'm not allowed to enter one but the wall was just low enough (or, rather, I was just tall enough, as I'm sure the wall is a perfectly adequate size for the Balinese!) to peek over and watch. There were girls and ladies carrying tiers of fruit on their head and putting them on the alters as offerings to intice the gods to join them in their festival, priests flicking holy water everywhere, all to the sound of the gamelan. It was just so colourful. The Balinese are an incredibly spiritual and superstitious people, and their unique take on Hinduism affects every part of their lives. When I arrived back in Ubud there was yet another ceremony in place, this time on the streets surrounding the main temple, with all the men dressed in white and all the women in colourful tops and sarongs. After being in Muslim areas for the last 15 weeks it was odd to see women praying without covering their hair at all, whereas it's the men who must partially cover their hair with a while wrap.

And that bring you up to date. I arrived in Kuta this afternoon, the most popular place in Bali, packed with Aussies and surfers. It's also the place of the October 2002 bombings that killed over 200 people. There have been warning not to travel to Bali at this time because the masterminds behind the bombings were executed by firing squad just a few weeks ago, so the authorities are a little nervous that there'll be trouble. But so far so good, which is helped by the very tolerant nature of the Balinese people. I thought I'd come to Kuta to finish though as there's still a lot of fun to be had, what with an 18km stretch of beach and the hottest place in town just down the road from my homestay - the Hard Rock Hotel! It has a swimming pool inside that's more like a lagoon with slides and a wave machine, although there is a proper waterpark not far away. Choices, choices! So I'm going to enjoy myself for these next few days before I have a 24-hour coach ride up to Jakarta on Friday and a 22-hour flight home on Sunday. I'll try to post something small for y'all on Saturday night. In the meantime, maybe you can head down to your local waterpark and see how much fun you have during wintertime!

Prambanan

2008-11-29T06:36:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in an internet cafe in the city of Solo, about an hour by train Northeast of Jogja. Fortunately it has a very fast internet connection and a good headset so I've been able to Skype Auntie Jan to wish her happy birthday and I'm now I'm listening to the Wales Vs Australia match using the BBC iPlayer. I'm usually not very good at multitasking: if I was listening to it on Radio Wales I wouldn't be able to simultaneously type at all so I'm listening to Radio Cymru instead. It's a little strange hearing Welsh again after all this time but luckily I'm still able to understand everything they're saying, even with their Hwntw accents! Shane's just scored a try to put us 5-0 up so it sounds like it's gonna be a good match.

The last week-and-a-half has been a very full and busy time compared to much of the last twenty-two weeks, so I'll just tell you about some of the things I've been up to. Grr, Australia's just scored a try :( And from 70 metres out, too. And I thought it was the All Blacks who were the counter-attack masters, looks like the Wallabies are good at it too.

Prambanan, 18th-19th November

I rented a push bike from someone on the little path I was staying on in Yogyakarta and made my way to Prambanan, a plain with lots of 8th and 9th century Hindu and Buddhist temples. I could have taken the 18km fume-choked duel-carriageway that goes straight there but seeing as I had a few hours of sunlight left I decided to take the longer but quieter route along a canal. The scenery was typically Javanese - rice fields in the foreground, volcanos in the background - and really once you've seen one piece of Javanese countryside you've seen it all. Just before turning back onto the duel-carriageway I reached a small village and stopped for a while to watch a primary school football tournament, much to their delight. At Prambanan I checked myself into a simple losmen (homestay), had some nasi goreng (fried rice) and a sprite for tea and made my way to a theatre at the back of the main temple complex where there was going to be a classical Javanese ballet performance of the Ramayama. The Ramayama - one of the great Hindu epics - is a very long and complicated story about life, the universe and everything, so I wasn't convinced that they would be able to tell the whole story in only a two-hour long ballet. Indeed, it was only really the skeleton of the story that they told but the overall performance was excellent: fluid dancing, colourful costumes and great gamelan accompaniment. In the summer months they do a longer four-night outdoor performance over the weekend of the full moon with the main temple luring over behind the stage but now that it's the rainy season they take it indoors which means you're a lot closer to the action.

The next day I had my requested 5 am knock on the door and started on my way to explore some of the smaller temples around the plain that hardly anyone goes to, partly because you can only really get to them by bike and partly because most people just come for the main Candi Prambanan. But, being me, I wanted to see these out-of-the-way candis. The first one I got to, Candi Sajiwan, was a Buddhist temple decorated with reliefs concerning education and the base and staircase were decorated with animal fables. It was, however, covered in wooden scaffolding. But being Indonesia and not caring about Health and Safety signs there was nothing to tell me not to climb it, so I climbed it for a good look down at the ruined mini-temples all around. Every candi had these mini-temples surrounding them and they were all in ruins but it was sometimes difficult to tell whether that was a cause of time or because of the devistating earthquake that hit the area in May 2006, killing 5,782 people. Then I went to a couple more candis, passing plenty of early morning workers in the rice paddies along the way and with the constant view of the smoking Mt. Merapi in the distance - although it was a lot closer than it looked. Mt. Merapi is Indonesia's most active volcano and the fourth most active in the world. I may go and climb it next week but what with the paths being slippery at this time of year and infested with poisonous snakes and spiders I might decide to give it a miss.

It was time for some breakfast... but there wasn't much choice. In fact, at the little roadside shop I'd stopped at to buy some water there wasn't any choice. So I settled for the only thing they had to eat: peanuts fried in batter! Now, Indonesian cuisine is very grease-heavy by anyone's standards but this really did take the biscuit. Actually, it was quite a lot like a biscuit. Oh, but it have a few strips of seaweed for flavour, so maybe that makes it a little more healthy... Anyway, I was going to need the energy because I had a steep hill in front of me to climb to get to the next candi. After about 50m I realised it was going to be impossible to cycle up so I pushed the bike the whole way and was looking forward to racing back down the other way! It was worth the effort though because this temple - Candi Ijo - had something special about it. I'm not sure what, it was just the atmosphere. There was one main candi and three medium-sized candis with ruined mini-candis beyond. Obviously I was the only visitor there but there were plenty of others around - a few gardeners weeding the lawn, a few stone masons repairing the stone wall surrounding the complex and someone sweeping away the dust they created. And here, just like on all the other temples, there were intricate carvings all over the walls and even a very cute statue of a cow in one of the smaller candis.

After some time I went back to the losmen for lunch and then to the main temple complex just across the road. After passing the hordes of people trying to sell me souvenirs for something I hadn't seen yet at a ridiculous price I was inside the grounds. The first thing you see is a board showing 'before and after' pictures from the time of the 2006 earthquake: the 'before' ones show the complex in all its majesty, while the 'after's show collapsed walls, fallen spires, disjointed blocks of stone and rubble lying all around. Given the magnitude of the quake it's fortunate that it didn't completely collaps, but it did unfortunately mean that only two of the candis were open to walk into (here they did care a little about Health and Safefy!) and one of the largest ones in the centre was covered in ugly red scaffolding. The boards also told of how they were going to repair the damage, which is going to take a long long time.

It's going to be hard to explain everything about Prambanan so I'll just go over it quickly and then if you're interested you can look it up on wiki! Basically there were six main temples in the centre square. The big ones at the back are dedicated to Brahma the Creator, Shiva the Destroyer (the biggest one) and Vishnu the keeper. The smaller ones in front are dedicated to their vehicles, or vahana - the bull Nandi for Shiva, the gander Angsa for Brahma, and Vishnu's Eagle Garuda. Garuda is also the national symbol for Indonesia, like the Red Dragon in Wales so you see it everywhere. Around this central square of large temples - the main one, Shiva's, is 47 metres tall - was a wall and beyond that there were 224 mini candis, by now all rubble. These mini temples form square rings around the centre square, the different rings symbolising the different stages of the Hinds and 'Trees of World Harmony' surrounded by birds and all sorts of other animals.u cosmos, with the main candi's, specifically Shiva, being at the centre, highest level of the universe. As is always the case, the temples were covered in intricate relief carvings on their walls. The carvings on the Shiva and Brahma temples illustrate the Ramayama story while the one on the Vishnu temple tells the story of Lord Krishna. There were lots of other reliefs and stone carvings dotted around - dogs and mythical creatures to protect the enterance

After walking around this Prambanan complex I wondered off to the museum on the grounds which had some interesting items they'd excavated and also a film about the candi's history, which was more about bashing the 'unharmonious' modern world than anything else! Then I made my way about 1km North to the final temple for the day - Candi Sewu. This Buddhist temple, along with the others on the plain, actually predates Candi Prambanan; It was build in the 8th century but the Buddhist kingdom was defeated by a Hindu king who built the Hindu temples in the 9th century. But he left the Buddhist temples intact as a mark of respect. Again, its 200 mini temples are now all in ruin and the Buddhas who used to sit in them are now all headless at the very least. The most impressive thing about this temple though is the two giant guardian statues on either side of the enterance, both fat, fierce and weilding a club. You see mini reproductions of these all over Indonesia - at the enterance of large houses and restaurants, etc. By this time it was starting to get late and drizzle so I quickly went back to where I'd left the bike and made my way back to Yogyakarta, this time along the highway so as to get there before dark. And then I went to bed early because I was going to have another pre-6 am morning on my birthday the following day!

Hurray, we won the game! Cymru 21 - 18 Awstralia. Tense few moments at the end there, mind. Well done, hogie.

The last month and a bit

2008-11-15T19:15:00.000-08:00

Hello hello again!

It's 7:15 pm on a Saturday night. Right now I'm sitting in an interesting little cafe just outside the visitor's enterence to the Kraton (Sultan's Palace) in Yogyakarta, Central Java, Indonesia. To be honest I don't know as much about the history of Indonesia as I should, only that they were colonised by the Dutch for a long time and proclaimed their independence shortly after the Japanese Occupation, so I'm still unsure as to why the official title is 'The Republic of Indonesia' when there are still plenty of Sultans around. Presumably they're just ceremonial figures now who get money from the government but who have no actual powers. Anyway, here I am in the cafe, looking at a window with water running down from tiny fountains on top making it look like it's raining outside, waiting for a Wayang Kulit (Shadow Puppet) show to being in the museum at the end of the street.

The last month and a bit has seen my passport stamped I don't know how many times, being in Sarawak, Brunei, Sarawak again, Sabah, Peninsular Malaysia and finally Java, Indonesia. I don't have pictures any more for most of it because I stupidly left my memory stick in the computer the other day and when I remembered I'd left it there it had already gone :( Luckily most of my pictures are already up of Facebook but not my ones from Borneo, but oh well. It just gives me yet another reason to go back there! I actually have a few posters from Sarawak though, free for tourists from the tourist information centre, so at least I have something 'visual' to remind me of it, and you won't believe how difficult it was for me to find a poster-tube to carry them in. They don't seem to exist in this part of the world so I settled for a 'drawing tube' (whatever that is, presumably something to keeps drawings in...) I found in a massive stationary shop in Miri.

Anyways, I'm deviating a bit here. So yeah, the last month and a bit. Well, I'll just quickly jot down what I've been up to, saying what snippets of memory come to mind first from each place and then later do another 'A Day in the Life of Hedd in Asia' sorta entries. OK, well, I went to the Niah Caves, which were very very big and very interesting. After my first few steps into the cave I slipped on some bad poo and cut my hand, which wasn't good because I'd left my mini first aid kit in the lodge thinking "what harm could come to you in a cave?" Luckily with a bit of spit to wash it out it didn't get infected. Inside the cave there was even more bat and bird poo and, as you might have guessed, quite a lot of bats and birds too. A little further in I saw a lone bird's nest harvester right at the very very top corner of the cave. Well, actually all I could see was the light from a candle but from that you know there must be a man up there too. Wait a second, I'll look on Google for some pics to give you an idea... there we go. So I went through a whole network of caves which were all inhabited in prehistoric times and at the very end I saw the famous 'death boat' painting, prehistoric paintings of their funeral rituals. Pretty interesting stuff. Then I waited for dusk for the 'changing of the guard', which is where all the swifts fly back into the cave to sleep and at the same time all the bats fly out to hunt for the night.

I got to Miri by bus the next day and guess who drove past the bus stop while I was standing there... the two guys from Chester I'd met in the Orangutan centre in Kuching! So they stopped and gave me a lift to their place for some tea and biscuits. They were heading off to Bario in the next couple of days and were in Miri patching up their Land Rover and meeting some old church friends. They were staying with a Chinese couple from their church, the husband of which used to work for Shell. That isn't surprising though - most people in Miri seemed to work for Shell as that's where the company was founded. A long time ago there was a guy who made a living buying fuel from abroad and selling shells in exchange. Then one day he hit an oil well on the hill behind Miri and created the company there and then. There's not much to do in Miri itself though, it's basically just an oil city with lots of big shops (although none of them, however big, sold poster-tubes) and garages to patch up Land Rovers. I stayed in a hostel run by an indigenous woman who's married to the man who used to fly the planes into Bario from Miri so the guys from Chester knew where to drop me off after the tea and biscuits because he used to fly the plane when John, the old doctor, worked there. Not that you'd need to know that... like I said, I'm just jotting down random memories that come to mind.

I went to Brunei for the weekend, which consisted of no less than four different buses and a boat ride. But it was definitely worth it. As soon as you cross over the border you know you're in 'oil capital' with the entire sea up to the horizon covered in oil rigs and on land there's nodding donkeys on every bit of free space between the roads and buildings. It's no wonder the country's so rich. They say money doesn't make you happy, but after being in Brunei I'm not too sure because the people there all seemed very happy and are without a doubt the most genuinely friendly strangers I've come across yet. I stayed in this strange Youth Centre place which was, well, strange but comfortable. Doing a bit of 'Jalan Jalan' (wandering around aimlessly) in BSB (the capital, which is where I stayed) is easy and all the 'sites' are within walking distance, although there really isn't much to see. There's this huge and very impressive white marble mosque with a golden dome, a water kampung (village) where most of the residents live, which is basically a huge crowded bunch of stilted wooden houses build on the river all crammed together. It's funny, because most of the houses in the country were huge (sorry to use the word so many times, but it's the best word to describe things in Brunei, apart from the country itself!) except for these ones in the kampung but it's not because the people living there are poor (it doesn't seem like there's any poverty in the country at all, unless you count the house servants, but then they're given everything they need by their employers) but because they just like the life there so carry on living in run-down houses but making a fortune at the same time. And what do you do if you're rich and live in a run-down house on a river? Play about in powerboats all day!

The country is completely dry (Islamic law) so there's no night-life at all. The Ex-pats who live there usually go to Miri for the weekend if they want a drink or to go clubbing, so in Brunei the only things that are open until relatively late (1 am latest) are the cinemas. I watched a film in this (sorry!) huge shopping centre. It was called Butterfly Lovers, and it was basically the story of Mulan for the first third and Romeo & Juliet for the rest. It was a good laugh though, one of those 'new-style' Chinese films with a mixture of soppy love, jokes, kung-fu and pretty scenery. There was a lot of hype about it there though because the main actor was from Brunei (on the right in the picture), the first from the country to appear on the big screen. In fact, the premiere of the film was in that very cinema only a few days before. After it had finished I needed to make my way back to where I was staying. It was a few miles away and I'd gotten the bus there so was a little stuck as to how to get back. So I asked a guy sitting outside a cafe how to get there and he offered to give me a ride, free of charge, which I gladly accepted. It's things like that that doesn't happen anywhere else I've been to, they'd usually always want to squeeze some money out of you but in Brunei they don't seem to care about that. Oh, I haven't talked about the palace! Well, I didn't see much of it as it's mostly hidden behind a load of trees but it's - you guessed it - HUGE! I mean, this really is huge, I think it's actually the biggest palace in the world or something. And all around the fence were these posh lamp posts all covered in gold leaf. So to sum up Brunei: small country, big buildings, lots of money, happy people. It kinda reminded me of St. Petersburg... well, the building at least, all big and covered in gold leaf. But Russia's a big country... and the people didn't seem awfully happy either...

Four buses, a boat ride, a swim in a public pool and a flight later I was in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, Malaysia. Here, I met Felicia, a friend of Elaine from college, whom I would be staying with for the next two weeks in her kampung in the jungle. I learned Kadazan-Dusun karaoke songs, rubber-tapped, made rice wine, went to a Christening, cleared an undergrowth-covered hill-side with a machete to later plant fruit trees there instead, had my hair cut by the native chief's son, swam in the river, chilled with youths at a Christian camp, sang 'Y Sguthan,' 'Gaseg Ddu' (the old version) and 'Ar Gyfer Heddiw Bore' to everyone's delight, watched Malay and HKese DVDs, cooked ayam sambal, went to the village's Catholic Mass (don't tell Auntie Jan!), drew with the neighbour's kids, tried to teach some girls to Salsa, ate dog (and very tasty it was too), chatted with the village sergeant and the visiting pig-seller... lots of things I wouldn't normally do basically! Everyone was very friendly and accommodating and, in true Asian style, offered you food (too much to mention) and drink (either 2nd grade rice wine, 1st grade rice wine, distilled rice wine or beer...) when you went to visited which, along with me being polite enough to finish everything put in front of me, meant my relatively flat stomach I had when I arrived what with all the walking I'd done in Sarawak and Brunei was, by the end of the two weeks, very much visibly fatter. And it wasn't unhealthy i.e. fried like most food out here, it's just because of the sheer volume of food and drink and the fact that, besides what I mentioned above, we mainly just relaxed on the veranda to take shade from the sun all day. Some of the food was absolutely stunning and I felt quite privileged to eat some of it. For example, one night when we went to the neighbour's house I was given, as always, a whole array of little treats. One of them I remember in particular though. It was a stew with only four ingredients: a jungle deer you catch using a bamboo trap so as to keep it fresh; a fruit you have to climb the highest tree to pluck; and a type of chestnut and mushroom only found deep deep in the jungle. And that's it, it was all boiled together and it tasted delicious. Apparently it's only allowed to be eaten by men to make them strong but it just goes to show how much effort they put into making their food and how they can totally depend on their surroundings.

I flew from Kota Kinabalu with the very comfortable budget Air Aisa back to where I was nine weeks previously: Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. I got the SkyBus to the KL Sentral then a local train up north to Petaling Jaya, one of the districts of KL I'd gotten to know quite well after staying with Shu Haur. I went to a sate restaurant, ordered a lycee juice and waited for somebody I'd never met but had heard a lot about - Alina, my mum's dorm mate from when she was in AC. Lots of you might not know that my mum, my sister and I all went to AC... that's right, we're an 'AC legacy' family (!) but I tried not to spread it about in AC. Well, now you know. Anyway, my mum went to AC from '75-'77 and lived in the castle. Back then the dorm mates were all co-years. I'd met one of her other dorm mates a couple of times before, Marit from Norway, but not Alina. It was going to be interesting to get to know her, and who knows, maybe I might be able to dig up a few secrets from my mum's past at the same time! It turned out that Alina was very cool (I asked my mum if she was 'cool' in AC, she said she supposed she was but they didn't use that word back then!) but very worrisome! She was constantly afraid something bad would happen to me but I tried to explain that after being out here for about 18 weeks I knew what I was doing. I was staying in her auntie's house with lots of her family members who were all typically accommodating (i.e. in a very good way) and they all insisted I persuade my mum to come and visit one day soon. Well, I said, when Air Asia starts flying direct from Europe to KL, which they plan to start doing this next year, then it might be a real possibility. Alina was working the next day so I spent it with two of her sisters and their families around the sleepy Malay district of Shah Alam. With the first sister and her step-granddaughter we did what Malays to best: shopping! We went to the biggest shopping centre in the whole of Malaysia and it was very, very... you know what the next word will be! But not being the best shopper in the world (or, if you want to save money, then you could actually call me the best shopper in the world!) I only bought a Christmas present for my dad. Later, with Alina's older sister, I had a good ol' chat about SE Asian politics with her and her husband (they're convinced I'm an under-cover policeman hunting down political opposition members because!) and later visited the - OK, I'll use a different word this time - enormous blue Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah Mosque, Shah Alam's landmark. With my sarong and kufi and a little lying to the guard that I was thinking of converting (again, don't tell Auntie Jan!) I was able to go right inside to the prayer hall, and very impressive it was too. She remembered mum from when she came to visit Alina in AC and, again, insisted she came to visit Malaysia. The next day we drove to the airport and, after reminiscing about the old AC - James Mendelssohn, rubbish food... things never change - I was on yet another plane, this one bound for Jakarta.

I was appalled to find out lots of people don't know where Jakarta is - yes, you know who you are! If you're reading this and you don't know where it is then shame on you! What's the capital of the most populated country in the world? Beijing. The second most populated country? New Delhi. The third? Washington D.C. And the fourth? Well, that'll be Jakarta. Indonesia, the 4th most populated country in the world and the 16th largest country in the world has a population of 235 million, and Java, one of it's 17,508 islands where Jakarta and its other major cities and where I'll be spending about four weeks traveling from West to East, is the most populated island in the world. And you can feel it, too. It lives up to its reputation: fume-choked cities and beautiful volcano-laden countryside. Jakarta, formally the Dutch centre of it's East Indies colonies, is chock-a-block with building, cars, motorbike, buses and people. I came to Indonesia hoping for some culture - music, dance, puppet shows. There were a few good museums in Jakarta but not much else, which gave me much needed time to catch up with people after three weeks of being without communication and to finally sort out my university business. Oh, and I watched the new James Bond there too, which I thought was OK but some of the scenes were virtually exactly the same as the last one only with a different girl and in a different country. And I also went to the Indonesian National Mosque which was - yep, you know already. But this really was, as you can see from the picture of inside the prayer hall. The guards were more than welcoming to visitors here and although I didn't really want to take a picture while they were praying mine almost forced me to! I've kinda taken a shine to mosques after being here, it's just such an important part of life here. You hear the call for prayer four times a day (and once at night if you're unlucky!) so you know you're always close to one and they're normally very impressive both outside and inside and the guards are usually very friendly and welcoming to visitors. There are some things I'm definitely going to miss after coming home, not least the food and the weather, but the mosques are also up there, as are other temples. I mean, after you've seen twenty Chinese temples, Hindu Candis and Muslim mosques in one week you're kinda fed up of them but I can see myself after a couple of months at home wanting to go to the mosque in Birmingham or something just to see one again!

After Jakarta I went to Bandung, the 'Paris of the East', which was another business city but it did have a certain charm about it and a very good geological museum. Then it was on an eight-hour train ride off to Yogyakarta, the cultural centre of Java, where I could finally hear some gamelan and watch some wayang kulit, which I've already done and can't wait for this next installment. But more on that later, I'm sure you've all had enough of reading for now! Next time I'll tell you about Prambanan, which I'll go to in a few days, and Borobudur which I'm saving for my birthday before heading to Solo, another cultural capital where I'll, at last, have a chance to play some gamelan myself after all these months.

'Till then,
Enjoy.

First two weeks in Borneo

2008-10-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

So far in Borneo in the two weeks I've been here I've seen proboscis monkeys, langurs and bearded pigs, pitcher plants and the world's largest flower, giant squirrels and tufted ground squirrels, black naped terns, metallic pigeons and white-rumped shamas, glow in the dark moss and fireflies, more lizardy-dragony-things than you'd find in the Millennium Stadium on match day and so many species of palms that not even Mum's, Grandie's and Auntie Mary's minds combined would be able to identify them all. I've seen primary rainforest, mangroves, the remains of bush fires, weird volcanic-like plateaus and even weirder sandstone structures. I've lounged on beaches, hiked up hills and dragged my way up waterfalls. I've seen the only species of stingless bee, been spat at by a cobra and I've shaken a pot of salt over my left buttock to persuade a leech to let go. I've watched countless DVDs (non-pirated ones for once) and gorged on toast and jam. I've visited supposedly the best museum in southeast Asia and found a lovely internet cafe that's genuinely and internet cafe.

All this while staying in the best hostel so far, Borneo Seahare, run by the uber friendly Wesley and Teresa. I and the other two guests even went with them to Teresa's family's homes for open houses to celebrate Hari Raya. Open house is where people open their houses to family, friends and in theory anyone passing by and they provide them with food and drink. Muslims here do it for Hari Raya (the end of Ramadan), Christians for Christmas, Hindus for Deepvali and Buddhists for Chinese New Year. We only went to two homes to eat and I was already full bus Welsey and Teresa used to go to fifteen in one day when they were younger! I get the feeling that Sarawak is a lot more racially mixed and tolerant than in Peninsular Malaysia: Welsey, for example, is half Iban (one of the native tribes), half Chinese bus it Christian and in the houses of Teresa's family we visited there were Malays married to Chinese and all sorts of combinations. Of course you find this all over Malaysia but especially so here in Sarawak.

The city the hostel was in, incidently, is Borneo's largest city but you could easily walk from one end of the city centre to the other in fifteen minutes. It's called Kuching, meaning 'cat', so named as legend would have it because when Rajah James Brooke first arrived on his yacht he asked his guide what it was called. Thinking he was pointing to a cat the guide answered 'Kuching'. However, it's more likely that it's a corruption from the Indian word for 'port' - 'cochin'. Even so, the city is full of giant sculptures of cats as well as plenty of real strays running about the place. The souvenir shops are all filled a third with T-shirts, a third with local tribal woodwork and a third with cat-related things. There's even a cat museum, the world's first.

Kuching is the capital of Sarawak, one of two Malaysian states in Borneo (the other being Sabah), with Brunei and Indonesian Kalimantan making up the rest. Sarawak itself has a pretty interesting history having been colonised not by the British but by a single man, James Brooke, and later by his nephew then by his nephew's son. It once all belonged to Brunei but when James Brooke arrived in 1841 there were many bloody tribal disputes going on. The Sultan of Brunei told him that if he would settle these disputes in a certain area then he would give him that land as his own to govern. He set up a special legal system that proved so effective that he was basically given nearly all of Brunei and made it Sarawak. The British didn't like this and never accepted Sarawak as an official British colony (although the Brookes wanted them to). When they took it over after the Japanese Occupation during the Second World War they banned the Brooke family from returning and exiled them to Australia, one of which came back to lead an unsuccessful rebellion against the British. Nowadays though the Brookes are looked upon like royalty by the Sarawakians and are invited back for official celebrations because even though they were colonisers they were the ones that actually formed Sarawak for Sarawakians.

Seeing as I've been up to so much I couldn't possibly talk about it all so I thought I'd just choose one day: my encounter with orangutans at Semenggoh Nature Reserve. I woke up early on Monday morning and after lying in bed doing nothing for a while in a very Hedd style decided to get up, get ready, eat some toast with jam (supplied free in the hostel) and get to the tourist information centre by the waterfront in time to catch the minibus to Semenggoh at 8 a.m. There, I met Germaine, a Belgium/Italian woman in her sixties also staying at the hostel who had the spirit of a young backpacker, a Danish and a Texan woman and the driver, a jolly Malay who knew anything and everything about the nature reserve.

We got to Semenggoh about forty minutes later, walked over a sheltered bridge and to a small area with a large tree, some planted pitcher plants, some caged crocodiles, the vetenary centre and a few other buildings. We waited here until 9 at which time a warden in the jungle was leaving fruit - bananas, papayas, coconuts, all the things they'd eat in the wild - on a feeding platform. The head warden was radioed that there were some orangutans there that had come for some breakfast so we all (about 50-odd all together, most had come as one big French tour group) followed him in along a planked path into the jungle. There, we saw a large feeding platform about forty metres away and on it was an orangutan eating away. Or rather, he wasn't really 'on' it, more like leaning towards while balancing spread-eagle on the surrounding vines, gripping lightly with three of his hands (they have hands instead of feet) and using the other to shove the fruits into his mouth. In the trees imediately above were a mother and her child, only a few months old, waiting for the male who was eating to leave. And in the far distance you could see trees swaying and bending like pendulums and then suddenly spring back as orangutans moved about the rainforrest.

After about half an hour they'd all mosty gone apart from one adolecent female who was waiting in the trees just above our heads. She obviously wanted to go down to eat but for some reason wasn't, maybe because she was shy in front of all the spectators, maybe because of something else. A warden went to the feeding platform and had a look down to see if there were any snakes around that might be scaring her off. Whatever it was she was starting to get angry and she started to tear branches off the tree she was holding on to and throw them down, then she began weeing above the observation platform, wetting some of the spectators. Then a pair of tufted ground squirrels climbed up the wooden legs and onto the feeding platform to eat, and it was these the warden said that must have been scaring her off coming down.

By this time nearly all the visitors had left as their tour busses were leaving at ten. The minibus I took was leaving too but I'd arranged to stay in the centre and take the same minibus back when it returned for the afternoon feeding. It was only me and a group of four people from near Chester who were left. The husband of one couple in the group had worked for many years as a doctor around Bario, deep in the Heart of Borneo close to the Sarawakian-Kalamantan border and had been to the centre many times. The wife of the other couple had worked in the apes section in Chester zoo and so was thrilled to see some semi-wild orangutans. "Things like seeing them swinging from one tree to another," she said, "you just don't get to see that in the zoo."

We left the jungle and after chatting with them for a while I took a break by learning more about Semenggoh Wildlife Centre (sometimes it's called a Wildlife Centre, sometimes a Nature Reserve). For the past few decades it has been a centre where orphaned or recovered orangutans came to be rehabilitated and taught how to survive in the wild. When they'd completed their training they were let out into the surrounding forrest, and food palced on the platforms twice a day if they wanted to come back to eat. They start by coming back regularly (then classed as semi-wild) and then less and less until they feel comfortable enough to be completely wild and never return. So in a sense the fewer orangutans that come to feed the better. Nowadays the rehabilitation training goes on in a seperate wildlife centre but Semenggoh is still the best place to go in Sarawak to see them up close.

I had a good four hours or so to burn so I thought I'd wonder around the centre and enjoy its other attractions that most people never bother visiting. As well as being an orangutan centre it's also a botanical centre with many gardens and a seed bank. This is the part of my travels when I wish someone like mum was here to explain all the different plants; I've seen enough David Attenborough programmes to recognise most of the animals's calls and to understand their behaviour but plants are still pretty alien! I got to the first garden, an exotic fruit garden, and meandered up and down its slopes reading the wooden labels by the trunks of the trees thinking I might have a better chance to know what type of tree I was looking at if I could understand Malay or Latin... having a couple of fruits hanging down would have helped too but every tree in the garden, although covered in leaves and very much alive, was fruitless.

So I continued onto the next garden - a bamboo garden. This was much more fun as it meant I could pretent to be super strong by effortlessly shaking a structure metres and metres tall and seeing its leaves russle high above me as I did. I walked deep into this garden, testing each different species of bamboo to see which had the best shake-factor, until I saw something on the dirt track that I knew would keep me occupied for a long time: a trail of ants. It's become something of a favourite pasttime while trecking through jungles out here to take a break by a trail of ants. I try to see where they're coming from and where they're going to, watch them eat whatever they're eating or fight whatever they're fighting, put little leaves in their paths to see how they overcome the obstacle or collect them on a stick and put them down somewhere else and see how long it takes for them to get back on track... I'm sure I could play with them for hours but the trail usually ends and they've all moved on within about half an hour.

I left the bamboo garden and found a third garden along the road, this time a Chinese herb garden. This one was much more landscaped than the rest with a small lake in its centre and some benches all around. When I entered I saw one plant that must have been a type of cactus, tall and completely covered in a deep green waxy coat with needles sticking out of its fleshy branches. I wondered if it might be an aloe plant or something (again, a lack of Chinese and Latin didn't help) so I snapped a tiny bit off and smelled the white goo oozing from the flesh. It didn't smell of anything so I squeezed some of the goo onto the back of my hands and rubbed it in to see if it could be used as some sort of moisturiser. It turned out to be very sticky though and wouldn't come off when I poured water all over it. In fact the water seemed to make it even more sticky. By this time the sun was shining very brightly so I found a bench in the shade and got out my 'A Short History of Malaysia' book. I read about half a page about the Johor Sultanate after the Portuguese had driven them from Melaka and, as always happens when I start reading the book, felt sleepy, lied down on the bench and had a nap.

When I woke up it was time to go back to the orangutans for the afternoon feeding so I made my way there trying not to scratch the back of my hands which had by now come out in a bright red rash! My jaw and the back of my elbows were also tingling, places I must have touched with my hands in my sleep. When I got to the small area with the tree and the pitcher plants there were three orangutans there: the same mother and baby that was in the morning session and another adolescent who's the older sibling of the baby. They were only a few metres away from us so I could see their actions much more closely than in the morning. Orangutans are generally a little smaller than humans but they're about 6-7 times stronger than us, something you can find hard to believe until you see them effortlessly bite a coconut in half and pour the water into their mouths! The older sister was enjoying herself too, for example when she dropped a sweet potato she was eating the head warden picked it up and streched his arm offering it back. The orangutan took it from him but it 'slipped' out of her hand, so the head warden offered it again and again it 'slipped' out of her hand. The third time it was offered she took it and threw it away as far as she could!

There weren't any orangutans who had come to eat in the main eating area in the jungle so we stayed around these three until suddenly everyone started running over the sheltered bridge to the entrance to the jungle. There stood Delima, a veteran of the centre who usually always turns up for food, and she started walking towards the croud and then onto the sheltered bridge, where she climbed up onto the bench running along one side of the bridge. I was lucky enough to be on the bridge at the time and sat on the bench on the other side of the bridge sitting virtually opposite her only a few metres away. As if this wasn't amazing enough we then saw something tiny clinging onto her hairy chest that you couldn't see at all when she was walking on all fours - it was her new baby born only that morning! This was the first time anyone had seen it and given that they have a newborn at an average of only one a year the wardens were all excited and overjoyed while us spectators just looked on in awe. This was Delima's fourth and probably her last child, and the fact that she'd just given birth to a healthy baby boy on her own in the jungle is proof that Semenggoh works.

Delima carried on sitting on the bench for a while tucking into fruit from a bucket placed down beside her. She was obviously very hungry after the birth and it was fascinating to watch her just sitting there peeling bananas and papayas and showing off her suckling baby to everyone. Then she got up and slowly walked back over the bridge and up the road, posing for pictures (unfortunately by camera ran out of batteries in the morning! gutted.) along the way and shoving fruits into her mouth to keep for later. Suddenly it started to drizzle so Delima with her baby boy climbed up a bank and into the thick jungle to find shelter and to rest in her nest. Like always out here, within a minute the drizzle had become a heavy thunderstorm and our minds went from running after orangutans to running back to the busses. I was able to buy a set of photos and postcards along the way and then we (this time me, a couple from Twickenham and the same driver) were on our way back to Kuching, soaked but feeling very privelaged.

Right now I've just tucked into a delicious laksa Sarawak and a laici kang after taking a 12-hour bus journey from Kuching to a town called Batu Niah in northern Sarawak who's economy is dependent on birds nests and bat poo from the million or so swiftlets and bats living in the caves close by. The caves are also the most important archeological discovery in SE Asia as they contain the remains of the earliest known homo sapien inhabitants in the region as well as cave paintings depicting their 'death boats'. Then it's off to Brunei for the weekend to see the palace of the man who earns £5,000,000 a day then back into Sarawak to visit Lambir Hills National Park, the most bio-diverse place on the planet where I'll see some wild orchids and maybe even a hornbill. All this before being out of contact for a fortnight while living like a local in the jungles of Sabah. Wish me luck!

Exciting Stuff

2008-09-15T02:45:00.000-07:00

When I was Skyping Ondra in Langkawi he asked me a question to answer the next time we spoke: what's the most exciting thing I've done over here. I've been thinking about it, and although I've seen some amazing things, stayed with and met amazing people and eaten some pretty amazing stuff I wouldn't necessarily call much of what I've done "exciting". Then I went to the Perhentian islands... I arrived at D'Lagoon Chalet by speed boat and you could see from the boat the clarity of the turquise water, something I didn't have in Langkawi. There were lots of us on the boat when we left the mainland but by the time we reached the last stop - D'Lagoon, a tiny secluded lagoon with one chalet right at the very North of the smaller island - it was only me and a Finnish couple. I checked into the dorm for four nights (only three of us in the twelve-bed dorm, a little fuller than the ten-bed dorm in Kota Bharu I stayed in on my own, and here in Kota Terengganu I'm all alone in a five-bed dorm. Brilliant!), got changed into my swimming shorts, rented some snorkeling gear from the desk and took my first paddle in the lagoon.

With the bright sun shining down the water was as clear as anything. I wasn't expecting too much in the way of coral and wildlife, thinking most of it would have died from seeing all the skeletal debris on the shore, but after swimming out only a few metres it was obvious that the lagoon was very much alive. The colours of the fish and coral were quite spectacular and it really did feel like I'd entered an entirely different world. Even after looking down at this new world for hours I was still seeing new corals and new fish, getting up close to them and spending enough time to get to know their personalities: the territorial ones, the shy ones, the curious ones... and with my underwater camera I snapped away at it all.

I spent a long time in the waters around the islands, sometimes in the lagoon, sometimes off the beach the other side of the island and once off a beach on the other larger island after kayaking there. Over there there was even more coral, even more fish and two things I'd been looking forward to since arriving: turtles and sharks! During my good three hours in the water off this island I only saw one green turtle and although I saw plenty of black-tip reef sharks they were all juveniles. There are some big two metre-long ones that come to the beach a short walk from the lagoon for about an hour in the morning and although I tried to see them twice I'd failed both times.

I was talking to my dorm mate Steve from Northumbeland and a couple from Germany and Finland while we were eating some barbarqued squid they'd caught earlier about what the most exciting thing I'd done would be. I said that I wanted to see the big sharks just so that I could say I'd seen them, becuase that would definately be something I could catagorise as "exciting". But then they pointed out that seeing turtles & small sharks in the beautiful water, having monitor lizards running about the chalet freely on their way to and from the surrounding jungles, having geckos crawling about the dorm (one of which woke me up in the middle of the night as it clambered down the windowsill to the floor via my face), catching squid for supper (which I tried to do but didn't even get a bite!) and waking up to look out the window and finding yourself a mere twenty metres from the sea with only coconut trees, sand and hammocks in your way is all pretty exciting stuff. And they were right.

And when the excitment got too much, I found a hammock underneath the coconut trees and slept . Oh, and I wrote a song about lying in a hammock underneath the coconut trees, which the other guests and locals seemed to like when I sang it in one of the nighly sessions, accompanied by goat-skin drums and brass gongs. I'd have rathered steel drums and a couple of trumpets, but there we go. And on the last day, just to protect my back that had seen enough sun during all my time spent head-down in the water, I stayed in the common area and watched all five Harry Potters. Man, I love being able to do whatever I like!!

A Typical Conversation with a Malaysian

2008-09-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

Malaysian (usually a guy, middle-aged with not much to do): Hi
Hedd: Hey
M: Where are you from?
H: I'm from Wales... (momentary pause to look for a reaction indicating he knows where it is) ...in the U.K. Do you know Wales?
M: Ahhh, Wales. Ryan Giggs, eh!
H: Yeah, Ryan Giggs.
M: They beat Azerbaijan. Got (insert next country to play Wales in the football world cup qualifiers) coming up (insert exact time and date), isn't it.
H: Yeah that's right
I used to at this point ask if he liked football but I realised the answer would obviously be yes, and of course it always was. So I changed it to:
H: Have you ever been to Wales or the UK?
M: No, I want to go though, maybe to London. There's this tour company that does trips to the UK and includes a premier league match with (insert which ever team he supports, either Man U, L'pool, Arsenal or Chelsea) so I might do that one day.
H: Do you travel often?
M: Not really, I've been to Indonesia once and China once but that's about it. So where are you going now?
Note that they never ask what I'm going to do where I actually am but rather they assume I want to get out of wherever I am as soon as I can and go somewhere else.
H: I'm here for a few days now, and then I'm off to (insert next destination). I'm in Malaysia for two and a half months all together actually.
M: Two and a half months! Long time lah. Alone?
H: Yeah. Well, I was staying with friends in China and Japan, I was in China for five weeks and Japan for two weeks, and I was staying with friends in KL but now I'm on my own.
M: Japan, eh? Expensive, no?
H: Well yeah, quite expensive, but not as bad as I thought it would be. Not as bad as the UK anyway.
M: UK expensive, is it?
H: Yeah, very expensive.
M: I see. Do you like Malaysian food?
H: Of course!
M: Not too spicy for you?
H: Nope, the spicier the better.
M: And what have you tried?
H: (Trying to remember the names of them all) Nasi Lemak, Ro...
M: You like Nasi Lemak?
H: ...Yep, umm, Roti Canai, bu...
M: You like Roti Canai?
H: Yep. My favourite thing here though is Ais Kacang, it...
M: Oh, you like Ais Kacang, do you? And what about durians, have you tried those?
H: Yeah, and I actually like them too!
M: Oh, you like Durians? You don't mind the smell?
H: No, it's not too bad. But I can't eat much of it becuase it's just so creamy.
M: Yes, very creamy. Best time to visit Malaysia for food, Ramadan. Best time.
H: Yeah, I like all the night markets and everything.
M: So it's not too hot for you?
H: No, it's OK. I like it hot, I just don't like the humidity. Hot and dry I like. It's not as bad here as it was in Shanghai when I got there though, there was a heat wave. Now that was really, really hot.
M: We only have two seasons here, see. Not like UK where you have four.
H: Hmm, although it doesn't feel like we have four these days, it's all just one long rainy season now. I mean, I remember when in the winter you'd always have snow and in the summer you'd always have sun but now you can have anything anytime mixed in with plenty of rain.
M: My friend, he's in (insert British university) says he laughs at the British when they come out to sunbathe even with just a little bit of sun.
H: Aye, they do, it can be freezing outside but they'll all be out in their bikinis with just a little bit of sun trying to get a tan.
M: I don't get it see, why do they want to get a tan? The girls in Malaysia try so hard not to get a tan.
H: I know, you see them walking i nthe street under the sun with these big umbrellas! I don't know, to look different I suppose, it's just fashionable. We try to get a tan to stand out and you tey not to get a tan to stand out. Same thing, really.
M: So two and a half months in Malaysia, you say. And then home?
H: No, then Indonesia for one and a half months and then home, just in time for Christmas.
M: Why such a long holiday?
H: It's a gap year. I finished college a few months ago and now I'm taking a year out and then I'll go to university next September.
M: Oh, next September. So you're in college now?
H: No, I finished college, now I'm taking a year out of education.
M: Why?
H: To travel and to have a break after thirteen years of education.
M: So you're in university now?
H: No, no, I'm not doing anything right now.
M: I don't get it.
H: So I see! It doesn't matter though.
M: So how old are you then?
H: Guess.
M: Umm, twenty-two.
H: No.
M: Twenty-three.
H: No, I'm eighteen.
M: Eighteen! Woah, so young! Hey, you'll have to be careful in Indonesia then.
H: Yeah, I've heard it's not as safe there as in Malaysia.
M: But you're a big man, you'll be fine! Are you going to Bali?
H: Yep, I'll have about two weeks there.
M: Oh, I love Bali!
H: Everyone here seems to love Bali.
M: Yeah, it's a good place. OK, I need to go. Good luck when Wales plays (insert team). I'll be watching it. Bye-bye!
H: See ya!

A Day of Firsts

2008-09-07T13:31:00.000-07:00

OK, BIG gap between the last post and this one but I'll try to fill the gap when I can.

I arrived at Zackry's Guest House in a quiet corner of the island of Langkawi in the afternoon on the 2nd of September, having taken a boat from Kuala Kedah to Kuah and a taxi from there (there is no public transport on the island) to the guest house. I wanted to relax in Langkawi and the guest house seemed like the perfect place to do just that. And indeed it is. For the past week I haven't used a single alarm to wake me up, I've lied in, and when I have gotten up I've gone straight to the common area to switch on the TV and catch up with the news or to watch a DVD. The beach is just the other side of the road so when the sun shines I can head over for a dip in the sea or a nap on a lounger. And when the sun doesn't shine I can go and grab some fruit to eat from the stalls at the end of the road, try out some of the local sea food in one of the restaurants or go back to the guest house and chat with the other guys staying here over a game of cards or a beer (Langkawi is duty-free). Or just watch another DVD. So that's basically what I've been doing here since arriving. There isn't a lot to do on the island - there's a cable car to the top of a mountain, some waterfall called Seven Wells, an aquarium, a crocodile park, an eagle-feeding park and that's about it. So yesterday, my last full day on the island, I thought I'd actually do something and go beyond the couple-of-hundred-metre radius I'd confined myself to. That was my first first.

I decided to rent a bike - I was going to say that renting a bike was my second first since being away, but then I remembered we rented some bikes in Beijing - to go to Seven Wells. The journey wasn't too far, just one length of the island, but the bike only had one gear and so it took a good two hours to get there, past the two most popular beaches, past the airport and past the posh-looking marina. I bought a coke and some peanut biscuits, parked the bike, had a look at the map on a board at the bottom of the steps and proceeded up them. I didn't really know how far it would be - it was hard to tell from the map - but about half way up the steps I could feel my legs take the toll of the bike ride there and so sat down on a bench, ate my biscuits and took a rest by reading Seventh Uncle, a short story from a book of short stories by the English language Malaysian writer Chuah Guat Eng. When I finished the story I continued up and it didn't take long at all until I'd reached the top, supposedly at this place called Seven Wells. I'd heard it was a very beautiful place and that you could swim in the 'Wells', natural pools created as the river water collected in the rocks before it cascaded down the waterfall. There wasn't too much water in the pools themselves though and I thought - expecting something of Rheadr's or Rhiwagor's grandure - perhaps I hadn't got there yet. There was a sign by the pools, a strange-looking map that had two routes. The route to the right, through the jungle, had two 'swimming areas' along it and, having brought my swimming stuff and determined to go for a dip, ventured into the jungle. After a good while in there - maybe twenty or thirty minutes - following a half-beaten track often blocked by fallen rotted trees and still not finding any of these swimming areas I was thinking of heading back. I could, I suppose just go for a dip in the pools I'd just left. The track was getting less and less beaten and when I reached a stream - I thought maybe the sign of running water would mean I'd found it, but no - I decided I'd better head back now before I lost my way. I dipped my feet into the running stream to give them a cooling off and started back.

After clambering over some dead trees and ducking under hanging vines I made it back to the half-beaten track. I was wearing my sandals, as I have been every day since leaving bar three - and suddenly I felt something between the back of my right foot and the back strap of the sandal. It was a strange sort of feeling, as if I had an egg yoke stuck in there. I stood there, unstrapped my sandal and had a look to see what was making this strange feeling. This egg yoke wasn't a rich golden colour, it was black... and moving. It was a great big cluster of leeches, about four or five of them in one place, sucking away at my blood. I was pretty shocked, this was my first encounter with leeches. And then I noticed something I didn't really want to notice: it wasn't just this one little cluster on the back of my foot but they were everywhere on my foot! They were between my toes, on the top of my foot, even on the sole. Turns out dipping my feet in the stream was a bad move! I didn't know what to do. Should I leave them there to have their fill? How long would that take? Should I push them gently away from where they're attached or should I tug at them and yank them off? It turns out that what you're meant to do is either leave them for about 20 minutes by which time they'll be full and drop off or if you really want to gt them off then to prise your nail between their teeth and where they've attached and nudge them away. But I did want to get them off, and I didn't have any nails, so I proceeded to one-at-a-time grab hold of them and pull them off and throw them as far away as I could. Not an easy task, I'll tell you, because their jaws are so so strong and they keep wriggling and changing their size, and even if I did get them off my foot they more often than not then attached themselves to my thumb or index finger. Very very annoying! I eventually got them all off my right foot, about fifteen of them in all, maybe more. It also turns out that when they bite into you they excrete something that prevents the blood from clotting there and so my foot was now bleeding from left, right and centre, even gushing out in a couple of places. I didn't mind really, it didn't hurt at all and my feet have endured a lot over the times so why worry about having a few leech jaws stuck in there?! It did look pretty bad though, a foot and a hand both covered in blood and no sign of it stopping. The smell of it must have been attracting the leeches back from whence they came as I saw them crawling along the jungle floor from where I'd thrown them to (I expect most of them hadn't been thrown but instead let go of their own accord after trying to be violently shaken off my finger) and towards my feet again. I started along the path again and after about a hundred metres repeated the whole ordeal with my left foot. Every few hundred metres after that I kept checking each foot again, tugging at the ones I'd either missed before or had found their way back on. I exited the jungle and got back to the steps that lead up to Seven Wells and found a bench to sit down on for one last scourer just to make sure they were all gone. The state of my bloodied feet was quite comical, I thought, and so I took a picture or two to remember the experience - not a harmful one but not one I'm looking forward to having again. The handful of people going up and down the steps didn't quite see it the way I did and looked by in horror, asking if I was OK to walk, ect. Luckily one of them had some alcohol wipes so I could disinfect the bites and wipe it up. When I got to the bottom again I washed my hands and feet in the toilet, bought a cold coconut to drink and some Oreos to eat and watched the monkeys about the place having fun. They were scraping the used coconuts to get the last bit, making a racket playing on the corrugated steel roofs of the stalls, grooming each other incessantly, all good fun to watch. And then I biked back.

The anti-clotting spit the leeches had used was doing its job well and by the time I got back to Zackry's Guest House there were a good few streaks of red on my feet. But that could wait, first I wanted to eat the cold watermelon half I'd bought from round the corner and chat with the Scotsman and the Cornish couple (by far the commonest nationality I've seen traveling are Brits, followed by North Americans and Australians, then Dutch and German and then Scandinavian and French). Then I went online to check what damage leeches can actually do. They're quite fascinating little things, actually. I found out that their spit would wear off in a few more hours and that any viruses or bacteria they carry doesn't harm humans. Good news. The only problem is the obvious risk of infection, heightened by the fact that because I yanked them off I now have... wait, let me count... 10 little jaws stuck in my right foot and... 15 little jaws stuck in my left foot. Lovely! So after a shower I then did another first since coming here: I used my little First Aid kit I've been carrying around in my rucksack. And with a couple of disinfectant wipes (alcohol-free this time) and a couple of plasters to cover the bites where the spit was working very well my feet were looking in much better shape! Not that my feet are ever in a decent shape to begin with, but there we go. And then in my room I wrote out a Plygain-esque tune I'd just thought up, complete with pauses :D

All in all I've had an amazing time in Langkawi doing, apart from yesterday, basically nothing. This is my first time since last summer that I haven't either been around ACers or been busy sorting things out and so although I haven't seen anything of the island I think spending my time watching DVDs, writing a few long-overdue emails and splashing around in the sea has been time well spent. Maybe in hindsight I should have done that yesterday too! Today I'll be getting the ferry to Kuala Perlis and from there the night bus to Kota Bharu, and after a couple of days there off to some more paradise islands: The Perhentians!

Huangshan

2008-07-29T04:52:00.000-07:00

I was beginning to get fed up with China, or rather with the Chinese. As soon as I got off the Su Zhou Hao at Shanghai International Ferry Terminal on Sunday afternoon there were taxi drivers galore trying to get me to take a ride with them. A fellow passenger on the boat and I both needed to get to the nearest Metro station and so after trying to say a few times where we wanted to go in both English and Chinese, pointing to it on both the 'Central Shanghai' and 'Metro' maps on the pop-out map of the city I have, trying to explain where we were now on the map, pointing in the direction of the Metro itself and using other various hand-guestures we were finally on our way, heading down a road, turning left, then left, then left again and another left before the driver asked us again where we actually wanted to go. You'd have though a taxi driver should know the map of his own city. This one probably did, it just gets him more money to go round in circles a few times and acting all confused.

Da was in Shenzhen for a few days and so I had to find somewhere to chill until he got back. I could have stayed in Shanghai and seen some of the place, maybe going to one of its many museums. Incidently, having been traveling for over four weeks now I still haven't entered a single museum. Dad, you must be horrified! Yi Hui suggested I go to somewhere like Zhou Zhuang - a river town about an hour-and-a-half's bus ride from Shanghai, where they filmed one of the Mission Imposible films - but I'd already gone there on a day trip with some guys I met in the hostel in Shanghai a few weeks ago. Yi Hui says that it was very beautiful when she went there many years ago but we were sorely dissapointed. True, it looked pretty, but virtually every single building in the Old Town had been turned into a souvenier shop, their owners shouting "you come lookie!" and "this, only [insert rediculously high value compared with what it's actually worth] yuan, look!" as you walked passed. And you had to pay to get in there! They should be paying us. I might be sounding like exactly the sort of people I hate - the ones that when you go canvasing for Plaid say "we moved in to this lovely quaint, unspoiled part of rural Mid Wales from the South of England but now it's just not the same with all these people from the North of England moving in, ruining the community" - so sorry for being hypocritical, but don't they realise that the reason people want to visit a 'quaint' (excuse my use of one of the most quintessentially English words... or maybe 'quitessesntial' is even more quintessential...) Old Town is exactly because it is 'quaint' and 'unspoiled', something people find special, something that has a charm about it, but as soon as it transformes into basically a massive carboot sale selling junk worse than what you would actually find at a carboot sale it looses all its charm and everything that once made it special. That day wasn't a complete dissaster though, as we found a little garden appropriately named 'Paradise' to escape the witch-like (most of these souvenier shop owners seem to be female for some reason) voices of the Old Town and all had a good laugh together.

So there I was in an internet cafe in Shanghai searching the web for somewhere to go for a few days. A couple of places looked interesting, although whenever I saw the words "...has a lovely little Old Town" I quickly closed the window. I stumbled upon a place called Huangshan fairly early on in my searches and after comparing it with a couple of others I thought I might as well go for it. I got a taxi to the main train station, waited in line for a ticket, had a few people barge in in front of me to dodge the queue in true Chinese style, bought a return ticket to Huangshan, left the station to find a bite to eat, got hounded by a few taxi drivers while crossing the street who couldn't understand why I didn't want to use their dodgy services, bought a meal in a Chinese fast-food restaurant, was still hungry so went next door to buy a very tasty custard cream doughnut, made my way to the train, walked past the carrages, walked passed more and more carrages (this train was huge, I have no idea how long it was), found carrage number six, found middle bunk number twenty-one, put my bags on the rack, got out the book (although it's more of an extended essay really) I'm reading about a policeman's reminices of Old Llanwddyn (very interesting, anyone in Llanwddyn who's reading this blog I highly recommend you get a copy) and settled down for the night and the eleven-hour train ride to Huangshan.

I arrived here after a virtually sleepless night just before ten on Monday morning. "You want bus?" and "Here, you want raincoat? You buy map, yes?" were the first things I heard after leaving the train station gates. By now my "Bu yau, xie xie" had gone through the phases of "Bu yau" and just ignoring them to giving them the 'evil eyes'. All I wanted to do was find the Huangshan International Youth Hostel (88% ratings on Hostelworld) which was meant to be just round the corner from the station and have a nice cold shower. Walking down the street I was again hounded by a load of Chinese-style rickshaw drivers who shout "Hello!" as you walk pass (evidetly the only English word they know) to try and get your attention. Now, if a Shanghaiese taxi driver with a metre doesn't know the way to one of the main Metro stations when I have a map in my hand, as if one of these rickshaw drivers would have any chance on earth to get me to where I wanted. You wonder if any tourist is dumb enoughto actually use one of them. Perhaps that's why they haven't needed to learn anything beyond 'hello'. I hadn't booked into the hostel in advance so when I came across the other International Youth Hostel called Koala (92% ratings) and found they had had a room I thought things were looking up. But after paying for the room and a 100 yuan deposit for the key I found that I only had 7 yuan left - about 55p - and was in desperate need of a bank. A fairly large town like this must have a HSBC I thought, but no, only Bank of China. I was in such a rush that I forgot to go upstairs to the dorm to dump my rucksack and so went back out onto the street with all my belongings, round the corner, down some stairs, down a very dodgy-looking alleyway (at least dodgy compared to most of Shanghai; it seems to be the norm in this town) and found the Bank of China with the ATM outside. Card in the slot, select English, PIN number, everything good so far, cash out... sorry, "card communication failed". After a couple more attemps in vain I entered the bank and explained the problem. The manager didn't know what the problem was, phoned someone else to ask and told me to go to the main branch in town. 5 yuan by taxi, he said, but emptying my wallet and showing him how little I had he felt a sorry and gave me 5 yuan of his own, went outside to a taxi, told him where to go and how much it he should charge and I was on my way. 11 yuan is the minimum for a taxi ride in Shanghai, but this is not Shanghai and it was interesting seeing for the first time in Asia a taxi driver not using the metre. I got out a couple of minutes later, entered the main branch, tried their ATM - "card communication failed" - was given a ticket (number 1111 - easy to recognise when it was being called out) to see a representative, had a word with her and found out that a HSBC Solo Debit Card can't be used to withdraw money with them. "Do you have another card? A Visa or Mastercard? A Credit Card?". Sorry, no. No wonder, as Elaine says, a Solo is free. Nobody would ever pay for one. Only one thing for it then - I'll have to exchange my remaining Sterling, all thirty pounds of it (although I have about five pounds in coins that they can't exchange). "Do you have your passport with you?" Umm... I should do... wait a second... where is it... Then I realised I must have left it with the receptionist at the hostel when she was checking it, such was my rush to get to a bank. "Will a driver's licience do?" I asked. "Sorry, we need a passport". So, not having money to take a taxi back, I ask for directions to the train station. She points in some vague direction. I make my way back passing plenty of stalls selling water along the way which by now I could really do with but was not prepared to spend any money at all. I would have to be very thrifty these next few days, I thought, which means that the postcards I wrote to Auntie Jan and Auntie Mary and the letter I wrote to Sophie Deas can't be sent until I get back to Shanghai and find a HSBC, so sorry ladies. Entering the hostel, the receptionist hands me my passport straight away. "You left this" she says. I know. This time I go upstairs to dump my things, head back to the closer Bank of China, exchange my sterling (at a very good rate I thought) with a whole form to fill in before I got my Yuan, head back to the hostel and had that cold shower I'd been waiting for. "We've been travelling China for a while now and we're always surprised with how friendly and kind the Chinese are," said one of my dormmates when I got out of the shower, his voice almost drowned out by the incessant beeping from the polluting cars on the street below. Yeah right, I thought, maybe the ones I've met in AC but certainly not the majority of the ones I've seen in China. So as you can see I was beginning to get fed up with China, or rather with the Chinese.

The town I am staying in is actually called Tunxi and Huangshan (literally Yellow Mountain) is the mountain range close by in southern Anhui province. If ever you've seen any traditional Chinese paintings of a mountain it was probably of Huangshan. You've probably thought 'wow, that's very striking, the artist must have used a lot of his imagination' if you've seen one, but actually it's just as striking as it is in the pictures. It's China's most famous mountain range and is a UNESCO World Herritage Site. Needless to say, it's also one of China's most popular tourist destinations too. I got up at quarter-to-six on Tuesday morning to catch the one-and-a-half hour minibus ride I'd booked that would be leaving at six from outside the hostel doors. I actually woke up at half-past-four when my alarm went off an hour earlier than I expected - I hadn't changed my mobile phone's timezone since coming back from Japan. I was a little unsure of how the day would go; I'd already drunken two out of my four 1.5 litre bottles of water I'd bought from the supermarket round the corner. I could have topped them up with the hostel's tap water and used my iodine drops and neutralising tablets for the first time but thought I'd see how it goes. If I was desparate I could top it up from a spring on the mountain or from a stream as I would be taking my water purification gear with me, and if the worst came to the worst I could fork out and buy some from one of the stalls up there. Food was also an issue: I hadn't really had much to eat the day before as I was trying to save my cash and the supermarket didn't have much suitable mountain climbing grub on sale so I would have to do with a pack of 'French Bread' (strange-tasting brioche), a pack of custard-filled muffin thingys which tasted a little alcoholic, two small packets of chocolate biscuits (the only chocolate on sale was Snickers and some Nestle stuff, both way too expensive), some jellied fruit, a packet of peanuts and two small sausages. A strange selection maybe but it should give me the energy I needed to last the day. Finally I was concerned about timing: the last minibus would leave for the town at 5 p.m. giving me about eight hours walking time. I wasn't going to stay the night on the mountain in one of its many over-priced hotels to watch the sun rise like some other people in the hostel but was determined to make the most of my day by seeing as much of it as I could. There were cable cars to take you from the foot of Huangshan to half-way up it but, again, I didn't want to throw my money away if I could help it. I'd heard it would take about eight hours to walk from the eastern base to about two-thirds of the way up, walk across the range for a while seeing some of the sights and walk back down the western side. But I wasn't too worried. After all, I can be a fast walker when I want to be and I've got plenty of back-up energy stored up inside of me.

We got to the foot of Huangshan and then transfered into another minibus to take us to the eastern base. Here we would have to buy the enterance ticket. The Lonely Planet guide to China says that "No matter how you approach the gate you will be still be shocked by the enterence fee" - a whopping 200 yuan normal price but I got in half-price with my student ID. I had a good look at my tourist map I'd bought on the train and at the one on the wooden plaque by the enterence: 3.5 km until the first 'Scenic Viewing Point'. You're not allowed to stop to look at the view while you're walking which is part Chinese philosophy and part practicality given the narrow steps all the way up. Oh yeah, there are steps to take you everywhere. So through the gates I went at 8:20 a.m. and up the first few steps I climbed. One hour should be enough to get to this first viewing point, if I walk quickly.

Things were going well for the first kilometer or so. The sun wasn't shining, hidden behind the clouds, but it was dry, although some showers were expected later on in the day. I was wearing for only the second time in Asia my walking boots plus my white shorts and white shirt - the coolest and most absorbant clothes I have. The stairs were short enough to manage two steps at a time and I was steaming ahead of all the short-legged Chinese. Slowing down when I got stuck behind somebody carrying food and water ballenced on either side of a long pole perched on their shoulders proved a pleasant break as you had to wait for the steps to get wide enough to overtake. But I knew I couldn't keep up with this speed for long as by the end of the second kilometer I had to sit down and could hear my heart beat two quickly for its own good. I was also drinking more water than I had rashioned for myself and by this stage my first bottle of water was already half empty. I slowed down a little bit and made it to the viewing point in time with a few minutes to spare. The water prices here were already 10 yuan for a small bottle compared with the 2.5 yuan I'd paid in the supermarket for my 1.5 litre ones. The price would inevitably increase the higher up you went although I'm sure they would we up for some bartering.

If I was going to make it up this mountain alive I would have to slow it down a bit. That first section proved to be the hardest though so looking back I'm glad I rushed it. It was another 3 km to the next viewing point and the upper station of the eastern cable car. I could see how far I would have to climb by looking up at the cable above and following it up and up. A long way. I'm not sure how steep the gradient was but my guess is that this next stage averaged about 40-50 degrees. I had some brioche, opened one of the packets of chocolate biscuits and nibbled on one of those, took a sip of water and started walking again, this time only one step at a time but nonetheless at a good steady pace. I could see I was about to enter the thick clouds and about half-way up I was walking through a rain shower. By this time everyone around me (almost exclusively Chinese - although this might be one of China's main tourist destinations it seems that applies for the Chinese only) is wearing their thin plastic poncho-style raincoats like the ones they were trying to flog off outside the train station. I didn't have anything waterproof with me to put on but I wasn't complaining. My shirt was already drenched from my own sweat (and, originally being white, was now see-through) and the rain accompanied by the visable light breeze was cooling me down quite nicely. When I reached this next viewing point, named 'Wild Goose Ridge', I wasn't out of breath at all, had a custard-filled muffin and rummaged around in my day bag for a buiscuit which by now had all fallen out of their packet, took another sip of water and looked at the map to see where I should go next. What's more, it was only 10:15 a.m. It looked like the not-so-slow-but-not-so-fast and steady approach was working better than the blitz attack after all.

The road forked into two different directions at this point and I decided to take the one that would lead me to a lake to see if it was in the same league as Lake Vyrnwy. The steps at this point were slightly more narrow than before which didn't help the fact that there were substantially more people around now that they had all gotten off the cable car. Most belonged to tour groups from various corners of China each wearing rain coats in the colour specific to their group and a baseball had also either with the tour group's logo or that of the hotel they were staying in. After getting to the lake - or what was probably a lake down there somewhere hidden away under the thickening fog - which was only half a kilometer up-hill from Wild Goose Ridge I thought I might as well carry on straight away to the meteological observatory, only another half kilometer. The steps were getting so congested by now that even if I wanted to I wouldn't have been able to go two steps at a time and I somehow ended up in the middle of one particular tour group and walking alongside a Chinese guy about my age who looks exactly like LuZe.

We started talking to each other: where are you from (always a rather pointless question as I don't know the names of anywhere in China apart from the major provinces and cities and they only just about know where the United Kingdom is let alone Llanwddyn or Wales, but that at least gives you an oppertunity to talk about it), where are you travelling to, for how long, etc. It turns out that his name is Char (that's what it sounded like anyway), and he's a twenty-year-old university student from somewhere in North-East China. His English isn't perfect - about LuZe's level - but anything's better than my non-existant Chinese and it was good enough to get by slowly in a conversation. When we reach the observatory he introduces me to his mum who takes a couple of pictures of us together. Like I said, for some reason Huangshan was virtually desserted of non-Chinese and suddenly - maybe because there wasn't much to see over the edge other than thick fog - I found myself the main attraction, more so than the mountain they'd all come to see. I didn't mind at all - anyone from AC knows that I'm used to being surrounded by Asians :P - and was quite enjoying posing for pictures with all the teenagers, especially when they remarked on how handsome I was! I must say that I don't think I was really looking my best, what with my see-through shirt exposing my moobs and hairy chest, but we all know that Asians have different tastes. I was further introduced to his English teacher and her sixteen-year-old son and when the tour guide lead them on I thought I might as well tag along. They certainly all wanted me to join them.

As we continued along the ridge we were all chatting to each other. They seemed to take a shine to me and were asking all sorts of questions about life back home, schooling, work, table manners, gap years and the like. It was giving them all some good practise of their English and I was taught a little Chinese too including the word for 'fir tree', which I've now forgotten. Char's mum gave me her baseball hat to wear, which almost flew off my head several times in the gushing winds we were now experiencing. I was introduced to an eighteen-year-old girl called Dodo too who's English was very good indeed for her age surpassing that of her English teacher - although having had two years of interpreting non-natives is useful experience, such as knowing that 'the bus in the sky' means cable car and being able to guess what word they're trying to say by thinking about its context (the Star Treck harmonica holder incident comes to mind, Ondra) and impressing them by guessing it correctly. "Wow, you can speak Chinese!" Said Dodo as we were walking single-file down very narrow stairs with sheer cliff-faces either side of us after I correctly guessed what word the English teacher's son was trying to say. "No, he's just clever." Said Char. Either one will do for me, but considering I'd just been talking about what Welsh weather was like in Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter it wasn't too difficult to guess the word he was trying to think of was 'season'.

This went on for a few hours whereby they were very impressed that I wan't feeling the cold and wasn't afraid of getting a cold, although my fingertips were incredibly wrinkly. I was also fortunate not to get the dreaded crotch rash which I had after my last bout of long-distance walking in Kyoto. I had no reason to leave the tour group and we were making steady progress towards the western side of Huangshan, passing various 'Scenic Points' along the way. The mountain range is famous for many reasons, most of which were shrouded by the fog. But we were able to see some of the "Strangely-Shaped Rocks" including one which is meant to look like an old mobile phone with a long antenae and also some of its more famous fir trees such as "The Tree to Welcome Outsiders". All the while I felt very much at home with them: I was lent an MP3 player and listenned to some camp Chinese Pop to which I could easily sing along to after only one verse; I was 'nudged' over to the safer side of the path if ever I verged (wow, I just looked up the word 'verge' on an online dictionary to check if I used it in the right context and there are so many different definitions. Still not sure if I'm using it in the right context though) near the edge; and every so often we'd take a few pictures of us four together. Having Dodo explain the meaning behind the names of various places on the mountains was also very useful and proved a lot more informative than the Chinglish signs dotted around the place trying to do the same job. At about 2 o'clock we arrived at the western cable car and finding it cheaper than I'd expected (they thought it was quite expensive but considering the amount of work that must have gone into constructing it I thought it very fair) and realising that after walking through rain for the last four hours or so I hadn't needed to touch my second bottle of water nor the majority of the food I brought I decided to join them on it. As we decended below the clouds we finally saw what makes Huangshan a World Heritage Site: a vast mountain range of many many peaks, seventy-seven of which are over 1000m, the tallest being 1864m, covered from the foot upwards with dense fir trees until the barren granite cliffs take over. And with this as our background we exchanged email addresses and signed eachother's baseball caps. They promised to send me the pictures they'd taken as I hadn't brought my camera with me (my battery charger's broken and the batteries from the supermarket in Tunxi were a waste of money) and Dodo and I said we'll try to keep in touch.

When we reached the bottom they had to wait for the remainder of their tour group to arrive, some of which had decided to walk the western side of the ridge instead of taking the cable car. I bought the bus ticket to get back to the main gate bus seeing as I had another two-and-a-half hours or so until the last minibus back to Tunxi left I decided to stay there until the rest of the group had caught up. They began to eat their lunch - snacks of dried peas and crackers - sharing plenty of it with me. Of course, they refused to eat any of the food I offered them. We continued chatting about this and that while munching away until all the food had gone then, not wanting to stand around in the rain and get cold, we took shelter under a gate where the English teacher's son produced a pack of cards. They asked me if I knew any Chinese card games to which I replied "only one, I don't know its name but you play it like this..." I'd only played it once or twice before with Shu Haur in Coffee Lounge sometime in second term and I've forgotten its name again now after a few rounds and lots of help from the English teacher who was peering over my shoulder and giving me more than just hints as to what I should do I was going out first (i.e. winning) in almost every hand. They were all impressed by how quickly I learned it. "See, I think he's clever as well as strong." Said the English Teacher, although I put my success down to her virtually playing for me. Her son, however, proved not-so-good at the game and gave up after almost an hour of play. A ten-year-old took his place who was almost in tears after his dad kept telling him what to do. "His dad thinks he knows more than his son," said Dodo. "All dads think they know more than their sons!" I said. After another round the rest of the tour group had arrived and it was time for them to continue on their way towards some hot springs, another of Huangshan's attractions. I said goodbye and hopped on the bus. Maybe I was wrong about Chinese people after all, I though as I was driven down the spiralling road away from my new friends.

Arriving back at the main gate I wasn't sure where to go to get the minibus back to Tunxi. I had a good half-hour before 5 p.m. so I walked around to try and look for one. I could see lots of people heading into a big building on one side of the car park area and, assuming is was some sort of waiting area (there were many people coming down from the mountain at this point, enough to fill at least a dozen or so minibuses) decided to follow them inside, up some stairs and into a room with benches all around the sides. A strange little waiting room, I thought, as there were posters of tea plantations on the walls and three big barrells of tea leaves on the floor. I sat down in on the beach near the far corner and, seeing everybody else around me wearing identical red and white baseball caps, realised that I was the only one in the room who didn't belong to this one tour group. A mother ushered her young daughter to sit next to me to practise her English, which was very good considering she'd only been learning for a year, who swapped places every few sentences with her friend so that she could 'have a go' at speaking to me as well. The mother took a few photos of us together with her camera and the children yet more photos with their phones. Once again I was the centre of attention but as always I was enjoying it and made the most of it by encouraging them to practise their English. Then two ladies in a strange hippy-like multicoloured uniform entered the room, one of them rigged with a microphone and speaker, and proceeded to do a presentation and prepare samples of the tea on offer for us all to try. This wasn't a bus waiting room after all but a show room. The teas - one red and two green - were all delicious and watching them prepare it by pouring the teas from one pot into another, pouring hot water over the teapots etc. was interesting. It all had an 'Eisteddfod Tesco Foodhall Tent' sort of feeling to it, whereby everybody looks interested and is more than happy to take the free samples on offer but everyone knows that nobody's going to buy any of it at the end, even if the three tins of tea do come in a golden fabric-lined box.

I left the showroom with everybody else, went through the shop which had every type of tea you could ever want on sale on the way to the exit and saw that, as I feared, everybody around me who were members of this one tour group went to their own bus. I looked at my watch and saw that it was ten minutes past the hour. I'd better find these minibuses, I thought, and fast. After asking at the Main Gate information desk I found out I needed to go onto the main road, round the corner and wait at a junction. On my way I passed two taxi drivers, the first offering to take me to Tunxi for 260 yuan and the second for 200 yuan. I'm sure I could have got that down if I'd tried but I'd rather put up with having my legs squashed between my seat and the one in front of me than paying that sort of money. Besides, I didn't even have that much on me. At the junction there were about twenty of us all waiting to catch a minibus heading in the right direction. We waited... and waited... but it seemed as if this time they really did stop when they said they'd stop. After about half an hour of the Chinese people around me trying to persuade buses coming from Tunxi to come back quickly and pick us up it was obvious that we'd have to find some other way. Fortunately, a girl from the hostel with whom I went into Huangshan with that morning saw me waiting on the side of the road and told the driver to stop. "How much?" I asked. 25 yuan, she says. "That's good enough for me" I said as I clambered into what can only be described as a weird Chinese hippy van turned into a makeshift minibus. There must have been about eleven of us including the driver and crammed into this little space but it was a way back and only a few kuai (another word for yuan) more than the minibus in. We got dropped off just outside the hostel and I went straight up to the dorm to have, you guessed it, a nice cold shower!

The next day I slept in late, checked out of the hostel, stayed inside the hostel all day (it was raining heavily outside non-stop), chatted to the girl (a Chinese girl in her twenties, again from the North East) who stopped the hippy van for a couple of hours, wrote most of this entry and got the night train back to Shanghai. My time in Huangshan made me think about what the 'real' China is. Is it the super-clean multi-storied shopping centres of Shanghai? The desparate souvenier sellers and rickshaw drivers of the towns? Or the welcoming and friendly Chinese vourists travelling their own country that I meet along the way? I suppose in such a massive country with so many different faces there's no such thing as the 'real' China after all.

Arrived in Japan

2008-07-12T21:42:00.000-07:00

Kumiko says that Japan is the most wonderful country I've ever been to. Everything is perfect here and I've never tasted such good food, according to her. She obviously hasn't been around Wales much.
Kumiko: I'm sorry Hedd but just in case you didn't know, the UK is world-known to be the worst country for food. British people's taste-buds are literally like... dead

Apparently it's been scientifically proven that Japanese people have the most developed tastebuds in the world. The experiment was probably carried out by Japanese scientists, but there we go.

Anyways, konichiwa from Tokyo! After a long ferry ride, a long-ish bus ride, a short-ish metro ride and a short taxi ride I arrived at Kumiko's appartemnt late at night on Thursday. It's good to be able to understand at least the basics of the language of the country I'm in, even though when I first tried to use my Japanese in Osaka to buy the bus ticket up the only word the woman behind he counter underderstood in my sentence was 'Tokyo', and from then on we continued the conversation in English. The dialect they speak in Osaka is very different from the Tokyo dialect I've been taught, or at least that's what I blamed it on. On the bus up I noticed three interesting things about Japan: they drive on the left side of the road (as does, having just looked it up on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_on_the_left_or_right - Malaysia and Indonesia, so that will make me feel a little more at home while over there); outside of the cities there's virtually no houses, just miles and miles of forrested hills with a huge expressway tearing its way through, which I found quite surprising given the country's high population density, and; many drivers (as in China too), whether on a pedal bike or in a lorry, wear these white gloves, presumably to protect themselves from the drity steering wheels, making it look like a large proportion of East Asians are lepers.

There'll be something on Tokyo itself when I've seen a little more of it. It's big. It's very big.

Some guideines on how to cross the road in China

2008-07-12T21:12:00.000-07:00

1. Don't.

2. If you have to, DO NOT cross when the little man is red. This is when the cars play chicken with eachother, weaving in and out and almost crashing into eachother. The traffic lights at junctions and crossroads don't make any difference to controling their movement. The general rule for a driver is if you can see a gap between two cars, no matter how small, then go for it. They have no concept of lanes.

3. When the little man turns green the real fun begins. This is when the cars play chicken with the pedestrians. It can be quite scary at first, but after a few days it becomes a sort of game. A green man does not mean that the cars will stop in front of you, but rather that they are obliged to avoid you. The safest way to cross the road is to start walking when there's nothing coming and then to keep walking at a slow and steady pace all the way until you reach the other end. That way the cars can see you from a long way back and once the fisrt one starts to swerve around you the rest will follow like a snake.

4. DO NOT RUN! That way the cars can't predict where you'll be and there's so many of them on the road that you'll never find a gap big enough to run through in time. Just go slowly and steadily and walk with confidence.

5. Use Chinese people as bumpers. Three in the front, two to the rear and one to each side of you is a good choice for beginners.

6. Enjoy it. It's more nail-biting than most themepark rides and when you know how to do it safely it's a lot of fun!

Food Glorious Food...

2008-07-05T04:03:00.000-07:00

... hot sausage and mustard. While we're in the mood, cold jelly and custard.
- for anyone who doesn't get that, shame on you!

Perhaps even more important to the Shanghaiese than shopping is food. Life seems to revolve around it and every meal is an experience. For a start, it's a very social event: everybody picks lots of little things from the menu and they're all placed in the middle of the table then everybody eats some everything. It's good that you can then talk about the food because everybody knows what everything tastes like, but my Mandarin phrasebook does say that this culture of eating from the same bowl is the main factor in China's high leves of Hepatitis B. Lukily for me, then, three out of my nine injections I had before coming was to protect me from that, so hopefully I should be OK.

The Chinese don't like to waste any part of an animal, and I mean any part. My first two meals included marinated chicken feet, a noodle soup with cow stomach (not sure which one, though. Maybe the lining of them are all the same) and congealed duck's blood, a fish soup with congealed pig's blood, shredded jellyfish and lots, lots more. Unlike Lin, I can't yet tell the difference between duck's and pig's blood, but give me time!

At Yuyuan Garden on Thursday we had the Shanghaiese speciality: steamed crabmeat dumplings. In the restaurant we were sitting by a window that looked into the kitchen, so you could see how they were being made and how quickly they were being made too. One person to make the dough, one person to roll the dough into perfect small circles and put the right amount of crabmeat on them, one person to wrap it up into a ball and put in on a steamer, and one person to put them into the steamer. There was a huge ball of crabmeat on the table they were working on, and you wondered just how many crabs must have gone into it considering how little meat there is on a single crab. We ordered 24 of these dumplings. I tried to eat my first one and bit off about half of it. That was a bit of a failure, as I hadn't banked on quite how much juice there was inside! Da then instructed me on how to eat it properly: you bite a small hole and suck out all the juice, then dip it into some vinegar and put the whole thing into your mouth. And very tasty is was too.

Yesterday came the most interesting eating experience yet. "Have you ever had hotpot before?" Da asked me in the taxi to one of these massive shopping centres we'd be eating in. "Well, I've had Lancershire hotpot and casseroles and stuff," I said. This hotpot was going to be quite different, though. When we got to the basement of the shopping centre and found the hotpot place we sat down in a row by the bar. On the bar in front of each stool was a metal hole cut into the wood where you were to put your pot. We got a menu each, and flicking through some of the pages I knew this was going to be, umm, different (diddorol-gwahanol iawn sort of thing). For example, there were two pages for meat, the second being your average thinly cut ham, beef, lamb etc., and this is what was on the first page (as it's written), with pictures to go with each one: Pork Brain; Pork Liver; Pork Kidney; Pork Intestines; Deep Fried Crispy Pork Skin; Pork Tendons; Duck's Intestinal; Hollow Throat; Poultry Stomach; Cattle Stomach; Chicken Heart; Chicken Stomach. You'll be glad to know that the only one of these that we had was Hollow Throat and neither Da nor Lin could say which animal it had come from. It didn't really taste of much, but was quite chewey and elasticy. Anyway, we all ordered our own individual hotpot - a metal bowl of boiling water with different things added to it, a bit like a broth - and it was put in our individual holes which keep the water boiling. Mine was a mushroom one. Then we ordered the food to put in it. Da kept asking me what I wanted but, not knowing whether Pork Tendons was tastier that Duck's Intestinal, thought it better to let him decide. He kept putting 1s and 3s in different boxes on the order paper, saying "oh, you'll like this one" each time. I couldn't believe how much stuff he was ordering and I kept saying "don't you think we've got enough now?", him replying with "no, no, lets get some more". After a good 10 minutes he hands the paper to the waitress and the chef gets going with this monster order. In the meantime, as if this wasn't enough, Lin went to another stall to get yet more food and came back with 10 dumplings and a massive bowl of spiced vegetables, tofu and fat. Da doesn't even like spicy food, so it was up to just the two of us to get through this bowl of stuff. We started to eat (I found it odd that you could just get food from another stall and eat it there but the waitress didn't seem to care) and then the hotpot food came... and came... and came. It included (I can't remember it all, I'm just going by what I can see on the photo - I couldn't fit it all into the frame!) a plate of about 20 slices of mutton each; frozen tofu; bean sprouts; some sort of Chinese lettuce; bamboo shoots; mini omlette-type things; mini sausage-type things; Chinese cabbage; shrimp; the hollow throat; some weird rolled-up meatyfishy thing which none of us could remember what it was; and three different sauces. And these weren't just little tasters of each one, these were big portions overflowing from big bowls and plates. And then we began. You basically put the raw meat & vegetables into the hotpot and let it cook. I had no idea how long each thing would take to cook so was asking Da if it was OK to eat all the time. It didn't really matter with the vegetables but I wanted to make sure with the meat. It all tasted quite good, especially the omlettes and the sausages, although fishing it out of the pot was a little tricky at times and each time you dunked your slotted spoon in to have a look you'd find a piece of mutton or something that you missed last time and is now way over cooked. I looked on nervously when Da put two large blue raw shrimp in my hotpot. "And when will these be done?" I asked. "When they turn pink" he said, and after only about 30 seconds in the boiling water he fished them out and put them in my bowl and told me to eat. "Iechyd Da" I said to myself as I started to peel the first one but, not coming out of its shell easily and noticing a little grit along its back, I decided it would be best to wrap the two of them in a piece of tissue and hand it to the waitress before he saw. Somehow we managed to finish almost everything, although it was Da and Lin who ate the most. I can't understand how it all physically fitted inside them! We all needed a long sit down to let our food diguest so headed for the cinema on the top floor. We watched Kung Fu Panda first, which was very funny including for the Chinese who seemed to get a lot of in-jokes. Then, deciding we still couldn't really move, we watched Hancock - some good special effects, but not much of a storyline. All the while, Da and Lin were munching on the biggest bag of sweet popcorn the place sold and after the second film had finished they said they were hungry again and asked me where I wanted to go for supper. "Supper?!" I said, "You've got to be joking!"

Shanghai - First Impressions

2008-07-05T03:01:00.000-07:00

Shanghai is a haven for shoppers. It's the financial centre of the World's most populated country and it looks like everyone of its 20 million residents (25 million during the day, and growing) love to shop. Every other building is a gigantic shopping centre at least 9 stories high. They all follow the same layout: the basement will be restaurants and food stalls, the ground floor (or here, confusingly, the first floor) will be cosmetics, the second and third floor will be woman's clothing, the fourth floor men's clothing, the fifth floor sports clothing, the sixth floor accessories, the seventh floor electronics, and the eighth floor a cinema. Having been in this city for 4 days I've been in no fewer than six of these huge shopping centres, all catering to different levels of the new Chinese Middle Class. Advertising is everywhere, as are all the big multinational companies: Starbucks, McDonald's, etc. It makes you wonder how much this place must have changed in the last 20 years or so.

I've been taken around the place by Da and Lin, his girlfriend from Shenzhen who's been staying with him since the evening before I arrived. It's very fortunate that I've had someone who knows his way around and who can speak Chinese, as hardly any of the locals speak any English. In fact, it would seem they don't need to as in my first 24 hours here I only saw one other Westerner. But maybe that's because we weren't in the touristy part of town then.

On Thursday we took the underground to Yuyuan Garden. Not only is the underground very cheap, it's also maticulously on time, arriving to the second that it predicts (there's a second countdown above the platform). Yuyuan Garden, contrary to what you might expect from the name, isn't really a garden at all but rather lots of small streets in the centre of the Old Town where all the tourists go. The buildings are quite impressive and there's a little river with lots of koi carp to one side. It must have been a lovely and quiet place once. Not any more, though, as the buildings have all been transformed into souvenier shops selling anything and everything to do with China: stamps, fans, bamboo flutes, chop sticks, etc. Sorry, but one thing nobody seems to sell is postcards, so you'll have to wait until I go somewhere else to get one. However, they're certainly not short of watches to sell: literally every few steps I took in Yuyuan Garden somebody would come up to me shouting "Watch?! You want watch?!" Always, somebody with "Watch?! You want watch?!" You might get the occasional "Watch? Or Bag?" And if they were really desperate they would come right up to your face shouting "Watchwatchwatchwatchwatch!" Of course, I was already wearing a perfectly good watch which they could easily see. But that didn't seem to matter.

Later that day the three of us walked along the promenade on this side of the Huangpu River, the main river that runs through Shanghai and where I'll get the ferry from on Tuesday. The sun had already set but it was still very hot. On the other side are more high-rise buildings: banks, offices and the famous Oriental Pearl TV Tower. "Chinese people don't really think about environmental problems, they just waste all the energy. Maybe they'll change in about 30 years" said Da as we looked across the river, the countless lights from the buildings brightening up the haze - a mixture of high humidity and pollutuion - that engulfs the entire city.

Arrival

2008-07-03T05:44:00.001-07:00

So on the 2nd of July I finally arrived at Shanghai Pu Dong airport at 6:30 am local time after a long and sleepless flight. Birmingham to Zurich was a little cramped inside the bright pink plane, and I was a little worried that it wouldn't be going at all as the boarding desks didn't open until half an hour before it took off. Zurich airport is surprisingly massive and the duty free shops are nearly all chocolate shops It's a pity that they only take Swiss Franks, otherwise I could have given them some good business. Then came the long flight from Zurich to Shanghai. For about 20 seconds after getting on the plane I was actaully looking forawrd to it and was impressed that I would be flying in nice suade seats with plenty of leg room. And then I realised that I'd just walked through business class. My seat, which had significatly less leg room, was in the second row in from the front of the economy class, but when the man in front of me realised that he couldn't recline his seat because of my legs he kindly swapped, giving me about an extra 10cm but, more importantly, a wall that I could push against. I tried to get some sleep, but it wasn't working, so instead I made advantage of the in-flight entertainment: Charlie Wilson's War; Definitely, Maybe; a documentary about the making of The Bird's Nest in Beijing (the architects are Swiss); an eppisode of Top Gear; and a 'learn Mandarin' game, where I just about managed to learn the numbers from 0 to 9999. So much for learing the entire language like I'd planned.

The heat and humidity of Shanghai hits you straight away. Unfortunately for me, I arrived on the second day of a heatwave, with average temperatuers exceeding 35 degrees. After touching down at 6:30 am, smoothly passing though customs and getting my rucksack I was sped along the 30km Maglev track from the airport to the edge of the city centre at 380km/h. The Maglev is the fastest train in the world and between 9:30 and 18:00 its top speed is 450km/h. Thankfully, it's also fully air-conditioned. Then I got on the underground, a single ticket to go to the other side of the city costing only 30p. This is when I really noticed my height advantage: there are no doors separating the underground train carrages, and even during rush hour when every carrage was chock-a-block I could see a forest of arms and hands holding onto the handles above for as far as the eye could see in either direction with not a single head getting in the way. I must have looked very odd. I got off at Jing' An Temple and then found a taxi to take me to Da's (a friend from AC) flat. I tried to ask how much it would be, fearing I'd get ripped off if we didn't agree a price, but he couldn't speak any English what-so-ever. Fortunately, it turns out that during the day time every taxi in the city charges only 90p for the first 2km, and then about 10p extra for every couple of hundred metres after that. With such cheap public transport, it seems everybody wants to use it, meaning sometimes you have to wait about 15 minutes just to hail one down, by which time you might have been able to walk there. That's if you can bear the heat. When I reached Da's place on the 12th floor I dumped my stuff in my room and a very sweaty Hedd headed straight to the bathroom for a much needed shower.

Final Night in the UK

2008-06-30T13:52:00.001-07:00

So here it is: the first post. I'm sitting in Terminal 1 of Birmingham International Airport and the place is pretty empty. The last flight to depart is in one hour. The hotel I'm staying in to catch the flight at 8:40 tomorrow morning is literally about 15 metres from the entrance doors to the terminal, and very nice it is too: a nice big double bed all to myself, a comfy sofa, wide-screan TV and a bath, which I'll have after I've finished writing this along with a hot chocolate and two complimentary Walkers Shortbread. Makes a change from chocolate mints on the pillow. The cups are a little odd though, as instead of glasses by the sink like I'd expected there were four little plastic cups individually wrapped and sealed in little plastic bags. Instead of forking out for a £9 alarm clock from Boots (which has just closed now anyway) I'm relying on my phone alarm, the TV alarm and reception to make sure I wake up. Any anybody who's tried to wake me up before will know that they've got a challenge on their hands! So there we go. The next time I write I'll be in sticky Shanghai, 16 hours and quite a few thousand miles away from Birmingham. Is 16 hours enough to learn basic Mandarin from a Lonely Planet phrasebook? I'll let you know...