Mid-life crisis? What crisis?

Forty seven years old and I finally bought my first motorbike. Not exactly a Harley but it's a lot of fun. Buying it isn't per se a sign of a mid-life crisis but the motivation for buying it is: after never really worrying about what I ate or drank (I call it "enjoying life") I've ended up with "the disease of kings" - gout! So I got the bike to help me get me up and down to the hospital on the other side of town for treatment.

Perhaps 'crisis' is too strong a word but it's certainly a shock to the system. Apart from the tear-inducing pain on the first couple of days of the attack it seems that nothing in my lifestyle will ever be the same again. No beer for a start. No more shrimps or seafood. No liver, kidneys or other sweetmeats. No duck or venison. No mushrooms for goodness sake! Marmite! Even beef, pork, lamb and chicken are on the watch list along with things like peanuts, milk, cheese and peas.

What's left to eat? Bread and vegetables basically. Mmm. To be honest I've always been a little sniffy about vegetarians; I thought they were just a bit pigheaded to stubbornly eschew all the lovely meaty things I've always taken for granted. And now I know I was right. Blimey, it's boring eating veg all the time. And in Chengdu it's virtually impossible. Even if you order the Vegetable Soup (featuring "three fresh seasonal vegetables") they'll still hoy in a handful of sheep intestine or stomach just to add to the flavour. It's like offal doesn't count as meat here. Typical too, when I ordered it one of the three veg was mushrooms so I had to leave them behind too.

The diet was given to me by a Chinese doctor, a specialist in arthritis. She's really great but I think Chinese doctors take a certain delight in draconianism. Whatever the condition you have the first thing they'll say is "Stop drinking!". My regular doctor is a Korean guy who's worked in America and he is a lot more forgiving. "How can you live without fish?" he says, "No milk? But your body needs milk!". I like him. I'm expecting him to prescribe me double whiskys and a Havana cigar before I go to bed every night next. Other aspects of his bedside manner I'm less fond of. Of all the bits of dietary and medicinal advice he has given me he continues to insist "the most important thing is to pray".

The lady doctor wants me to attend hospital five times a week for IV treatment. This is almost taken for granted in China. In every doctor's surgery (which are often open to the street) you'll see people of all ages hooked up to drips just sitting there infusing whatever drugs have been prescribed for hours and hours on end. I'd much rather just pop a pill or two and get on with my day thank you very much.

I've often thought that Traditional Chinese Medicine is a bit like a religion. There's very little scientific basis for most of it but people believe in it and - also just like religion - they get upset if you dare to criticise it. Whenever I've been prescribed with TCM it's had no noticeable effect. (This is probably because it's based on 'walnut logic' which states that because a walnut looks a bit like a brain, if you eat it it will make your brain healthier.) A funny thing too is that doctors will always prescribe a course of medicine lasting a month or more ("because we don't treat the symptoms we treat the cause" is the mantra) by which time of course you're better! What headache or cold or other common ailment is going to hang around for that long? And it's not cheap either. The last time I had to fork out around fifty quid on some kind of snake oil or other before realising that I'd not been prescribed good old western medicine.

That was at one of the largest hospitals in Chengdu, a huge place, very modern but teeming and seething with sick people. Given the sheer number of patients the organisation was very good but the experience is very different to back home. My first appointment with a specialist lasted about a minute and his advice was "Come back in six months and we'll assess if it's got any worse". All the time other people were piling into the little office, shrieking for attention. You get no privacy in a Chinese surgery. Whatever your ailment, whatever the treatment, however invasive the examination, you can count on a little scrum of other patients to be around you. And they take a special interest when it's a foreigner with a doctor's finger up his arse.

All these trips cost money. You imagine a notionally communist state would have state provision of healthcare pretty high on its list of priorities but, no, the ground floor of every Chinese hospital is dominated by the payment hall and you don't go anywhere until you've handed over your hard earned yuan. Why can't anyone do communism right? Bill Bryson perceptively points out in his 'Notes from a Small Island' that while it failed in the Soviet Union, the British would probably be rather good at it:

"All those things that are necessary to the successful implementation of a rigorous socialist system are, after all, second nature to the British. For a start, they like going without. They are great at pulling together, particularly in the face of adversity, for a perceived common good. They will queue patiently for indefinite periods and accept with rare fortitude the imposition of rationing, bland diets and sudden inconvenient shortages of staple goods, as anyone who has ever looked for bread at a supermarket on a Saturday afternoon will know. They are comfortable with faceless bureaucracies and, as Mrs Thatcher proved, tolerant of dictatorships. They will wait uncompromisingly for years for an operation or the delivery of a household appliance. They have a natural gift for making excellent jokes about authority without seriously challenging it, and they derive universal satisfaction from the sight of the rich and powerful brought low. Most of those above the age of twenty five already dress like East Germans..."

The reason I'm banging on about this is because I was so struck by what Danny Boyle pulled off a couple of weeks ago when he made the NHS - that great socialist institution - the very definition of Britishness at the Olympic opening ceremony. Whenever politicians of whichever party (but, let's face it, it's probably going to be the Tories) threaten to dismantle the service those images of massive white beds and bouncing kids with dancing nurses are going to be blazed across the media and blazed and blazed and blazed till the politicians back off. Great job. Of course the whole thing was bonkers and made virtually no sense to your average Chinese viewer but even here people liked it. And it certainly made me feel proud to be a Brit.

Most of all it was such a creative response to the Beijing ceremony four years ago. Everyone acknowledges that that was the most spectacular ever and left the Olympic world with nowhere to go without facing certain bankruptcy so the London ceremony took the whole thing in a new direction, completely changing the rules of how these things are meant to be done. It was also so un-Chinese. Where Beijing had thousands and thousands of neatly ranked drummers and painstakingly choreographed armies of dancers we had a shambles of people wandering about and skipping a bit. The scale of it and the attitude was all so much more human. And, never mind China, what other country anywhere would take the piss out of their head of state with the whole world watching? Can you imagine that happening four years ago? Go on, try.

Still, there's no way I'd swap the UK for China right now. I registered today for a further two semesters at a local university for their course in beating one's head against a brick wall or, as it's described in the brochure, studying Mandarin. It's become a kind of existential experience now as I wonder what it is about me, what flaw, what preordination is going on that means I seem simply unable to crack this language? Perhaps one day when I'm dead and chatting with God we'll have a good laugh as he tells me that I was always missing a certain gene which meant, of course, it was inevitable that I could never learn Chinese and all these efforts were absolutely and profoundly pointless. Or perhaps, as Martin Symonds (the writer of a leading Mandarin text book) said to a friend of mine "If you're over forty just forget about learning Chinese". And he's a teacher! It's depressing to realise I am losing faculties - like the ability to learn new things - that I once had and that they are gone forever. Learning fifty new characters yesterday and forgetting forty nine by this morning does make me feel like I'm getting passed it, my memory seems shot and learning to read Chinese characters has buggered my eyesight something rotten but I'll trudge on for a while more.

All in all, the impaired functions, the failing study, the motorbike, the gout: it's more like a mid-life deep sigh of resignation right now. But I expect the crisis is just around the corner.

Paradise lost (and found)

Google “Jiuzhaigou” and you get hundreds and hundreds of pictures of sky-scraping mountains reflected in the clearest of petrol-blue waters, fallen tree trunks ossified in the shallow lakes, and, even in a photo, you get the feeling of cool, fresh air in your lungs. That’s why most visitors to China make time for the trip to this national park in the north of Sichuan province either the easy way – by air – or the more interesting way – by winding mountain road in a bus that’s probably seen better days.

In Chinese, “jiuzhaigou” means “nine village valley”. Those villages are Tibetan and in the buildings you see, the language you hear, the songs and dances you watch, the culture is distinctly different to anywhere else in China. So it’s not only western tourists who come by the bus and plane load; it seems like every single person in The People’s Republic makes a beeline for this tranquil, natural paradise whenever there’s a public holiday.

The pictures on Google don’t lie. The “Y” shaped valley is home to the most amazing scenery. Starting at the foot of the “Y”, you pass a string of small lakes including Bonsai Shoals, Reed Lake, Double Dragon Lake and Lying Dragon Lake. The water, clear to the very bed of each lake, is unlike anything else you’ll see in China. But this is the appetiser. Continue on to the small Shuzheng Falls then Rhinoceros Lake and the larger Nuorilang Falls and the feast really begins.

At the split of the “Y” the mountains close-in and the combination of hills and trees, water and blue skies becomes that much more intense. The left route ends at the aptly named Long Lake but the star of the show here is Five Coloured Pool. With a sheer backdrop of conifer trees painted in a palette of a million greens which reaches to the clouds, the different depths of this modestly sized lake – along with the chemical properties of the bedrock – give the water jewel-like properties displaying translucent colours you never even knew existed.

The trouble with something so beautiful is that everyone, naturally, wants to see it. So it’s all but impossible to add to Google’s 83,000 Five Coloured Pool images without a bobbing head or two in the shot. It’s hard to even enjoy the serenity of the place without being jostled this way and that by the swirling crowds around you.

The volume of people wanting to visit Jiuzhaigou presents serious problems of management to the authorities. In an effort to preserve the sanctity of the park while offering the chance to visit to as many people as possible, they have to lay down rules. More specifically, they have had to lay down boardwalks to channel the flow of people and discourage them from charging every which way and damaging the very jewel they came to see. Understandable, then, but I couldn’t help feeling it was a shame to be in such a veritable walker’s paradise but be constrained to these narrow walkways. It felt a little like traipsing the aisles of a supermarket at times.

So, despite the surroundings, it’s difficult to feel the rawness or freshness of nature here. As for solitude, forget it. Swarms of visitors gather at the foot of the valley waiting for buses to take them up stream. The buses come and everyone pushes forward in an almighty and undignified scrum of feral humanity. Tempers flared while I was there, people really got hurt. Ugly. Very ugly. We were then dumped short of the Tourist Centre and funnelled along a narrow path next to the lower lakes where we were literally pushed along by the force of the crowd and quite unable to stop to even take a snap of bobbing heads with a glimpse of the lake in the background.

The courtesy buses ferry punters up and down the valleys all day long. You can jump on or off wherever you like. Some people methodically visit each lake in turn, tick that box and jump on the next bus but that seems to miss the point of being out in the great outdoors to me. Determined to walk a little and hopeful of outrunning the herd, I headed to the top of the right hand fork, where the valley gives way to forest, before making my way back on foot.

It was a decent plan. Sure, the boardwalk was still the only route you could take but it was no longer necessary to walk the lakes in crocodile fashion. The path winds through the trees threading the lakes together: first, Grass Lake which is more like a watery meadow and then Swan Lake whose swans must have migrated when I was there. There’s a long stretch after that to the next string of lakes and most people take a bus to join up the dots. The path, though, continues if you choose to take it, leading you on a good hour’s hike through the trees which occasionally takes in a tumbling mountain stream meandering through the forest.

And not a soul about.

Looking up the sides of the valley as I came out of the woods, the leaves on the trees at the lower levels were changing from their summer greens to autumnal yellows, oranges, reds. With the different colours, it’s as though you are watching autumn happen in front of your eyes. A million shades at once look back to summer and forward to winter, all bathed in a benevolent sunshine. The first leaves, yellow tinged with brown, have fallen on the path or rest on the glassy water like counters. Moving further down the valley, the colours change imperceptibly again and the number of people you encounter starts to increase too.

Some of the most popular and memorable lakes come next. The waters of Arrow Bamboo Lake cascade down Arrow Bamboo Falls toward Panda Lake and on to Peacock Riverbed whose deposits of calcium spread beneath the lens of the water surface like a fabulous fan of tail-feathers.

You leave the national park past several of the valley’s eponymous villages which, truth be told, are not much more than Tibetan themed gift shops selling the same kind of kitsch ‘n’ tat that people buy, take home and sling to the back of some cupboard or other never to be seen again.

It’s the same outside the gates of the park. Tourists think that a Tibetan ‘homestay’ may give then some higher cultural experience but, in reality, a bunch of awkward westerners making small-talk over a stove with a steaming kettle of Tibetan tea in a local’s home which has been hastily re-worked to include rudimentary guest rooms is hardly my idea of getting closer to a culture.

Happily, in my case, the homestay managed to double-book my room the next day so I was forced to change plans and move on. So at eight o’clock the next morning I stood at the roadside, my breath steaming as I braced myself against the mountain chill, waiting for a bus to Songpan.

I had no ticket for the bus. I’d been told it would come at 8.30 and that I could just flag it down. 8.30 came and went but something told me to just go with the flow. An old man joined me at the roadside and, with a mixture of my pidgin Chinese and his animated gestures, he assured me the bus would indeed come. And, of course, it did.

No luxury coach this, the bus was full of locals – workers, families – and a couple of hippy backpackers squeezed in on the back seats. The driver gestured toward the metal wheel arch by the front door which was my seat for the next couple of hours. The guy already sitting there shuffled up a little and offered me a cigarette. We were off.

The road climbed through the mountains, switching this way and that, and the temperature plunged whenever we lost sight of the sun. Then we would turn a corner and come upon a wide, flat plain surrounded by brooding peaks topped with snow and the sun would flick back on filling the bus with a chilly warmth. The mountain wind seeping through the gaps in the rattling windows was so fresh you could taste it.

It took a couple of hours to reach Songpan. The main street stretches the length of the town and threads itself through the massive old stone gates of the original settlement. Although work was going on downtown to modernise – pedestrian areas, newly built shop units and the like – it remains a town largely untouched by out-and-out tourist development. Tatty tumbledown stores line the street from the bus station selling everyday necessities, not tourist tat. Yak meat butchers and restaurants predominate. Hardware and general stores come next, again, set up for local trade: damn! not a souvenir cigarette lighter or Songpan key-ring to be had anywhere.

Two hills tower above the town on each side. Both are good options for a hike, one with a monastery to head for, the other with nothing but a few sheep and cattle munching on its green grass. There’s no clear path, of course, but after a while you can pick up the odd trail here and there. Very soon I found myself high above Songpan and could make out the fortified walls of the original garrison town from which the new one spills out. Pretty Tibetan roofs are jostled and bullied by the blue tin roofs of the latest, more utilitarian buildings. Climbing higher, the temperature dropped but the sun was blazing from a perfect blue sky smudged with perfect white clouds. Not the fittest walker in the world, I’d stop for regular breathers, take a deep breath and just smile at the simple beauty of it all.

Toward the top there was a sheepfold or something, I couldn’t quite make it out. But as I approached, a big dog on a small leash leapt up from lying down and barked furiously. “Okay,” I thought, “bad idea” and so turned and started walking away. There was plenty of hill for both of us. Then, before I could quite make out what the sound was behind me – a slobbery panting – another huge, black and brown dog clamped his jaws around my right calf. The blood was flowing immediately. The pain kind of dull. Something told me not to run, be calm. So in a rather absurdly British way I tried to walk on like nothing had happened, mumbling Be calm to myself and, not really daring to look around, hoping with every fibre that the monstrous animal wasn’t still following me.

Amazingly, it worked. The pain came on, the blood was going into my boot but I kept walking. Calmly.

Once clear, I reflected on how sublimely happy I’d been on the way up and how nothing had really changed. The grassy hill and the scraggy bushes, the beaming sun and pure air, the feeling of freedom and being far away from the everyday were all still there, all still mine. Wild-dog bite or not, it didn’t matter. This was how I prefer to enjoy nature.

Untamed.



.

Not guilty

I measure my life in construction sites. One day a crane appears, secretly growing taller as it hauls the latest concrete apartment block out of the ground in my neighbourhood. Every day I watch the green mesh sleeve slip silently first upward, later down. I watch the hundreds thousands millions of trips the simple caged elevator makes up the outside of the building, each one delivering workers and materials, each trip making the tiniest contribution to the overall task of building this monster. But still it goes on and on till the job is done.

So, you see, my life is pretty slow. I've engineered a quite absurd lifestyle for myself. Two (long) weekends of work a month is enough. The rest of my time is my own.

I feel a little guilty about this for some reason. It doesn't seem right and proper. You're meant to to work your balls off to be successful, aren't you? Yet here am I, all shorts and sandals with a beer on the bar and a good book continuously in my hand, living the kind of life you normally spend a lifetime saving up for. I'm not rich by any means (and goodness knows I have no pension plan - apart from planning on dying at some point) but I feel so relieved after spending my fair share of time perched on the hard seats of the gravy train to get here.

So, hang it all, I won't feel guilty.

The 12th of August marked four years for me in China. Yes, The Glorious Twelfth indeed. Wow. Four years seeing things a million miles from Newcastle. Four years doing something I thought I couldn't do (anyone who knows me know that standing in front of fifty people and speaking for an hour does not come naturally). Four years of teaching gave me the experience needed to become an examiner of the 'IELTS' English test (which Chinese students need to pass if they want to study at a British or Australian university). It means I can earn the same each month as I had done as a teacher but in a fraction of the time - and without the additional hassle of writing lesson plans or the stress of bringing those plans to life. It also means I get to visit other cities like Chongqing and Guiyang where testing is hosted too.

Happily, one of the dividends of that four year investment is that I have the time to write again. To blog too. And, since last time I wrote, I've also been taken on as a writer/editor by a local NGO which has made life so much more pleasant since writing comes a lot more naturally to me than teaching. So, in June, I had to take a trip to Hong Kong to renew my visa and register it in my new employer's name.

I loved Hong Kong: a metaphorical breath of fresh air. In Chinese it's called 'Xiang Gang' which means 'fragrant harbour'. I wouldn't fancy taking a dip in it but all the water separating the many different islands that make up the city make it a quite unique place. It must be cool to commute on the famous Harbour Ferry from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island every day.

It's also amazing how utterly different this little part of China is to the rest of the country. A sign on the elevator up to the visa office declared that the lift buttons were sterilised every thirty minutes. To be honest, it made me feel a little grubby, unworthy to be using it, but there you go. On the mainland you'd be lucky to get a 'No spitting' sign.

Then, getting the visa was a doddle. This, after a whole two months of delays and setbacks thanks to the mind-numbing bureaucracy in Chengdu to get all the necessary preparatory paperwork done. You'd go to the visa office in Chengdu with all the papers you'd been told you needed only for them to find some tiny discrepancy which would take another trip to another government office in another obscure part of the city before you would return, full of hope and expectation, only for them to find another discrepancy on the same document as before, which they could have but didn't tell you about the first time, which would entail another odyssey to more green-tiled, spit-floored waiting rooms full of visa-worn faces.

That said, the local Chengdu police could not have been more helpful when this jabbering fool turned up with his pitiful Chinese and tried, mainly through hand gestures and a bit of gurning, to explain which official document I needed them to give me to support my visa application. Turned out I was in completely the wrong police station so they threw me in the back of a - rather fittingly for Chengdu - panda car and, lights a-flashing, raced me down to the correct station. Once there, over a cup of green tea, sat outside in the main courtyard of the police station, several cops humoured me until, between their rudimentary English and my hideous Chinese, we communicated.

Yes, the Chinese has not been going well - and that's something that does make me feel guilty. It's frankly embarrassing to have been here for years and be no further on that I was four years ago after my three months of night classes in Newcastle. And the excuses don't cut much ice: "I'm concentrating on learning to be a teacher" at the beginning; "I'm too busy with lesson plans" for the next couple of years; "Nobody in Chengdu speaks proper Mandarin so I can't practise enough"; "It's too noisy in here"; "It's too quiet in here"; "Just not in the mood", etc., etc. Fact is, there's no shortage of 'foreigners' (although, as my old friend William Ward would say "I'm not foreign, I'm BRITISH!") here who have successfully learnt it from scratch. Fact is, I spend too much time at the local English pub speaking, hum, English. Fact is, my memory and application aren't what they used to be. Fact is, I just haven't made enough effort. Nonetheless, I'm giving it one final go now that I have all this free time.

So there is some purpose to life at the moment; I'm not just screwing around. But, for all the hours of study I'm putting-in, once I get outside and come to use it, it's like I'm lingually constipated - nothing with come out - and daily I get more frustrated as though my skull's going to explode and I'll be found one day lying face downwards in a grisly pool of addled Chinese vocab and grammar.

(Incidentally, given Chengdu's reputation of some of the spiciest cuisine on the planet, constipation is rarely a problem. quite the opposite. I went to get some pills the other day for what the Chinese call 'laduzi' - literally 'empty your belly' - and, after asking how long I'd had the runs for, the lady in the pharmacy was a bit taken aback when I replied "For about four years now". Still, I can't stop eating the local food. In fact, my eating habits have changed a lot recently. One of my guilty pleasures used to be have a Big Mac and large fries once or twice a month. You know how it is: you sometimes just get an irresistible urge for a Big Mac and you just can't say no. But, for some reason completely out of the blue, I've totally lost my taste for them. I can't even finish one these days and wonder what the hell I ever saw (or tasted) in them. Ugh.)

Anyway, back to the Chinese: I'm going to give it five months of serious study and, if I can't speak it then, I can at least stop beating myself up about it and so stay here and live with a clear conscience.

The great escape

I hate Chinese New Year. Everything in China stops for a week or two as everyone travels home to be with their family. It makes it a pretty lonely time to be a foreigner, knowing that everyone else is having a happy holiday while you can't even find a restaurant that's open. What's worse is that when 1.3 billion Chinese are on the move you're going to struggle like hell to get a train, plane or bus ticket to go travelling in China. And even if you do, your destination will likely be packed with local tourists processing behind flag waving tour guides anyway.

So, once a year. I like to escape. 'Escape' not only the endless Chengdu winter but also to avoid the phenomenon of 'China Rage' which creeps up on even the most Sinophile of us. (I don't think I'll ever call China 'home'.)

This year I've come down to Malaysia thanks to Air Asia now offering budget, no frills flights out of Chengdu. But I've found that it's not quite so easy to escape Chinese New Year even this far away from the Middle Kingdom.


The Chinese are everywhere! Along with native Malays and Indians, they make up a substantial proportion of Malaysia's population. So this great escape has been played out to a soundtrack of "Sorry, we're fully booked because of Chinese New Year" or "Sorry prices have doubled because it's Chinese New Year" or simply "Are you kidding? Don't you know it's CNY?"

The large Chinese population means there are plenty of great places to eat. In Chengdu, they believe Sichuan food in the best in the world (this, normally from someone who's never even travelled beyond Chengdu's third ring road). But I've had some great Cantonese cooking out here. And Malay food is good too, although it invariably involves a chicken. Whereas Sichuan food tries to blow your head off with spice, Malay spice is more gentle and varied. And, unlike Thai cooking, it's not full of bits of grass and leaves that you can't actually eat.


The first thing I ate in Kuala Lumpur was 'roti', a kind of chapati which you dip in spicy sauces for breakfast, lunch or dinner. I was in a cheap restaurant next to the hostel and the last of the season's monsoon storms beat warm rain down outside. The rain was a welcome break from the insufferable heat in KL. Airco, even in the cheapest of cheap budget hotel rooms is a must - along with a good mosquito-killing machine.


KL didn't impress me much. In fact, I was booked for two nights but forfeited the second night's money in order to get out quick. Sure, it's a clean, compact and modern city and it's bliss not having to listen to car horns bleating constantly like in China but, how can I put this?, it's boring.


The Petronas Towers are worth a visit, of course. It really is a great building and very beautiful up close. I also took it in through the grubby windows of the observation platform at the KL Tower which is substantially higher than the Petronas Towers' 'Sky Bridge'. Apart from the Towers, however, there's not much else to see across the city. Even the taped commentary they give you to listen to on headphones runs out of stuff to say after a couple of minutes.


It doesn't help that - this being a Muslim country - there aren't many bars and the beer in the few is very expensive. Doh! Why didn't I think of that before I came? On the first evening, tired from the four and a half hour flight, I resorted to the ubiquitous Irish Bar full of desultory ex-pats drinking cheap lager at far from cheap prices. As with KL in general, it wasn't much fun.


The night train took me north. The 'Jungle Express' rocks and rumbles up through the spine of Malaysia, finally rolling up at my destination: Khota Baru, next to the Thai border. Then it was down to Kuala Besut to catch a boat to the paradise beaches - you know the kind - of the Perhentian Islands.


If you're going to go, this is a pretty good time to do it, CNY or not. The hotel owners try it on a little bit but there's no getting away from the fact that this is off-season so prices are pretty good and the immaculate beaches virtually deserted.


The warm, clear blue waters are great for diving or snorkelling. I swam among shoals of brightly coloured little fish which literally bumped into my facemask so unafraid were they. I even swam with small sharks and alongside mighty turtles which drifted up from the sea floor, limbs outstretched like fabulous angels before they took a breath at the surface and then, indifferent to my lumbering presence behind, slid through the sea with no more effort than thinking a stray thought.


Snorkelling should come with a health warning, however. I discovered that spending three and a half hours with your face down in the water results in one's back being roasted to a bloody red. This kind of curtailed any further sunbathing plans I might have had. Ho hum, I never learn. Maybe it's just an English thing, having so little experience of bright sunshine.


There are two principle Perhentian Islands, one named 'Big Island' and the other named - wait for it - 'Small Island'. The latter having a more lively reputation, Mr Stupid here chose the big island and, surprise surprise, once the sun went down it was pretty boring. I found myself making a treacherous journey across a rocky headland one evening to reach the only bar on the island as it was showing football: Spurs v Bolton. (See? I was desperate.) I totally misjudged how difficult it would be to clamber over the rocks and, with darkness falling and the tide rising, was forced to wade around the rocks to reach the bar where, it turned out, a family from Stockholm insisted on watching speed skating on TV all night. Jesus! And I thought I was bored before.


Planning to visit a place called Cherating next, I changed my mind on the speed boat back to the mainland when the guy driving it told me about the attractions of Langkawi Island over on the west side of the country. So, Plan Z... I got the overnight bus to Kuala Perlis and the first ferry to Langkawi in the morning which (didn't I mention it?) is - hooray! - a duty free island!


Given that my back was so bright you could probably spot it from the moon, I was forced to spend the next few days in the shade of the Babylon beachfront bar reading the short stories of Lu Xun, drinking the odd can of Tiger while the rest of the world played on the white sand and gentle blue waters out front. Never liked sunbathing anyway.


There was only one problem. It was just too bloody hot for someone from Leeds. I know I shouldn't complain but, knowing I'd be returning to the broiler of KL soon, I wanted the chance to cool down for a few days. The perfect spot was The Cameron Highlands back on the mainland, a so-called 'hill station' where Brits retreated from the tropical heat back in the day when we ruled the world.


Taking a ferry to Penang and then a bus on to the highlands, I've had a relaxing final few days here, hiking in the jungle and just chilling in the cooler, clearer air.


It'll be back to KL tomorrow and, after that, on to Chengdu and back behind the great Firewall which means this will be the last chance I have to write a blog till the next time I leave China again. (So much for all the optimism before the Olympics that everything was going to change in the PRC.)


Hopefully when I get back to Chengdu the Spring Festival celebrations will all be a thing of the past and I can look back on another new year successfully negotiated. With any luck, I'll get to write again before New Year 2011 so please keep checking back.



If you're interested, there are a couple more photos at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=39126&id=589175623&l=c75e11433b

Getting over the Great Firewall of China

As you may have noticed, I've not written anything for months. This isn't solely down to laziness. It's mainly due the fact that blogger.com is blocked in China (along with YouTube, Facebook and a bunch of other sites) so I can't get on it to write anything. Happily, I'm on holiday in Malaysia for a while so I'll try and get something written before I disappear again behind the wall.

Do please keep checking up occasionally just in case I've had another chance to get online.

The cheaper, the better

Half way between Kunming and the border town of Hekou, laid flat on the sleeper bus at five in the morning I asked myself: "Why?". For about a hundred years Man has been able to fly but here am I on the most pot-holed highway in the world on a 40 centimetre wide bunkbed, legs cocked to fit, bouncing - literally bouncing - through the night on holiday. I did the calculation again: a flight from Chengdu to Bangkok and then on to Hanoi would have cost twice as much as the train, three times as much when you add the taxes which they always forget to mention until the last moment. No, there was no way around this being a holiday on a budget, what - if I was in advertising - what I'd call a "holiday experience".

Sleeper buses are regular coaches with the seats stripped out and three aisles of bunk beds bolted in their place. That gives you an idea of how wide they are; length-wise they're just short enough to be bloody uncomfortable. But they're undeniably cheap even if there's a price to be paid for saving money.

A few miles short of the border PLA soldiers boarded the bus and took everyone's passport; they were scrupulously polite to the couple of foreigners aboard and returned twenty minutes later to give them back. The border itself was quite dramatic: an iron bridge straight out of a spy movie spanning the Red River and then, a few more forms filled-in, you're in Vietnam.

The price for saving money was then exacted. The train from Lao Cai (on the Vietnamese side of the border) to Hanoi was to take 12 hours. It'd have been quicker to walk. And the 'soft seat' I'd paid for really was not at all soft. In fact I couldn't imagine what a 'hard seat' must have been like. Ouch.

I didn't like Hanoi. I tried; its narrow streets and tree-lined avenues owe something to the French and look very charming but the avenues, boulevards and rues are filled from gutter to gutter with the buzzing of a million 50cc motorbikes, the riders with their fingers permanently pressed on the horn which is made even louder because the narrow streets act as a kind of architectural amplifier. Blimey, I thought China was loud. But if China were a Heavy Metal band, then Hanoi would be a Speed Thrash Death Metal one.

Three hours from Hanoi on the coast is Halong Bay, right at the top of the list of things to see in Vietnam. Towering shards of limestone poke above the green waters in the bay, a kind of watery Guilin, which was made famous as the baddies' hideout in The Man with the Golden Gun. Undeniably impressive, the shine was taken off a little by being part of a sanpan procession around and through the rocks. Some tours last three days but I was happy with the single day trip, feeling like a carton of milk on the conveyor at a Tesco's checkout .

Onward and southward. The reason for choosing Vietnam/Cambodia for a holiday was that, after two miserable Chengdu Januarys, I didn't want to spend another cold, damp, shops-shut month and Chinese New Year in China. Above all, I wanted to be warm; even here Hanoi let me down so I was glad to get back on the train to head ever closer to the sun, first stop being Ninh Binh.

Ninh Binh is the base for visiting a land-based version of Halong Bay: Tam Coc, a nature reserve with ribbons of rivers twisting among skyscraping rocks and a similar procession of bored looking tourists desperately imagineering that idyllic holiday experience despite being Number 21 in a queue of a hundred boats paddled by local women whose only word of English is "Tip?".

Some aspects of Vietnam and Cambodia were a bit disillusioning. Very often the smiles of welcome disappeared as soon as you'd paid your money; and it was impossible to get reliable travel information because everyone had their own package to sell or their own deal with one operator or another. The hotel owner in Ninh Binh out-and-out lied to me about the cost and availability of train tickets to Saigon because he wanted to flog me a bus ticket from which he'd get a cut. The moral of the story: if you're on a tight budget always buy your tickets direct from the station!

So I was glad to get to Hue, about half way down Vietnam, the ancient capital of this ancient country. Hue may have a long history but it's also the jumping off point for visiting sights (or sites) from Vietnam's more recent past: the American War (as the Vietnamese call the Vietnam War, funnily enough). So it was another bus, another day, thrown together with a bunch of other tourists as I spent a long day dodging between key spots from the war.

It made me want to re-watch all those Vietnam War movies I've seen too many times already. We saw The Rockpile - a lonely peak overlooking the surrounding countryside, used by the Americans to keep an eye on things but ultimately given up as undefendable. Khe San was a vast U.S. base, again at the top of a mountain, which was besieged by the VC as a diversionary tactic before the famous Tet offensive of January 1968. Defended tooth and nail by the Americans, they ultimately withdrew when they realised it had little or no real strategic importance - a microcosm of the whole American adventure really.

And then at the coast we saw the tunnels at Vinh Minh where villagers dug in to survive bombardment from the sea and land. But more about tunnels a little later...

Still cloudy and chilly, I chose to skip the beaches of Nha Trang and take a giant leap all the way down to Ho Chi Minh City on another long distance train, a journey of about twenty hours. Since 'soft sleeper' tickets are only marginally more expensive than 'hard sleeper' ones in Vietnam I opted for a little bit of luxury - a compartment with just four rather than six bunks. This is where travelling by train beats air travel hands down. You not only get to see the countryside all the way north to south but you get to meet people like Hua, a student who was returning home from college. Her English wasn't great but, naturally, it was a damn sight better than my Vietnamese and she told me about her life, her family and her hopes for the future. She showed me photos of her mates and a rather disarming one of her wielding an AK47 rifle taken during her military training. Wherever you go in Vietnam war is never far away.

Next day I woke to blazing sunshine as the train hauled itself into Saigon station. (Yes, they still say 'Saigon' to denote the centre of Ho Chi Minh City; the railway station is 'Saigon station', the airport 'Saigon airport'.) It's a vast city (when taking the bus to Cambodia a few days later it would take an hour and a half simply to reach the outskirts) but I liked it so much more than Hanoi. It seemed more cosmopolitan, more modern and far better equipped to deal with the millions of people that populate it than Hanoi had done.

Highlight - although that's probably the wrong word - was a visit to the War Remnants Museum, once called The Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes. As at so many sites in Vietnam there was a collection of American armour, machinery and ordnance that never made it home outside: tanks, jets, helicopters, huge 'seismic bombs' stood on end. I'd never realised just how vulnerable a helicopter pilot must have felt with just a sheet of glass between him and the enemy below. But the museum, of course, is about the Vietnamese victims and it was interesting to read and feel the sense of indignation that Vietnam still feels at the American intrusion into their country. More than that, there was plenty of evidence of why the museum had initially had its original name. Grotesque pictures of inhumanity - soldiers posing with the decapitated heads of Vietnamese soldiers - brought to mind more recent images of American soldiers in the jails of Baghdad.

Two hours' drive from the centre of the city there's an even more chilling reminder of the war. Centred on the village of Cu Chi the Vietnamese dug hundreds of kilometers of interconnected tunnels on up to three levels. It was from these tunnels that they conducted their guerrilla war with the Americans, even managing to burrow right under one of their largest bases to attack the enemy from within. They're grim though. Bent double in blackness, the clay walls damp, the floor slicked with dirty water, it was enough for me to struggle about 30 metres before escaping through one of the modern day exits, a twinge of panic fluttering inside. To think that fighters would spend weeks down there; and to think that the Americans sent soldiers down those stinking holes to flush the fighters out. Staggering.

And so on to Cambodia, one of the few countries whose recent history could rival Vietnam's for grimness.

Throughout Vietnam you can pick up what's called an 'Open Bus'. These are coaches which tramp up and down the country which you can jump on and off as you choose. They're also incredibly cheap. From Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh is just $10.

So that is what I did.

Cambodia struck me as being abut twenty years behind Vietnam in terms of development. Not bad considering it started at Year Zero not so long ago. More Indian than oriental, the capital - and the people - have a laid-back, almost Caribbean vibe; it's much less frenetic that the big cities of its neighbour.

For the penniless backpacker there's a great strip of cheap hostels next to the (mosquito infested) lake in the north of the city. $3 buys you a single room with a fan (and when you think of it, what more do you need?). During the trip I paid much more in places which delivered much worse value. It infuriates me sometimes how hotels just don't seem to give a damn, how they ignore the most basic things that'd take pennies to fix but which make a big difference to the experience of staying there: a remote control that doesn't work, TV channels that aren't tuned in, bathrooms awash with water that doesn't drain away or with rails and soap dishes hanging from the walls. Oh don't get me started.

Time was running out so there was a limit to how much I could see of Cambodia. Top of the list, of course, were the temples of Angkhor so it was back on the bus (there are no passenger trains in Cambodia) and up to the town of Siem Reap.

Plenty has been written about the temples, especially Angkhor Wat which is said to be the largest religious structure in the world. My biggest worry was having too great expectations. But it was sublime. How can something so vast, so colossal be so graceful, so elegant? Around every corner there was a new aspect to its immense harmony.

Even the restoration work is exemplary. They have only rebuilt structures if more than half of the original stonework is available; otherwise they leave the tumbledown stones to tell their own silent tale. I'd seen the same approach at the old citadel in the centre of Hue where the most evocative parts of the emperor's palace were those left as ruins in a sea of fresh cut grass which invite your imagination to fill in the gaps.

At Ta Prohm temple the balance of nature and the ruins is of a different order. It's as though the jungle is slowly swallowing the structure, reclaiming it, as giant tree roots crawl along and around the mighty stones like some great devouring dragon. This, incidentally, was the temple featured in Tomb Raider.

Then at Bayon temple there's the eery sight of the hyper realistic face of the king carved into the stones of the temple no less than 216 times. Outside, a majestic avenue straddling a moat is lined with more immense busts . Again, the scale of it all is mind blowing (I loved the Elephant Gate - a door to one of the temples about two or three metres above the ground opening apparently to nothingness but this was where the king would have alighted his elephant to enter the place); how could they even have imagined it let alone built it? They reckon it took a million men working every day for thirty years to complete Angkhor Wat.

One day is not enough to see Angkhor but it was all I had; this was just a recce for a future visit.

There was time though for one final indulgence: a day on the beach at Sihanoukville on the south coast. Given Cambodia's history I wanted to experience something of its future - a simply beautiful holiday destination.

So that's how this year's adventure ended. Who needs flights and fancy hotels? Just give me a cheap bottle of beer in the shade of the tropical sun and a lot of wonderful memories. Definitely one of my better holidays.

See more pics at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=216463&l=9f87a&id=589175623

Insult and injury

I got a call the other day from some company trying to sell me something. After letting me humiliate myself in worse-than-pidgin Mandarin the woman at the other end stopped me to say: “Your Chinese is terrible”.

It’s really come to something when people cold-call you to say how bad your Chinese is. But such is my life.

I think my poor teacher is completely fed up of me. I seem to forget words quicker than I learn them. Of course, I should practise more but every time I try even the simplest conversations I’m struck completely dumb – in every sense – by the person’s incomprehensible reply. “Ting bu dong” I say – I don’t understand.

Then, to make matters worse, more often than not they don’t even understand what I’m trying to say when I say I don’t understand.

The sooner I teach China to speak English the better.

Let me be misunderstood

I went to watch the Olympic torch relay on its way through Chengdu the other day.

But I couldn't find it.

Where else in the world could that possibly happen? For the previous few days I had hounded my Chinese friends for information about the route and timings and, in a very Chinese way, got many helpful suggestions, rumours, apologies even, but no facts whatsoever. It wasn't much use talking to the ex-pats here either: they just had their own rumours about how only Party members were being invited, that the whole city would be cordoned off and that crowds lining the route were to attend a rehearsal the day before...

Even on the day itself there was no word about what was going on. No website with a schedule. No AA signs on lamp posts pointing you in the right direction.

As I cycled rather forlornly around the city centre I saw lots of indications that something was happening. Public buildings had armed police and even a few troops with plastic riot shields outside. There were lots of otherwise ordinary people wearing red armbands who seemed to be waiting for something along most of the major roads. I finally caught up with a group of about one hundred white tee-shirted students as it processed through the city centre behind large Chinese national flags. I asked them if they were following the torch. But no, they hadn't any idea where the torch was. They seemed a little wary of my interest to be honest but eventually concluded I wasn't very subversive. Then, rather furtively, one girl asked me "Do you love China?". Well, there's a long answer to this question and a short one. I gave her the short one and she stuck a China sticker on my chest and presented me with a little Chinese flag and a little Olympic flag to wave. Which I did.

I rode on. Still not a sign of an Olympic entourage. So eventually I gave up and called into a bar for a beer, like you do. The TV was on and I caught the last few minutes of the torch's procession somewhere way outside the centre of town in a new exhibition complex a mile or two beyond the city's third ring road.

What struck me about all this wasn't the authorities' reticence (or secrecy?). Nor its rigid control. Nor the fact that the final ceremony was before a carefully chosen audience who had indeed been drilled in how and when to cheer. What got me is the fact that people in Chengdu let this happen. Nobody I spoke to thought it at all strange that, even though the procession was going past their home, they had been told to "stay indoors and watch it on TV". Can you imagine Boris Johnson telling Londoners that in four years' time? The person whose house it had gone past told me the government had done this "for security reasons". Another person told me that the arrangements had been made because there would just be too many people to organise (Chengdu is just a tad smaller than London). But all the Chinese I spoke to about it thought it was quite normal. None felt aggrieved that they were being ostracised from their own Olympics or denied their chance to show their passion for their games.

As I said in another blog recently I will never understand this place.

The final ceremony was pretty wooden and charmless. Officials spoke. People cheered on cue. And the Olympic flame was marched off by the same officious looking figures who had caused so much offence in London. (What was it Seb Coe called them?)

Behind the dignitaries on the stage, the backdrop carried the city of Chengdu's latest marketing slogan - in English, so it must be intended to appeal to the western visitor - which reads: "All because of you, Chengdu will be better". Is this really what they meant to say? Or is it - as with most bits of Chinglish you see around the city - a sign that the Chinese really don't give a damn whether they're understood or not.

On top of the world

Plan as much as you like but sometimes holidays just don’t quite meet your expectations. My winter break in Xinjiang was like that. I’d gone at the wrong time of year and the whole holiday was spent desperately chasing entertainment but just missing out on it while getting tired and frustrated in the process.

And sometimes, by accident, everything just works out.

All I wanted from Yunnan last month was some peace and quiet and fresh air. Oh, and maybe a chance to escape the intense humidity that builds up under Chengdu’s hazy grey skies.

The photo says it all really.

It was taken from my room at Tashi’s Lodge near Deqin right on the Yunnan-Tibet border. I’d not planned to go there at all but turned up having missed my bus back to Zhongdian and then stayed for four days either sat on this terrace reading a book in the sun or walking around Meili Snow Mountain.

The mountain is one of Rough Guide’s ‘Must see’ sights while in China – although you have to be extremely lucky to see it at its best during a cloudless sunrise. Still, even through the clouds that hung around it while I was there, you can see why it made the Rough Guide list.

(By the way, it’s also home to the world’s most southerly glacier. I spent three hours climbing up the mountain alongside this rather sad piece of dirty ice which is disappearing fast because of the changing climate. My Tibetan guide wistfully pointed to the spot way down the valley where he remembered the glacier reaching when he was a kid. Ten more years and it’ll be virtually gone.)

Many of the most memorable bits of the holiday were kind of accidental. Just looking out of the window of the bus on the way to a new place often made you gasp. The towering mountains! The plunging valleys! Rocky roads scratched into sheer rock faces at nose-bleeding heights. And blue blue skies that lift your spirit like no drug or booze ever can.