"travels" in Weblog

A couple of mates of mine recently came back from Tanzania and looking at their photos, particularly the ones of Zanzibar with the beautiful mix of what looks like Arabic, Indian and Roman architecture, got me thinking. I know very little about Africa between Egypt and South Africa. So I bought a couple of books. But they all strongly advice checking out current travel advice before making any plans. Over on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s website they have a nice long list of places you should and shouldn’t go… Which is great except that I discovered that my geography is patchy at best and I can’t place half the African countries on a map.

I decided that what I really needed was a map. A little scraping, some geolocation (with a manually added exception for Georgia to make sure it got pinned next to Russia and not South Carolina) and a Google Map later I had something working. Nothing too fancy but it’s already proved to be dead handy for me so I thought I’d put it live. And thus I present the Foreign & Commonwealth Office Travel Advice map.

I’ve had a bit of time on my hands recently so I’ve taken the opportunity to finish up my China photos… FINALLY. The complete collection is up on Flickr titled Shaanxi and Shanxi Provinces, China 2005… I’ve gone a bit over the top, to be honest, but I can’t bear to take any more out than I already have. I guess it’ll come down to something more succinct over time.

I’ve also been writing up the trip but so far it’s pushing 2,000 words and I really don’t think anyone will be that interested in it. Instead of an epic, but ultimately tedious, account, I’ll just pop down a summary of the itinerary and leave the photos to flesh out the story.

We started in Xian with a trip to the Terracotta Warriors, the Wild Goose Pagoda and the Muslim Quarter. Then we jumped an 18 hour train up to Datong for a quick look at the Yungong Caves, the magnificent Hanging Temple and the Wood Pagoda. An overnight train later and we were in sleepy Pingyao. Pingyao was China’s financial heart before Beijing’s ascendancy and has been left largely unchanged for the last 150 years. The place is one big museum. One final over-nighter later and we were on our way back to Xian for the flight back to Shenzhen. It was a week of heavy travelling, all told, and well worth the effort.

Missed travel connections seems to be becomming a theme for my holiday. Emma and I were supposed to be flying to Shanghai last Sunday but we were told at check-in that her visa wasn’t valid. Hong Kong airport has check-in facilities in Central, which is an absolutely brilliant service, making the process almost entirely painless. Normally. It also meant that we were near the China Travel Service office, that issues visas. Emma headed over there to try and get her passport sorted, intending to catch a later flight while I continued on to the airport because my tickets weren’t changeable. After some frantic phone calls from the boarding gate we finally decided that the visa just wasn’t going to get sorted out in time so I had to walk away from the flight, get my bag offloaded and go sit in customs while they cancelled the exit stamp in my passport. They actually put a big stamp saying ‘cancelled’ over the exit visa, which is going to make immigration interesting for the rest of my passport’s natural life. Ah well.

It all worked out okay in the end though. We were able to go on the Pro-democracy march instead and spent a couple of lazy days in Hong Kong shopping. Word to the wise: apparently Granville Road is absolutely amazing for women’s clothes… I’ve been going there for years and had never been particularly impressed but Emma loved it - loads of little boutique-type places selling indie designer items. We were there for hours!

Emma flew home on the Tuesday and I hooked up with my mate George for a quick trip into China. On Wednesday we were up early and on the high speed ferry from Kowloon to Shenzhen, which was very efficient and, as far as I can tell, is the easiest way to get to the airport from Hong Kong. From there we jumped an internal flight to Xian with Hainan Airlines. I was expecting a hamster powered flying box with wings made out of egg cartons and sticky-back plastic but we got a brand spanking new Airbus that delivered us to central China exactly on time.

Xian was a bit of a surprise. I was expecting the city to be quite big but with a small town feel, since the city center is cut off from the rest of the sprawl by restored city walls, but it is SO much bigger than that. The taxi from the airport took perhaps an hour and a quarter, with most of that time spent driving through sprawling suburbs. The rest of the time passed sitting in horrendous traffic and dodging other cars, pedestrians and donkey carts as everyone competed for road space, changing lanes at will, cutting through gaps and occasionally dashing against the traffic to gain position. I’ve never seen anything quite like it!

The most surprising thing has been the pollution. Visibility is perhaps half a mile, muting all light and destroying the famous views from the Great Goose Pagoda and the city walls. It’s a city of 7 million people so I should have expected all this really. While I’m on the subject, the horrendous air quality in Hong Kong and macao also shocked me, although this is apparently the fault of their ugly, unregulated cousin Shenzhen (who lives just up the Pearl River delta). I’ve not seen a sunset in weeks - the sun just disappears into a yellow haze about 15 degrees above the horizon. We woke up this morning to a beautiful orange sky silhouetting a monster coal-burning power station somewhere South of Datong belching heavy smoke from its stacks. I guess air pollution is a problem common to many of China’s cities…

That’s it for first impressions. I’ll get cracking on what I’ve actually been doing now. Back in a bit!

After an last minute abort of our Shanghai ticket (I made it all the way to boarding before bailing after Emma’s visa was found to be expired) we found ourselves with an extra few days in Hong Kong. What was going on yesterday? The pro-democracy march. We couldn’t sit around and let that happen without us so we headed down to Wan Chai and joined in. I’m not exactly a protesting veteran so I only have the London anti war marches for comparison but I wanted to write down my impressions (for a visual account I have a Hong Kong Pro-democracy March photo group on Flickr).

From reading the local paper, the self-censoring South China Morning Post, I got the impression that the march was going to be a meager affair. This was compounded by the tiny turnout for the buildup to the march outside the Legco building last weekend. I know that 500,000 people turned out to the last one but I was really worried that this one was going to be a failure, signalling the slow decline of the democratic aspirations of the Hong Kong people.

We had to ask police for directions to the march since we couldn’t find a route on the web and I have to say that I’ve never met more helpful coppers. We talked to 3 or 4 and all of them were incredibly polite and helpful, pointing us in the right direction and telling us where the best place was to intercept the march. Following these directions we hit the procession just outside Pacific Place… And the mass of people stretched back for as far as I could see.

The official count from the government today is set at 63,000 people but I am absolutely certain that this figure is FAR, FAR short of the real turnout. The organisers estimate 250,000 and I think this closer to the truth. The scale of the protest was definitely comparable to the London ones from a few years ago. The crowd was a facinating mix of ages and backgrounds, with whole families turning out. The crowd was remarkably passive, although I did see one woman being carried off by police, with photographers in hot pursuit.

I was quite disappointed to find that the march ended up outside an obscure government building behind Queens Road Central, instead of the Legco building. The government had organised a children’s play day outside their seat of power, which just happened to co-incide with the march and prevent the protesters from coming anywhere near their legislature. I can’t believe that this wasn’t engineered… Instead the marchers were forced to wend their way up Battery Path, behind the HSBC building, taking them away from the center of town.

At the end of the march people tied their ribbons and stuck their stickers onto the railings outside the building to register their presence. We were there early but already they were covered… Will the Chinese government ever agree to free elections in one of their SARs?

In case anyone’s intrested, I am posting my Hong Kong photos to Flickr as I go. I’m loving how easy Flickr is to use and how quickly I can get my images up… My site’s photo gallery’s days are numbered.

I’m currently in Hong Kong! I’ll be here for a couple of weeks before heading over to Shanghai for a few days and Xian after that to take a look around.

Things could have started more smoothly… While I was walking to the train station on Monday morning, bag on my back, I got a call from my mate George in Hong Kong to say that the place I was staying had accidentally cancelled my room booking. They wouldn’t have another available until Friday. Great. Then I arrived at the airport to find that Cathay had misplaced my seat booking as well. Again, great. I was travelling standby and the flight was overbooked so even after they found my listing I still had to wait until 10mins before the gates closed to be given my ticket. A sprint through customs ensued, finishing in record time: 7mins from check-in to boarding, 3mins to spare!

The flight was awesome, once I got on. I had a jump seat, which was up in front of first class and incredibly comfy. A couple of movies and a decent kip later, we landed in Hong Kong. Because I was one of the last people on the plane, my bag was one of the first off so I was out of HK customs and on a train into town in about 15mins, to be met by George and a fried breakfast.

We spent the day sorting out an alternative hotel (Garden View, facing out over Central and Admiralty, giving me a grandstand view of the city lights) and checking out my old camera kit and electronics shopping haunts. Geeky? Yep. Oh, and I narrowly escaped being sharked by an old chap playing some kind of card game. He saw Gerorge and I watching and offered us a game for money. It seemed to be something a little like snap, where the players take it in turns to throw down a stick-like card and then try to pair it up with one of the ones already on the table. My pathetic Cantonese vocab includes ‘No, thank you’ so I walked away with my cash intact.

Hong Kong hasn’t changed at all since I was last here. I can still remember my way around and it’s still as entertaining as ever just to wander around. I don’t have anything planned until Saturday so I intend to take it easy, steal lots of photos and book my flight to Xi an for early December…

There’s something deeply cool about strapping your feet to a plank and hurling yourself down an improbably steep slope. Those graceful, arcing turns; The effortless power… Big trousers, sunglasses, punk. Every aspect says “Hey brother, you’re flowing”.

It was roughly this thinking (plus some vodka and some left-over holiday time) that found me sitting at the side of a nice gentle run in Tignes. Les Alpes, mes oui, mange toute. An innocent-looking nursery slope harbouring the dark desire to inflict terrible damage to my twenty-something pride. Hey, all the kids are doing it! Both my little brothers snowboard. Half my friends do too. How hard can it be?

The hire shop summoned a re-run of the surf-shop scene from Point Break: “Hey, man, guys your age learning to surf, it’s cool, there’s nothing wrong with it.” “I’m twenty-five.” “See that’s what I’m saying, it’s never too late.” I’m given two enormous, rather scaberous-looking, boots and a shiny new board. I’d look pretty damned cool if it wasn’t for the giant hire-sticker shouting BEGINNER at anyone who glances at the nose of the board. Still, who’s gonna see it as I cruise by at 30mph?

Back on the slope everything’s looking swell. I get the boots clipped into the bindings on the third or fourth attempt… The sign of a natural. Sadly, that’s where things start to fall apart. And fall over. Standing up turns out to be a surprisingly troublesome adventure and the first few attempts find me back on my behind with a bump. The following few tries transport me several metres downhill against my will before depositing me back onto the ice. Fortunately for my pride, my two friends and fellow apprentice snow-surfers are having the same trouble. All three of us stand up. One falls down. The other two piss themselves laughing and go over too.

Things progress along these lines for the best part of three days. We have lessons in the afternoons with a slick French instructor called Nicolas. Pronounced Nicola. Naturally. “Bend your knees and lean. Watch me. Oui? Allez!” Bang, crash, wallop. Meanwhile, 6-year-olds cruise by wearing little yellow crash helmets and obvious amazement that anyone could be making such a meal of the trivial act of traversing a snow-covered slope. Surely everyone can do it? Well maybe they’re not actually thinking this but my recently-battered pride is stoking my imagination. Do French women ski during pregnancy? Something tells me they might.

The fourth day is a whole other animal. Nicolas decides that we are ready for carving. “Bend your knees and lean. Watch me. Oui? Allez!” Except that this time things start to happen. The board points downhill but rather than heading off thoughtlessly on it’s own it starts to cut through the packed snow in one of those graceful arcing turns I’d seen on eXtreme. To be honest, this is probably a desparate fantasy borne to a discombobulated imagination fuelled by days of frustration but that was the first time that I really GOT snowboarding. What it was about, why people did it, how it inspired the cult following it enjoys with a massive slice of my generation, uniting everyone from accountants to rock stars under a single banner. C’est la bombe, bebe!

Right, I’m back near civilisation again (near enough for there to be an internet cafe anyway). Just got off the boat from Taveuni where we’ve been for the last week. I can’t believe how much travelling we’ve had to do to get around a place that looks so small on the map! Taveuni’s only a couple of hundred miles away but the only way to get there is by ferry and that takes 20 hours Fiji time (anywhere between 20 and 24 hours actual time)… Anyway, Taveuni was absolutely incredible. It’s also exactly the other side of the world from the U.K. as the 180 degree line passes right through it. Technically, while it’s Friday on most of the island, it’s Saturday on some of it. There’s one shop that stays open 7 days a week by having a door on either side of the line so when it’s Sunday on one side it’s Monday on the other!

We spent 4 days diving some of the best sites in the world, saw a bunch of sharks - apparently they were pretty small at 2 meters but I kept a close eye on my limbs, and just chilled in a fantastic little place (Susi’s Plantation) on the south west side of the island. We got invited to play volleyball with the local village (the guys here are all enormous so we figured we’d better accept volleyball before they offered rugby) which was cool too but we were soooooo out-classed. These guys play all day every day and I’d played once in my life. Luckily they’re patient folk. In fact, the people on Taveuni are about the friendliest people I’ve ever met. Everyone says hello and everyone seems genuinely interested in talking to you. London’s gonna be a bit of a shock!

After the diving we headed round to the other side to take a look at the rainforest and some of the waterfalls round that way. The best of the waterfalls was a 4.5 km hike and a short swim away from the village we were staying in so it was a proper mission to get out there! It wasn’t that big (maybe 20m high) with a smaller fall right next to it but the location was awesome. We figured it’d be kinda cool to jump off it so being the idjuts that we are we figured we’d just climb through the jungle, skirt the cliffs and hop off. Um. Well. Rainforest and all. We got bitten and stung by every little critter with a mouth or a tail but we soldiered on and eventually we emerged about an hour later by the smaller of the falls. Encouraged by this we figured that getting up to the high one’d be a doddle. Another hour passed and we emerged back at the lower falls again with added cuts, scrapes, bruises and stings. Doh! We gave up after that and just jumped from where we were… Still very cool but we felt a touch foolish and we did get laughed at by the locals when we told them.

We’d been advised to take some Kava (traditional Fijian drink that tastes very much like dirty dish-water but on the bright side it’s a mild narcotic) for the village chief since we’d be staying on his turf. We got invited to go drink the Kava with him so we spent most of that night drinking this Kava and chatting to a real-life chief while him, his brother and his son chain-smoked ‘Fiji tobacco’ joints (the marijuana industry here is bigger than the sugar industry apparently!) while they lectured us on Fijian politics. Proper Indiana Jones stuff.

Right, we’ve gotta go catch a bus to the ferry to Ovalau (the old colonial capital) but I guess I’ll catch you all pretty soon…

Easy

Mike (still the whitest white-boy in town)

For anyone who doesn’t already know - I’m back in London. [sigh]. And back at work. [sigh]. I thought I’d finish up my holiday account rather than work…

Levuka on Ovalau was cool as hell. It’s the old capital of Fiji and hasn’t changed in 150 years - it looks like the set of a Western with all the wood-fronted shops and hand-painted signs! The island is an extinct volcano so there’s a ridge of hills surrounding a crater with the town on the coast and a village in the center. We spent most of our time there climbing up said hills. This has never happened to me before but I had an inexplicable urge to, er, climb stuff. We’d walk out of our hotel (this carzy old colonial place) in the morning and then pick the highest spot we could see and just start walking. We did a couple of these walks on our own and then we did a guided one over the crater and into the village in the center with this wacky little Fijian guy who I think might be a witch doctor or something in his spare time. But anyway… Nice place, good walk. We only saw about a dozen villagers. All the rest (that’d be 500 minus a dozen) were sitting in their houses listening to the rugby on the radio because the Ovalau team was playing Lautoka for their premiere league cup having only been promoted that season. Just as we were leaving, Ovalau won the match so all the way back to the hotel the road was lined with people cheering and banging drums… The celebrations could have been to congratulate us on a successful climb over the crater but I think it’s more likely that they were getting live for their team. Crazy stuff! Just about the most enthusiastic response I’ve ever seen to anything!

Last Monday we headed back to the main island to get ready for our shark dive. We had a day to kill so we went for a half-round of golf. As you do. I hadn’t played golf since the last time I was in Fiji (10 years ago) and my brother hadn’t played in about 4 years so we, um, no nice way to say this, were shit. I felt quite sorry for our caddy. He he he. And we had a golf cart! In fact, the golf cart may well have been the highlight of the day… I reckon it could get up to about 30kph downhill with the wind behind it. Back to the golf, I managed to par one hole though which I’m pretty chuffed about. Born lucky.

The shark dive was well cool. They take you down to about 30m and you cower behind this low concrete wall while they open a crate of 100kg fish-chum. As my bro said “you’re garunteed to see some big fucking sea monsters!” No kidding! We saw a couple of bull sharks (arguably the most dangerous fish in the sea, with many of it’s attacks wrongly attributed to great whites… nice), a dozen or so grey and white-tipped reef sharks, a nurse shark (allegedly), a 6ft grouppa and hundreds of 5ft trevellis. It was pretty nuts…

After the shark dive we headed back to Nadi to fly out, via Sigatoka to check out their sand dunes. We just missed sunset because the 1 hour Fiji-time bus took 1:45 real-time but man, these things were huge! Sand mountains they were. And again, we climbed them. The Fijian rugby team train there because running up and down sand dunes is about the most tiring thing in the world. And that was it. Back to Nadi and I flew back the next day… Made it through LA airport without getting searched once which is slightly bizarre. In fact, I didn’t get searched in Fiji either. I was just trying to figure out which part of the controlled chaos I was supposed to be engaged in when one of the airport security guys ushered me through without checking my bag. Er, not too sure why but I figure after my LA fiasco on the way out I was due an airport-security break.

I shook the last of the sand out of my shoe this morning. Expect to have photos plus commentary inflicted on anyone who strays too near to Hackney.

Well, I’ve made it to Fiji… Just. I got searched 3 times coming through LA customs and as a result almost missed my connecting flight. Do I look that dodgy?! Don’t bother to answer that. My penknife was confiscated by some bloke who didn’t speak any English and couldn’t see straight. He definitely made me feel safer and restored my faith in American security. I bet it was the special Swiss Army hijack blade that did it. Yet despite three separate people searching me no one checked inside my wallet or in the pockets of my bag (only the main compartment) so for any of you intending to commit terrorist acts or smuggle drugs you now know where to hide your stuff. Also, the American visa application actually has a question asking whether you are involved in terrorism (or whether you were convicted of war crimes in 1945, incidentally) so don’t be caught out by that one either - just tick the ‘no’ box. Crazy bastards. Just had to get that off my chest.

Nadi airport employs four guys to sing and play guitar in the reception area while every flight arrives. My flight got in at 3:30am and these guys were still there playing their hearts out. How cool is that? Anyway, I suspect that I may just be the pastiest white man in town so I’m gonna go do something about it…