Last Known Location

The Rock

2008-09-15T20:53:00.004Z

Ayers Rock: just a short detour from Alice Springs! [Enlarge]

Most people are familiar with Uluru—the big, red, flat topped boulder formerly known as Ayers Rock. If you haven't been there you still know about it: you've seen it on documentaries, in magazines, on the front cover of any book about Australia. It rises suddenly from the flat, golden grassed plains, dwarfing the landscape, including the few stunted trees nearby. You see it from tens of kilometres away. For the aboriginal tribes it has been sacred for millennia; for the colonial explorers who stumbled upon it in the 1800s it was notable and they undoubtedly exclaimed "By Jove, how terribly notable", before claiming it as their own and naming it after Sir something Ayers, who happened to be important at the time. The government handed it back just a few years ago. It's up near the top of the 'must do' list for Australia. And yet even many Australians have never seen it in the flesh. This is not so surprising when you consider that from the local town, Alice Springs (which is in the middle of nowhere), getting to The Rock involves a 900 kilometre round trip.

Sand storm on the Lasseter Highway [Enlarge]

Still, what's another 900 kilometres, we told ourselves as we turned right off the Stuart Highway and began heading west. The Lasseter Highway was very quiet—even quieter than the Stuart Highway. We saw more camels than cars. It was blowing a gale and we were glad we weren't in a bigger van, as our tiny van was being blown all over the road. Ahead the sky was very overcast; surely it wouldn't rain on us? About 200 kilometres into the journey, with Isla in the driving seat, we saw something strange on the horizon. We'd seen plenty of dust devils up to this point, but ahead of us it looked as if the whole desert had upped sticks and was marching towards us in a spooky, amber cloud. Within seconds we were engulfed in a sandstorm. We slowed down and crawled along at 30 kph. Driving through airborne sand is very similar to driving through fog (something we Brits have ample experience of), your headlights reflect back eerily and shapes loom up from the roadsides. We seriously considered turning back, as it would take days to get to Uluru at the speed we were going, and in any case if the rock was also in the sandstorm there'd be bugger all to see—but we pushed on.

The storm eased up quite quickly and was completely finished by the time we got to Yulara, the purpose built tourist village that serves The Rock. It was still as windy as hell, but the sand was all on the ground where it should be. From our campsite we could just see what we'd come to see, but it was a long way away. To go any closer we would have to pay an admission fee—$25 each (GBP 9.36 / USD 15.81). Why is the Devil's Marbles free, but not Uluru? Why does the Devil's Marbles campsite cost $6.60 and the Yulara one $31.31? Answer: because they can! Uluru is a must-do and people will pay for the privilege of seeing it. Doesn't mean we're happy about it. We grudgingly paid up and drove down the narrow road. The closer we got, the bigger the rock became... obviously, but from a distance you don't realise just how huge it is.

Uluru at sunset [Enlarge]

The thing to do is to be here at dusk and watch the colour change as the sun sets, so we went to the sunset viewing area and waited. From time to time we glanced behind us. The sun was heading horizon-wards, but it was doing so behind a blanket of cloud—it was just a pale disc and wasn't strong enough to even cast a shadow. Had we just driven 450 kilometres through a sandstorm to watch a sunset that wasn't even going to happen? As we waited, some bored teenage girls on a school trip were combating the monotony by posing for photos of themselves with our cool campervan. Then just as we entered the golden hour before sunset, by some miracle the sun broke through the bottom of the cloud and Uluru's sandstone surface was suddenly bathed in warm, yellow light. Over the next hour we were treated to the most incredible natural light show imaginable, with the rock changing colour from pink to yellow to red, to a deep burgundy just as the sun dipped below the horizon, and finally to a black silhouette against the crimson night sky. It really was stunning. We went to bed thinking the 50 dollars had been well worth it.

The following morning we got a chance to look at our van in daylight; she* too had changed colour—from white to red, coated as she was in a layer of sticky, fine dust. We'll have to give her a thorough wash before we give her back, or they'll think we've been off-roading! The wind had dropped. We set off back toward the Stuart Highway, happy to be able to see the edges of the road this time.

Back on the main road we stopped for lunch at Mount Ebeneezer Roadhouse. We'd finished our Famous Mrs Mac's Pies and were availing ourselves of the facilities (US: using the bathroom) when a tour bus rocked up and a load of tourists flooded in. We overheard the tour group leader talking to the roadhouse staff about the previous day's weird weather. In his many years of Uluru tour guiding he'd never known a sandstorm like it... or a better sunset!

Driving through the desert [Enlarge]

South of Alice on the Stuart Highway is a whole lot of nothing. There's not much choice of campsites, so we drove until about 17:00 and stopped at the one we were closest to which happened to be at Kulgera Roadhouse. Apart from the Devil's Marbles, which only had a dirt toilet, and certainly no showers, it was the cheapest place we'd stayed: $11.00 (GBP 4.12 / USD 6.96). For that we got to park anywhere we liked on a large field of dry grass. We picked the only bit of shade we could find, behind a big yucca tree. The wind gusted across the campsite, rocking our little van from side to side. There's a good reason why campsite adverts emphasise "shady" and "sheltered"—when you're camping in the Red Centre it's very important!

We were sharing the huge site with half a dozen other vans. A tow truck was parked beside one of them, preparing to take it back to Alice Springs. There were no obvious signs of damage, but evidently someone's holiday had gone pear shaped. As we were making breakfast this morning the same tow truck rolled up again, and a second crippled campervan was loaded onto the back. This one had hit not one but two kangaroos last night—we mean it kids, don't drive in the outback at night! Park up and open a tinny instead.

We really hope our little Mitsubishi can make it out of the desert in one piece. This road trip has been one of the highlights of our whole round the world trip, but we don't want to be stuck in the desert forever, with this dust, constant wind and relentless sun.

[* For some reason, Isla always assigns a gender to vehicles (it's a girl thing). Our van is apparently a she—Glenn.]

In search of water in The Alice

2008-09-12T21:18:00.001Z

ANZAC Hill, Alice Springs [Enlarge]

Alice Springs is a town in the middle of nowhere. Known in Australia as 'The Alice', it's about as close to the centre of Australia as you can get in a normal car. It's almost the halfway point between Darwin on the northern coast, and Adelaide on the southern coast. Twenty-six thousand people call it home. Back where we come from that would be a sizeable local town, but nothing notable. Here it's the largest place for 1,500 kilometres in any direction. It's a very nice place with art galleries, restaurants, shops, and interesting tourist attractions. But it is absolutely in the middle of nowhere.

The Alice began life about 150 years ago. The south of Australia had been settled, with towns like Melbourne and Sydney attracting people from all over the rest of the world, but communication was a major headache. How could this new British colonial outpost function when it took three months to get a message to London, and another three months to receive the reply? What Australia needed was the latest high-tech communications network: the telegraph. Darwin in the north was quickly linked to Europe through Java, Singapore and then overland up through Asia. But the last link from Darwin to the south of the country was still unconnected. A mere matter of three thousand kilometres of inhospitable, mostly uncharted desert was in the way. And there was one more minor problem: telegraph technology was still in its infancy and messages could only be sent 200 kilometres before needing a repeater station. At each repeater station they had to be decoded by a person, and then manually resent down the line to the next repeater.

Telegraph Station, Alice Springs [Enlarge]

So, just to be clear, it's 1850-something; you're 12,000 kilometres from home; winter is summer and summer, winter; the natives... well, they're not very friendly because you've just nicked their country; it's up to 50 degrees in the shade; there's no water... and you want to build a telegraph wire across a continent with manned stations every 200 kilometres. These days no one would even tender for the contract, that's if the Health and Safety Executive hadn't already vetoed it. Back then, the Victorian can-do spirit made anything possible. And so they just did it, trekking off into the unknown on (imported) camels with a roll of fencing wire.

We found out about this history at the brilliant Alice Springs Telegraph Station from a guy called Bruce, who was a very knowledgeable volunteer guide. We highly recommend this museum to any visitors because it doesn't just give you the telegraph history, you get an insight into what any nineteenth century settler would have faced in the outback. We were left wondering why anyone would have taken the skilled job as a telegraph operator... not to mention the wives and families that went with them—it was a commitment to seven years of almost total isolation, and your shopping came twice a year by camel.

Some things are easier out here now: groceries are delivered to supermarkets by road trains and you can buy anything from fresh avocados to tasty cheese. We know it's tasty by the way, because it's called 'Tasty Cheese'. You can also get 'Extra Tasty Cheese', 'Australian Tasty Cheese', 'So Low and Tasty Cheese' and 'Strong and Bitey Cheese'. But still, we kind of wonder why people choose to live here.

The original Alice Spring [Enlarge]

Just next to the telegraph station is the actual Alice Spring from which the town gets its name. It was, of course, completely dry (did you expect running water?), and had a few wallabies walking around on it, but we were reliably informed that you can dig down a metre or so and find water. We chose to go for a cold beer instead.

Sadly, we missed by just a few days the famous Henley-on-Todd Regatta held every year in The Alice. Inspired by the Henley Royal Regatta held in London, the Aussies don't let the fact that the Todd river is as dry as a bone stop them from having a regatta. In fact, the Alice Springs version is the only regatta in the world ever to have been cancelled because there was water in the river. Details as ever at Wikipedia.

RFDS Visitors Centre [Enlarge]

We visited the Flying Doctor Visitor Centre in The Alice, which operates out of the actual Flying Doctors control centre. If you're ill in most of Australia, you really need these guys—and you'd better hope you're not too far from one of the hundreds of airstrips dotted around the country.

The Flying Doctors were started by a missionary named John Flynn. One of the stories which inspired him to do this is retold at the Flying Doctor Visitor Centre in Alice:

Darcy was a stockman in Western Australia. After being found injured by some friends, he was transported over 30 miles (12 hours), to the nearest town, Halls Creek. Here, Darcy was met by FW Tuckett, the Postmaster, and the only man in the settlement trained in first aid. Tuckett said there was nothing he could reliably do for injuries so serious, and tried unsuccessfully to contact doctors at Wyndham, and then Derby, by telegraph. He eventually got through to a doctor in Perth. Through communication by morse code, Dr Holland guided Tuckett through two rather messy bladder operations utilising the only sharp instrument available, a pen knife. Holland then travelled 10 days to Halls Creek on a boat for cattle transport, a Model T Ford, a horse drawn carriage, and even on foot, only to find that Darcy had died the day before. To rub salt in the wound, the operations had been successful, but the stockman had died from an undiagnosed case of malaria and ruptured abscess in his appendix.

One of those who heard him speak was a young man named Clifford Peel. Sometime later, during World War 1, Peel wrote to Flynn. He had seen aeroplanes used in France by missionary doctors. Slowly Flynn began to solve the technological barriers to the service, and eleven years after Peel's letter was sent from France the service got started. On an average early twenty-first century day the flying doctor makes 159 calls and sees around 600 patients from its 22 bases across the country. The running costs are government funded, but all capital costs like replacing aircraft and buying lifesaving equipment are met by fundraising.

So we enjoyed our relaxed couple of days in Alice. Next stop, the world famous local attraction, Uluru (Ayers Rock).

A fair dinkum road trip

2008-09-11T18:33:00.002Z

For us Poms, Australia is quite big [Enlarge]

Note to reader: this post should be read in an Aussie accent.

Mate, Australia is a big country. If you're a Yank you can probably understand but if you're a Pom you can't. No matter how much you think you can imagine how big this country is, you're wrong. It's way bigger than you reckon.

We thought we knew it was big, but we're Poms and so we had no real idea. Our plan is to go south straight through the 'Red Centre' of the country to Adelaide, and then round the coast a bit to Melbourne. The main road north-south is the Stuart Highway, named after the famous explorer John McDouall Stuart, whose route of 1861/62 it roughly follows. It's sealed and has just one lane in each direction. Most of the other few roads in northern and central Australia are either gravel roads or dirt tracks only passable with a 4WD.

Our van beside a termite mound [Enlarge]

As we left Darwin behind, the Stuart Highway was eerily quiet. We were so close to the state capital, yet we probably saw one other vehicle every ten kilometres. We did see a lot of termite mounds though. All along this section of highway, and as far as you can see off it, these teeny tiny bugs have constructed towering termite cities, many bigger than our van. In one area they were so impressive they had a tourist attraction sign!

We detoured off the Stuart Highway onto the Arnhem Highway into Kakadu National Park, to visit Ubirr, home of some famous Aboriginal rock art and cave paintings (our pictures here). We spent our second night at a campsite in Jabiru, near the paintings.

Past Jabiru the sealed road runs out and if you continue on the tracks (permit required) you enter an Aboriginal Reserve called Arnhem Land. Occupying a corner of the 'Top End' of the Northern Territory, Arnhem Land is bigger than Portugal or Hungary. In that space it has only about 16,000 residents. We couldn't go further as we didn't have a permit and anyway you're not allowed to take rental vans off sealed roads. So we turned back towards the Stuart Highway. In all, our little detour to see a few paintings was about 425 kilometres. Did we say Australia is big?

We'd heard about Australia's big skies. Heard about them, but never fully understood what they're like. The landscape spreads out around you in vast, sweeping bands of colour. The road stretches to the horizon, dead straight, disappearing into a shimmering heat haze. The sun beats down, white hot in a pure blue sky. You can see forever and you feel very small and vulnerable. Britain's skies are shrunk by buildings, trees, pollution, clouds, street lights—you're hemmed in, unable to see the horizon, except on the coast. Outside of the cities, Australia is absolutely empty. However, it's also a dessicated, inhospitable place. In places, bush fires have burned away almost all the grass and low bushes along the side of the highway, but the trees seem to be able to cope with it as they still have leaves on their top halves. The wind is as dry and hot as a paint-stripper, whipping up dust devils that surge across the road in front of you and blast the harsh dust into everything. It coats every surface and gets everywhere.

Breakfast [Enlarge]

The landscape was unlike anything we've seen so far. In the Top End it's a tropical climate and so there are lots of trees. In places it seemed to belong in Africa—there should have been elephants roaming and wildebeest stampeding, but instead there were kangaroos, hopping we presume. You see a lot of kangaroos on the Stuart Highway, but sadly they're all dead at the side of the road. Kangaroos are mostly nocturnal and anyone driving at night runs a real risk of hitting one. If you're in a car this is bad news for you as well as the roo. A male red kangaroo is about two metres tall and weighs 90 kilos (14 stone / 198 lb). Regularly we saw trashed cars by the side of the road, which had hit roos, or else swerved to avoid them, and then rolled into the bush.

At our third overnight stopping place, Nitmiluk National Park (formerly known as Katherine Gorge before it was handed back to the native people) the temperature on the walking trail was posted on a sign as 50 degrees Celcius (122 F), in the shade. We didn't go for a stroll.

Only once did we see a pair of live roos hopping away across the desert. However our campsites each seemed to come with their own unique wildlife features. At Nitmiluk semi-tame wallabies boing'd about the campsite. They were very inquisitive so everything had to be locked up so they couldn't get into it. As we were drifting off to sleep we could hear one of our fellow campers chasing them out of her rucksack that she'd left outside her tent.

Attack Creek [Enlarge]

Every few kilometres the road would pass over (or rather 'through') a dry creek-bed. The road signs would warn of the danger from flooding. Marker posts allowed you to gauge the water height before driving through it: the posts went up to 2 metres. At this time of year this seemed crazy, as there was not a drop of water in the creeks. It felt like the area had never seen rain at all, let alone floods, but actually in the summer the Top End gets a lot of rain and the minor roads become impassable. The highway deliberately dips into each creek to create a natural flooding point, to stop the whole lot from being washed away.

The Stuart Highway is the major road across this continent, yet the "towns" along its route are just tiny collections of a few buildings. The main focus of each town is the filling station, without which it would be impossible to continue. The fuel stops are so infrequent that we fill up at nearly every one. On day four, we stopped for the night at one such fuel stop, at Elliott, a dustbowl whose unique wildlife offering was a flock of peacocks! Out here there's no mobile phone signal for hours on end, sometimes all day. The van radio only receives static. Even now, in our high tech world, the outback feels unconquered. We're loving seeing this area, but we honestly can't see what would make anyone choose to live here.

Daly Waters Pub [Enlarge]

One thing we've found is that the people out here are friendly in the extreme. Everyone talks to everyone, presumably because they don't know when the opportunity to have a chat might next arise. One of Glenn's goals for his big road trip was to be called "darl" by an Aussie sheila when he went into a shop, and sure enough it happened at Elliott when he went in to pay for petrol ("Fifty bucks thanks darl!")

1324 kilometres into our journey, we paused to refuel at Renner Springs, the generally accepted boundary between the Top End and the Red Centre. When we set off again we could indeed see a subtle shift in the landscape, to a grassy savannah. Here the drought hardly ever breaks. It was 14:00 and yet there were no shadows. A raptor looked up from the kangaroo carcass he was pecking at to watch us pass, then went back to his lunch. The paint-stripper wind blew tumbleweed across the road.

The Devil's Marbles [Enlarge]

That evening we arrived at the Devil's Marbles, a bizarre rocky outcrop where massive boulders of ancient lava lie perched on the bedrock, as if placed there. According to Aboriginal tradition, the marbles were formed when... Sorry, we're not allowed to tell you the story according to our Barkly Region Tourism booklet. You'll have to visit for yourself. We had plenty of time to enjoy the view at sunset and then took a couple of cold tinnies of Victoria Bitter (a very fine beer indeed, considering it's made by Aussies) out of the esky as it got dark. Above us millions of stars came out across 180 degrees of sky. True magic. The Devil's Marbles Conservation Reserve campsite set us back a princely $6.60 (GBP 2.97 / USD 5.53).

On day five we got up before sunrise so that we could see the whole light show in reverse. It didn't disappoint. On the road that day not much happened, we were fully in the travelling groove and sharing the driving between us. There was no rush: we went at a steady 85 km/h (53 mph) and only did between 300 and 500 kilometres per day. Two notable incidents that day were crossing the Tropic of Capricorn, and being overtaken by a road train. Eventually, five hot but incredible days and 2,034 kilometres after we left Darwin we rolled up at the first real town, an oasis right in the centre of Australia: Alice Springs.

Days 652-657
Darwin to Alice Springs

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Crossing Continents

2008-09-06T20:06:00.001Z

Chilli's Backpackers hostel [Enlarge]

Note to reader: this post should be read in an Aussie accent.

We stumbled into Darwin's airport at 05:10 local time (02:40 Sumatra time) and were completely awed by how friendly, helpful and efficient the immigration and customs staff were. They were like normal people. The staff in certain other Western countries (ours included) could learn a lot from watching them at work. We swapped our last few Indonesian rupiah for Aussie dollars and got on the airport shuttle bus into town. It was driven by a German guy on a working holiday visa. A visa which we'd love to have ourselves, but unfortunately we're over 30 so don't qualify.

Arriving in Australia was information overload. After 22 months in countries where English was at best a second language, we could now understand people's conversations on the bus, read every shop sign and billboard, and speak to anyone we wanted to. It was bewildering. We hadn't been able to book accommodation from Indonesia, so we asked the bus driver to drop us in the city centre.

Actually we say 'city centre' but the centre of Darwin is about the size of the centre of a typical market town centre back home, so it didn't take much walking to get anywhere.

We just wanted to find a room and go to sleep. After twenty minutes looking around the few places to stay which had manned reception desks (it was now still only about 06:30), we settled on Chilli's Backpackers hostel. Our double room with a shower, but no dunny, cost 77 Aussie dollars per night (GBP 34.64 / USD 64.31). Our days of sub-ten-quid hotel rooms are well and truly over. The Brit (on a working holiday visa) at the reception desk said that we couldn't check in until 11:00, but we could put our bags in their locked storeroom until then, which freed us up a bit. We gave up on the idea of sleep at that point—it was getting light and we were feeling more awake than before. So we went for a proper cooked breakfast at a nearby cafe, which consisted of extremely non-halal bacon and sausages, egg, beans, and proper tea with milk and the bag still in... absolute heaven. It was cooked and served by Brits on working holiday visas.

Now when we have western food we don't have to feel the slightest bit guilty about not eating the local food—this is the local food!

As we ate our brekky a group of Aussie workmen turned up at the cafe for their morning tucker. They were dressed in blue denim shirts, blue shorts, blue socks with workmen's boots and bush hats, and all of them were called Ned. We wondered if they were part of some tourist attraction but it gradually dawned on us that these were just regular guys. Although we were in a city, this was no Melbourne or Sydney. We were in the capital of the Northern Territory. The fair dinkum outback, mate. We loved Darwin already.

While we waited for check-in time to roll around, we put our efforts into what to do next. Number one on our list of things to investigate was transport. We didn't want to take a bus or train through Australia: a seat on 'The Ghan' train from Darwin to Adelaide will set you back a stinging 710 dollars (GBP 319 / USD 593) and a sleeper berth will come in at a brutal 1410 dollars (GBP 634 / USD 1178). The bus is cheaper but did we really want to sit on a bus for 42 hours? Anyway, we wanted to be able to take our time, and stop when and where we wanted. We've been looking forward to Australia as a major goal for a very long time, and there was only one way we were going to see the place: in our own vehicle.

The noticeboard at Chilli's was full of campervans for sale, but they weren't all that cheap, even if we went for a heap of scrap metal which would probably break down hundreds of miles from anywhere. And if we bought something we'd have the hassle of selling it later. Several companies will sell you a vehicle with a guaranteed buyback at the other end, but there are strings attached and of course a hefty margin built in for them on the prices. Hiring something seemed like the better choice. The tourist season in Darwin is very close to being over (summer, from October to March is very wet and very hot), whereas in the south of the country it is now springtime and the season is just beginning... So vehicle rental companies want their cars and vans down south to meet the demand of the summer tourists along the coasts. Maybe there was a deal to be had on a one-way hire to the south?

We eventually hired a little Mitsubishi campervan for 64 dollars a day (GBP 28.79 / USD 53.45) including fully beefed-up no worries insurance cover and unlimited kilometres. We have to deliver the van to the company's Melbourne branch in three weeks. We'll obviously have to pay for fuel, food and campsite fees, but that's us sorted for the next few weeks. Maybe we'll camp by the roadside some of the time to save on fees. We celebrated the discovery of a way forward with a delicious meal in town with Australian beer for Glenn and Australian wine for Isla and went to sleep very early.

Endless highway [Enlarge]

At a reasonable hour the next morning, we had another fab cooked breakfast, picked up the van and spent the rest of the day sorting ourselves out with supermarket shopping (at which the checkout was manned by a Brit on a working holiday visa) and route planning. Mid-afternoon we drove out of Darwin and spent the night at a campsite on the edge of the city. A pitch in a campsite with cooking facilities, showers, barbecues and a swimming pool cost 30 dollars—much less than a gloomy hostel room. Prices will come down a bit as we get further from Darwin and choose more basic sites. So now, let the adventure begin! Ahead of us is over 5,000 kilometres of tarmac.

You will have noticed that we mention the fact that there are a lot of foreigners here on working holiday visas. If you spend any time in London, you discover that everybody working in the pubs and hotels there is an Australian backpacker. In return, all the British and European backpackers are doing the same jobs over here.

Day 651
Denpasar to Darwin

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Flying out of Asia

2008-09-05T03:02:00.000Z

Javan volcano [Enlarge]

Our three flights have gone smoothly so far today (actually yesterday—we're writing this at stupid o'clock in the morning somewhere over the Timor Sea), although it's been a very long day sitting around in badly organised airports. We had a final chuckle on the first plane from Padang to Jakarta. Garuda's inflight magazine for this month has a couple of interesting articles that the general population could do with reading. The first is a piece by one of the magazine's publishers (a Westerner) all about why corruption is such a bad thing for a country; the second is by an Indonesian journalist talking about how the current generation of 20-to-40 year olds have to stop blaming colonialism for what's wrong with their country and their lives, and taking some responsibility for fixing it. We have to agree. Korea fared much worse under Japanese colonialism than Indonesia did under the Dutch, and it has almost nothing in the way of natural resources, yet it's now a prosperous developed country investing heavily outside its boundaries. Because its people are hard working and forward looking. Same with Singapore and Malaysia. And yet in Indonesia, everything is always the fault of the Dutch, even though they left over sixty years ago. And amid the moaning nothing actually improves.

So anyway, there ends our Asian adventure which began on a short ferry ride across the Dardanelles in Turkey twenty months ago. We've had infinitely more good times than bad. It's a shame we've had to leave on such a low, though it does mean we have no qualms about moving on. Australasia, whatever it brings us, will be very different. At the moment we're most looking forward to eating our own kind of food and being able to converse easily with the natives for the first time in nearly two years. We just have to remember not to mention Olympic Gold Medals... You beaut!

Day 650
Padang to Jakarta to Denpasar

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

An uncouth place by the sea

2008-09-03T23:02:00.000Z

Visit Indonesia?! [Enlarge]

After a couple of pleasant days in the mountain air of Bukittinggi we were cooled down and ready to continue south. Our research on flights suggested that the cheapest flights to Australia go from Denpasar airport on Bali, because Bali is one of the Aussies' favourite places for a holiday or short getaway. Getting to Bali by surface transport wouldn't be too much of a problem because the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java and Bali (part of the chain from Sumatra to Timor) are very close to each other, meaning short ferry hops from one island to the next. So the plan was to go overland to the southern tip of Sumatra, take a ferry to Java, down the length of Java and then another ferry to Bali. We thought we woudn't continue to the other islands like Lombok, Sumbawa and Flores because to be honest we were ready for a complete change of continent and were already looking forward to Aus.

So our next stop was Padang on the western coast of Sumatra, from where we planned to connect with road transport going south towards the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Java. Our guidebook painted a glowing picture of Padang. Most travellers rush straight from Padang airport to Bukittinggi and bypass Padang city, it told us. It went on to say that this is a mistake: Padang is well worth your while.

Hmmm... We think they got Padang confused with somewhere else. Penang in Malaysia, perhaps? Admittedly we arrived on a grey miserable day, blowing a gale and bucketing down with rain, during Ramadan, so we weren't seeing it at its best. Here's the story.

First stop as ever was the tourist office to try to get a city map. It was closed; the door bolted. The streets were almost un-walkable with diabolical pavements and big holes waiting to swallow the unwary traveller. And the locals were without a doubt the most uncouth, xenophobic and mercenary people we have met anywhere on our travels. We were trying hard to like the place, but Indonesia just wasn't weaving the same spell for us that Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Malaysia had done. It was beginning to seem more and more like India, even down to the legions of "where you go?" taxi and minibus touts. Indonesia is Greek for "Indian islands", so even the person who named the country saw the similarities. We were fed up, sick of being stared at and hungry, finding it even less possible to get food here than we did in Bukittinggi.

Eventually we had another 'sod it' moment and decided to fly out of Sumatra. We justified it to ourselves on the grounds that travelling by road here is guaranteed to bring on a near-death experience. Maybe Java would be better, we thought. We began a walk across town to the ticket office for Garuda Indonesia airline. We were both feeling disappointed, with ourselves and with the country. Every time we take a flight it feels like a small failure.

We weren't far from the airline office with Isla leading the way (we had to walk in single file most of the time in Padang) when a minibus tout decided to have a go at getting some money from the bedraggled locals approaching him. He obviously thought that, marching purposefully through the rain swept, mud-slick covered streets, we would just be in the market for a minibus ride. We weren't. And Isla wasn't in the mood to do battle with a tout either. As she moved sideways to give him a wide berth, he put out his arm to herd her towards his van. It was nearly full of locals, and these things never start moving until they're full. Everyone was impatient for us to get in. Isla's foot went onto the 45-degree angled part of the kerb, which was covered in wet mud. She slipped over and fell face first onto the pavement.

What did the tout do at this point? Apologise? Help the lady get up? Check that she was OK?

No, he laughed, as did his tout friends.

To say that being made to fall over in the rain, on a filthy pavement, by a lowlife piece of pond scum like this made Isla angry would be a world record breaking understatement. From that point on there was no doubt that we were not just leaving Sumatra, we were leaving Indonesia and getting a flight to anywhere, as long as it was a civilised country.

At Garuda Indonesia's office, we were able to start formulating a plan to get to Australia. We briefly considered stopping in Bali for a few days so that we didn't fly three times in one day (Bali is one big holiday resort and is nothing like the 'real' Indonesia, and certainly nothing like Sumatra), but then we came to our senses. There was no point putting it off any more, we should just get it over with and leave. As we stood at the counter Isla's tears (more from anger and hurt pride than the blossoming bruises on her hip, knee and elbow) seemed to make the ticket seller think that she was desperately trying to get home after some terrible tragedy had befallen her family. Magically, 171 US dollars came off the price of each of our tickets. After a lot of requests for various quotes we had put together an itinerary consisting of the first flight to Jakarta next morning, followed by an afternoon flight from Jakarta to Bali, and finally an overnight flight from Bali to Darwin in Australia. By the time the first sabbath of Ramadan came around, we'd be the hell out of here. It sounded perfect.

We walked back to our homestay accommodation via a disorganised supermarket where we bought some cold pizza slices, fruit juice and chocolate chip bread. Our purchases were tightly sealed inside their carrier bags by the staff, presumably in case we got an urge to snack before nightfall.

Imagine if being nice to visitors earned you points with Allah, rather than things like only eating at prescribed times... Then we suspect we'd want to see more of Indonesia.

Day 649
Bukittinggi to Padang

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Around Bukittinggi

2008-09-02T19:52:00.001Z

A typical street scene in Bukittinggi [Enlarge]

Next day we took a tour of the area surrounding Bukittinggi. The itinerary included trips to a sugar cane farm, a peanut farm, a silversmiths' village (where we got to see some cool flying foxes), and so on, before a 44-hairpin descent down to the Lake Maninjau, a vast volcanic caldera (crater lake). Dono was a good guide and showed and told us plenty of interesting things. The volcanic soil and abundant sun and rain make the area highly fertile. Rice grows all year round, as do mangoes, bananas, pumpkins, cinnamon, coconuts, peanuts, sugar cane, ginger, and probably lots more. We sampled a cinnamon leaf straight from the tree, and also bought some peanuts which had just come out of the roasting pan.

Flying foxes [Enlarge]

The rich volcanic soils come at a price. This area is part of the Pacific ring of fire, constantly poised on the brink of seismic catastrophe. In 2007 Bukittinggi was hit by a significant earthquake. Many buildings were damaged, but few lives were lost because fortunately the big one was the last of a series of three shocks, increasing in magnitude. The first two made people get out of their homes and on to the streets, so that when the final, devastating quake struck, hardly anyone was inside the buildings to be buried in the collapse. The stunning Sianok Canyon was reshaped by the quake. The whole thing is made of a light sandstone, and whenever the ground shakes the walls of the canyon collapse a little more. The 2007 quake stripped the canyon walls of all the trees and vegetation and left one pinnacle bare except for a single tree clinging proudly to the top. Dono estimated that two or three more quakes will destroy the pinnacle completely.

Maninjau caldera lake [Enlarge]

Dono found us a homestay on the shores of Lake Maninjau where we could get a tasty and very welcome lunch. We ate it guiltily as the staff and Dono did everything they could to avoid watching us eating, hungry as they obviously were. Dono borrowed a prayer mat and went into an unoccupied chalet to pray. Being out with us he'd missed one or two of his appointments with Allah.

Back in town after an excellent day we had an hour in a friendly, cheap web cafe which had both wifi and beer. Indonesian Bintang beer is good. Why do muslim countries all seem to be so good at fermentation?

Ramadan retreat

2008-09-01T21:50:00.000Z

Pekanbaru morning [Enlarge]

Next day, our mission was to take a bus—a proper, public bus—to the old Dutch colonial mountain retreat of Bukittinggi. Before we set off for the bus station we ate as much as we could at the all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast (all Glenn can eat is seven croissants in case you're wondering; Isla had a bit of everything except the bright turquoise 'pudding').

We got a hotel car to the Akap Terminal seven kilometres out of town which is described in our guidebook as 'uncharacteristically reserved and organised'. Those would not be our adjectives of choice. We'd go for something like 'weird, ghostly, confusing, tout-ridden, sleepy and purposelessly large'. We worried that if this place counts as uncharacteristically reserved and organised, we're going to have big problems catching buses in other Indonesian towns.

We just wanted a bus to Bukittinggi. The first bunch of touts tried to steer us towards the minivan station. When we successfully got past them and found the many bus desks, they were all devoid of staff, prices or timetables. And when we managed to round up the staff who were loitering outside, they seemed unconcerned about selling us a ticket. On closer inspection as we circled the desks, followed by a little crowd of touts, we saw that there were actually a few prices handwritten on some of the windows, but definitely no times.

The locals seemed to enjoy our confusion. I guess when you spend all day every day sitting around in this place, a couple of foreigners visiting counts as entertainment. Eventually someone suggested that there might be a 12:00 bus to Bukittinggi. It was 09:10 and we knew that buses are supposed to be hourly. After a while an 11:00 bus was suggested. Then a modern looking bus pulled up outside. On the windscreen it said 'Bukittinggi'. We bought a ticket. We got the price down a bit but failed to get close to the price marked on the window. We asked why we were not allowed to pay the marked price. 'This bus full AC, so more expensive.' Yeah, right.

(Not) fixing the road to Bukittinggi [Enlarge]

We had a go at negotiating further but we didn't want to wait in this godawful place any longer and they knew it. The inflated price was still pitifully small, and again, they knew it. We paid up.

To cut a long story short it was a truly awful journey. There was, of course, no AC (even though it was clearly and neatly painted on the very side of the bus!). The bus steward was a vile person, although interestingly only to the other Indonesians—he was OK to us. Every person we picked up as he strove to overfill the bus proffered a note or two and was sent back into their wallets for more. The more we saw the more we realised that we hadn't been ripped off just because we were foreign—being ripped off is a standard part of the service. The male passengers were all chain smokers, exhaling their toxic smoke literally all over the children crowded onto the seats with them. We were on the back seat, intended for five people. There were eight on the seat including us at one point, with a further three squatting in the luggage space behind us. Our sanity was salvaged when a nice woman named Lefi got on and sat next to us. She found the experience every bit as vile as we did as she chatted with us all the way to her village on the outskirts of Bukittinggi.

1.6 seconds south of the equator [Enlarge]

One of the things we'd been looking forward to on this journey was our first ever crossing of the equator. We've taken more flights on our round the world trip than we hoped we would, but we were not prepared to compromise on this: we were determined to cross the equator overland, whatever happened. This moment had been a long time coming, and we were teased to the last as the GPS told us the road was steering tantalisingly close, only to veer northward again around a sharp bend. But finally, without fanfare, flag or signpost the GPS's digits lapsed from N to S and our latitude began to move away from zero. In a brief moment we'd passed from the late summer northern hemisphere to the late winter southern hemisphere. It didn't feel any different. We shared our excitement with Lefi and the man who had woken from his slumber on top of Glenn's rucksack in the luggage space behind us. Both of them were under impressed—they've probably crossed the equator hundreds of times before.

The sun began to set and the Sumatran late-afternoon rain arrived on cue. Bukittinggi is a mountain town, 920 metres above sea level. The altitude makes the air cooler and the rain more frequent. We were dropped off on the edge of the town centre. The streets were awash with muddy puddles and full of people, motorcycles, tiny, rickety minivans called opelets which serve as shared taxis, and a few horse-drawn passenger carts. Tomorrow is the first day of Ramadan, the month of fasting which forms one of the five pillars of Islam. Everyone was out on the streets hurrying between the market and the mosque. Indonesia is supposed to be laid back and lazy but it certainly wasn't anything like that as we arrived in Bukittinggi. We cut through the crowded streets to find our hotel. From among the feet of the people a rat shot down a wide alley. It happened to be going the same way as us so we followed it and finally found our way to the door of the Kartini Hotel.

Roadside snack stall [Enlarge]

A warm shower and a cool bed would normally have restored our equilibrium, but in Bukittinggi you are never, it seems, more than 100 metres from a mosque. And a mosque that doesn't just broadcast the call to prayer five times a day from the minaret megaphones, but broadcasts the entire sermon. If we could understand Arabic and Bahasa Indonesia we would have been left in no doubt about the solemn importance of Ramadan after the three solid hours of lecturing that we received that night. Even our ear plugs didn't shut the noise out.

It was even less funny at 4:30 the next morning when the whole thing was repeated.

Bukittinggi changes its character depending on the time of day. The road layout stays the same, but from morning to evening different shops seem to appear, while others vanish; and the people seem to come out in shifts. We spent our first full day there walking around the town, seeing the sights and enjoying the simple fact that at 920 metres high, Bukittinggi is not mired in tropical heat—you can actually walk around all day if you want to. On one side of town is Panorama Park. For 3,000 rupiah each (GBP 0.18 / USD 0.32) you can wander through a long, narrow park with a great view over Sianok Canyon. The park is home to innumerable macaque monkeys who like to perch on the pillars between the railings, have play fights with each other, and climb into the litter bins to do huge, steaming wees. They're also more than happy to pose for photos. From the park, we walked down into the canyon. The river that formed this huge geological feature is now just a wide, shallow stream, lazily tumbling over a stony river bed. A woman was collecting sticks. She was the first person all day who we'd seen working. Everyone else seemed to be hanging around, doing nothing. We knew that the end of Ramadan was a big holiday, but it seemed like schools and businesses closed for the start of Ramadan too.

During Ramadan, healthy adult muslims don't eat, drink or smoke from sunrise to sunset. In a town with something like 95% muslims this means restaurants, cafes and food stalls close, all day, for the whole month. We didn't mind too much; non-Muslims are free to buy food to eat in their own homes, or hotel rooms. But we decided to respect the local culture and delay our own eating until after sunset at 18:20, expecting all the restaurants to fling wide their doors and usher in the crowds. But they didn't. It turns out that they had all gone home for a big family feast. Confused and hungry, we lapped town a couple of times before going back to our hotel to eat something there. We asked the manager what we could have for dinner, as he tucked into a large bowl of delicious looking something. "Not tonight," he shrugged. He sent us round the corner to a Chinese-owned restaurant, the Mona Lisa. One of its doors was open a little, and through the crack we could see a group of foreigners squeezed around a table, filling the tiny place. No joy. There was only one other place in town open: Texas Chicken—a KFC-esque fast food place. And that's where we spent our first evening of Ramadan 2008.

Day 646
Pekanbaru to Bukittinggi

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Return to the realm of the touts

2008-08-31T22:05:00.002Z

Fenix Inn, Melaka [Enlarge]

The ferry terminal in Melaka is a small, single storey building just inside the river mouth. Tickets are not sold at the terminal. Instead you have to go to one of a handful of agents nearby. The one we'd bought our ticket from had told us to turn up at 09:30 for the 10:00 sailing, but we were characteristically early, and were glad to be so. When we arrived the covered area in front of the terminal building was already very crowded, and two queues snaked off in opposite directions. In the absence of any instructions we joined what looked like the shorter, quicker moving line and waited. Someone was in control somewhere because the queues kept taking it in turn to move forward as a few people at a time were let through to immigration.

To get onto our ferry we had to go into, across and out of another ferry. Paranoid about getting on the wrong one and ending up at the wrong Indonesian port we checked several times that we were definitely the boat for Dumai. Seats were unallocated so we nabbed the front ones with ample legroom. That also put us near to two exits in case of pirate attack or sudden sinking. For once the in-flight movie wasn't too loud or too bad, and free water and snacks were distributed.

Fifteen minutes or so into the journey, Malaysia was shrinking into the distance behind us, and we were settling into the movie quite nicely when we suddenly slowed down and the engines stopped. We spent a few stationary minutes looking out of the windows to see if there were any fluttering Jolly Rogers, or cutlasses glinting in the sunshine, but boringly it seemed to be some sort of mechanical problem... we started off again a bit slower than before.

The billed one and three quarter hour journey took more than three hours, but it wasn't too bad. As we neared the port we stood up and went over to the door area so we wouldn't have to wait while the mountains of luggage was gathered by our fellow passengers. As we came alongside we wondered just what sort of a country Indonesia was going to be.

The single door to the three-passenger-compartment ferry opened. At once the crowd around us surged forward toward the door in a fluid mass, suitcases flying. And then the mass stopped, as people in their misguided hurry to get out jammed the bags of the people in front of them. This made all forward movement by anyone impossible, and so everyone stopped, unable to make progress.

OK... It's going to be that sort of country.

Well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. After we'd elbowed all the old women out of the way and pushed a few children overboard we found ourselves inside the terminal building wondering what to do next. We had no visa, but our research had told us that Dumai is one of the entry points where you can get a visa on arrival. There was an immigration office, but the door said staff only. Luckily a 'friendly local' was on hand to help us out. He sent us through the door and we handed over our passports and USD 50 (25 each). Our passports were returned about fifteen minutes later with a one page visa and a big entry stamp on the facing page—another double page wiped out. The friendly local, our new best friend (here we go again), had spent the intervening time finding out where we wanted to go and telling us not to worry, he'd help us get there. Uh huh.

He told us to come with him in his MPV, he'd take us to the bus station. Free, of course. We were some way out from the town centre with no readily apparent alternative way of getting to the bus station, which we knew was on the other side of town. We decided to go with him and see how he would try to get our money. Along with two Indonesian passengers we all got into the MPV and drove from the port to... the bus station? No, to a travel agent's office in town. Here we were sold what we were told was a transfer to the bus station and a bus ticket to Pekanbaru for significantly more than the price we were expecting, but still a pifflingly small amount for a five hour journey. We weren't in a position to negotiate, and the town didn't seem like one we wanted to linger in. We had some time to kill so our friend suggested we have something to eat at the cafe next door. We weren't hungry, but we were thirsty so in the absence of a menu to point at, we communicated a desire for two drinks.

No matter what we tried, they wouldn't take our money until we'd finished our drinks. Isla went up to pay expecting change from a 10,000 rupiah note, but the lady wanted more. She initially said 14,000, then her friend said something and the price went up to 20,000. Presumably the something was "Charge them more, don't forget we have to pay commission to the friendly local".

The MPV driver had just called us back to start our journey when we were approached by another 'friendly local', but this one turned out to be a bit different. He runs an English school in Dumai and offers native English speakers free accommodation and transfers to the bus station in exchange for coming to talk to his students for an hour or two. Glenn had read about him on Wikitravel, but we didn't expect him to hunt us down so effectively. If we hadn't already bought our bus tickets we'd have loved to take him up on his offer. Mr Teacher-man, if you're reading this, our advice is: try to get to the ferry terminal to intercept people before the scumbag touts do!

We accelerated out of the town centre in the MPV. The GPS told us we were heading for the bus station and everything seemed fine. Then the driver got a phone call. He did a u-turn, stopped at a shophouse, collected a box and sped away again. Just out of the town centre we turned up a narrow road alongside a stream that was so full it threatened to engulf the road at any moment, and finally stopped at a tiny cottage with a garden full of ducks. He delivered the box and we were off again.

Main road from Dumai to Pekanbaru [Enlarge]

After a while it became clear that we weren't going to the bus station at all, we had in fact unwittingly commissioned ourselves an MPV all the way to Pekanbaru. That at least explained the high price tag. To be fair, the journey was much more comfortable and faster than it would have been on the bus, even allowing for the absolutely heart-stoppingly, underpant-soilingly dire standard of driving in Indonesia.

Seven hours later, after many small detours to pick up and drop off packages and small family groups, we were dropped at the door of our hotel in Pekanbaru. We felt like kissing the ground in thanks that we had survived. The driving wasn't as bad as India's, but the problem was that the roads and vehicles were in a better state and so the speeds were much higher. When you're flying round a narrow, blind bend three wide at 100 km/h, there's not much you can do except maybe pray to Allah for safe passage. Unlike in our taxi ride in India we didn't actually see the aftermath of any accidents, apart from a few wrecked cars which had been mounted on posts as a futile warning to drivers.

Pekanbaru was grubby, devoid of footpaths, with muddy puddles everywhere... But unlike in India, at least it was just mud on the ground, and not anything more... biological!

Our hotel of choice was the Ibis, part of a French chain, and much higher-end than we usually go for, but Indonesia is very cheap. We took full advantage of the facilities: restaurant, money changing, travel desk and free wifi. The staff were very helpful, but every time we asked them something it seemed like it was the first time they'd ever been asked. Still, we had survived our first day in Indonesia and the spectacular sights of Sumatra were now tantalisingly close.

Day 645
Melaka to Pekanbaru

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Plan B: Melaka

2008-08-29T20:45:00.002Z

Bibimbap! [Enlarge]

So, we found ourselves in Melaka (Malacca), a place we didn't originally intend to visit. Its name is very funny if you're Greek, too, as it sounds exactly like a Greek curse-word. Anyway, we're glad we came here—it's a wonderful mix of different cultures. Six hundred years as one of the region's most important ports has augmented the native Malays with immigrants from nearby Sumatra, China, and the former colonial occupiers Portugal, Holland and Britain. The blending of these different peoples with their varied cuisines and cultures makes Melaka totally unique. It's a good thing that we didn't go here first or we might never have left. We randomly picked the Fenix Inn from the many budget options on Hostelworld, and it turned out to be spotlessly clean, well located and wired for internet. The best part was that there was a Korean restaurant just up the road. Yum!

There's plenty to do in Melaka—a lot of it for free! We walked up to the hilltop church of St Paul which the Portuguese built ten years after they overthrew the local Muslim Sultans and destroyed their main Mosque. After the Dutch ousted the Portuguese they continued to use the church—there are some massive tomb stones propped against the walls, all inscribed in Dutch (there's a particularly tragic memorial at the bottom of the steps dedicated to five members of one family, mostly children, who all died within a few months of each other). When the British took over, they decided the church tower would make a fine lighthouse, so they turned it into one. Pragmatic to say the least.

Dye your hamster [Enlarge]

We also enjoyed walking up Jonker Street, the heart of Chinatown, and the surrounding lanes. A buzzing night market is held here every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We discovered that's the place to go if you've run out of pink or yellow dye for your hamster.

If you're willing to fork over a few ringgits we'd recommend the Maritime Museum. It's housed in a replica Portuguese ship—made mainly of concrete, but you (almost) couldn't tell. When you pay your entrance fee you're give a plastic bag to put your shoes in—shoes are forbidden inside the exhibition rooms of the ship. Take our advice and use the bag rather than the shoe racks at the doors otherwise you'll end up having to cross the red-hot deck in bare feet to retrieve your shoes... It's impossible to run fast enough, and we literally burned our feet.

We first entered Malaysia on 13th July. We've had a few days in Singapore and a few more in Brunei, but still, we've been here a lot longer than we ever anticipated. That's simply because we like it so much.

Decorated trishaw [Enlarge]

But we have to move on, as we're still north of the Equator, still west of the date line. We're two years older than we were when we left home. We feel like we've skipped so many places already, but the truth is there's a lot of world left. Tomorrow we're going to catch a ferry across the Strait of Melaka to Sumatra, the western most island of Indonesia. It's one of the most earthquake prone areas on the planet. And just for good measure, the sea crossing we've chosen is pirate territory apparently, although they mainly target container ships going to Singapore or Hong Kong, so we should be okay. We're then going to work our way down through Indonesia before catching as short a flight as possible to Australia (there are no boats—we've checked).

So as we leave Malaysia for the last time, we think back on our time here. Before we came we had expected to have a few difficulties—like it would be hard to find sunscreen, it would be a bit dirty, transport would be unreliable and hard, there wouldn't be many places with internet, there would be an infestation of touts. We're happy to have been completely wrong. What does this mean for the rest of our trip? Should we reassess our expectations for Indonesia? Perhaps it just tells us that we should travel without any expectations at all.

Golden oil rigs

2008-08-26T20:53:00.000Z

Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin Mosque [Enlarge]

Brunei is difficult to describe. In some ways it's like the rest of northern Borneo, in some ways it's like a Middle Eastern oil producing state, and it also has similarities to Singapore—a small, wealthy country surrounded by the 'real' south-east Asia.

We sent an envelope back to the UK containing a postcard… from Singapore! We bought it, wrote it and even stamped it in Singapore but then we forgot to post it until our last morning there. We have a niece who was born just after we left the UK. We've sent her a postcard from every country we've visited (except Serbia—we weren't there long enough). It's harder than you might think. In some places you can't find postcards, in others you can't find stamps. Anyway, in Singapore on the last morning we couldn't find a postbox. There were plenty marked on the map, but they were all in malls and therefore impossible to find. So we carried the postcard all the way to Brunei, where we stuck it in an envelope and mailed it home.

Floating school [Enlarge]

One of Bandar Seri Begawan's tourist attractions is the Royal Regalia Museum. It houses the Sultan's huge collection of presents given to him by worldwide leaders and various organisations. We thought we had too much stuff when we sold up to go travelling, and if you think your life is cluttered too, try being a Sultan! He has obviously run out of space in the palace because he's had to donate to the museum his model offshore oil platform (in solid gold); his silver model of Angkor Wat; the beautiful pair of side tables inlaid with tiger mosaics given by the late Benazir Bhutto; and countless thousands of other possessions including the enormous golden batmobile used for the his coronation. As part of the collection we saw a gift from our own queen, which we were pleased to see has a practical use for functions or just brightening up a hallway, being as it is a large (we mean large) crystal vase. The museum was interesting, but we didn't get any christmas list ideas.

Don't walk [Enlarge]

It's worth mentioning the difficulty in crossing roads here. Being a highly ordered and developed country, every road junction has a pedestrian crossing, as you would expect. The problem is that they never seem to let the pedestrians cross! You push the button, and wait for the green man to light up, but he never does. Eventually you just give up and cross anyway, wondering if you've committed a crime.

After a quick peer at the Kampong Ayer (water village) and the Sultan Omar Sharif Mosque we really had done all there is to do in BSB besides eating and shopping. Brunei's not cheap compared with the rest of Borneo, so we decided to continue our journey north. We didn't have a fixed plan but we had sort of decided that we would get to Kota Kinabalu (neighbour to the semi-famous Mount Kinabalu) and then decide whether to fly somewhere or cross into the south of the island, part of Indonesia, and continue.

So our next step was to get into Malaysia's other Bornean state, Sabah. The road crossing from Brunei is very fiddly, and involves going to the thin sliver of Malaysia (Sarawak state) which divides Brunei, then back into the eastern part of Brunei, then finally to Sabah. Thankfully there is a much better way, by boat. You do it in two steps. The first is to Pulau Labuan (Labuan Island), which is a Malaysian federal territory, not really part of Sarawak or Sabah. That's just one hour away by express boat. From there you take another boat, three hours to Kota Kinabalu. In line with our new way of doing things we planned to do the journey over two days and spend the night in Labuan.

We caught the local bus to the ferry port from opposite our hotel. No one knew what time it would come because it has no timetable, it just arrives approximately every hour. We sat in the shade at the bus stop and waited. After twenty minutes along came the bus we wanted, a number 38. Walking down the aisle to find a seat we were surprised to be greeted in friendly fashion by French voices. It was one of the couples we shared a four-wheel-drive with from Belaga to Bintulu 17 days ago! After we left them in Bintulu they'd been on a trip to Mulu national park, we'd caught our colds in Miri and then slowly trundled to Brunei when we'd felt better, and here we were, the only four foreigners on a random city bus.

Some time later the bus stopped in Muara, Brunei's port town. We had to change bus in the town centre and get another one to the actual port. The French couple weren't coming to Brunei, they were just taking a day trip to nearby Muara beach before flying back home the following morning, so this was definitely a final goodbye.

A fine whisky [Enlarge]

At the port, while waiting for the boat we got into conversation with a Singaporean guy who was delivering a spare part to an oil company in Labuan. We learned from him that Labuan is a major destination for the workers on the many offshore oil platforms in these parts, for two reasons. One reason is that many mobile drilling rigs set out from Labuan, but the main reason is that Pulau Labuan is a duty free territory with plenty of alcohol!

We had expected it to be easy to find a hotel in Labuan, but we were very wrong. Our first choice hotel was full. The receptionist there suggested another place, which luckily had one room left. Labuan was nothing special—just another small Bornean town, albeit one on an island with cheap booze. We planned to leave on the morning boat to Kota Kinabalu, but we suspected we'd have to book accommodation in KK because it's a major tourist destination for a lot of Asians, and August is prime holiday season.

Isla started phoning round KK's hostels, guest houses, lodging houses, budget hotels, mid-range hotels... nowhere had space for us, not a single place in the whole town. We even called the tourist helpline but they couldn't help. OK, we thought, no problem, we'll stay in Labuan for another night then go to KK... But no, Labuan was full the next day too!

Labuan to Brunei boat [Enlarge]

We were out of realistic options and so we had to do a quick but complete change of plan. We decided to go back to Miri (through Brunei again—aaaaggghh!) from where we would catch a cheap flight to Johor Bahru in Peninsular Malaysia. Then we'll do a short road trip to Melacca (Malaka), the famous colonial port on the west coast. Finally we can take a boat across the Malacca Straits to Indonesian Sumatra. We called our old hotel in Brunei and booked a room there.

The next morning, we went back to Labuan ferry terminal and bought a ticket on the first boat back to Brunei. As we sat in the waiting room, the guy from Singapore greeted us. He'd finished his business and was going back to Singapore by way of BSB. He'd had even more trouble than us finding a hotel the previous night. We'd been right to just take the first room we found.

From the ferry terminal we managed to catch an express bus back to BSB (it's pot luck), so we didn't have to change in Muara's town centre. The driver let us out right outside our hotel.

In the hotel's restaurant that evening, while we were eating some wonton soup the day's final prayers interrupted the programme on the big TV in the corner. Without hesitation the waiter picked up the remote and flicked to a non-Bruneian cable channel. Not all the Bruneian residents are happy with all the rules and restrictions, it seems.

Crossing the river in the rain [Enlarge]

The rest of the story is simple. Five buses and a boat took us back to Miri. Achoo, the slow and smiling bus driver, was still smiling. And his funny sign was still there reminding us that he wouldn't hurry.

Two days later another bus took us to Miri airport and an Air Asia plane took us to Senai Airport near Johor Bahru. We stayed the night there, splashing out on the Sofitel Resort because it was cheap, then caught a coach to Melaka. Travelling around Malaysia is easy. This is in part because everyone is so friendly. People who want to sell you something will take no for an answer the first time, and will happily tell you what you need to know. There's no lies or mis-information like the touts in India peddle. Sure, the timetables are patchy or non-existent, but so long as you can slow yourself down to the same, dawdling speed it's pleasant, relaxing and reliable.

Days 636-641
Bandar Seri Begawan to Labuan to Bandar Seri Begawan to Miri to Johor Bahru to Melaka

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Some rain, some Koreans and a crocodile

2008-08-20T16:31:00.004Z

Longboat to Ulu Temburong [Enlarge]

Miri to Bandar Seri Begawan, capital city of Brunei, is a 150 kilometre trip involving five buses and a short boat ride across a river. It sounds complicated, but it turned out to be one of the simplest, least stressful overland border crossings we've done. We bought a combined ticket in Miri which got us from the local bus station in town all the way to Kuala Belait in Brunei (that's three buses and the boat accounted for). Then we caught a minibus from Belait to Seria, and finally another one to the capital. At each interchange our next bus was sitting there waiting for us. There were friendly people hanging around the bus stations who pointed at the right bus and were happy to tell us the departure time, fare, and anything else we wanted to know.

Our first bus driver out of Miri was quite a character. He was probably the least aggressive bus driver we've ever ridden with, and was permanently smiling. We think he believes he has the best job in the world, and that makes him a very lucky man. He took great delight in driving carefully and slowly, and even had a carefully stencilled sign above his head to tell us in three languages not to expect him to hurry:

Sorry
I'm not a Formula one or sport car driver.
I'm only a normal bus driver.
If you people want to catch a plane on time.
You better take a taxi, Formula one or sport car.

We had just long enough in Seria between buses to buy some delicious toffee with peanuts and sesame seeds, and a couple of iced lemon teas. At all the other change overs the bus was moving almost before we'd sat down.

So, what about Negara Brunei Darussalam, country number twenty-six? There's no doubt that Brunei is more affluent than Sarawak, the neighbouring Malaysian state. This is most obvious in the kind of homes you see in the countryside—large private houses with big gardens, instead of communal longhouses or tiny wooden shacks. Brunei is one of the most observant Islamic nations in the world. You can't buy alcohol anywhere in the country, even if you're not Muslim (which 33% of the population isn't), although you can, we believe, ask for a 'special tea' in certain Chinese restaurants and you might just get a beer served in a teapot. We couldn't possibly comment on the veracity of this. If you're watching any of the Bruneian TV stations, your programme will be interrupted five times a day for prayers—yes, rather than just having the call to prayer ringing out from mosques across the city as happens in the Middle East, it is broadcast on the telly. But, these two differences aside, Brunei feels and looks quite a lot like Sarawak, only a bit more polished. The people are quite a lot like Sarawakians—friendly, smiley, delighted to meet you and happy to help, and not at all pushy.

Something's missing from the map [Enlarge]

Whereas a lot of Malaysians live above their shops, Bruneians seem to reserve the ground floor of their houses for shaded parking space for all their cars. They like their cars here: there are far fewer people on the pavements than in Malaysia.

The Sultanate has a long history of friendship with Britain, and was until as recently as 1984 a British protectorate (never a colony). It became fully independent on friendly terms and remains a member of the Commonwealth of Nations... So, we wondered while flicking through the channels, why is Britain completely missing from the map behind the presenter on the national TV news every evening? Has nobody ever noticed this before?

Brunei is a small country—a bit bigger than Norfolk, a bit smaller than Devon. The population is roughly the same as that of Manchester, England or Tulsa, Oklahoma. Most of the country is still jungle, and in fact because of the oil boom here, the country hasn't felt the need to destroy its rainforests for timber, and so it is home to some of the most pristine rainforests in South-east Asia. When the oil runs out, the forest is pretty much the only natural resource Brunei will have. The current plan is to exploit it for tourism, not for the timber trade—hopefully they'll be able to stick to this.

One of the most popular bits of jungle to visit is at the Ulu Temburong National Park. A day trip there starts with a swift speedboat ride down the Brunei River delta into Brunei Bay, round a spur of Malaysia which splits Brunei into two separate parts, then up the Temburong River to the small town of Bangar. From Bangar you take a car into the forest, followed by a longboat ride into the National Park and a tree-top walk along an impressive canopy walkway. A nice way to spend a Tuesday.

Down by the river in the early morning we met our trekking companions: a family of five from Hong Kong. As we boarded a speedboat at the Bandar Seri Begawan dock it was raining. Luckily our torpedo-shaped vessel was enclosed and almost watertight. The young speedboat driver was soon accelerating through the maze of streams that make up the Brunei River delta. We popped out into the open ocean and zoomed along a line of poles that marked the deep channel at low tide.

The rain had stopped by the time we docked in Bangar and met our guide, Langi. He is a member of one of Brunei's indigenous tribes. We've noticed that most of the people in Borneo offering services aimed at tourists are non-Muslims. He happily pointed things out and gave us snippets of information as we drove out of Bangar. One thing he told us was that Bangar just means "town", while the Bandar part of Bandar Seri Begawan means "city".

All the big travel companies in Brunei have their own lodge houses on the edge of Ulu Temburong with accommodation, catering facilities and a boat jetty. Freme Travel had laid on tea, coffee, banana fritters and sticky rice when we arrived. Once that was gone, we donned life jackets and took a longboat ride upstream into the national park. As we've mentioned already, Borneo is currently in the dry season. Langi told us that this usually means that the boat gets stuck and the passengers have to hop out and help push it over the rapids and sandbanks. But he said that because it had been raining all night we'd be okay, and we were. The driver had to basically point the boat uphill at each set of rapids, attack them at full throttle and quickly lift the propeller out of the water to coast through. We occasionally scraped the bottom, but Langi managed to punt us over it. Even without getting beached it was quite an exciting ride.

We have to climb this?! [Enlarge]

At the entrance to the park, we had to get out of the boat to register at the park office. As we were signing the visitor book, Isla felt something sink its jaws into her shoulder. After some arm flapping and frantic t-shirt wafting a large ant fell out. When we say large, we mean bigger than your thumbnail. The wildlife in Borneo is super-sized.

Isla's gaping wound salved, we headed into the jungle. There is a way up to the canopy walkway involving some 1200 wooden steps, but this way is currently closed for maintenance because apparently several tourists have slipped over on the steps. That meant we would be taking the long way round through the jungle, using ropes to help us pull ourselves up, which was much more interesting. It wasn't too hot because there was a slight breeze coming up the river valley. Eventually we reached the base of the canopy walkway's tower, from which a long metal platform well above tree top level was suspended. Assuming you can get up the courage to climb to the top, you have a fantastic view over the top of the jungle. Of our group of seven, we were the only ones to go up.

Sliding back down the hill, we passed a group of Koreans on tour, coming the other way. We said "안녕하세요" (annyeonghaseyo / hello) to them as we passed and they almost rolled down the hill in surprise. We went on to further astound them by explaining in Korean that until June we had been English teachers in Seoul. They loved it.

Isla on the tree top walkway [Enlarge]

We'd just passed a patch of monkey wee (it smells strong and musty), and a poisonous tree (don't touch!) on the way down the hill when Langi told us that it was going to rain. As soon as he'd said it, we could sense the change in the air, and the stiffening breeze, which we hadn't noticed before. We just made it to the longboats before the downpour came. The boatman magically produced waterproof ponchos for everyone and we had an even more interesting voyage back down to the lodge house. No danger of getting grounded this time! When it rains in Borneo it really rains, even in the dry season. Pity the poor Koreans who had probably just about reached the summit as 비가 왔어요 (bi-ga oasseoyo / it started raining).

On the way back to the city the speed boat took a route closer to the coast than it had before, as it was now high tide. We wondered if we were sticking to Bruneian waters or taking a short cut through Malaysia, so we tagged a few points on the GPS to check out later on Google Earth. True enough, we had sped through little creeks deep in the Malaysian mainland for a lot of the journey!

We were almost back to Bandar Seri Begawan when the boat driver suddenly cut the throttle and we all nearly flew through the windscreen. He excitedly pointed out of the window and we looked just in time to see a huge salt-water crocodile launch itself vertically out of the water, snap its jaws around an unsuspecting fish, and disappear again below the surface. The driver said that he'd never seen a crocodile here before, and he's been navigating the waterways of Brunei for many years. As usual, the highlight of the day turned out to be something unexpected.

Our trekking trip was fab. We're not sure that the Hong Kongers shared our view though. Take out the breathtaking treetop walk, and all you have left is a trudge up and down a hill and a wet boat ride. Life's much more fun when you try stuff. JFDI, we say.

Day 633
Miri to Bandar Seri Begawan

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Miri rest stop

2008-08-17T23:53:00.001Z

Tapang tree [Enlarge]

On the drive from Belaga to Bintulu Isla began to feel like she was coming down with a cold. We just managed to get checked in at a hotel before it turned into a nasty cold and throat infection, and pretty much wiped her out. But as there was a distinct lack of places to find Western comfort food in Bintulu, she dosed up on paracetamol (Tylenol) and we caught a bus up the coast to Miri hoping for something better.

In Miri we checked into a reasonable hotel with a TV and wi-fi, ate a decent pizza and settled down to watch the Olympics, at which Great Britain are doing quite well!

After a few days' rest Isla's cold had gone except for an annoying cough and we finally felt like doing something different. So we took a guided excursion to Niah National Park (pronounced NEE-a). Sarawak has several national parks, each with a different selling point. Niah's main draw is its caves, once home to the oldest human settlement in Malaysian Borneo—a human skull 40,000 years old was found there in the 1950s.

The caves are fittingly huge. We say fittingly, because it seems that everything in this part of the world is huge: the insects, the trees, the leaves, the rivers, the rainstorms. The Great Cave at Niah is particularly impressive, its roof rising as high as 75 metres. We can't find a figure for the size of the mouth of the cave but we reckon it must be around 100 metres wide by 30 high. As you enter, a long wooden walkway disappears back into the endless blackness, countless steps rising up and away from you. You are hit by the cool and musty air, and the only sound is the clicks of the swifts for which this cave is famous: their nests (or rather the binding cement for their nests, which is made from their saliva), are prized for the curious Chinese delicacy bird's nest soup. Until visiting Niah, we thought it was just called bird's nest soup—we didn't think it was actually made of bird's nests! Maybe we're strange. But anyway, we now know the soup is the real deal. And it's expensive! The nests retail at around USD 2,000 (GBP 1,081) per kilogram.

Great Cave, Niah National Park [Enlarge]

The swifts have an annoying habit of building their nests on the roof of the cave, out of reach of predators, and all but the most determined human collectors. The locals here are licensed to harvest a certain number of nests each year, and they still do it in the traditional way: by climbing up a 75 metre tall bamboo pole and precariously scraping them off the ceiling with a scraper. Slips are usually fatal. As we walked through the darkness by torchlight we could see little points of light in the far distance. Sometimes the points were on the cave floor: they belonged to collectors of bird and bat guano for fertilizer. Mostly they were ascending or descending the ropes and poles, as the day's quota of nests was steadily filled.

Stalactites and stalagmites grow more quickly here than they do back home, but less gracefully. The hot sun evaporates the water on one side faster than the other, which causes the formations to grow out of the cave towards the sun. In the painted cave (named after the ancient cave paintings found there) the ceiling is almost completely level and smooth, apart from the crazy formations growing downward from the cracks. However the floor is rough and undulating, made that way by water flowing across it for millions of years. There's a good vantage point—a natural balcony—against one wall of the cave, about half way between the floor and ceiling, and when you stand here and look across the cave you feel like the world has been turned upside down.

The day after our trip to Niah, Isla was finally feeling near normal but Glenn inevitably came down with the evil cold; and it rained all day. So we were back in the hotel room, but with Olympic sport on the telly and fairly reliable internet we didn't mind too much.

We like Miri. It's got everything we need, it's pedestrian-friendly, the natives are great, the food is too. In a day or so we'll get moving again, continuing our trip north-east up the coast into our 26th country: Brunei.

Day 626
Bintulu to Miri

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Leaving the Rejang behind

2008-08-09T17:58:00.007Z

Main street, Belaga [Enlarge]

We liked Belaga straight away. It's a tiny town consisting of just three or so parallel streets, each one only about a hundred metres long. It has just two or three shops, between them selling absolutely anything you could ever want to buy, as long as you don't want a big choice; a surprising number of cafes offering variations on a theme of nasi goreng (fried rice) or mee goreng (fried noodles); and a smattering of hotels. It has a chilled out atmosphere. The locals smile and greet you on their way to the badminton court or park, but no one pressures you to join their 'special price' excursion or buy their locally produced handicrafts. You can if you like, take it or leave it. It's our kind of place.

Now, about the excursions. The thing to do in this part of Borneo is to go on an organised visit to a longhouse. The state of Sarawak alone is home to more than forty sub-ethnic groups and many of them still live in traditional style in multi-family longhouses, up to 200 metres long and raised up on stilts to avoid floods. Longhouse visiting is big business.

We are genetically predisposed to be sceptical of anything that involves swapping money for an 'authentic experience'. We've been lucky enough to be taken to the homes of people we actually know while on our travels, and these visits were great. But we find organised, money-changing-hands experiences awkward and difficult. We prefer to see what normal family life is like rather than some manufactured idea of what Westerners expect to see. It's one thing to meet a local on a boat or bus, get talking, and end up going back to his place for a cup of tea—that's special and unmissable—but we don't like it when it's commercialised.

Public garden [Enlarge]

We talked to a few Brits in town who'd been on an overnight stay in a longhouse over the previous two days. In addition to the fee, they told us you are required to bring gifts. Also, they didn't say outright, but they strongly implied, that it's quite boring at times. Almost every family unit in the longhouses has satellite TV and the probability is that your hosts will spend the evening watching Malaysian soap operas. If you try to talk to them or play with the children, you'll be sssshhhed. And you have to eat truly weird food (for Westerners) in circumstances of dubious hygiene... Of course, they said good things about the visit too! We may regret it, but on balance, we decided to give the longhouses a miss, for now at least.

(On the subject of food, we can imagine the poor longhouse hosts complaining to each other: "We've got some more weirdo foreigners coming tonight, we'll have to leave the pizza in the fridge and cook them up some bugs!")

****ing rooster [Enlarge]

We spent two days in Belaga which was enough, especially since we had another rooster with a faulty body clock living outside our window. It's a lovely place, but it's very, very small and you keep bumping into the same people over and over again. It's like when you pass the same colleague in the office corridor three times in the same morning; the first time you say "Hi", the second time you nod, and the third time you awkwardly ignore each other.

Our last day in Belaga was the 8th of August: 08/08/08. In our room we had a tiny television with a very limited choice of channels, so we didn't hold out much hope as we turned it on at 8pm and flicked through the channels hoping that just maybe we'd be able to catch something from the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony. We found it! With commentary in Malay, of course. It was good, but not a patch on the Arirang Mass Games in North Korea. It felt like just another identikit Olympic opening ceremony from the shelf marked 'Olympic opening ceremonies'. We really hope that the London 2012 team breaks the mould, throws away the rule book, and does something totally different for our opening ceremony in four years' time.

Clouds in the Borneo hills [Enlarge]

So, how to get out of Belaga? Until recently you had to go 60 kilometres further upstream as far as the Bakun Dam where the only road in the area began. What then? Catch a lift from a friendly logger, or call ahead and arrange for a pick up. It would have been nice to have been able to say that we'd travelled the entire length of the Rejang from ocean to source, all 640/530/564/567/770 kilometres of it. (None of our leaflets or guides can agree on the actual length—the last three numbers came from the same booklet.) But those days are gone. Belaga is now well and truly connected to the outside world by a road that starts out as a gravel and dirt track before getting wider and flatter, until it finally joins up with the Pan Borneo Highway part way between Bintulu and Miri.

There's no public transport out of Belaga, so we teamed up with four more Westerners and commissioned a Toyota Landcruiser four wheel drive to take us from Belaga to Bintulu, back on the coast. It cost us a slightly pricey 60 riggit per person (GBP 9.63 / USD 17.92), but it was a long drive and the vehicle was new and immaculate—and came with a couple of golden Buddhas on the dashboard to assure our safety.

Buddhist dashboard [Enlarge]

The road was bumpy. In places it was a compacted mud track, in places it looked like it had been freshly ploughed. We passed a few roadworking gangs who were using huge yellow earth-movers to flatten out the ruts. On a road without deep foundations or tarmac this must be a full time job. We bounced through beautiful jungle scenery, including looking down on a sea of clouds which the early morning sun hadn't yet burned off. As the road gradually improved, we began to come across occasional longhouses dotted throughout the forest. At one point the jungle suddenly disappeared, as far as we could see in all directions. The hillsides had been cleared and terraced ready to receive a few million oil palm trees.

Finally the road joined a wider, tarmac road and then before too long we were at the junction with the Pan Borneo Highway. Here we parted company with two of our travelling companions who were going east to Miri by bus, while the other four of us turned south west to Bintulu.

The last week in Sarawak has been one of the most memorable of our entire trip so far, and we're still only half way up the coast of Borneo!

Day 624
Belaga to Bintulu

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Rejang roof-riding

2008-08-07T21:12:00.003Z

Upriver express boats [Enlarge]

Finding the boat upriver to Belaga was not very easy. Kapit has at least two wharfs, and another huge pier is being built right next to the town's market. So not only did we not know exactly where to catch the boat, we also didn't know what time it sailed. Or even if it sailed! Allow us to explain. All along the Rejang River, people had been a bit vague about the Kapit to Belaga boat. In Kuching they sucked their teeth and told us it was impossible to get further than Kapit in the dry season (i.e. now). In our next stop Sibu they said there was a boat some days, but only if there had been enough rain upstream and the river was high enough. The Sarawak Tourism Board's handy little Sibu and Central Sarawak Visitors' Guide says:

Note: During the dry season (July to September) express boats may not be able to reach Belaga.

While the same organisation's Sibu and the Rejang leaflet says:

Express boats leave Sibu for Belaga (7-9 hrs approx.) at about 6 am (and 9 am during the rainy season), stopping at Kapit.

We were confused and prepared to be told that we would have to either fly out of Kapit or backtrack down the river until we found a road. But when we asked people in Kapit they looked at us like we were daft and said of course, there's one boat a day. They just couldn't agree on the time.

It's not really their fault. The time is variable because it depends when the boat arrives into Kapit (it starts off downriver in Sibu). After loading up and taking on a new set of passengers it continues to Belaga. Some people said it would arrive at 09:00, some said 09:30, some said 10:00. We didn't want to risk missing it, so we went down at 7:45 to find the right place, make sure we had tickets and generally watch the comings and goings in early morning Kapit.

Rejang river [Enlarge]

It turned out that the upriver wharf was signposted as being the right one for Belaga, although only in Malay. Several locals confirmed that we were in the right place for the Belaga boat, and that the place to buy the tickets is on the boat. We sat down on the concrete steps to wait. There was plenty to watch. Although this wharf is of secondary importance to the downstream one, there was still lots of activity. Boats to local villages and long houses were constantly coming and going, and being loaded up with provisions, livestock, goods and people. Every so often an express boat would torpedo in, tie up and quickly unload something or someone and take off again. The boats moor side by side and the only way to reach the most recent arrival is across all the other boats. How they kept track of which string-tied cardboard box should go onto which boat, we couldn't even begin to guess.

Everything imaginable was being taken upriver, from bedsteads and freezers, to pet dogs in wooden crates, local Tiger beer, and jellyfish satay, to live chickens in plastic shopping baskets. It was the Bornean equivalent of an Ikea car park. The people were a fantastic mix too. The teenagers and twenty-somethings were dressed in Levis and logo'd t-shirts, while the older generations, travelling back to their longhouse communities, were distinguishable from the ethnic Chinese and Malays by their hugely elongated earlobes. The practice of piercing and then stretching your ears isn't practised much by younger generations, and will probably die out within another few decades.

The boat came at about 8:50, and there was no shortage of friendly locals telling us that it was the boat we wanted. We sat down inside on one of the cracked chairs, in refrigerated air conditioned coldness. The in-flight movie was already playing. It was something Malaysian that we didn't understand. Then one of the other passengers told us that we shouldn't be inside—the best place to sit was on the roof! It seemed like a great idea so we walked round the side of the boat on the wide metal skirt that acts as both a loading platform and a splash guard, and climbed up onto the roof. The white painted metal wasn't too hot, and was more or less flat, sloping slightly from the middle towards the edges. All around the edge was a rail, about 15 centimetres high, to stop cargo sliding off the top and into the fast-flowing water.

Riding on the roof [Enlarge]

We positioned ourselves behind a bed frame, gas cooker and stack of boxes, which were coming up river with us. At 09:25 we set off. At first we had the roof to ourselves. From time to time someone would pop out of the doors at the front for a smoke. With our UV proof sun hats, sunglasses, ear plugs, SPF 50 shirts and trousers and a lot of sunblock, we were actually very comfortable and quite cool. We had a nice breeze from the movement of the boat, and a fresh ozony smell from the river mingled with the wood smoke of jungle bonfires. And there was no trashy movie!

Two hundred kilometres inland from the sea, the Rejang is still wide, but it's no longer very deep. Our skipper was having to constantly adjust course, throttling back and steering wide arcs around invisible rocks and sandbanks that he knew were there. The scenery was truly stunning. We've done some great journeys by road, rail and waterways, but this might well have been the best.

Rejang river longhouse [Enlarge]

About an hour upstream we came to the Pelagus Rapids. This is a stretch of water that was practically impassable until the 1960s when British Army engineers and a lot of explosives opened up a navigable channel. But even these days, it's only the shallow bottomed speedboats and express boats like ours, with reinforced hulls, that can make the trip. Fifty years ago, passengers had to disembark and trek through the jungle to reach a second boat on the other side of the rapids. We were expecting a wild ride, and they were an undoubted challenge for the skipper and the boat. There were a couple of points where it really felt as if we were driving up hill, engines revving, but disappointingly they weren't nearly as wild as we thought they'd be. They're probably worse in the wet season.

We stopped at almost every longhouse on the way upstream. People were constantly joining and leaving the boat as every twenty minutes or so we'd slow up and drive, nose first, into the muddy bank to let people on or off. At one point a small group of men carrying construction tools boarded and hopped up onto the roof with us. We exchanged smiles and after a bit one of them wordlessly expressed an interest in the GPS. Glenn ran through its different functions to the guy's obvious delight. Who needs a shared language when you have a shared love of gadgets?

Disembarking [Enlarge]

Three hours into the trip and with at least another hour to go, we were in the full untempered force of the midday equatorial sun, and in spite of the breeze it was becoming too much. We retreated below to where loud Malaysian dance music was playing on the TV screens to drown out the engine noise, and loud tribal women were shouting the latest longhouse gossip to each other to drown out the TV. But at least we were cool.

At first sight Belaga looked homely and very welcoming. Above the narrow jetty a big sign proclaimed "Welcome to Belaga". Mowed grass—you could almost call it a lawn—coated the river banks all the way up to the first line of buildings. It was not what we were expecting!

Our first task as ever was finding somewhere to sleep. It wasn't a big job as there are only a handful of hotels in the town and they are all metres apart. In fact after five minutes in the town we had explored it fully! We chose the Sing Soon Hua Hotel, the town's most expensive, and got a large twin room with private bathroom and air conditioning for 35 ringgit a night (GBP 5.62 / USD 10.45). Excellent value as ever in Malaysia. Can you really ask for more?

All our photos from today are here.

Day 622
Kapit to Belaga

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Kapit, in the middle of nowhere

2008-08-06T21:49:00.003Z

Plenty of choice for boats upriver [Enlarge]

There are no roads to Kapit, and when the only way to a place is by boat there are a lot of boats. When we turned up at the wharf for the 10:45 express (chosen at random), something like seven ferries had already started the journey upriver, and another three or four were scheduled to follow ours. There are no fewer than three classes to choose from on the Kapit Boleh 168 express boat, at 20, 25 or 30 ringgits each (GBP 3.17, 3.96, 4.75 / USD 6.01, 7.52, 9.02). We chose the middle ones at 25 (didn't want to be extravagant!), and when we were handed the tickets they said 'business class'. When we got on board we were able to see what the extra money gets you on these boats: the more you pay, the further from the outrageously noisy engine you are, and the more legroom you get between your plastic leather seat and the one in front. In business class we had just enough legroom for Glenn to sit down and our seats, like everyone else's, had partially come adrift from the floor. They rocked violently when we sat down or moved. If there hadn't been a Malaysian granny behind us we might have shifted the whole seat back for some extra space. We put in our ear plugs (top tip for these boats, by the way) and carefully settled back in our seats.

Business class [Enlarge]

The express boats running upriver from Sibu are like no other boats we've ever encountered. They look like jet planes with the wings cut off, and they go nearly as fast and sound nearly as loud as their airborne cousins. The ride took about two and a half hours. It wasn't particularly interesting, mainly because we couldn't see much through the windows. To keep the sun out and earn a bit of extra cash the boat operators cover the top 90 percent of the windows with vinyl sticker adverts. As with seemingly all Malaysian public transport, there was an in-flight movie, but it was inaudible over the growling engines.

First impressions usually stick and we didn't particularly like Kapit, when we walked up the long flight of steps from the pier. In isolated places there always seems to be a strange atmosphere, and Kapit had it. It's hard to describe exactly, but there's a sort of feeling of being trapped that pervades everything and everyone. Kapit has a small airport with a couple of commercial flights each week, boat connections back down river to Sibu that stop running in the early afternoon, and a few boats each day to various upriver villages, mainly in the morning. Because of the lack of travel options if there was a problem with accommodation, we had decided to book a room by phone the previous afternoon. It was across town from the wharf, but that meant only a few hundred metres away. The woman at the New Rejang Inn was very sorry, but despite our phone call she didn't have a room for us. The line hadn't been good and the receptionist hadn't known what date we'd be arriving. Her hotel was full of a party of Belgians and Germans.

View from the Melagai Hotel, Kapit [Enlarge]

Instead she directed us to the New Rejang Inn's sister hotel, the Rejang Inn back across town near the wharf. She quoted us a price and even phoned to check there was a room ready. The Rejang Inn is old, as the presence of the New Rejang Inn testifies. Although it was undeniably cheap, we thought we could do better. We went round the corner to the Meligai Hotel which was mentioned in a leaflet we'd picked up in Sibu. They had a room. It was twice the price of the 'Old' Rejang but still cheap.

We are in the middle of nowhere, and we have to make one more journey upriver before we can access onward transport back to the coast of Borneo (without flying or backtracking): to the tiny town of Belaga, another five and a half hours upstream. But to go any further than Kapit you need a permit from the local government, to control and protect access to the rainforest and its people. So that was our next task. It was free, but we had to apply for it in a government office, a few minutes' drive out of town.

Eventually we were accommodated, clean, and permitted... we were ready to explore Kapit. Sadly there's not a great deal to see. Kapit appears to be the archetypal one-horse town, except that with no roads in or out, it hasn't got much need for horses. No one tried to sell us anything. We couldn't see any companies offering local trekking trips. Kapit seems to have no idea that it could be a tourist destination. But the weird thing is that the place seems to be booming. On the way out to the permits office, we passed endless rows of huge new villas with private walled gardens. In the centre of town there is a lot of construction going on, and a whole block has been redeveloped as modern apartments. We could smell the drying plaster as we passed. Most of the cars around town are less than three years old (strange considering there are no roads to anywhere further than a few miles out of town!)

Orchard Inn Chinese restaurant [Enlarge]

We walked through Kapit's streets as day became dusk, struggling to find any reasons to like the place. From a couple of satay stalls a delicious smell of barbecuing chicken reminded us that we hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. We stumbled upon the Orchard Inn, a Chinese restaurant serving large portions of delicious food and cold beer, for very reasonable prices. The owner was very welcoming and served us a Chinese portion (i.e. huge) of sweet and sour pork, another of melt-in-the-mouth beef with ginger, and two plates of fried rice that was very similar to the fried rice with dried salted fish that we ate in Macau. Including two beers, it came to 37 ringgits in all (GBP 5.86 / USD 11.12). Remembering that most stuff has to be brought in by plane or boat, we don't know how they do it. Actually, because the number of tourists to this area is still manageably small (our Belaga permit is number 190 so far in 2008!), there are no overpriced eateries catering for foreigners—you eat with the locals and pay the same prices. Fine by us.

We stopped at a local shop to buy water. The owner wanted to know where in England we were from. We told him and of course he didn't know where that was, so he asked which was our local football team (US: soccer). After telling him, he still didn't know where we were from, but he could at least relate to it. Malaysians, like so much of the world, are crazy about the English Premiership. It's a marketing triumph, and it does seem to make us more welcome when people know we're from England.

However one good restaurant and a friendly shopkeeper couldn't make us love Kapit enough to stay. One night is plenty here, and that means catching tomorrow's boat upriver to Belaga, even further into the wilds of Borneo. The difference however is that Belaga has a recently constructed road out of the forest, which is hopefully going to be our eventual way back to the towns on the coast.

Day 621
Sibu to Kapit

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Into the Borneo interior

2008-08-05T21:57:00.001Z

Bags and chickens [Enlarge]

The current vague plan is to head north-east towards the Sultanate of Brunei, and carry on clockwise around Borneo into Indonesia. We could travel overland to Brunei in two days by air conditioned express bus, straight up the Pan Borneo Highway. Or we could take the interesting option, which is to take much more time over the journey and travel by boat up the Sungai Rejang (Rejang River). The Rejang is Malaysia's longest river, and it passes through places that still aren't connected to anywhere by roads, cutting through rapids and passing indigenous long houses. This decision was a no-brainer.

Step one was the once-a-day express boat from Kuching's port on the Sarawak river, out into the South China Sea, north-east across open water for about 90 kilometers, then into the Rejang estuary, and a further 80 kilometres upriver to Sibu. Though the price recently went up, 45 ringgits (GBP 7.19 / USD 13.53) is still pretty reasonable. For that money you can sit watching "inflight movies" in the air conditioned cabin, or you can sit outside with the chickens (by the boxload, clucking and roostering all the way!), which is what we did. The wooden benches weren't too comfortable, but the view was great. As we entered the mouth of the Rejang River, our progress slowed. The boat's huge engines battled against the vicious current and we began to fight our way inland towards Sibu.

Logging barge [Enlarge]

Starting at several kilometres wide, the chocolatey brown river soon began to narrow until we could clearly see the jungle on both banks. The river was busy with passenger boats and logging barges—tiny but powerful tug boats pulling huge, chained together platforms of logs. There were plumes of smoke rising from the forest in places. Along with oil, logging is Sarawak's main industry and the environmental impact is huge, with estimates claiming that as much as 90 percent of the primary rainforest has given way to oil palms and other plantations. From the river, we didn't see any areas of cleared land or deforestation, but certainly a great deal of tree trunks were making their way downriver on this Tuesday morning.

The journey only took five and a half hours, and Sibu was fairly quiet when we arrived just before 14:00. The only life as we left the landing jetty was a cluster of taxi drivers chatting near the taxi stand and a smiley man raking grass clippings in the town park.

Rejang river boats [Enlarge]

First stop as ever was the visitor information centre. In spite of having directions, we walked round in circles getting hotter and sweatier than we wanted to be, but we couldn't find it. Eventually we gave up and phoned the centre to ask where it was. It turns out we hadn't seen it because it had moved a few hundred metres last year. When we found it, the information person was friendly, just like all the other Sarawakians we've met, and spoke great English. He suggested some hotels that we might like to stay in. Clustered on the main square, they were all ones that were in the lowest budget section of our low-budget travel guide. We asked if there was anything in a slightly higher price bracket and he circled a mid-range hotel on the map. In Sarawak 'budget' means around GBP 5 (USD 10) a night for the room, whereas 'mid-range' means GBP 10 to 12 (USD 20 to 24). The extra five quid makes a big difference.

Already we're noticing the effect of our new proper backpacks—people are now judging us as wanting the lowest possible price regardless of quality. Also the number of taxis screeching to a halt on the road beside us and winding their windows down has increased markedly. The backpacks act as huge beacons proclaiming:

I'm a western backpacker I'm just like all the other western backpackers I want cheap hotels cheap food cheap beer and but I won't try to bargain your ridiculous price down because I'm hungover and we don't do that in the west so you can charge what you like and anyway I'm not discerning so you can rip me off with all your overpriced tours and taxi rides and souvenirs after all I'll buy anything.

Yuk.

We walked back through town to find our hotel of choice (a fantastic ten quids-worth), showered and went out for some dinner. The choices in Sibu were a lot less inspiring than in Kuching, but we found a place serving chicken and rice and while it wasn't the best meal ever, it was better than doritos. Back at our hotel, we discovered that they have wifi in the lobby, so we checked that the world was still turning and then had an early night. There is still a long way to go up the Rejang.

Day 620
Kuching to Sibu

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Kuching festival

2008-08-04T22:02:00.002Z

Shophouses on Kuching Main Bazaar [Enlarge]

Our arrival into Kuching, Sarawak's largest city, must rank as one of the most bizarre arrivals of our trip so far. To get through the door of the Waterfront Lodge, our home for the next couple of days, we had to duck between groups of locals in colourful costumes, and the endless stalls which had been set up in front of all the buildings. We managed to slip through between the boys brigade and the India society into a haven of relative tranquillity. The Waterfront Lodge is part of the old colonial-era waterfront, but it has only just opened after a complete refurbishment. The beautiful shophouse must be one of the oldest buildings in town. The tastefully restored interior is all terracotta floor tiles, white walls, plants and gorgeous local wood. Despite the lobby not being air conditioned it felt like an oasis from the tropical heat. There was more than a little of the caravanserai ambiance that we'd felt in the souk in Aleppo—the silk road may not have come through here, but the Chinese certainly did.

The manager greeted us with a broad smile and checked us in. As he showed us to our spotless room, he told us that this Friday night parade was the beginning of a weekend of festivities. We'd had no idea. When we were checking in the noise from outside was deafening, but it turned out that Sarawakians like to go to bed early, even when there's a parade. By 10:30pm the city was quiet...

Sarawak regatta [Enlarge]

...Until 7:00am on Saturday when the rowing regatta commentator decided to do an early sound check of the PA system, and we discovered that there was a massive speaker right outside our room. We were awake whether we wanted to be or not. After a bit we got up and went for a look at what was going on. Just across the road, under marquees, a small band was playing. A man in his sixties was up on the little stage, dancing. As we watched, a middle aged guy joined him, grooving to the mellow Bornean music. The people of Malaysian Borneo, we began to realise, are an even more chilled out bunch than their mainland cousins.

We paid a visit to the local tourist information centre to pick up a map of the town and to look at our options for onward travel. Then we spent some time walking around, mingling with the crowds watching the regatta races that had now got under way on the river. The regatta had attracted a big crowd. They lined the river on both sides. We learned later some regional bigwigs had paid a visit at some point, but we didn't see, let alone get to meet, the Sultan of Brunei, or Jason Brooke, great-great-grandson of the second Rajah Brooke of Sarawak. Everyone was having a great time, eating satay from the riverside stalls, drinking iced tea and fluorescent milk drinks, buying helium balloons and generally enjoying a day out with the family.

Buying a cold drink [Enlarge]

We hadn't really known what to expect in Borneo, but we'd somehow expected less civilisation. We certainly hadn't envisioned wifi in our room and an excellent Lebanese restaurant just around the corner. Kuching isn't just modern, it's characterful, cultured, vibrant and welcoming. We had such a nice time just hanging out, eating nice food, we didn't want to leave. But we can't really stay forever.

On our last day we crossed the river and visited Fort Margherita, Rajah Brooke's defence against pirates. Sarawak's history is unusual—it wasn't a colony of another country, but was owned and administered by three generations of the Brooke family for over a century, having been granted to Englishman James Brooke in 1841 by the Sultan of Brunei as thanks for Brooke's brokering a peaceful settlement of the Dayak uprising. Brooke styled himself the first Rajah of Sarawak, but eventually the dynasty was pressured into ceding sovereignty to the British after World War II.

Fort Margherita, Kuching [Enlarge]

With the Rajahs and the pirates long gone (at least from Malaysian Borneo) the fort doesn't have much purpose any more, and it's looking a bit tatty. The Bornean weather is not kind—relentlessly hot with torrential rain for part of the year. Our guidebook uncharitably describes the fort as having "been left to rot under the Borneo sun". This is a huge exaggeration. Inside the fort we found a local still guarding the fort. As we arrived he leaned his broom up and led us inside the main building to write our names in the visitors book and stow our bag before climbing the spiral staircase to the watchtower.

It was close to midday. The sun was beating down on the fort's whitewashed stone and gleaming off the river. Water taxis were shuttling back and forth. A rooster crowded somewhere down the hill, and in the background, noise from the huge construction site next door (the new Sarawak parliament we think) rumbled over to the watchtower. The heat was almost unbearable and our need to find some shade became irresistible, so we had to come down from the tower. It's hard to believe that there was ever any need for forts and defences—In this equatorial heat surely no one has the energy to have wars!

Sarawak river taxi [Enlarge]

We beat our retreat down the hill and back across the river. There's plenty to do in Kuching if you have the stamina. There are a couple of crazily decorated temples and some small museums around the town centre, and lots of shops where you can buy locally made souvenirs. Some of the hardwood furniture was beautiful. If we still had a house we might well have bought one of the amazing boat-shaped seats. Of course it wouldn't have fitted in our backpacks, so it's probably a good thing we don't have anywhere to put it. The city's restaurants are many and varied. Chinese food dominates, with Malay cuisine a close second, but you can find almost anything.

So, Kuching was a wonderful start to our Bornean adventure. We can only hope that after such a great introduction, the rest of Sarawak doesn't bring us crashing back to earth.

Across to Borneo

2008-08-02T10:00:00.003Z

Johor Bahru bus station [Enlarge]

We thought we'd check out Borneo next, to see if we can find some headhunters. There are no ferries between peninsular Malaysia and Malaysian Borneo, so once again we needed to make a short flight. The main city in Sarawak, the western province of Malaysian Borneo, is Kuching. We could fly there expensively from Singapore with Malaysian Airlines, or cheaply from Johor Bahru (just inside Malaysia on the other side of the causeway) with Air Asia. Obviously, Johor Bahru it was.

We checked out of our clean but rule-obsessed hostel and made our way slowly, with a lunch stop en route, towards Kranji MRT station in the north of the island, from where we could catch a connecting bus to Johor Bahru. While we were on the MRT there was an announcement that people going to Johor Bharu should get off at Woodlands station and use bus number 950. It wasn't what we had planned, but we went with it. We found out later that the 950 is run by SMRT (the MRT company) while the buses from Kranji are run by SBS (not the MRT company), so that's why the MRT company tried, and succeeded, to entice us to leave early. No matter, it was a bus going our way. We stopped at the Singapore end of the causeway and everyone was chucked out to be stamped out of Singapore. Then after passport control, the way it works is that you have to wait for the next number 950 bus to come along—your original bus has taken the previous load of passengers on to the Malaysian side of the causeway. It was here that we discovered why the internet resources recommend Kranji and the 170 bus—there are about four times as many of them as there are 950s. It didn't really matter as we were in no hurry.

The trip across the causeway only took a few minutes and we were turfed off again for Malaysian passport control. As we emerged from the building, passports freshly stamped, it was immediately obvious that we were now in Malaysia rather than Singapore. The polishedness had gone, and there were no signs telling you what you couldn't do. But the downside was that there were also no signs telling you where the bus stop was, and when you found the bus area, no signs telling you where each bus would stop. And horror of horrors, there were no special queueing lanes for each bus. After a bit of mental readjustment we just followed the crowd into a big layby area, where it seemed all the buses stopped.

Eventually a 950 turned up, on which we we were the only passengers all the way to the Kotaraya bus terminal, where we would connect with the Causeway Link Express bus to the airport.

Johor Bahru is Malaysia's third largest city, but its bus station certainly doesn't give away this fact. It was devoid of any activity and curiously uncontaminated by buses. The next bus to the airport was due at 16.10 so we sat down in the waiting lounge to kill the forty-five minute wait. While Glenn went outside for a look around, Isla was approached by the bus station cleaner. He leaned his mop up against the table and struck up a conversation. His English wasn't great (but better than our pathetic attempts at Malay of course) and not knowing how to say what he wanted to, he instead disappeared off and fetched us various leaflets from around the waiting room which he thought would be useful to us. He also brought a great free map of Malaysia, on which he enthusiastically pointed out all the places we could visit. Then another local arrived to join in the conversation. When Glenn came back he found a crowd around Isla's table. The second guy turned out the be a Singaporean, and claimed to be a taxi permit inspector, but his ID said he was a taxi driver. He was very friendly and gave us his wife's business card (we now have a great contact for all our plumbing and project management needs in the Johor Bahru area) and his name and address. Malaysia is just like that—it is the friendliest place we have been by miles and we love it. We feel that Thailand's superficial friendliness is often laced with a mercenary streak, and it can stop abruptly when the person finds out you're not interested in buying anything. But we're discovering that Malaysia's friendliness seems to be completely genuine.

The airport was quiet. We ate some dinner, got our backpacks wrapped in cellophane and checked in. The short Air Asia flight left on time and arrived early at Kuching in Sarawak.

Sarawak is a semi-autonomous state within Malaysia and so although we were on an internal flight, we actually had to pass through border control and get another stamp in our passport. Malays have to do this too, and apparently they even need a permit to come to Borneo and can only stay for a limited time.

As at Kota Bharu airport there were no taxi touts baying for our custom, just a well organised taxi desk where you state your destination, pay your money and get a receipt to give to the driver.

We're big fans of Michael Palin's televised travels. In fact he was the inspiration for us carrying an inflatable globe with us on this trip. Incidentally, we still have the globe, although it's got a bit of a slow puncture somewhere in the Russian Arctic. Anyway, we're sceptical about the way that everywhere Palin goes, he always seems to miraculously turn up in a town just as it's having it's once-in-a-century festival. That would never happen by chance, we've always said... Well, as we got nearer to the centre of town the traffic started to get really bad, and the taxi driver explained that we were going to have to walk the last five minutes to our guest house because the road along the waterfront was closed. We've heard that sort of thing before from taxi drivers who are keen to get their next fare rather than sit in a traffic jam, so we were a bit skeptical. But sure enough, there seemed to be some sort of parade going on. A platoon of Roman soldiers marched past the car window and down the road which lines the waterfront.

We have indeed, completely unknowingly, timed our arrival to coincide with the first night of the annual Kuching festival and rowing regatta!

Day 616
Singapore to Kuching

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Singapore slingshot

2008-07-31T22:21:00.002Z

Aeroline bus from KL [Enlarge]

When we checked into our hotel in Kuala Lumpur we noticed a flyer at reception advertising Aeroline, a bus company offering a luxury coach from KL to Singapore. When we looked at the service they promised, and the prices, we didn't bother shopping around for alternatives. We booked online and turned up at the pick up point, the Corus Hotel near KLCC LRT station, at 07:15 for our 08:00 departure.

The service was excellent—exactly as advertised with a baguette for brunch, drinks on demand, a power point at the seat, the most smiley, helpful staff we've ever met, and a very professional driver. We had booked at the last minute and the only seats available were on the back row. Our fellow passengers were from all walks of life. The man in front of us in a shiny grey suit could easily have been Korean; up front were a middle aged, white American couple; an extended family of Indians occupied the middle of the bus, and took their time disembarking and rejoining us at each border post.

Border formalities at either end of the 'Second Link' causeway separating Malaysia and Singapore were straightforward. As ever it took a bit of time to get everyone through the passport checks and back on the bus, but we arrived ahead of schedule at the Harbour Front in Singapore.

To get to our hostel we had to find the nearest subway station. To get to the subway we had to walk through a mall. We soon found that to get anywhere in Singapore you have to walk through a mall. This is because Singapore is basically a series of malls linked together by little pieces of city.

If you've heard anything about Singapore you've probably heard that it's clean and safe. This is true. Maintaining this infeasible level of cleanliness and safety isn't easy though, and it is accomplished by having rules. Lots of rules, strictly enforced. Rule breakers are fined, heavily. Persistent rule breakers are presumably executed. On top of the national rules, each building implements its own local rules. Our hostel, home for the next four days, had rules posted everywhere. Here are the ones we can remember, along with associated fines:

Breakfast is between 6 and 10am. Outside this time you pay S$1. People caught stealing breakfast without paying will be fined S$50.
No eating on the sofa. Fine S$100.
No food or drink in your room. Fine S$100.
Guests must leave by 9pm. Trespassers will be handed to the police.
No shitting on the floor. Fine S$500.

Assuming the last one isn't a joke, it means someone probably did that once. In which case we don't begrudge them that rule! Western backpackers can be a vile lot, and we wouldn't relish trying to maintain a Singaporean standard of cleanliness in a backpacker hostel. Actually, we wouldn't try. Unfortunately the task is so herculean that the hostel owner seemed really pissed off most of the time.

Singapore slings [Enlarge]

We did quite a lot during our short stay in Singapore. We walked the nearly-finished track of the upcoming Singapore Grand Prix. When it's on TV in September watch out for the bit which goes over the Anderson Bridge—it looked scarily narrow to us. We went to the Long Bar in Raffles Hotel for a Singapore Sling in surprisingly laid back and non-touristy surrounding. We shopped and we ate. Actually shopping and eating are Singaporeans' two favourite pastimes. Food courts offer cheap meals from every corner of Asia, and much of the rest of the world. We even saw a British chip shop selling deep fried Mars bars. If food is the national hobby, shopping is the state religion. Malls tower, cathedral like, over the city; their gleaming domes and marbled atria filled with the devoted making their weary pilgrimage from shrine to retail shrine. Shopping is not, never has been, and never will be a pleasure to us. We find it incomprehensible. Does spending too much money make people happier? Does owning this season's ridiculous 'designer' objects fill a need? It made us sick after a few days.

In Singapore we did actually need to shop for a few things. Glenn's shoes never had much grip on the soles, but we've walked so much he's worn them totally flat. We've also both worn out a pair of socks. So we fixed both of those problems.

Also, there is some sad news. Since we started back out on the road from Seoul we have struggled to fit everything into our tiny bags and they have become too heavy. The addition of another laptop, to add to the one we bought fairly early on our trip, a pair of flip-flops and set of swimwear and beach towels each and a couple of extra t-shirts for Glenn had the old bags bursting at the seams. So, we've bitten the bullet and bought proper backpacks. They're not the huge ones that we've been so scathing of throughout our trip. Isla's is 38 litres and is sold as a day pack, and Glenn's is a little bigger at 50 litres and quoted as an overnight bag (he's bigger, so it's fair). We now have plenty of extra space for whatever we need for a particular country. This means we can keep the beach towels we bought in the Perhentian islands until after we leave beachy places and when we move from the tropics back to cooler climes we'll be able to buy a jumper or coat without having to wear it all the time. Our little day bag can go back to travelling inside one of our main bags so we're much more streamlined when we transit. We know it makes sense, but it's still a disappointment that we couldn't keep to our original plan of using truly tiny bags.

Orang utan [Enlarge]

On day three we went to the zoo. Singapore zoo is cleverly engineered so that a lot of the time you're hardly aware of being physically separated from the animals. Orang utans roam freely in the trees above your head and can travel a long way outside their moat, but it's designed so that they can't climb down until they go back to their own area. We had a recommendation from a friend to visit the zoo for their Jungle Breakfast. We followed this up and phoned ahead the day before to book our table. Before breakfast we watched two elephants take their morning bath and snack on bananas. Then we went to satisfy our own hungry tummies. Half way through the meal, we were joined by Miri the Orang utan and her three month old baby, Ah Tseng. Miri was persuaded to sit patiently by a seemingly endless supply of fruit, while tourists oohed and aahed at her, and queued for a closer look and a photograph.

By lunchtime we were flagging in the equatorial heat. The eco-conscious zoo doesn't seem to have any air-conditioned places to provide respite—maybe it knows that if it did they're be swamped by sweaty westerners. We'd seen almost everything we wanted to see, so we trudged back to the bus stop and the delicious coolness of Singaporean public transport (London Underground take note).

We had one final purchase to make before leaving Singapore and her malls. Tomorrow we hop back into a malaria-risk area with a flight from Johor Bharu (just across the Malaysian border) to Kuching in Sarawak, the western state of Malaysian Borneo. So as of tonight we're back on the Malarone. We still have a few of our original UK batch left, and all the ones we bought in Hong Kong, but we felt it made sense to top up while we could.

You can buy Malarone in Singapore without a prescription, if you go into a large pharmacy and present your (non-Singaporean) passport and an air ticket to a malarial area. You have to wait until the day before you fly out. You also have to present a large wad of cash. The price is S$7 per tablet, S$92.40 per box of twelve (GBP 34.21 / USD 67.47). When you can eat a sumptuous dinner for less than S$6 that stings! We don't know what the limit is—the pharmacist didn't blink when we asked for three boxes in Isla's name, so we could have bought twice that if we wanted to, and probably more. We don't know whether you can do this at all pharmacies but as of July 2008 you can definitely buy Malarone in Singapore, over the counter at Watsons. We used the large branch in the basement of Ngee Ann City mall on Orchard Road.

So what did we think of Singapore? It's similar to our favourite city Hong Kong, and very easy to get around in, especially since everything is written in English first. But to be honest the obsessive rules got to us. We were continually worried, for example: we've just bought a sandwich from the Seven-Eleven. Can we eat it in that park over there? Are we even allowed to walk on the grass? Or will we be dragged away and flogged? We think that the reason Singapore doesn't have much crime is because everyone's head is so full of rules, they don't have any mental capacity left over for doing bad things. A crime-free society comes at a hefty price.

Day 612
Kuala Lumpur to Singapore

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

A rather bland place

2008-07-28T07:36:00.000Z

Petronas towers [Enlarge]

Say the name Kuala Lumpur. What does it conjure up? The Petronas Towers... the Malaysian Grand Prix... anything else?

Us neither. We came here not really knowing what to expect, but expecting a modern, industrialised Asian city. And that's what we got. It's hot, it's clean and it's quite relaxed. But that's it.

So what does Kuala Lumpur have to offer? It's a melting pot of cultures (to use a travel guidebook phrase). On any street or subway train you'll see faces from all over Asia. Fashions are varied. Women walk through the airconditioned malls in full black muslim burkas, accessorised with designer label handbags and the spoils of a day's hard shopping, while their teenage daughters in skin tight jeans pay lipservice to their culture with sequined head scarves; Indian women in garish saris dawdle through the streets of Brickfields.

Taiwanese food [Enlarge]

The multiculturalism extends, gloriously, to the food. Having made such a mess of Taiwan that we didn't even manage to sample any Taiwanese food, we finally rectified this when by chance we stumbled upon the 'Little Taiwan' restaurant after emerging from the subway into an almost deserted mall. We ordered delicious noodles and a side order of dumplings. Glenn's noodles came with chicken and Isla's with honey coated pork. They were worth waiting for!

We spent three nights in Kuala Lumpur, but we arrived late on the first night and left early on the final morning, so we only actually had two days to explore. But despite the short time, we didn't feel we missed anything. As well as the ubiquitous visit to the Petronas towers we filled our time with a fun afternoon at Petrosains, the Petronas-sponsored interactive science museum inside the Suria shopping complex adjoining the towers.

Maybe the friendly Malaysian temperament and culture just doesn't lend itself well to bustling metropolises; or else Kuala Lumpur just doesn't have enough history and attractions to distinguish itself from any other big city. We still love Malaysia, but in our opinion the smaller towns have so much more to offer.

The Jungle Line

2008-07-26T13:31:00.001Z

Wakaf Baharu station [Enlarge]

Debating where to go from Pulau Perhentian Besar we decided that Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur should be our next destination. There are lots of ways to get there—luxury coach, regular bus, minibus, plane, and the train. Buses take about six hours, quickly crossing to the west coast and zooming down the characterless multi-lane highway.

The Perhentians are close to the start of the 'Jungle Line', which finds itself on a few of the lists of great railway journeys of the world. This long, winding, single-track line snakes from the north-east corner of peninsular Malaysia down to Gemas in the south-west, where it intersects with the main line between Bangkok and Singapore. On the twelve-hour route, it twists and turns as it rises gradually into the Malaysian highlands, passing through hundreds of kilometres of... jungle! No surprises there. Reports and opinions vary. Some people are enchanted by the wonderful views of jungly jungleness, some people are disappointed at the lack of real jungle (saying it's just straight rows of non-native palm plantations). Others are bored rigid by the coccyx-numbing slog.

This time there was no contest, it had to be the train. We knew we'd regret it if we didn't. Time to stock up on some more of our traditional railway fare, Doritos (or local equivalent).

On Perhentian we had come up with a new plan following our stupid journey there from Thailand. It's a very simple plan. We're going to slow down and not try to make multi-stage journeys in one day. So, putting our new plan into action we did the journey to Kuala Lumpur in two steps. Day one: speedboat from Pulau Perhentian Besar to Kuala Besut ferry terminal, then a leisurely taxi to Kota Bharu, the capital of Keralan state. Day two: another taxi to nearby Wakaf Baharu station, then catch the train through the jungle to Kuala Lumpur.

Ideal Travellers' House [Enlarge]

Our plan meant staying the night in Kota Bharu, giving us the chance to see this allegedly ultra-conservative Muslim city. We booked a super-cheap hostel, Ideal Travellers' House. At 22.50 ringgit (GBP 3.50 / USD 6.89) per night for a double room, it was the cheapest place we've ever stayed. It was very basic—for the money we got a bed, a washing line and a cockroach—but there was free wi-fi, the place was clean and the owners friendly.

Kota Bharu had a bit of a frontier town feel to it. It is indeed quite conservative, but it's nothing compared to, say Syria. We couldn't get a beer from the convenience store, and there were more headscarves than in other Malaysian towns, but that was all we noticed.

At 08:00 next morning we left for the station. The drive took much less time than planned, only fifteen minutes. So we found ourselves sitting on the platform early, waiting for the ticket office to open so that we could collect our internet-booked tickets. At 09:00 Glenn went to pick up the tickets. The man in the ticket office took our confirmation number and pecked at his keyboard. He then entered a catatonic state for about ten minutes, during which time he hardly moved except for his fingers, which occasionally bashed out a few more keystrokes. It seemed there was a problem with our reservation.

As the queue behind Glenn grew embarrassingly long (there was only one guy at the desk, so everyone was waiting for us), a train came into the station. The ticket man shouted through the glass "After train!" and then he promptly disappeared out back! It seemed he was not only the station's ticket clerk, but also the flag waver.

Glenn noted that the long queue behind him was now stretching out of the ticket office, and almost out of the station itself, but that nobody seemed remotely concerned about having to wait, even though our train (the only one for most of the remainder of the day) was now due in about five minutes. Malaysians are laid back, but surely this was too much to bear even for them? In our local station at home, the situation would have caused a lot of tutting, gazing at watches, and much shuffling, arms folded, from one leg to the other. Strangers would probably even start talking to each other. But here, you got the feeling this wasn't unusual.

The ticket man eventually came back, only to do some more keyboarding and then disappear again, this time to make a phone call to head office. Eventually the problem was identified: the web site had given us a confirmation number containing a hyphen. Due to a system incompatibility the ticket man should have converted that hyphen to a zero before entering it into his computer. Only he obviously didn't know that, and instead he very publicly blamed Glenn for writing the code down wrongly. (Yes, we've checked and we didn't.)

No doubt you've already guessed why the locals weren't worried about missing their train. Yes, of course they all knew it was late. In fact, the train that had arrived and left while Glenn was trying to get the tickets, was our train still going the other way up the line on its previous journey! Once we'd worked this out, we chatted with a Swiss-Dutch family of five who were travelling to Kuala Lipis, about six hours down the line.

The train made up some time on the turnaround and arrived only 45 minutes late. So, finally, we were underway.

Limestone cliffs and jungle [Enlarge]

The journey was long, but not boring. The scenery was always interesting, and in case we tired of it the train staff were showing back-to-back pirate DVDs on the flat screen TVs at either end of the carriage. The AC was so icy cold that we had to put our warmest clothes on. The toilets were shockingly clean with toilet paper, soap, running water and hand towels. True, a lot of the jungle had been replaced by palm plantations, but we get to see quite a lot of primary rainforest, including monkeys swinging in the trees (yes, honest). The glimpses of line-side Malaysian life were fascinating. In places the scenery was stunning. The sun set as we reached Gemas, where the train was turned around to head back northwards on the main line to Kuala Lumpur. We finally arrived at KL Sentral station at 22:30 and checked into our hotel, which we had carefully chosen for its walkability from the station.

It's worth noting for people who arrive at this post by googling for the Jungle Line, that we were on some sort of special Friday-Saturday-Sunday service which runs all the way from Wakaf Baharu to KL, so you don't need to change trains at Gemas. We've heard very bad things about the toilets on the regular weekday services, so don't blame us if you travel in the week and find it not as we describe!

It was late, we were tired and stiff. If we'd gone by bus we'd have been there mid-afternoon, but we would have missed out. Would we make the same journey again? Probably not. But are we glad we did it? Definitely! As ever, the long, interesting way is well worth doing, but only once!

Day 608-609
Pulau Perhentian Besar to Kuala Lumpur

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Snapping turtles

2008-07-22T13:38:00.005Z

Isla at 15m [Enlarge]

It turns out we're quite good at scuba diving. We keep diving with people who have done far more dives than us, but they're flailing around, kicking up the sand and generally not getting the hang of it whereas we seem to have been able to just do it from the outset. Go slow, breathe slowly and deeply and enjoy the scenery; be aware of everything around you and of what you're doing; and don't let anything stress you. That seems to be the key to being a good scuba diver. We just need to get the same attitude when taking public transport.

We decided to do the PADI Advanced Open Water course because it would give us lots of different dive experiences, a qualification to go deeper (to forty metres), and demonstrates to other dive operators that we're not complete noobs. We started with a navigation dive, using a compass to navigate a square, learning how to judge distance, and so on. Then we had a dive in which we focused on perfecting our buoyancy... well, trying to. We learned how to turn upside down, and stay like that, for looking under overhangs, and we learned how to swim backwards (in theory at least). Doing it for further than about a metre will need a lot more practice.

Clownfish [Enlarge]

On our second day we began with a deep dive, going down to thirty metres to visit the Secret Reef, a beautiful place at a depth where colour begins to disappear—red things appear black. After lunch we did a wreck dive. The Sugar Wreck is a 50-metre long freighter that, having delivered its cargo of sugar in December 2000, sank in a monsoon close to the islands. It's at an easy depth. Lying on its side, the highest point is five metres down. The huge cargo holds beneath the deck are like wide caves. In the eight years since it sank, flat disks of coral the size of dinner plates have grown on the hull. The ropes, nets, rails and masts are coated in invertibrate life and thousands of fish now live there. It was a good test of our buoyancy control with plenty of swim throughs, and quite a strong current coming over the stern. We were even able to surface in an air pocket in one of the cargo holds.

We finished the day with a night dive. Night diving is very different to day diving. Of course you only see what your torch illuminates, but because the light isn't filtered through 12 metres of water, colours are brighter and more vivid. And if you turn off your torch and stir up the water with your hand, you get to see phosphorescence: tiny plankton in the water lighting up and dancing around like fireflies. It was great. We were at the back of the group and did a lot of hanging around waiting for the sand to settle because the four divers in front of us were constantly stirring it up. But we were happy just playing with the magic water sparkles.

Leopard Shark [Enlarge]

After we got our advanced qualification, we decided to rent an underwater camera for a day and we crammed in three dives to make the most of it. We chose easy locations where we wouldn't have to worry about depth or current, and where we could just hang out and try to take photos. We learned that taking photos underwater is an incredibly hard thing to do. You're trying to hang in mid water and not crash into anything in case you damage it (coral) or it damages you (sea urchins and scorpionfish), push buttons on a camera whose labels you can't read and whose screen you can't see properly because it's in a watertight box, get extremely close to your fast-moving subject without scaring it off because if you're too far away the flash won't work properly and you'll get lots of backscatter from the plankton, and (in the case of the second dive site) fend off the evil territorial soapfish (damsel) who are swimming into you at full speed trying to bite chunks out of you for encroaching on their territory. Oh, and trying to take a well-composed photo. Glenn enjoyed it: he loves photography and thinks he'd like to buy an underwater housing one day, but not until he's really got the hang of floating perfectly still exactly where he wants to be. Isla took a couple of photos but hated it, preferring to help with finding things to photograph. All in all though we're pretty pleased with the results (see here) given that it was our first attempt and we weren't familiar with the camera.

The highlight of our third dive was when we ran across a hawksbill turtle and stayed with it for several minutes. From twelve metres down we watched it swim to the surface, have a bit of a breathe and a look around, then dive straight back down next to us to do some more munching on the bottom. Typically the camera decided to run out of battery just after we first saw it, so that was the end of the photography.

So now we're qualified advanced divers and we've done sixteen dives in total. We haven't decided what we want to do next. There are higher levels of qualification that we could go for, or we could just do the odd fun dive in places like Bali and Australia, and maybe the Caribbean. We'll have plenty of time to decide as we pass by more of the world's top dive sites in the coming weeks... We'll keep you posted.

Pulau Perhentian

2008-07-14T18:40:00.000Z

Taxi! [Enlarge]

Unfortunately because of our stupid journey yesterday and our stupid decision to pre-book onward transport this morning we left ourselves with no time to see Georgetown.

We complicated our route to the Perhentian Islands a bit by taking the most westerly border crossing from Thailand to Malaysia, when we could have crossed the border on the east side and missed Georgetown altogether. We did this for two reasons: firstly, we wanted to see Georgetown (failed—see above), and secondly, because the border crossings in the east are a bit dangerous due to some Muslim separatists in the south-eastern provinces of Thailand. Some people swear by the eastern crossing, saying that westerners are not targeted and that they've never seen any problems, but just three weeks ago there was a shootout on a train and four people on board were killed.

From Georgetown, we had two main options for crossing Malaysia: a long bus journey, or a short flight. The buses take either all day or all night to make the journey. The flight takes just 45 minutes and costs about GBP 35 each (USD 69.90). Again we were constrained by our stupid decision to try to do the whole journey in two days. In our defence, we did have trouble booking accommodation on the Perhentian Islands because they're very busy right now (this is peak season). Having secured a booking after a couple of days of phone calls and emails we then had to work a plan backwards to get to the islands on time, so our current predicament is not all down to stupidity. Anyway, we digress... We reluctantly chose the short flight.

Our hour spent in a Fokker turboprop care of cool little low-budget carrier FireFly was hassle free. We took off from Penang fifteen minutes early and landed in Kota Bharu still fifteen minutes early. Almost everyone on board was European and was heading for the Perhentians. Bracing ourselves for a huge army of touts in the airport arrivals hall, shouting "Hello yes! My frien'! Where you wanna go?!", we were stunned to emerge from baggage reclaim and find the airport practically deserted, apart from a sleepy little taxi counter. There were no tuk-tuks. No share minibuses. No pickups. No motorbike taxis. Weird... We're gradually realising that ultra-laid back Malaysia is nothing at all like its northern neighbour Thailand. We teamed up with an Irish couple to share a taxi direct to the ferry terminal at Kuala Besut for 78 ringgits in total, so 19.50 each (GBP 3.05 / USD 6.09).

The taxi driver dropped us off right outside our guest house's ferry ticket desk in Kuala Besut. The set up here is weird. The guide books say that there are 'ferries' and 'speedboats' to the islands which run several times per day, which suggests that there is some sort of public boat service. But instead the truth seems to be that there are a thousand different private operators with their own boats, who run back and forwards all day long. We didn't work it out because we weren't there long enough—within five minutes of arriving we were hurried onto a speedboat and handed lifejackets.

Ah, yes, the speedboat. Our boat didn't look like a speedboat. A speedboat is small and pointy. Our boat looked like a standard pleasure boat with a little canvas roof, and bench seats for maybe 14 people along the sides. The only thing giving away that the thing might soon be travelling quite fast were the two 200 horsepower motors hanging off the back. The women passengers all put their lifejackets on when given them, whereas most of the men awkwardly put them to one side, not wanting to be the first bloke to look like a girl... That is until we started moving! Everyone was wearing their lifejacket by the time we left the port, because by then our little pleasure boat was already bouncing over the waves at a face-deforming speed. We covered the 20 km to the islands in twenty minutes. After a few stops at other guest houses, we were ferried to shore by a water taxi.

Perhentian Island beach [Enlarge]

Imagine two pristine jungle-clad islands in a warm, calm, turquoise ocean. Imagine white sandy beaches fringed with coconut palms. Imagine huge lizards roaming in the forest. Imagine a place with no cars, in fact no roads, the only way to get between beaches being to walk, stepping over gnarled tree roots on a twisting jungle track. Now imagine that the whole thing is made into a protected marine park to restrict development and ban fishing. That's the Perhentian Islands. OK, OK, so they're a bit resorty in places, but the hotels and restaurants lining the beaches are small and reasonably sympathetic to their environment. And the food and drink is a bit pricey because everything has to be hauled from the mainland, but in spite of that, things are looking very good for our stay here. Judging by the number of fish we could see below our water taxi, and the fact that we could easily see the bottom when the depth was around 15 metres, the diving is going to be excellent.

After getting out of the water taxi we checked in at Mama's Place, a collection of little wooden chalets practically on the beach. Aziz, the owner, is a character and seems to speak lots of languages. Our room is basic but very clean and it's literally right next door to the dive shop that was recommended to us by the folks in Koh Lanta. We've already spoken to the owner of the shop, Yaakub, and booked two fun dives tomorrow. We're planning to stay here for a while, try a few fun dives with them and then probably go on to do our advanced open water qualification.

Day 598
George Town to Pulau Perhentian Besar

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

How not to travel to Malaysia

2008-07-13T21:24:00.001Z

Our bungalow [Enlarge]

As we said in our crap Taiwan post, our plan for the next phase of our trip is to cross into Malaysia and then head down the peninsula towards Singapore. When we took our open water diving course, we asked the dive shop for recommendations for a good cheap place to do lots of dives and increase our experience. They suggested the Perhentian Islands, which just happen to be more or less on our way to Singapore. So fully rested after two weeks in paradise that's where we decided to go next. The islands are about 20 km off the east coast of Malaysia, in the north of the peninsula, just across the border from Thailand. Not far from Koh Lanta, really.

But this is South East Asia, where 'not far' always seems to translate to a marathon of hot dusty travelling.

The border between Thailand and Malaysia has six crossings: four by road and two by rail. Pretty much all the routes converge on the southern city of Hat Yai, so we set an initial course for there. Through our resort in Koh Lanta we were able to book a minibus to get us to Trang, a large-ish town to the south-east of Lanta. On the way we got caught up in a tropical rainstorm but it passed before we got turfed out at Trang.

We arrived in the centre of Trang at about 10:15 and were deposited straight into the hands of a load of touts, as usual. We spent a few moments trying to find someone selling minibuses to Hat Yai. There was nothing immediately obvious so we asked a westerner who'd just pulled up on a motorbike, and who from the look of him clearly lived in Hat Yai. He couldn't help us, but while we were talking to him, we were approached by a local man in his seventies. In excellent English he asked if we needed help. When we said we were looking for a bus to Hat Yai, he volunteered to take us in his car to the right place. Our scam-o-meter twitched a little but we felt like letting this one play out and see where we ended up. As we walked together to his car he explained that when he had been a student in the US and Australia, locals had often given him a ride when he was stuck, so now he repays those favours in his home town. It also gives him time to practice his English.

It took a couple of stops to find the right bus. During the journey we found out that our new friend had been on Koh Lak during the 2004 Tsunami. Since he retired he's been a tour guide, leading eco-trips to the national park there. Almost every day he would go down to the beach to try to drum up business with the tourists, but on the morning of December 26th, he had an appointment with a resort owner, so he had a lie in. As a result he didn't go down to the beach as usual—a decision which could well have saved his life. In the aftermath of the disaster he volunteered as a Thai-English interpreter, communicating between medical staff and patients in the hospital in Phuket. He is still in contact with some of the people he helped in the weeks afterwards.

It took a while with several false starts, but eventually he found us a public bus to Hat Yai, leaving at 11:15 from the main bus station in Trang. The scam-o-meter had been wrong, and this had in fact been a case of a kind local simply helping us out. It's such a shame that the scumbags in Thailand do so much to spoil the country's reputation for kindness and hospitality. We boarded the bus and waved our new friend off. We were the only farangs (foreigners) on the bus today, but only the small children were unselfconscious enough to stare at us. At 11:30-ish the bus began to move. It trundled around town picking up people until every seat was full.

As time ticked away and the GPS told us we were making glacial progress towards Hat Yai, we found ourselves wishing that we'd just gone with the touts when we first arrived into Trang. We would have paid more for a tourist minibus but it would have got us to Hat Yai in plenty of time to catch the train we ideally wanted: the 14:40 to Butterworth in Malaysia. The only train to Butterworth until the next day. But on our distinctly non-express bus it took more than three hours to get to Hat Yai. We told the steward we wanted the train station, and he got the driver to drop us at a big traffic circle with only ten minutes to go until the train was due to leave. As we consulted the GPS to find the direction to the station, we were not impressed to discover that we had been dropped over a kilometre away from it!

We started walking quickly but when a passing sawngthaew (a kind of big tuk-tuk) offered its services at a non-scamtasic price we gratefully jumped in and told the driver to make a beeline for the station toute suite. Glenn put the GPS away so that we would be ready to jump out at the station and make a dash for the ticket office. But after about four minutes and a few turns we seemed to be heading in completely the wrong direction. So out came the GPS again and it confirmed that we were indeed doing just that. Glenn knocked on the window but the driver was too focused on his windscreen to notice. So then Glenn hung out the side of the sawgthaew and put his head in through the side window of the cab, which caused the driver to look a little surprised. After a brief exchange which comprised lots of choo-choo miming, the driver suddenly seemed to understand and did a virtual handbrake turn.

We arrived at the station about two minutes before the train was due to leave. Of course Thai trains rarely run on time but we just knew that this one would be sure to set a new record for punctuality. Glenn ran ahead to the ticket window and Isla watched as he paused for a moment and then turned and walked away. The train was on time... And full! Every single seat was taken. From first class sleeper to third class benches, there was no availability and so after the frantic panic to get to the station it turned out that we had made it, but we still were not going to be taking the train to Butterworth that day.

Plan B... We crossed the street to a sprinkling of minibus offices. "We'd like to go to Penang please." (Penang is the island next to Butterworth, which was where we were actually headed. Georgetown is the main city on the island and is the old British colonial capital of Malaya—and that's where we were staying the night).

The minibus agent looked glum. He had just sold the last two tickets to Penang not ten minutes previously. What a coincidence. But being a very helpful agent he could arrange a private taxi for us! We went door-to-door, but always got the same response. Either they had sensed that we would be good for a taxi and closed ranks, or there really were no spaces on the minibuses.

This journey was starting to look like a mess. In our efforts to avoid the touts all we seemed to be doing was digging a hole for ourselves. Yet again we cursed ourselves for being too optimistic with our travel plans. Because we like to plan a whole journey in advance so that we have the security of knowing that we're not going to be stranded anywhere, we had booked a hotel in Penang, onward travel to the Perhentian Islands tomorrow, and our accommodation for the first few days in Perhentian. But as we discovered, we still managed to get stranded, because we didn't conceive of the possibility that the train across the border would be completely full. We either need to chill out and take these multi-stage journeys one step at a time, or just pay the goddamn tourist touts to take us on the whole journey we want to do.

Now we had a simple choice: spend the night in Hat Yai and write off the hotel, the onward tickets and the first night's accommodation in Perhentian; or punish our wallet some more and stump up for the taxi. After doing some sums the taxi came out as the logical choice.

Our 'taxi' driver was Malaysian, had obviously come to Hat Yai with a delivery of some sort, and had been waiting for some farang to come along and pay him to drive home. The joy of being those idiots. The border crossing, 50 km south of Hat Yai, was very busy, and the driver told us to get out of the car and walk through the border. As we stood in the huge queue for Thai passport control the driver drove straight past us, through the gate and off around the corner out of sight. We then confounded our annoying day with a minute of utter panic as we remembered that (in the briefest moment of lost concentration) we had left all our stuff in the car! As we stood there wondering how we could have been so absolutely stupid for the umpteenth time today, and realising that we didn't even have the driver's licence plate number, we caught a glimpse of him through the crowds: he had parked up and was standing waiting for us on the other side.

Back in the car the driver told us that the reason all the transport was fully booked and the border was so busy is that it was Sunday afternoon and so many Thais work in Kuala Lumpur during the week. We passed through the other stages in the border crossing without incident and at last we were fully checked, controlled, stamped and immigrated, and speeding south on a wide highway admiring our new ninety-day Malaysian visas which had been thoughtfully squeezed into a space on an already crowded page of our passports.

It was dark when we arrived on the car ferry into Georgetown on Pulau Penang (Penang Island). Georgetown is a funny mix of British colonial and Chinese architecture. It's a bit shabby and grubby, but it seems OK, even in the dark. Our bed for the night is in Hutton Lodge, just off Georgetown's main street: Penang Road. The staff are friendly and very helpful, and the shower is probably the best one we've had in Asia—gallons of hot water at a decent pressure. Having spent a little while walking around town to get something to eat and find an ATM, we notice that Malaysia doesn't seem to have the same problem with touts as Thailand. It seems at first glance to be a lot more laid back. Things are looking up.

Day 597
Koh Lanta Yai to George Town

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.