Monday, August 29, 2005

Alice! Who the...

I just arrived in Alice Springs to my first full-on, smelly backpackers hostel, and a dorm room. I've held out a pretty long time without going for this kind of set-up, but Australia is just a tad more expensive than everywhere else I've been so far, so it's necessary. The subtle aroma of cheesy socks drifts down the corridors and towels capable of standing up on their own hang from every available bar or hook. It still costs three times the price of a half-way decent private ensuite room in Vietnam, but I'll try and get over it.

The West Coast wasn't feasible in the end, very expensive, so I've opted instead for a tour starting at Alice Springs (to see Uluru, a.k.a Ayers Rock), then flying across to Cairns to work down the East Coast on the Greyhound bus. I only booked the tour yesterday and I'm already here. After three days around Uluru (including sleeping in the desert), it's on to Cairns and two days in Cape Tribulation, back to Cairns for some surf 'n' partying (well, that's what the brochures say), Airlie Beach, a three-day sailing trip around the Whitsunday Islands, a jeep safari on Fraser Island, Brisbane, Byron Bay and back to Sydney. Phew. In my previous entry I might have mentioned not being interested in the East Coast - gulp, words eaten.

Sydney was mainly great because Prue and Anna, old mates I met six years ago when they were backpacking around England, have really been looking after me - they're absolute stars and will get the red carpet treatment next time they come to my place. I've been staying in the up-and-coming and somewhat trendy area of Newtown, a little like Northcote Road in Clapham but bigger, less stuck-up, and with no haughty people in rugby shirts. No idea why I compared Newtown to Northcote Road then.

After a week in Sydney I've seen all manner of creatures, furry and aquatic, after seeing Taronga Zoo, the brilliant Featherdale Wildlife Park, and Sydney Aquarium. I've got masses of pictures to upload but this Internet cafe doesn't let you do anything more complicated than blogging and e-mailing, so they'll have to wait. As well as all the animals, highlights included a tour of Sydney Opera House, the Museum of Contemporary Arts, the premier of a David Mamet play, a walk around the coast to Bondi Beach, and a night out in Manly at the Steyne Hotel, a sort of complex of about six pubs and bars all linked by a raucous and friendly open air yard. Sydney feels like a giant playground.

Monday, August 22, 2005

Bye-bye Asia, hello Oz

Going about her businessAfter the bike tour finished in Hoi An, I stayed there for a week, enjoying the chilled-out atmosphere and small streets of worn-looking French colonial buildings, wandering to the beach, or just reading and grazing. I could have gone to Danang or Hue to the North, even as far as Hanoi if I'd been in a tearing hurry, but Hoi An was a good place to hang out for a while, and I just felt like biding my time until it was time to leave Vietnam for Australia.

Hoi An was easy going enough, except for packs of young kids patrolling the bars and restaurants selling tiger balm, postcards and necklaces for five times the regular price. The kids were persistent, charming and cheeky, but when you'd been asked "where you from?" for the fifteenth time that night and said no you didn't want any tiger balm for the fiftieth time, it got to be a pain in the neck. Genuine conversation with interested locals in obviously a thrill, but the question "where you from?" in Hoi An is little more than a tactic to delay a tourist walking away until someone can sell you something.

Asia was an amazing, frustrating, hot as hell and often hysterically funny experience, from the baptism of fire that was India, through the stunning landscapes of China, to the friendliness and fun of South East Asia. I was getting to feel pretty comfortable in Asia, and pretty lethargic, so it was definitely a good time to move on. It's been an entirely memorable experience all of its own, a skewed version of reality where all the normal rules of existence went out of the window, and arriving in Australia to more familiar-feeling and comfortable surroundings it feels almost like the trip's over already... except that I'm further from home than I've ever been, and I've crossed the equator. I freaked out last night when I couldn't recognise the stars.

Sydney Opera HouseSydney, where I started my trip to Australia a few days ago, is beautiful. Even though the days are crisp and cold, the sun is bright and the skies are clear, and everything is lit up like a postcard view. Sydney is very clean, easy-going, the service is incredible (I know I'm not in London as you don't get grunted at by the food vendors), and compared to Asia at least, the prices are astronomical. The Circular Quay area is a kind of waterfront Leicester Square - a big tourist draw, where ferries zoom in and out all day, performers shout friendly abuse at cooing crowds, and the Opera House and Harbour Bridge sit across the water from each other, twin icons of the city.

There's a good sense of humour here, that extends to the language - I've been cracking up reading the glossary of Aussie terms in Lonely Planet. The best shop name I've seen so far, for a homeware store I saw in King Street, is 'Holy Sheet!'. Fortunately I have the help of Prue and Anna who I'm staying with in deciphering the language and customs of this weird place.

One word of advice to my fellow tourists - don't bring food in to Sydney airport. I had to wait forty minutes in a customs queue to declare a tin of Pringles, half a packet of Oreo cookies and a few bars of Toblerone. Australia's borders are guarded zealously against contamination by undesirable substances from outside the country, and all food has to be declared.

I've got the rest of this week in Sydney, and next stop is possibly Western Australia, for a safari in the desert. The East Coast tourist trail of beaches and beer with gap-year students is not looking so appealing, but I might stop being an old fart and give it a go.

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Easy Rider

Watching the world go by

Leaving Saigon was a relief, but I quite liked the place - it's not so different from being in London. The place does your head in but it's fun at the same time, you're one of many anonymous people, everything you want is at hand, and everything costs more than it should. Just like temples, after a while many cities start to seem the same. At least in Saigon, unlike London, people don't look at you like you're about to suggest eating their child when you say hello. I have been getting better at saying hello to strangers since I've come away, partly because people are generally much more receptive to contact here than I felt at home. Gavin, a butcher and a nice bloke I met on a camel safari in Rajasthan, said that he had become less and less patient with people being standoffish when he greeted them, so he'd adopted a policy of shouting "Well f*** you then!" at them if they didn't respond. I haven't got to that stage yet, but some people can be very rude (some people have looked at me like something they just scraped off their shoe when I smiled at them), and it often seems only fair to return the compliment.

When you do get talking to people, two things usually always happen. You can be talking with the same people for hours, go for dinner with them, make travel plans, discuss life, the universe and everything, without knowing their names. Usually in this rather backward way of doing things, you're introducing yourselves as you say goodbye. The other thing that happens is that e-mail addresses get swapped all over the place, written on receipts, in diaries and match books, on the backs of hands and occasionally even in address books. When people write their e-mail addresses they're always accompanied by where you met them, as the simple fact is that much of the time, two weeks later after you've met ten more people, you're stuffed if you can remember who angel613@hotmail.com was and how you met them. This is all part of the 'single serving' friend phenomenon (see Fight Club) that Nick talked about in his blog a while ago - nicely packaged short-term relationships formed while travelling, that can extend to travelling together and becoming closer friends, or usually be as simple as having some company for a few hours.

If there's one thing I've learnt since I came away, it's that beaches and me don't mix. After a brief period of enjoying the swaying palms and the frothing surf washing over my toes, sitting with sunglasses on reading a good book and drinking a banana milkshake, boredom sets in. This usually takes about forty-eight hours, after which time I realise that all of my possessions are damp, I have sand in my underwear, no bugger is interested in saying hello and that frothing surf is just an annoying racket - it's a bit like Shirley Valentine sat drinking wine and looking at the sunset, and feeling it's all a bit rubbish after all. With this in mind, I chose to avoid the Sinh Cafe (after a travel company that organises much of the tourist travel in Vietnam) tourist trail up the coast and take a different route, heading where I hadn't decided yet.

I left Saigon for Dalat, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, after reading some promising stuff about it in Lonely Planet, and having good memories of similar places in India and China (i.e. hilly, cooler, a bit off the beaten track). I wasn't disappointed - Dalat is green and lush, cool and relaxed. The town is surrounded by greenhouses and coffee plantations, so a major fix of fresh vegetables and salad and good Vietnamese coffee was possible after the greasy noodles of Saigon. As soon as I got off the bus, I was met by a man with a big smile on his face who introduced himself as an Easy Rider. I had read about the Easy Riders in Lonely Planet - a group of motorbike tour guides with good English who conduct tours around Dalat and further afield, with you riding pillion and them telling you everything you need to know. The next day I arranged to go on a one-day tour of Dalat with Binh (a.k.a Dunhill on account of his predilection for Dunhill cigarettes and his Dunhill baseball cap).

After our one-day tour around Dalat, to see waterfalls, coffee plantations, silk farming and production, minority villages and other sights, I decided to take Binh up on the offer of a five-day tour up through the Central Highlands to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, ending in Hoi An. I'm in Hoi An now, having got here a few days ago after a fantastic trip. We covered over seven hundred kilometers on the back of Binh's bike, with all of my baggage strapped to the back, in all weathers, mostly rain.

Ke Ho village shop

The first leg of the trip, from Dalat to the village of Lak, took us through green hills and a succession of quiet hill-tribe (montagnard) villages, stopping along the way to peek into people's houses and shops, and take rests from the arse-numbingness of the bike ride to note points of interest or grab a toe-curlingly strong Vietnamese coffee. Many hill-tribe villages were established along main roads by the Vietnamese government in the wake of the Vietnam war, ostensibly to ensure access to services for these communities. While they have for the most part been 'Vietnamised' - i.e. they now speak Vietnamese, they have their own characteristics, dialects, dress and customs, though it can be difficult to tell different tribes apart.

Sitting on the back of a motorbike for long stretches presents certain complications and frustrations; you have to be sure to align your arse cheeks centrally on the seat as rearranging yourself when doing sixty kilometers an hour is not ideal - shuffling bottoms might bring you both off the bike. You have to look around the head of the person riding the bike so you can anticipate bumps in the road, lean into corners, and also get a better view, so you're leaning back and forth while trying to keep your arse central. You may slip forward in your seat and end up hugging your rider, leaving him with less space to sit on himself and ultimately pushing him off the seat, much as dogs tend to end up owning most of their owner's bed space during the night. And finally, you have to ignore when you can no longer feel your own bottom, and wait for a break so you can walk about a bit and bring the circulation back. Fortunately, Binh was great at anticipating these breaks, hence frequent stops accompanied by the line "OK, now we stop and rest your bum".

Lak Lake

Lak village was very beautiful, skirting the sides of a large lake in a green valley, home of the M'Nong minority. The houses of the village are built on stilts, similar to village houses in Cambodia - long, open-plan places for sleeping, eating and socialising. Lak was a very tranquil place, welcoming to the ten or so tourists there, but hardly making a fuss about it. Dogs and pigs wandered the street, kids played around in the lake, and the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of rice husking competed with the concussive sound of techno music from one of the houses in the evening air. Binh and I stayed in a large open room in a modified tribal house, and were brought a fantastic dinner of barbecued pork, noodles and rice. I was told that the Vietnamese are early sleepers and early risers - but while Binh was in bed by nine, I heard people footling about until the early hours outside.

From Lak we headed to Buon Ma Thuot, a big town and site of a major North Vietnamese victory during the Vietnam war that precipitated the defeat of the Southern Vietnamese forces. The town was dominated by a large war memorial. During the trip I saw many war memorials, commemorations of the fall of Saigon thirty years ago this year, and the omnipresent image of Ho Chi Minh. I'd been thinking once in a while that Ho Chi Minh looked a little like Colonel Sanders, when I read a story about a Kentucky Fried Chicken rep who made the same remark to a Vietnamese official when setting up the first KFC franchise in Vietnam - the deadpan official apparently said "No. Ho Chi Minh was a general, not a colonel".

Moving on from the busy, industrious and rather charmless Buon Ma Thuot, we headed for Kon Tum, a town inhabited by seventy percent minority hill tribes, and saw some of the villages on the outskirts of the town, as well as a Catholic church (Catholicism was introduced to Vietnam by French missionaries) and traditional tall Rong houses.

Meat and fire

I do think about more than just food, but the meal we had in Kon Tum was outstanding, and on the trip in general I had the best food I've eaten in Vietnam, some of the best I've ever eaten. A meal is not just about the food. It's the place, the people, what you're drinking, how hungry you were to begin with, what you'd been doing that day. The meal in Kon Tum was based around fantastic fresh wild meat, caught by local hill-tribes, barbecued on the table top and eaten with a sharp lime and chilli dip, chewing fresh lemon grass, and drinking cold beer from an ice bucket. The people that ran the restaurant saw few enough tourists that when I started to eat, I had four people sat looking at me, or the other Western couple also touring with Easy Riders. Smoke from the barbecue formed a cloud below the ceiling and the rain fell outside, while in the back of the restaurant, a quiet chatter came from about fifteen tables where everyone was eating the same.

Maybe it's because eating occupies all of the senses that a good meal forms such a vivid memory. Some of my strongest memories from this trip include eating phenomenally good potato and aubergine curry in the Lonely Planet restaurant in Kovalam, pink bananas on the train across the Western Ghats to Tamil Nadu, grilled fish in Goa, dahl and rice and banoffee pie in Bhagsu, five different dishes on an empty stomach in Lijiang, Khmer curry and chicken with cashew nuts in Siem Reap, and most of the things I ate on this bike tour. Food is brilliant isn't it?

So finally, from Kon Tum, Binh and I headed for Phuoc Son on the Ho Chi Minh Trail for a night, and then on to Hoi An a few days ago. The stops themselves paled into insignificance next to the journey. Binh was great company, highly knowledgeable, and very charming - to me, and to the numerous people whose houses we invaded so I could take a look around. Binh would sweeten people with gifts of cigarettes or food, translate my questions, and offer background on places and people, pointing out in numerous cases the improvements that have been made possible to people's lives since the Vietnamese government's loosening of restrictions on private enterprise in the nineties. While some of the people we met were very poor, mainly the hill-tribe communities along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, most people own and can buy and sell land, most appear to own their own vehicles, and, at least according to Binh, many Vietnamese are better off nowadays than they have been for a long time.

Montagnard lady II

It's only by doing a trip like this, and particularly with a Vietnamese guide, that I was able to meet some of the people I did. I'm not claiming for a moment that I was entering uncharted territory for Western tourists - the places we saw were mostly in Lonely Planet, and we saw other tourists along the way, though very few. This tour was the closest I got to the experience of the Aidcamp in February, when we were in rural Tamil Nadu - people were curious and bemused, though friendly and open, and on arriving at the much more touristy Hoi An a few days ago, the feeling of being like some rock star getting rapturous welcomes everywhere I went was replaced by the standard feeling of being just another white guy.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail was a strange experience at times - riding along the new road that has taken the name of its dirt track predecessor, in hard rain and through sometimes threatening-looking mountains, felt a bit other-worldly. The road, only a couple of years old, cut a path through the Central Highlands, sometimes criss-crossing with the original Ho Chi Minh Trail, sometimes overlapping, always taking a more direct route - the original trail was hand-made, this new one was helped along with heavy machinery and explosives. At times in isolated areas we saw villagers walking the roads, one teenage boy was walking on all fours - I heard dueling banjos in my head.

Central Highlands

The word Vietnam, for most people, is synonymous with the war that happened here. I never knew too much more than what I'd seen in the American movies - undoubtedly a biased perspective on things, even though Binh assured me that Platoon was accurate. Even though Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces thirty years ago now, signs of the war are still everywhere, from the numerous memorials, through the amputees, to the scrap bombs and shrapnel still being dug from the land, to the very land itself. The landscape of Vietnam is a hotch-potch of original old forests and newly planted coniferous woodland, after extensive re-planting of trees to cover the ground that was scorched by napalm. Perhaps most interesting has been that coming to Vietnam I have learnt how its history is intertwined with French colonialism in South East Asia, Communism and the country's relationships with the former USSR and China, US political interests, and the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. While its been great fun, its also been a great history lesson.

See pictures from the trip here.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

New service - Make Nathan Do Stuff

I have been asked to recite a line from a movie by Iain while still in Ho Chi Minh City, so here it is (Windows Media 1.3MB).

If you have any movie lines you would like me to recite in their actual locations, please let me know. And I may just do this even if you don't ask for it.

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Asia fatigue and a lemon massage


My cap'n
Originally uploaded by Big Trippy Nathan.
I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City yesterday, and am already feeling like, for the good of my health, I need to leave as quickly as possible. I'm staying in the Pham Ngu Lao area, a backpackery haunt, therefore it's rammed with shops selling dodgy North Face backpacks, pirate CDs, cheap food, T-shirts, lacquerwear souvenirs, and tours. The streets are lined with moto drivers who keep offering you rides even as you walk into your hotel saying 'no' for the tenth time, food vendors, book sellers, cafe owners attempting to herd you into their cafes to eat their Pho and drink their Tiger beer, and, obviously, many backpackers.

Not that I want to get bogged down in semantics here, but I can't stand the word 'traveller' - it seems a very grandiose and important sounding term for people who may be adventurous enough to encounter remote minority hill tribes or hike distant landscapes, but are more likely in many cases to get hammered in a variety of settings and walk their hangovers off doing cheap tours, being ferried around a country in air-conditioned mini-buses, and bitching if they can't find a hotel with satellite TV that serves muesli. I am guilty of a few of the aforementioned so am not taking the moral high ground here, but we are all just tourists, even if we haven't washed for nine days and wear toe rings and henna tattoos.

In case you hadn't noticed, I am experiencing a minor bout of travel fatigue, hence the need to get away from Ho Chi Minh City and my fellow, ahem, travellers. I just haven't worked out yet if this is travel in general, the company, or maybe just Asia. I do know that when I was ill a few days ago, I felt a tremendous homing instinct, and missed family, friends, the dog, the cats, good tea, brown buttered toast, crisp frosty mornings, frothy bitter, fish and chips, regional news programmes, Sunday papers, Radio 4, Radio 2, driving my own car, cooking, wondering the aisles of Sainsbury's, Porkinson sausages, the smell in my mum's greenhouse, fresh laundry, long phone conversations, roughage, and duvets. You see, being ill actually caused me to remember nothing but all the good stuff about home, forget why I'm here, and therefore become an ungrateful arse who doesn't know how lucky he is.

I took a tour round Ho Chi Minh City today on a cyclo (basically a seat on wheels stuck on the front of a bicycle), and after walking into what must have been my fifteen millionth temple in Asia, felt incredibly weary. The temples I've seen in Asia have been, with the notable exception of the rambunctious temple in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, quiet and peaceful places of worship, reflection, and incense-sniffing, occasionally very beautiful, often very kitch. They may have been Buddhist, Hindu or Jain, but after a while, they all start to feel the same, and after respectfully walking quietly round the temple and admiring the gold-plated deities and wood carvings, I've invariably felt as relieved as hell to get outside, breath air that isn't choked with sandalwood, and move on to a place that wasn't decorated like a cheap nightclub. This is an advanced stage of templed-out-itis.

Today's temple visit was followed by a visit to the War Remnants Museum, a place where the Vietnamese have put on display an impressive range of US tanks, helicopters, jets and bombs left over from the Vietnam War, along with numerous archive photos from the war, including victims of bombings using napalm, agent orange and other innovative ways to melt people's eyeballs and deform their offspring for generations. What with already having had a belly full of US foreign policy over the last few years, and having seen what I saw in Cambodia, I walked in and out quicker than you can say "grouchy disinterested old sod".

A big frustration with Asia has been money, or lack of it - it affects everything about your trip. Being from the West, most people here assume you have a lot of money, and compared to most of them, you do. Beggars and street kids become a constant presence, appalling and unbelievable poverty becomes a part of the background, and having started off apologising to people on the very bottom rung of the ladder for not giving them money, you end up telling them a firm 'no' or ignoring them - treatment I would never want to be on the receiving end of in their position. If it's not beggars it's haggling - the fact that haggling is, like Eric Idle's character in Life of Brian ("What? You're not going to haggle?!"), expected in many situations becomes tiring. To argue over the price of something to save the equivalent cost of a Mars Bar with someone who doesn't have that much to begin with has never felt entirely right to me from the start, I think I complained about it in India. That said, it's even more infuriating when you think someone overcharged you by the equivalent cost of a Mars Bar, because you've been had, even by a paltry amount.

A highlight of the last week, after all this feeble complaining, was a day-trip to the Phong Dien floating market in the Mekong Delta, before I came to HCMC. I was picked up at about 5:30 in the morning outside my guesthouse by a tiny lady who led me by the hand all the way to the waterfront, making me feel like the only six foot two child in Vietnam going shopping with his mother. She put me in a narrow boat with a bunch of bananas for my breakfast, and we put-puttered down the river as the sun was coming up, her alternating between steering, trying to set me up with her sister in broken English, telling me I was beautiful, and bailing out water from the bottom of the boat.

After floating through the middle of the market at first light, fruit and veg being sold all around and many bemused locals grinning and waving, we stopped for something to eat at about nine o'clock, a bowl of the best rice soup with pork I have ever eaten, served to our boat by a woman in another boat with a huge, bubbling pot that looked heavy enough to punch a hole in the boat and take her to the bottom of the river. The soup was so hot and spicy that I started sniffing and coughing - this appeared to worry my 'mother' who muttered something to the cook in the other boat, before coming round my side and crouching in front of me holding two lime quarters. I was thinking this was slightly odd, and that maybe we were going to have some sort of lemon tea, but then she removed my raincoat and bag, and unbuttoned my shirt. By this stage the weirdometer was heading towards nine. Then it went over ten when she started vigorously rubbing my chest, shoulders and back with the lime quarters, hard enough to make me laugh hysterically, yelp with pain, and also to cause a bit of a rash that is only now clearing up.

The surprise of this citrus fruit-accessorised assault, or maybe some healing properties in the lime, was at least enough to make me stop sniffing. After recomposing myself and having her tell me I was beautiful again, we set off for another market. Lots more fruit and veg dealings and waves from friendly locals, and soon I was waving at everyone. I stopped when I realised that the woman I'd been waving at who was crouching at the back of her boat was in fact taking a dump - I'd been wandering why she was looking at me the way Audrey looks at me when she's on the litter tray.

The day drew to a close after meandering down narrow canals and backwaters for a few hours, and stopping for late lunch and vast quantities of fruit at the home of a fruit farmer, Muoi, and his family, including his three lovely daughters, all single I was told. I was treated to fried noodles, papaya, pineapple, rambutan, banana and dragonfruit, and plied with a local spirit, and jasmine tea. Then the oldest of the daughters pulled out a range of souvenirs for me to buy - yes, this may appear to be a simple family of fruit farmers, but they were in fact shrewd businessmen. I felt lucky to get away with just buying a lacquered ring box, but I still paid through the nose for the fruit.

So anyway, it's definitely time to leave HCMC until I'm due to fly to Australia, or I'll lose my sense of humour. It's a day trip to see the former Viet Cong tunnels at Cu Chi tomorrow, and then hopefully a longer trip to Dalat and further afield.