"travels" in Weblog

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!

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.

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)

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…

Evening one and all! After days of wandering we’ve made it to Siam Reap in Cambodia. Well, we’ve actually been here a while now but I was after a bit of drama. Always a good start with a bit of drama. Rambling apologies are the second best. I’ve managed to combine both into a kind of hybrid super-intro. Impressed? Eh? Hmmm.

Well, we flew out of sunny London on Wednesday (I think). Me and Rich arranged to meet at 12 in Paddington but both of us managed to be 1:45 late, which was quite an auspicious start. We then flew to Vienna: “You know, the place with the canals. No Mike you fuck-wit, that’d be Venice. Oh yeah.” That little confusion aside, Vienna turned out to be… a shit-hole. We had to sit in the transfers lounge with what appeared to be a Status Quo audience (i.e. a significant number of people displaying the tell-tale mullet/jeans/tucked-in-and-buttoned-up shirt with optional cardigan combo) for hours with nothing to do except watch people amuse themselves by wheeling their trollies around the small fountain in the middle. Honestly. One guy managed several dozen laps before losing the will to live.

Our connecting flight was with Lauda Air which was actually surprisingly funny. The safetly announcement was read out by a female porn voice-over woman which gave a whole new meaning to “adopt the recommended safety position” and “masks will drop automatically”. Plus they call business class “Amadeus” class and have fake wood panelling for the plane’s interior… Maybe you had to be there. I spent the whole announcement giggling. I think that makes me purile and immature but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

We had a night to stop over in Bangkok… We intended to stay on the Kau San road but first we walked the wrong way and then we got slightly lost so we ended up one road over. As it turns out, this was a blessing. The Kao San road was like a 18-30s holiday camp for wanna-be hippies. There’s only so much tie-dye one man can take… I did spot my first lady boy though. Damn, they make them well out there! No, not tempted, just impressed in a kind of “Holy shit, that can’t be a guy. Surely.” kind of way.

Bangkok was followed by a quick 12 hour bus ride over the border. Well I say 12 hour… It turned out to be closer to 17 hours on the bumpiest ‘road’ on earth after being royally screwed by the driver but that’s another story. And not a very interesting one. I know that’s never stopped me before but frankly I can’t be arsed.

Anyone still reading? Nothing better to do? Ah well. I’ll continue then.

Siam Reap has been wicked so far. We spent a day just getting orientated - i.e. eating and drinking with some limited walking in between and then a boat trip out to see the floating village and sunset on Tonle Sap lake. Our boat was driven by a 9 year old! Said kid then foolishly let Rich drive… I was scared. Very scared. Somehow we survived, saw the sunset and made it back to dry land in time for a motorbike ride through the darkness with a distinct lack of headlamps and lane discipline. Then a day of temple watching… Which was awesome!!! Up for dawn over Angkor Wat (as spectacular as you can imagine) followed by 8 hours in the back of a motorbike-drawn carriage (because we’re classy like that), tootling round about a dozen temples and spotting scenes from Tomb Raider.

Today was some more temples, lots of chatting to random locals and monks, with motorbike rides in between. I’m not sure yet but I think I prefer being on the roads at night because while what you can’t see can hurt you it doesn’t scare you so much… Tomorrow it looks like we’re going to hire motos for ourselves and brave what passes for roads out here. If no one hears from me again, I love you all and I wish you all the best for the future. For now I though, I’m going to assume that I will survive so I’ll just wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Catch you all around New Year somewhere!

I’m done.

Right. Well. I feel like I’ve been beaten up… and in a way I have… We recently spent 4 hours travelling up and down what some guy described as a ‘road’. Dear sweet Jesus, that was never a road! It was more a cross between a dried up river bed and a bombed airfield, which I think makes it a bad ‘road’ in a country of bad roads. Anyway, 4 hours being beaten about the buttocks with a moto seat has left me slightly tender. Who knows, one day I cold grow to like that sort of thing. It was worth it though. The aforesaid ‘road’ lead up from a little town called Kampot (where ginger people are worshipped as gods) into Bokor National Park where there’s an abandoned French settlement, including a 3 storey hotel which is almost completely intact but utterly deserted. It’s up above the cloud level and the only noise comes from the jungle a hundred feet below…Very cool indeed.

We headed to Kampot from Phnom Penh where we’d spent a few days. I spent most of my time in Phnom Penh without the use of much of my right hand after I managed to inflict upon myself some sort of RSI injury from clinging (in pure terror) to the handlebars of the motos we hired on our last day in Siem Reap. This unfortunately left me unable to open bottles, use keys and zips, or type emails - hence the holiday email drought. I’m sure you’re all gutted. It’s all better now though so here we go!

Our day on the motos in Siem Reap was damn cool, once I’d resigned myself to a horrible truck-meets-moto related death. We headed out into the country-side to check out one final temple and a carved waterfall, both of which were awesome. The best thing about the trip though was getting the chance to see a bit of the country-side… The people were so friendly! Everyone waved as we passed, all the kids shouted hello, and whenever we stopped we’d get a crowd of curious locals testing their English on us. We gave some guy a lift home from the waterfall and as a thank you he bought us some coconut wine from the local police… Best not to ask too many questions. I got back with a feeling of enormous well-being. And a buggered hand.

We caught the boat from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh the next day having seen most of the accessible temples. The boat ride was an experience in itself. We’d been advised to get the fast boat because the slow boat is hijacked every now and again, so we were dropped at this evil-looking, floating metal tube that lurked in the middle of a floating village just outside of Siem Reap. Inside there were about 70 seats, a TV playing Cambodia karaoke disks and only one exit. Hmmm, death trap. So we sat on the roof. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to us, the boat moves fucking fast and therefore generates quite a lot of spray. If you’re foolish enough to be sitting more than half way back you’re going to get soaked; we were sitting more than halfway back. Luckily, loads of people got bored of being wet and cold and moved inside to brave the karaoke. We, the hardcore, moved further and further up the boat until we were in the dry bit from where we could watch the fishing villages slip by us in comfort. The river was absolutely enormous and the scenery gorgeous. We also passed and entire floating town of Vietnamese fisher-folk (including floating schools, post offices and petrol stations!) which was pretty feckin’ cool. I felt a bit sorry for a few of the fishermen though as our boat’s driver treated the journey like a big game of British Bulldog meets Titanic, safe in the knowledge that our boat was bigger than everyone else’s. In fact, that seems to be the primary rule in the highway code over here. The bigger vehicle gets right of way, regardless of which side of the road it’s supposed to be on. It’s an entirely faith-based set of rules in a country that believes in re-incarnation.

Phnom Penh was really chilled. We checked into a guesthouse on the Boeng Kak lake, which has the most surreal natural phenomenon in the form of migrating plant-life. The day we got there, the lake stretched out on either side of us completely unobstructed… When we got up the next morning it was covered with green plants as far as the eye could see. I spent about 10 minutes just trying to figure out whether I was imagining things before deciding I was mad and sitting down for breakfast. Halfway through my pancake I looked up to see the plants making for the opposite bank at high speed! I finished my pancake, skipped back to my room and muttered quietly to myself about baboons and their wives, safe in the knowledge that I was completely insane. I later saw a lonely backpacker walking the streets playing a ukulele. I think that bit might have been real.

We did all the usual stuff in Phnom Penh: visited the Genocide Museum and the killing fields, shot AK-47s and visited the royal palace. We also spent a lot of time just chilling and watching the plants happily wander about the lake. I wasn’t a big fan of the shooting range - I felt I was taking advantage by firing such an infamous weapon for kicks. It’s hard to explain but I won’t be doing it again. Rich loved it though! The palace was interesting too. The outside was awesome, although it was packed with flocks of Japanese tourists carrying with them a moveable forest of tripods and thousands of pounds worth of camera equipment. The inside, however, was a bit of a disappointment. One of the highlights, according to the guide book, is a floor covered with solid silver tiles. For some reason, someone has used selotape to hold them together which kind of detracts from the beauty… Selotape for fuck’s sake!

Anyway, following Phnom Penh we went to Kampot, where we got spanked by moto seats, and after that dubious pleasure we moved on to Sihanoukville for a couple of days on the beach, and that is where we are now. Christmas day was spent sitting in the sun eating pineapple and playing frizbee. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

I’ve gotta head off now to argue with our hotel owners about a broken bath (story another time) so once again I’ll wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

See y’all soon!