Vagabonding in Asia without a return ticket.

2009-12-07T16:41:00.003+08:00

On the 6th of December, I got up at three in the morning and went to the international airport. Christmas is coming up and I want to be home. So this blog is going into hibernation again. As before, I am going to edit my notes, organize my thousands of pictures, and post a polished version on my homepage, www.bitrot.de, in a few weeks. So, for now, farewell to my readers, I hope you'll follow my future adventures too!

I have spent most of 2009 on the road. All my travel reports in Europe, Asia, America, and Africa can be found here.

Table of contents of the blog archive:

2009-12-07T16:39:00.002+08:00

Wat Saket, the Golden Mount, is a steep and tall artificial hill north of the old town, with whitewashed staircases all the way up and a golden Chedi on top. A procession of monks in bright orange robes were marching up, beating a gong and chatting for a while, and then back down. The views from the top is great. People are praying, and there is a souvenir shop too. At the foot of the hill is a modern wat with a huge golden sitting Buddha. On the way there I was once again stalked by a nice guy who is a professional (check), has a brother in Frankfurt (check), Wat Saket is closed today (check) - and then he turned and left without another word.

I walked to the old downtown, where the palace is. There are no skytrains here, no massive structure like that could be built there. I used a river taxi on the Chao Praya instead. The city is unusually quiet, and there were colorful military parades, because this is king Bhumibol's birthday and the king is highly revered in Thailand. At night they had massive fireworks.

I had booked a bicycle tour with Spice Roads to the Bangkok Jungle, Bang Kra Jao. That's part of a peninsula formed by a loop of the Chao Praya, connected to the city only by a narrow land bridge. It's quite large, and even though it's very close to Bangkok's Sukhumvit business district, it's undeveloped. There are two short narrow roads, and a maze of narrow raised conrete walkways through dense forests and rice fields. There are a few small farm houses and a very small wat. Unbelievable that such a peaceful place can exist so close to the center of Bangkok. For once, I had a good well-maintained bicycle with the correct size, and a helmet. Very nice ride.

2009-12-07T15:59:00.004+08:00

This is my fifth visit to Bangkok and I have done all the usual sights before, most several times (see here and here). So I decided to visit the modern parts of Bangkok, like Silom and Sukhumvit where few tourists go, to see how the city works. It's quite modern and clean, lots of malls, office towers, concrete, steel, and glass, but also trees. When I saw this part of town for the first time 11 years ago it was a howling mass of traffic and unbelievably polluted, and they were constructing an elevated skytrain system. That system was now complete and running, and it's working. The tracks and stations use about ten times as much concrete as you'd think would be necessary, but it's fast, efficient, and clean. I could no longer see blue smog rising up from the streets. The Bangkok business district has still too much traffic and is certainly not beautiful, but it has come a long way to a modern working city.

Christmas ornaments are everywhere in this Buddhist country. Huge opulent dioaramas with six-meter trees, green, blue, gold, or silver; phone booth-sized snow-covered swiss chalets, Cinderella, Disney dwarves, elks, snowmen, angels, and gingerbread houses. I asked some people about this but they were very unclear about the notion of snow. Like in Europe, all these things are just symbols for the annual shopping season. No prisoners taken.

Pantip Plaza is a six-floor department store packed with electronic shops. It's like Tokyo's Akihabara district packed into a single very large building. Shabbier of course, and not as cutting-edge, but it's a lot of fun. And there are no orange-rober Buddhist monks browsing around in Akihabara. I also had the pleasure of meeting another Bangkok institution, the Common Gem Scammer. He walked up to me and gave an impeccable textbook presentation, well-dressed and polite (check), has a brother in Frankfurt (check), the place I am going to is closed today (check), please follow me (check) - but here I excused myself because the next stage of the script is fun but time-consuming. It involves following him to his uncle's one-time government gem auction where I can buy expensive worthless pieces of glass that I am supposed to be able to sell for twice that price at home. Right. I decide to spend the money on a fresh fish with Thai spices at the excellent Baan Khanita restaurant instead.

2009-12-04T07:58:00.001+08:00

A travel day in a long parade of buses. First a minibus to the Old Market bus stop in Siem Reap, then another minibus around the bloock to the VIP bus stop, then a big bus towards Poipet at the Thai border. Its brakes failed, and after rummaging around under the bus with very large wrenches and disassembling big chunks of metal found there, they found us yet another bus and we continued to the border. The dusty and bumpy dirt road we had used in 2006 was gone and replaced with a smooth paved freeway. Poipet is the only place in Cambodia where casinos are legal, and they are building two there, just past Cambodian immigration.

On the Thai side, another minibus brought us to the bus stop, where we were all summarily forgotten. Nobody seemed to know who goes where and in which bus, so I kept nagging everybody in uniform and got put on a minibus quickly. Thai freeways are wide and modern and we arrived in Bangkok quickly. I was dropped at a skytrain stop and found my way to the hotel I had reserved.

2009-12-02T22:32:00.003+08:00

I rented a tuk-tuk for the day and went out to Angkor, the old Khmer temples. I focused on temples that I had missed on my previous visit in 2006. The circular temple in the northeast in the middle of a pool, surrounded by four smaller pools, was dry in 2006 but now the pools were filled, turning a dusty ruin into an enchanted place. I visited several more remote temples and wandered their extensive mazes of corridors and halls. Some had collapsed but most were restored. I was amazed that there were almost no other tourists, I even got my ticket without waiting at all.

Of course I also briefly visited the three most famous temples of Angkor: Ta Prohm, the Bayon, and Angkor Wat. Ta Prohm was my favorite in 2006: dark buildings, some collapsed, rising from the forest, mysterious, serene, and majestic. Huge tree roots were gripping the temples like alien tentacles, as if nature was clawing back what was once a jungle. It doesn't just look like a Tombraider set, it was a Tombraider set. But Lara Croft won't return. Ta Prohm was tamed and had its mystery and atmosphere squeezed out. Most exterior rubble and low vegetation was cleared away, leaving the temples standing naked, and wooden walkways were built including roped-off platforms right in front of scenic spots for the tourists to stand on and have their picture taken. They are even building a new concrete Naga passage to the temple. Morons. I guess it looked good on paper.

The Bayon with its many towers adorned with huge sculpted Buddha faces facing in four directions, and its maze of dark passages underneath, is still what it was in 2006. It has to be explored to be appreciated, from a distance it looks like a mound of rubble but it's fantastic inside and justly famous.

The central complex, Angkor Wat, was the only temple filled with tourists and tour groups, but it was being renovated and the central temple pyramid was closed. Not much to see there and no views anymore. It was magic in 2006. If there was no Unesco to recognize places like Angkor, they'd have to set one up just for Angkor to give it its dues.

Siem Reap is where everyone is heading for hotels and restaurants. On my last visit, Siem Reap's Old Market district was just a dirt road lined with old French facades. Now it's paved, reducing its former small-town charm somewhat but they managed to give the place a pleasant hipness that can stand up to any western standard. It doesn't have much to do with Cambodian culture though. Touts offer massages, girls, boys, marijuana, and other pleasures for those inclined. I had an excellent fish amok instead (a Cambodian fish curry served in a coconut shell). There is no ice cream in Laos, but there is in Cambodia, and the Khmer fruit and Khmer spices flavors were excellent.

2009-12-02T22:30:00.001+08:00

Yesterday, when swimming, I could see Cambodia on the other side of the Mekong, so I decided to swing by Angkor on my way to Bangkok. A boat brought me to Ban Nakasang, and to a 14-hour bus to Siem Reap in Cambodia. The bus passed within 1km of Vietnam, and within 70km of Phnom Penh, but I resisted these temptations; I have been to both places before. We crossed the Mekong one last time before Kampung Cham and switched to a "private car", which turned out to be a Honda packed with six people, driving in total darkness for three hours on a road with animals, unlit bicycles and overloaded motorcycles, parked trucks, and people sitting in the middle of the street chatting. That last one got a rise out of our otherwise imperturbable driver, "suicidal" he said.

I liked Laos; life is still simple there compared to its neighbors, even though some places sold out to tourism to get some of those euros and dollars no matter what it does to their cities. And I did not see any US chain store in Laos at all; no KFC, no McDonalds, no 7-Eleven, and no Starbucks. What a relief.

2009-11-30T19:14:00.002+08:00

Rented one of those impractical bicycles and rode south to Don Khon island, across the French bridge. They built the bridge for the only railway ever operating in Laos; the remains of one engine are still rusting away at the bridge. Rode a narrow footpath through a wat and bamboo, palm, and banyan forests to Tat Somphamit, aka the Li Phi falls. They are not very high, the highest cascades less than ten meters, but a tremendous volume of Mekong water is crashing down at high speed with a loud roar through a rocky canyon. Besides two large falls, there are numerous smaller ones that keep the water light green and covered with white foam for a long way.

Next I went all the way to the southern end of Don Khon, where I found a small beach jutting out between the main flow of the Mekong and a rapidly flowing side channel that has washed out a quiet pool. Went swimming for a while. It's impossible to swim against the current - even long-tail boats slow to a crawl - but approaching sideways from the pool and grabbing a root while the water rushes past is fun. Although I have travelled on the Mekong before, I have never swum in it before. Southern Laos is hot and sunny but not humid, and the water is quite warm. Not bad for the last day of November.

2009-11-29T18:34:00.001+08:00

My guesthouse runs a ferry down the Mekong river. It takes 90 minutes to reach Don Det, another inhabited island of Si Phan Don. many fishermen are squatting on the tails of their little boats, casting their nets. Despite its width, the river flows quite quickly.

The village of Don Det is supremely laid back, strung out along a lone dirt path along the river bank. At the ferry landing, where the boats just run up to the beach, there are a number of guesthouses and restaurants; further down the path are small wooden and bamboo houses on stilts where families live and work in the space under their houses. There are a few backpackers, but everything is extremely quiet.

I wanted a peaceful place in Laos' countryside, and that's exactly what I got. My guesthouse is at the northern tip of the island, and my balcony with a hammock is built on stilts over the river bank. As I write this I am watching the sunset over the Mekong. There is no electricity in Don Det, and hence no hot showers, on the island; some places run a generator for a few hours in the evening. The place does look ready to party, but there were none when I was there.

I walked to other end of the island through fields being harvested by old women (picture), until I reached an old bridge from French colonial times that leads to the next island south, Don Khon (not to be confused with Don Khong). There is a small village on the other side, even quieter than Don Det. I got the impression that it attracts a much older crowd of tourists. I did check out the Sala Phaet hotel, which consists of some droopy neglected-looking huts on rafts in the river, for ten times the price of other guesthouses.

2009-11-28T19:26:00.001+08:00

A tuk tuk brought me back to the ferry landing in the morning, and I crossed to the other side of the Mekong in a long-tail boat. Long-tail boats are long narrow wooden boats with a sunroof, and an exposed car motor that drives a propeller at the end of a long drive shaft, which is lowered into the water and generates a lot of spray. Took a crowded bus to Hat Xai Khun, which is just a cluster of bamboo houses an hour down the Mekong. Another long-tail boat brought me to Muang Khong, an even tinier and even sleepier village on the island of Don Khong.

Don Khong is a member of Si Phan Don, the Four Thousand Islands in the middle of the river. In the rainy season, the Mekong expands to a width of 14 km here. There are not really 4000 islands here, but there are a few hundred. Don Khong is the largest and one of the few that are inhabited.

Muang Khong consists mostly of a single road along the river; the village extends for a few hundred meters. The riverbank is quite steep, and most of the few guesthouses have restaurant terraces on stilts overlooking the river. There is very little to do here other than read and walk. The island gets very rural very quickly outside the village; all houses there (and most in the village) are on stilts and made from wooden planks and bamboo. There are lots of animals. I tried to rent a bicycle but the only one with working brakes had a loose saddle, which promptly broke off when they tried to tighten it.

2009-11-28T19:24:00.002+08:00

The regular bus to Pakse in southern Laos would have taken 18 hours, and the VIP bus runs at night only, so I figured I might as well fly. In Pakse I connected to a songthaew (a brightly colored flatbed truck with benches and a roof) to Chamnpasak, which promptly left after waiting for an hour to fill up. At Champasak, we had to cross the Mekong using a ferry (really just a wooden raft bolted onto a pair of canoes), after another hour of waiting. Every thing here moves slowly and it's a welcome change after Vientiane. Met a guy with a chicken on his lap, and a cynical bitter Australian who has been travelling for 30 years.

Champasak is a sleepy one-road village along the Mekong. Most of the guesthouses and restaurants have terraces built on stilts on the bank of the river. People come here to see Wat Phu, a Khmer temple eight km towards the mountains. It's built on three levels connected by steep broken stone steps. The architecture is very similar to Angkor, and it's about as old, but far smaller and in worse shape. Most windows are bricked up, and the walls are crumbling, roofs have fallen, and scaffolds hold up leaning walls and columns. Yet there still is a buddha shrine. It feels like a Tombraider set after the final showdown. Impressive, in a country ravaged by wars where few buildings are older than a hundred years.

2009-11-26T19:19:00.003+08:00

Wat Si Saket is Vientiane's oldest temple. Arcades along the outer walls of the compound have hundreds of sitting buddha statues, and thousands of little ones in niches in the wall. The walls of the central wat with the buddha shrine are covered with murals, but they are crumbling and chipping, and in some places the bricks are exposed and in others repairs were done rather inexpertly. The temple is very peaceful and in a state of picturesque decay.

More than half of Talat Sao, Vientiane's morning market, is already gone, they are building an eight-story mall in its place. What's left is mostly clothes, electronics, and pirated CDs and DVDs. It appears that if you want to sell an mp3 player these days, you must ape Apple's logos and design, but never mind the quality. Talat Khua Din is Talat Sao's slummy little brother, complete with narrow dirt paths, shredded tarps, corrugated metal roofs, and a covered meat market with buzzing flies.

The National Museum has a few pots and tools, but otherwise mostly photos. If I get the gist of it right, it's about the courageous heroic patriotic comrades of the glorious victorious revolutionary Lao Liberation Army, which won the war against the fascist reactionary aggressive US imperialists and their puppets, traitors, savage murderous henchmen, and mercenaries, and Laos has been a communist paradise ever since. It's especially relentless on US imperialists and puppets. To be fair, the US brought enormous destruction and suffering to Laos - unexploded US bombs kill people even today - and the US did lose that war like every other war they ever started.

I went to numerous other temples, but the one that stood out was Pha That Luang (picture), a huge golden shrine with many spires. It's a symbol of Laos and reproduced on the 2000 kip note. I talked to a smiling young monk holding a parasol and a Lao/English dictionary.

2009-11-25T20:50:00.002+08:00

Vientiane, Laos' capital, runs along the Mekong river. The height of the river varies, and large sections of Vientiane's riverfront get flooded seasonally. A dam, freshly reinforced with sandbags, protects the city; children play soccer at the shore. The Mekong also divides Laos from Thailand. Late in the afternoon, I watched the sun set over the Thai side of the river.

Vientiane is not as pretty as Luang Prabang and not as peaceful as Vang Vieng, but it's a real live city that hasn't signed over its body and soul to tourism. The pizza parlors are there if you look for them, but the people who live and work here have other concerns and the tourists get lost in the crowds. Vientiane is quiet enough to be pleasant, yet alive and humming like an Asian city and capital should be.

Patuxay, the vitory gate, is said to resemble the Arc de Triomphe in Paris but doesn't, at all. It looks imposing from a distance. But from a closer distance, it appears even less impressive, like a monster of concrete. The preceding sentence is a verbatim quote from a large sign mounted on the gate. Honesty is a virtue... Inside, the gate is packed with souvenir vendors.

Vientiane used to be a French colonial capital, and French language is visible everywhere. And they have good honest Laotian food. I'll stay here a little.

2009-11-24T19:58:00.001+08:00

The minibus took six hours to Vang Vieng, a small town at the foot of the northern mountains. The bus was packed but I snagged the front seat. We went over two passes at 1000 and 1400 meters with views above the clouds. The mountain scenery is beautiful - craggy karst peaks all around us, forests, lots of banana trees, and small bamboo villages full of children.

Vang Vieng is an unassuming town with few tourist sights that stretches along the Nam Song river. The big thing here is rafting and tubing on the river. Sadly, an alien invasion force has crash-landed in the center and is building big concrete hotels with no consideration or respect for the old town. All around them, nearly identical restaurants with pseudo-western food are springing up. I rented a nice quiet bungalow at the edge of town, but soon the cancer will spread to the whole town and it will be just like Luang Prabang, except ugly. LP, at least, is pretty.

Several swaying bamboo bridges cross the river to Dom Khang island, which is still green and quiet, with just a few bars and huts overlooking the river and the dramatic mountain background. I had real Lao food for the first time: pizza. It's difficult to ruin a pizza recipe but the restaurant was totally up to the task. At the next table, a group of girls were ordering, quote, a jug of vodka, end quote. At least the menu didn't list happy pizza or happy drinks, where the "happy" indicates marijuana, meth, or cocaine. I wonder whether the monks at the temple here are sometimes treated to happy alms.

2009-11-23T20:03:00.003+08:00

Early in the morning, the monks from the temple went through the village chantin g and collecting alms. Returned to Luang Prabang by boat, minibus, and songthaew. The minibus managed to run out of gas 250m before the gas station. This time I didn't bother to reserve a room in Luang Prabang, I just went to a cluster of guesthouses and picked a nice one.

Luang Prabang's National Museum, and former royal residence, is forgettable. It's modern and quite bare and sterile, except for the boxy reception room with red walls with gold trim and mirror mosaics. The royal apartment is almost depressing, by place at home is fancier than that. This king must have come down in the world.

2009-11-23T20:00:00.003+08:00

In the morning I was woken by roosters. I was planning to stay only one night in Muang Ngoi, but I decided to enjoy the quiet village life one more day before returning to the cities. Late in thge morning I went with ba few others up the river to Sopjam, a native village that is just a cluster of bamboo houses on wooden stilts. Palm trees and a backdrop of green mountains create a very pleasant atmosphere. They make those narrow Laotian scarves here that are sold in Luang Prabang's night market. Very colorful. The village is full of playing children; families here have four or five children.

We visited a cave, but since the guide brought only a weak flashlight and a little candle, there wasn't much to see. The reral attraction was the narrow path from the river bank through the dense forest up to the mouth of the cave anyway.

We stopped three times to catch fish with a net. The result was one small fish, and a handful of smaller ones. We built a fire on the beach and grilled them. That must have been the freshest fish I ever had, and it tasted great, but it was far too little.

2009-11-23T19:42:00.005+08:00

It takes three hours by minibus to the village of Nong Khiaw northeast of Luang Prabang, and another hour in one of the narrow, long Laotian boats up the Nam Ou river, to reach Muang Ngoi. The river is winding its way through densely forested mountains with steep rock faces.

Muang Ngoi is a small peaceful village that consists of a single dirt street lined with small houses built from bamboo and wood, with just a few brick buildings. A long stairway leads up there from the baot landing, where many of the narrow boats are moored. I was staying at the Phetdavanh guest house; it, too, has a wooden frame and bamboo mat walls. There is a nice upstairs terrace with hammocks. It's very quiet in the village - there are almost no phones, no Internet, and my guest house is one of the few houses with electricity. Most others run a generator for a couple of hours in the evening, so the village is very dark.

2009-11-20T20:13:00.000+08:00

Luang Prabang's small old town has a large number of Buddhist temples, all of which are active with many orange-robed monks about. Most are small, but Wat Xieng Thong is an impressive large complex with not only the usual large hall that houses the Buddha shrine, but also a smaller hall with a huge golden hearse for kings, and numerous smaller shrines and living quarters for the monks. Their orange laundry hangs out to dry between the shrines. The walls, inside and out, are covered with gold, gold painting, and glittering glass mosaics.

Took a tour bus to Kuang Si, a park with a large waterfall that drops from a tall hill, and then through a series of wide cascades between turquoise pools. Very beautiful. There are lots of trails in the forest, and viewpoints to watch the falls. There was an annoying loud American on the bus that kept dropping names of all the unexciting places he's been to in Asia and his boring adventures there. He has seen people on the roof of his overcrowded bus, yawn.

Luang Prabang is very pretty and avoids all the mistakes that have turned so many other Asian cities into swirling maelstroms of honking traffic and faceless office towers, but it sold its ssoul to tourism. One hears a lot more German than Lao in the streets, and it's packed with guesthouses, tour operators, and fancy restaurants. It's difficult to find Lao food, it's just an afterthought tacked on to the end of the pizza, burger, and spaghetti sections of the menus (under "Lao cousins" in one place I was eating at). Tomorrow I'll escape to a place without Internet, phones, cell towers, and (most of the day) electricity.

2009-11-19T18:47:00.001+08:00

I have visited almost all countries in southeast Asia, but not Lao, until now. Luang Prabang is Lao's cultural center. As much as I liked Australia, it's good to be back in Asia, away from the perfectly organized affluence and "slippery when wet" signs. Luang Prabang is rather touristy, I saw almost as many Western tourists as locals on the streets and there are guesthouses everywhere. But it's also peaceful and quiet, with old low houses, narrow streets, very little traffic, no modern buildings, and only a handful of souvenir shops. Small temples are scattered throughout the old town, and Buddhist monks in their orange robes are out on the streets.

Luang Prabang is built along the shores of the mighty Mekong river, which slowly flows down the length of Laos until it emerges in a huge delta in southern Vietnam, where I had gone out in a boat for a few days last year. Long narrow wooden boats are loaded by boatmen carrying huge bags on their shoulders, walking up narrow planks to their boats while tourists watch from restaurant terraces that overlook the Mekong.

2009-11-19T08:18:00.002+08:00

Last day in Sydney, mopping up a few sights before my flight leaves in the evening. I picked a ferryboat at random and went out to the western suburbs, passing under the Harbour Bridge. The area becomes scenic very quickly, small houses perched on the hills around the western bay with numerous little coves and marinas. Sydney Tower is a great vantage point to see just how green and suburban sydney is - the ocean, bays, beaches, parks, and forests are everywhere. Only the CBD doesn't look good from the Tower: you only see the air conditioners on the roofs of nondescript highrises, and the entire Harbour Area - the jewel of Sydney - is mostly hidden behind other towers.

They run tours of the Sydney Opera every 30 minutes, but few tours include both concert halls and the drama theaters because of ongoing shows. My 12:30 tour did, though. The opera building is rather more impressive from the outside than the inside because little of the dramatic roof is visible, but it's very modern and airy, with views of the water everywhere, in a Sixties kind of way. Sydney Opera is a World Heritage and deservedly one of the most recognized building on earth.

Also checked out museums (not as many as I would have liked), and walked about town. Itwas another warm day, over 30 degrees C; summer is near. At the same time they have Christmas trees everywhere, and they are building a huge Christmas tree with a steel trunk and branches and plastic needles in Martin Square in the middle of the CBD. Fairly good imitation though. Christmas is less than five weeks from now.

I am writing this at Bangkok airport. Finally, back in Asia! I'll catch a flight to Lao soon.

2009-11-17T19:44:00.003+08:00

Took a ferry to Manly, a suburb that is part of Sydney's Northern Beaches. Corso, the main street, is short and connects the bay ferry terminal on one side of town with the ocean on the other side.

They have a former army reserve with a quarantine station at the North Head, which is opposite the South Head I had visited two days earlier. Both form the gateway of Sydney Bay to the ocean. The army is gone, and the area is now a nature reserve with a bushwalk trail. Saw only two other visitors.

The Northern Beaches are much quieter and more difficult to reach than the Eastern Beaches. Saw only a few surfers. The final stop was Palm Beach, a crescent of sand overlooked by very expensive weekend mansions.

Tomorrow evening, after a final few hours in Australia, I'll be on my way to Luang Prabang in Lao.

2009-11-16T19:48:00.002+08:00

Checked out The Rock. It used to be a dangerous part of town a hundred years ago but its old brick warehouses got remodeled into expensive restaurants, cafes, and galleries. Some of its alleys are more modern redevelopments that pay less attention to the old style, but it's still a very nice neighborhood in a very prominent location at the Harbor Bridge. Sydney loves its waterfront and puts promenades, piers, and parks there; unlike, say, Paris or Seattle where they like to close off the waterfront for freeways.

Newtown is another neighborhood, west of the CBD. Its main street is King St, lined with unassuming old buildings with lots of little cafes, restaurants, and second-hand bookstores. But like in many modern cities, the very nice left side of the street is separated from the very nice right side of the street by four lines of heavy traffic.

2009-11-15T19:09:00.003+08:00

Yesterday was mountains, today is beaches. Sydney has countless beaches. Started at Bronte Beach, one of Sydney's Eastern Beaches facing the ocean, and walked to Bondi Beach, Sydney's most famous beach. There is path that connects them all, and in November there is an event called Sculpture By The Sea where perhaps a hundred sculptures are placed along the ocean shore walk. There is a giant straw out in the sea, plastic eyeballs embedded in a rock wall, a wicker and a brass horse, and many other figures and abstract shapes. The path is quite busy. Bondi Beach itself has become a victim of its beauty. There is lots of traffic and expensive hotels and restaurants. Whales were breaking through bthe waves out on the ocean, chased by small tourist boats.

Also saw several bay beaches. They don't have the dramatic rock cliffs. At South Head, where Sydney Bay opens to the ocean, is a viewpoint called The Gap with a panorama of both an ocean beach and a bay beach. Went swimming at a less crowded beach near Botany Bay in the south.

2009-11-15T19:08:00.002+08:00

Blue Mountain National Park begins 60km west of Sydney. It's very accessible: a six-lane highway, double train tracks, and lots of buses connect Sydney to the park. It can get quite busy. All the viewpoints and trails in the park are tamed - perfect roads lead there, there is parking, fences, guardrails, and stone steps. I almost expected coin turnstyles.

The first stop was Wentworth Falls viewpoint. The Blue Mountains are a deeply cut plateau, with steep rock faces down to hilly and densely forested valleys. The falls drop into a circular canyon with a pool at the bottom, like an Aztec cenote except no princes are sacrificed here.

Passed through the main town of the Blue Mountains, Katoomba, a sleepy little town with restaurants and galleries, on the way to Echo Point. It has a similar fantastic panorama of canyons and valleys, and a view of the Three Sisters. They are three rock pinnacles off to one side. Another lookout, Evans Viewpoint nnear the town of Blackheath, has similar views and the Bridal Veil Falls, a thins but very tall waterfall; the water reaches the bottom only as a fine mist. The final stop was Sublime Point, with a view of the opposite side of the Three Sisters. It was late afternoon by this time, and mists started to roll in. They are very blue, giving the mountains their name.

2009-11-14T20:25:00.002+08:00

Ok, promise, Sydney will be the last distraction in this blog before the action returns to Asia. I arrived in the early afternoon and had time for a walk around Sydney Harbor.

Sydney Opera's roof is every bit as extravagant as it looks on the postcards. It's different from every angle. The waterfront between the opera and the ferry poiers in the middle of Sydney Harbor houses numerous cafes with outdoor seating, and various speedboat operators. The opposite side has green spaces, street musicians on the waterfront promenade, and great views of the opera. Behind the promenade, there is an old district called The Rock with old brick warehouses that have been converted to trendy restaurants and hotels. It's all very inviting.

Sydney Harbor Bridge is a massive structure looming from the western side of the harbor. There is a walkway on the eastern side with fantastuic views of the harbor. Unlike Melbourne and Hobart, Sydney is an outdoor place where people enjoy sitting out in the sun. It's already my favorite Australian city of the few I have seen so far.

It's very strange to be here while summer is coming up, people go out to the beaches and enjoy the warm weather, and prepare for Christmas.

2009-11-14T19:33:00.004+08:00

Took a tour to Mt. Field because there is no other good way of getting there. The driver proudly pointed out attractions on the way there: a zinc smelter, a paper mill, and most importantly, a Cadbury chocolate factory. The first stop in the Mt. Field National Park was Russell Falls, a large waterfall at the end of a nature trail through dense rain forest. We saw several pademelons, which are small furry animals that look like stubby pocket-sized kangaroos with dark fur.

They have a private wildlife sanctuary there where injured and orphaned animals are raised and later released into the wild. This is my chance to see all the weird fauna Australia is famous for because they can't hide from my camera here. The menu included:

Kangaroos watch idly from a distance. Can't have a wildlife sanctuary without kangaroos.
Wallabies are like kangaroos but smaller.
Tasmanian devils are cute black furry creatures that don't move a whole lot.
Quolls look like black cats with white spots.
Platypuses look like beavers with flippers and a soft gray duck bill, but it took a long time to see it. They are mammals that lay eggs.
Possums are beautiful golden creatures that look like a cross between a cat and a rabbit.
Koalas are the same impractical slow-moving teddy bears with big noses that I have seen the day before.
Wombats (picture) are a sleeker variant of teddy bear with long claws, but the baby wombat we saw was just cuddly.
Corellas look like parakeets and could impeccably enunciate "hello".

And no, I didn't make any of these up. We concluded the day on Mt. Wellington, with a fantastic view of a few slices of Hobart through gaps in the clouds.

2009-11-11T14:14:00.002+08:00

Did Hobart's museum circuit during the short time window when things open here. The Maritime Museum has all sorts of models and items used during Australia's colonization; the Penitentiary Chapel is a church on the upper floor and solitary confinement cells - some only a little larger than coffins - for British convicts, and the Tasmanian Museum shows aborigine art, animals, and various galleries. They are all very well done. Whenever the subject of history comes up in Australia, it's all about the aborigine genocide and abuse of convicts. Australia is doing its best to educate and atone.

Also went to Richmond, a historic village north of Hobart. I managed to find a tourist bus that goes there because there is virtually no public transport in Tasmania; you really can't properly visit this place without a car. Richmond is very small, and everything there is cute. Cute little wooden houses in cute gardens overflowing with colorful fragrant flowers, cute little souvenir shops and cafes, even a cute little colonial penitentiary. If they hadn't poured four lanes of asphalt through town it would look like a toy city. Which they have there, too: a scale model of Hobart. The bus goes through green fields, hills, and a few vineyards.

2009-11-10T18:21:00.002+08:00

The plane from Melbourne to Hobart on the island of Tasmania takes a little over an hour. I am staying at Battery Point Manor in a huge room with a view of the ocean. It's in a quiet neighborhood where people frame their driveways with flower beds, right above Salamanca Square at Princes Wharf, a row of nice restaurants and galleries in a curving row of old houses. It's all very pleasant and relaxed, and spring is in the air with birds singing and fragrant flowers blooming.

There are more restaurants at the piers and docks further west, and the main part of town begins right behind them. I had very fresh fish and chips there. Downtown is much busier, but Hobart has a population of only 200,000 so it still has a small-town feel. Most buildings are low and old, with only a few ugly blocky highrises marring the skyline. They have several beautifully landscaped little parks too.

Like in Melbourne, the world comes to an end every day at 18:00. Everything except a few restaurants on Salamanca closes, Hobart becomes a ghost town, and the Internet goes to sleep for another Australian night.

2009-11-10T18:19:00.003+08:00

After a final look at the Twelve Apostels in the morning, we went to Otway, Australia's westernmost rain forest. They have a nature trail through the forest, dense with underbrush, huge ferns, tall trees covered in moss, and fire hoses. It's so dense that it would be impossible to move away from the path. Birds were singing. I let two chattering Japanese girls pass who had no ears or eyes for the forest, and had the place mostly to myself. They have a 600m steel canopy walkway, with a long cantilever section and a viewtower with a spiral staircase winding around a tall concrete pole. The walkway is wide and one can look through the steel lattice of the floor. The forest is intensely vertical from up there.

After several more viewpoints we left the Great Ocean Road. (They pronounce it like Gradation Road.) At one point we turned off into a small eucalyptus forest to see Koalas. They live high up in the trees, and eat only eucalyptus leaves, and only those of 10 of 600 eucalyptus species. Eucalyptus trees are Mother Nature's way of placing barrels of gasoline in the forest: they shed their fuzzy bark in the winter, not their leaves, and their leaves are oily and quite flammable too. Their seeds require forest fires to germinate. But they aren't very nutritious so the Koalas move very little and sleep 20 hours per day. Saw a Koala mother with her baby. It's very sunny and warm, 32 degrees C.

2009-11-08T17:55:00.002+08:00

The Great Ocean Road is Victoria's main attraction. The coastline is very rugged and consists of steep limestone cliffs, washed out by the ocean so that a number of tiny islands and pillars have remained standing out in the ocean. The deep blue ocean and sky, the yellow limestone cliffs, the white surf, and the green low vegetation on top make it very beautiful. Lookouts with little parking lots are strategically placed along the shore. Since I was on a tourist bus we stopped at all of them.

The coast is called Shipwreck Coast, some 600 ships have sunk here over the past 200 years. It appears that most sailors died in part because they couldn't be bothered to learn to swim. The bays with the lookouts have names like Bay of Islands, Bay of Martyrs (aborigines killed by colonists), and London Bridge, a double rock bridge that has, alas, collapsed a few years back. We also went to a beautiful secluded beach ringed by steep sandstone cliffs. The sand is hot but the water is very cold. In the evening we went to the Twelve Apostles, a set of eight tall rocks in the sea. Very beautiful. The sunset was just a gradual darkening though, the rocks lost their definition and mist rolled in.

2009-11-08T15:34:00.003+08:00

The Grampian Mountains are west of Melbourne, just past the Pyrenees. Australia is almost completely flat so they have to economize - anything you can't throw a tennis ball over is a mountain, and the Grampians peak at 1167 meters. The road there is green farmland, site of Australia's Gold Rush in the 1850s. The road passes through the town of Ararat, made the home of the criminally insane by a big prison, now closed. Otherwise it's famous for a pedestrian crossing that leads from one pub to the other; fame is relative. And they play a special kind of football, a mixture of rugby (kick a lemon-shaped ball), Irish football (kick a soccer ball), and an aborigine ball game (kick a possum, now endangered).

The bus passes by a number of lookouts with views over the valleys, lakes, and surrounding farmland. Also followed a trail to the McKenzie waterfall. There is a cultural center with excellent displays describing how the British colonists killed virtually all aborigines. Saw many kangaroos hopping through the fields and forests. At one point on the trail, a kangaroo was looking at me from behind a bush, waiting for me to pass, then hopped up to the trail. Kangaroos are big animals, you can see the muscles working hard when it's thumping along on the trail. It's not especially graceful. They also have a couple of little extinct volcanos, now overgrown with trees. No hot acid lakes and boiling sulphur here, like on Java.

2009-11-06T19:18:00.001+08:00

Ventured beyond downtown: Brunswick St in Fitzroy has lots of little offbeat shops, restaurants, galleries, and bookstores, and is not at all glossy like the central business district. It's fun to walk and browse here. If they could only lose a couple of lanes of the busy Brunswick St, and maybe add a few head shops, and it would look like Haight St in San Francisco.

St. Kilda is one of Melbourne's beach suburbs. It's fairly low-key - there are some restaurants, a couple of ugly hotels, a narrow beach, a long pier to a boat harbor with Melbourne's skyline as a backdrop, and a quiet residential neighborhood. No souvenir shops or other annoyances. The place is quiet and pleasant. When looking out on the ocean, I had to think for a second to remember which ocean it is this week.

The Sofitel hotel downtown has the most scenic toilet I have ever seen. It's on the 35th floor, and one wall is a huge picture window with a great view of Melbourne. Melbourne's shops close down at 18:00, as if Melbourne was some small-time village. They need to work on that.

2009-11-05T20:39:00.002+08:00

At the travel agency they told me that the spire at the Fed Square looks just like the Eiffel Tower. Boys and girls, if you think that this thing looks anything like the Eiffel Tower, you need to get out more! Fed Square is a somewhat sterile cluster of museums, boring boxy buildings with funky facades. A group of boys with clipboards interviewed me about my opinion of it. I tried to be polite, but the real heart of Melbourne is not here (that was one of their questions) but in the numerous little alleys where people go and cars do not, where little shops and cafes attract an easygoing crowd, even on a Thursday afternoon.

The southern side of the Yarra River is all developed with a riverwalk, many pretty much interchangeable restaurants, and the Crown Towers that house a casino with a few smallish roulette tables and acres of slot machines. These are just LCD screens with stop buttons and a coin slot, running DOS software. The Eureka Tower nearby has great city panoramas from its 88th floor.

The Queen Victoria Market is a large covered market selling clothes, fruit and vegetables, and some souvenirs. What a difference to an Asian market - it's clean, modern, orderly, no hustlers, wide aisles, airy and bright. In other words, boring. I bought a power adapter; Australia has the second-weirdest power sockets on the planet. (Top honors go to the UK, of course.) I also spent a few pleasant hours in Melbourne's botanical garden.

2009-11-04T16:51:00.004+08:00

Editorial intermission:

If you want to be really pedantic about geography, you might wonder what Melbourne is doing in a blog about Asia. Melbourne is not, in fact, in Asia but on a former penal colony off the coast of Papua New Guinea. At least, when you look my way from Europe, you'll have to see through Asia's exhaust fumes. I figured that if Indonesia wants me out, I might as well use the opportunity to visit a place whose distance to home has previously always outweighed my interest in it. I'll blithely continue to post to the hereinasia blog. Even if I had known that I'd spend some time here, I probably wouldn't have found a blog name like hereinasiaandmaybeaustraliatoo sufficiently catchy. Bear with me on this for a couple of weeks or so... No worries mate.

2009-11-04T16:49:00.003+08:00

Never had so much opportunity to chat with customs officials as today, arriving in Melbourne. They wanted to know what I do, what's in my backpack, and how I can afford to visit so many places. They browsed through my pictures to verify my statements. Apparently Bali is a major source of illegal drugs.

That, and figuring out Melbourne's metro system which is very good at keeping salient information secret, such as what lines exist and how to find the right train and which train stops at which stations, took most of the morning. The afternoon I spent walking in Melbourne's rather compact downtown.

At first sight, Melbourne feels like a large Canadian city - a clone of a large US city, but with a soul. There are highrises, a regular grid of wide busy streets, the usual faceless modern chain stores, and malls; but also grand old facades in the mix, little alleys with cool restaurants and little shops, and trees. There is a small Chinatown and an even smaller Greek town. Nobody here carries a basket with pineapples on their heads though. I miss Indonesia already...

2009-11-03T17:56:00.003+08:00

The Ulu Watu temple is at the southern end of Bali. It's small but very scenically perched at the edge of a huge cliff that falls down vertically to a foaming ocean. Admission includes a rental sarong. As before, the temple can't be visited but the real attraction are the views of the ocean anyway. There are signs everywhere warning not to wear sunglasses or necklaces because the monkeys living here will steal them.

Further west, there is a little village nestled on the hillside overlooking the rocky Suluban Beach. This is a surfer mecca, and there are lots of surfers out in the waves, waiting for a big wave that never seems to arrive. It looks very peaceful and a little futile but I am told this place is too dangerous for any but the most experienced surfers.

Today is my 30th day in Indonesia, and the day my visa expires. Extensions are not possible so I'll flee the country tonight.

2009-11-02T18:48:00.003+08:00

Tanah Lot is a pair of Hindu temples built on large rocks in the sea. The larger one is reached by wading out through shallow water on the lee side of the rock, while the surf crashes on the rock at the other sides. They have a holy spring in a cave at the bottom, where everybody gets sprinkled with holy water and gets some rice stuck to the forehead. That's your ticket to walk up the stairs to the temple, except that stair doesn't go very far because the temple at the top is closed to visitors.

The other rock is similar but much smaller, and instead of wading there is a rock bridge. It's closed too. They also have a cave with a big holy snake, but the cave but the roof is very low, maybe 80cm, and there is lots of garbage. Several local tourists wanted their picture taken with me. My driver says I look like a movie actor, maybe he is looking for a bigger tip? Julia Roberts is currently filming just east of here, at Ubud.

Had a great Indonesian lunch, with bakwan dumplings and "sicko juice". That's spirulina, banana, apple, and papaya; deep green. The other meaning of the word is not known here.

2009-11-01T16:32:00.002+08:00

After hurrying about hectic Bali for a few days, I decided to conclude my visit to Indonesia on the quiet little Gili Air island just off the coast of Lombok, the next major island past Bali. Perama runs a boat there from Perambai in Bali. There are no piers in Perambai, Lombok, or any of the three Gili islands; the tour begins by wading out to a small boat, which transfers passengers to the larger Perama boat that runs between Bali and Lombok, and calls on the Gilis as well. In China, they would call this kind of boat a junk - not very large, all wood, with a lower enclosed deck and a sun deck on top. It's a very relaxing four-hour trip. Then a dinghi transfer to Gili Air, wading onto the beach, and I am in a tropical paradise.

Gili air is the opposite of Kuta. It's very small, one can walk all around it in an hour and a half. There are many trees, little scattered villages, and a string of restaurants and hotels right at the southeast beach. They have little bamboo platforms, some with thatched roofs, seating (or should I say reclining) four, directly on the beach with a great view. Most of the buildings are made from bamboo and straw. Bricks, mortar, and metal are rarely used. There are no cars or motorcycles on the Gilis, and no asphalt; everything is done by bicycles and horse carts. The only sounds are the surf, cicadas, geckos (how can such a small creature make such loud calls?), roosters, and other animals.

It's all exceedingly pastoral and unspoiled, and meets the stereotype of an ultra-relaxed tropical island exactly. Not much happens here, ever. There is an Internet cafe but it was closed because the family was preparing for a wedding. I was staying in the wonderful Coconut Cottages, generally agreed to be the best hotel on Gili Air.

I went on a snorkeling trip by boat that stops at various coral reefs around all three Gili islands. The boats here are narrow with two outriggers held by curved struts. Just sitting on the boat and watching the outriggers slice through the water is incredibly relaxing. The corals are good, but not as good as on Pulau Weh in Sumatra; large swaths have died and look like boneyards. But there is an incredible variety of fish, and we saw turtles swimming as well.

Snorkeling was best on Gili Air. The next day I went out with Lee, another backpacker I met on the way to Lombok. He was planning to continue to Komodo to see the dragons, but got into a really bad head-on truck collision so he - wisely - decided to recuperate on Gili Air. We just walked out into the water where the beach restaurants cluster, and the snorkeling was just fantastic. The corals are better there than any of the others I had seen, although still not as good as on Pulau Weh. But the number and variety of fish was much greater. I found myself in the middle of huge shoals of glittering silver and blue little fish, sometimes swimming randomly but then, as if on a signal, aligning in one direction and racing away. Others have white, black, and yellow tiger stripes, or a rainbow of hues. And we saw several turtles. They don't mind if you dive down to watch them, but turtles can move very swiftly underwater. A few dolphins were playing at some distance from the beach.

Vendors walk down the beach with big baskets of fruit and souvenirs on their heads. We bought pineapples from one lady, who slowly set down her load, pulled out a big curved knife, and started to artfully carve the pineapples in the spiral fashion they use everywhere here to remove the skin.

The fish on the island is fantastic. They catch the fish right there and put them on display in the evening. You pick one and they'll barbecue it for you. Delicious.
But most of the time I was busy doing nothing, sitting on the beach or in a hammock reading a book. The days blended into each other and the little attention I had been paying to things like the day of the week was fading entirely.

Eventually I had to return to Bali because the 30 days my visa allowed me to stay were expiring. I was wading out to my boat for the last time to get to Lombok, where a horse cart and then a minibus took me to Senggigi. The road winds up and down the hills at the shore, with many scenic views of sandy beaches. The west coast of Lombok is not unlike California's Big Sur, but much nicer - much denser vegetation, large palm tree forests, curving sandy beaches, and occasional thatched bamboo huts. The road is narrow and carries very little traffic. Near Senggigi, there are a number of beach resorts. I was the only passenger on the Perama boat to Bali. (I won't ever use Perama again though. They do a big slow loop to touch all their offices, stretching what should have been four hours to nine. It's very easy to get onward travel on the Gilis with other outfits.)

2009-10-27T19:59:00.001+08:00

Quiet day. I have spent so much time in buses, hurrying from one place to the next, that I thought a rest day was in order. I went to the beach, and walked for several hours through rice fields and little villages. They have lots of roadside shrines, mostly consisting of a little empty throne and some offerings of fruit. Bali is nominally Hindu, but there are a lot of animistic gods and sprits to appease as well. I didn't ask if they did some controlled studies to verify whether the fruit voodoo works or is just a waste of fruit. Finally I went back to the hotel and spent the afternoon at the pool. Fragrant Frangipani blossoms float on the water, and the staff brings cool juice. I managed to catch up on reading a little.

Tomorrow I'll be off to some small islands off the coast of Lombok. I'll probably drop off the Internet for a while.

2009-10-26T21:23:00.001+08:00

Ubud is a town north of Denpasar, close to the center of the island. It's known as an artist's village. I went there by shuttle, motorcycle, and finally a bemo (a minivan with benches in the back) all to myself. Ubud is a quiet village with none of the hustle of Kuta. It's very green and all the houses are low and unassuming. They are all either souvenir shops selling locally made trinkets, or galleries for paintings or wood sculptures, which amounts to the same thing. A few are tourist restaurants but I found an Indonesian one. They have a market too, which is a labyrinth of souvenir stalls. But the town is so nice and pleasant to walk in that I'll forgive it for the rampant souvenir racket.

They have a Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary at the edge of Ubud. True to its name, lots of monkeys sit on trees and on the paths, and some were enjoying themselves by jumping into a small pool to the delight of the tourists. There is a temple as well, and a number of very scenic paths leading to a river through the jungle. Lots of Banyan trees here; they have big bundles of vine-like roots instead of a trunk. The bridge, stones, and the many statues and sculptures in the park are overgrown with moss. The park feels like a Tomb Raider set.

There are trails south of the park that pass through a few villages and rice fields, but the rice fields here look pretty much like the rice fields on Java, so after a couple of hours walking I return to the hotel by motorcycle. The driver doesn't know it and I don't have the address so I navigate him with my GPS receiver.

2009-10-25T21:15:00.001+08:00

I have been warned about Kuta. It's a tourist trap gone wild, with big ugly malls and resort hotels, souvenir shops, brand clothes stores, fast food, billboards, and taxi drivers yelling "transport". It's also quite modern and clean. But this is also Bali, and a smile and some friendly words quickly make easy friends. And to escape the hustle of Kuta, I had chosen a guesthouse some distance inland that was very nice, with a shaded pool in a nice garden.

The beach of Kuta stretches from Kuta to the neighboring town of Legian. It's a wide stretch of white sand. There are many sunbathers, surfers and bodysurfers (although the waves aren't high), and food and drink vendors in the shade of the trees at the edge of the beach. I chatted for a while with a surfing instructor; there is much competition but little business at the moment. It's unusually hot,

2009-10-25T10:49:00.002+08:00

It's three km climbing a steep dirt path up the forested slopes from the minibus parking lot in Ijem to the top of the crater rim of the Ijen volcano. A stream of workers carrying a pole with a basket full of big sulphur bricks at each end over their shoulders. I talked to Suleiman, going back up with empty baskets; he carries as much as 100kg! I tried a 70kg basket and could barely walk straight, but they go up and down the mountain with this load. Many have big scars on their shoulders.

There is a large green lake of hot acid in the crater of the volcano. Near the surface steam comes from crevices at high pressure, carrying sulphur. The crater wall is yellow there all the way to the top.

I climbed down the extremely steep rocky trail to a place near the bottom of the crater where I could watch the workers. The trail is barely discernible, just a big rock face where the workers carry they 80-100kg loads up. For me it was hard enough doing it without any load. I saw one guy doing it barefoot, and another whose legs were shaking. They get 30 kilorupees per load carried up there and down the volcano, about two euro. They do it two or three times a day. Nobody seems to be over 30.

From my viewpoint I could see workers hacking the condensating sulphur into big bricks that get loaded into the baskets. Sulphur is yellow when cooled, and orange when it's still liquid. The steam is poisonous and cannot be breathed, but they stand right where it comes from the ground; I heard a lot of coughing. Eventually I had to run away from a big cloud coming my way; breathing through a scarf doesn't stop the sulphur.

If you sometimes don't like your job, imagine doing theirs.

The minibus took us to Ketapang harbor, where I caught a ferry. I am now on Bali.

2009-10-25T10:46:00.002+08:00

A jeep picked me up at 3:45 to take me to the top of Mt. Penanjakan. The view of the sunrise is fantastic there. Much of the large crater with the Bromo volcano in the middle and its white plume are spread out before us. The bottom of the crater is with a sea of fog from which the volcano and a few other peaks rise. There are maybe 50 other jeeps and vans parked there, and the viewpoint platform is packed with other tourists, who enthusiastically take snapshots of the sunrise with a lightning storm of flashes.

On the way down up I couldn't see much because of the fog and the dust, but the return trip revealed just how steep, deeply rutted, and close to the edge of the cliff the road up Penanjakan is. The jeep trip passes the volcano so I paid it another visit. I didn't have it to myself like the day before though; hundreds of tourists had the same idea and lots of guides with horses were expecting them. A long caravan of tourists trundled up the path to the volcano's crater rim. Because of the fog and dim yellow sun, the scene had a slightly surreal Lawrence of Arabia feel.

Took a minibus to Probolinggo, then another to Ijen, then yet another because the previous one broke down. The distance is small but takes six hours anyway because when the road reaches the mountains, the road is more potholes than asphalt, and big trucks very slowly crawl up the mountain, sometimes two side by side, passing at 5 km/h. Much of East Java is a series of national parks like Bromo and Ijen, which is the easternmost one. There are lots of Arabica coffee plantations on the way. After arrival, I could just barely see a nearby waterfall before sunset at 17:20.

2009-10-22T19:40:00.001+08:00

I woke up in my bungalow the next morning with a view of the Gunung Bromo. This is a small volcano in the middle of a vast crater ten kilometers across, and my bungalow is just meters from the edge of the caldera. There is a road from the hotel to the bottom of the crater. It's the world's biggest ashtray, filled with dark gray sand and a few sparse patches of brown grass. Gunung Bromo is an ash-gray mountain with its top blown off. A steep path, and then a stairway, lead up to the rim of its crater.

Bromo's crater is a few hundred meters across, and looks exactly like a crater is supposed to look like: crevices run down the sides to the bottom of the bowl, where craggy canyons can be seen through the mist. Gunung Bromo is an active volcano, and alternates between a single wisp of steam rising from the canyons, and eruoptions of steam that fill the crater with gray fog slightly tinged with yellow before it rises up in a big cloud like from a smoke stack. A strong smell of sulphur wafts up like memories of highschool chemistry classes. There is no lava.

It's possible to walk around the rim but the path is very narrow between steep slopes, and the crumbling ash makes it unsafe. Since I had no urgent desire to fall into an active volcano I went back down the fractured gray lunar landscape to the bottom.

2009-10-22T19:17:00.002+08:00

The bus from Solo to Gunung Bromo National Park takes ten hours, plus a change of buses in Probolinggo. It's basically ten solid hours of risky passing maneuvers. The road is in excellent condition but has only two lanes, and there are many trucks that crawl along at 30 km/h. So long lines form, and the driver whose patience runs out first - often a big bus - will turn into oncoming traffic and cut back into some small gap in the line just before a head-on collision becomes inevitable. It's a game of chicken played with flashing headlights. And a large number of motorcycles swarm through little gaps like angry hornets. Saw a big truck laying on its side, still loaded with motorcycles.

For the first time since arriving in Singapore three weeks ago, I sleep in absolute silence.

2009-10-21T11:35:00.002+08:00

Prambanan is a Hindu temple complex of enormous 7th-century stupas on a large terrace, dedicated to Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. It's a Unesco World Heritage site and under extensive restauration; one stupa is all scaffolded and sevaral are closed to visitors. The stonemasons are clinking away on the stupas and on the ground to prepare large stones. They are nearly done in the central complex. Saw a worker free-climb one of the stupas, he looked like a small white dot on the massive structure. Prambanan is not as grand as Angkor Wat in Cambodia but gives a similar feeling of ancient majesty.

Solo is a small version of Yogyakarta, a nice working town with few tourist sights (and most of those, like the Kraton and the Pura, were closed). It's very relaxing that nobody wants to drag you into their batik galleries here and the rickshaw touts are too sleepy to annoy you all the time.

Met a guy at a food stall who works as an English tutor. We talked for quite a while about life in Indonesia and Europe, and he invited me to join one of his lessons. We went to a fancy house with a large terrace, garden, and iron fence close to downtown Solo, where two earnest but shy boys, and later a university student, joined us for the lesson. It's mostly about talking because English teaching at schools is very formal, but also about TOEFL worksheets. Everyone here wants to travel but the relative cost to leave Indonesia is very high.

Then my teacher friend and the student joined the English tutor gang at a street food stall where they often hang out at night, and they invited me along. We had great discussions, sitting on mats and sipping tea for many hours until after midnight. One of them sails on cruise ships to the Bahamas, and another is a professor who worked for two years as a waiter in the US. I loved it, getting to know people is time much better spent than checking off yet another temple from a list!

2009-10-19T22:43:00.003+08:00

Went on the back of a motorcycle to Borobudur, a large Buddhist temple in a forest before a backdrop of green hills. It's a square of 120 meters at the base, with four square terraces topped by three round ones. The four square ones are walkways with very intricately carved panels on both sides, topped with (often headless) buddhas. The panels at the bottom show everyday life: people working, learning, dancers, houses, ships, animals, and a frieze of what looks like winged platypuses linked head to tail. Higher terraces show spiritual scenes. My crude estimate is some 10,000 people in deep relief, with millimeter detail but sometimes somewhat eroded. The floors look like a frozen tetris puzzle of carefully fitted pieces. There are two million blocks total, precisely fitted without mortar.

The round terraces have no carved panels, just 72 stupas with buddhas inside. You can reach in and touch the buddha, people believe it's good luck. Everything is crowned by a large central stupa. Much of the there time I didn't see any tourists because they all rush to the top, snap some pictures, and rush back down. Fools.

The whole thing feels like walking a giant mandala (a picture of the buddhist world). Except that all mandalas I have seen lack tourists with gaudy parasols and guides with megaphones in the center. I bet that when devout buddhists, after accumulating virtue on the wheel of incarnations, finally have their ticket stamped for nirvana, they'll get there and find chirpy tourists snapping pictures of them with cell phones. Bummer.

We continued to Magelang, a village and mountain pass with a vista point from which the Mt. Fuji-like Merapi volcano can be seen in all its glory. The volcano last erupted in 2006, sending lava down the slope and through a few villages. The panorama is beautiful, and so is the road there through rice fields and villages.

2009-10-18T20:16:00.001+08:00

Yogyakarta's main street is Jalan Malioboro, a busy road with separate rickshaw lanes. It's one long shopping mall with clothes stalls in narrow dark arcades. It ends at the sultan's palace. The sultan lives there but a cluster of very large reception pavilions and smaller attached buildings that house exhibits can be visited. The central reception pavilion has an original beautiful wooden ceiling; all the other pavilions were lovingly fitted with flat pale green plastic ceilings with flourescent lights and loudspeakers. Well done guys. The overall impression is rather lame.

The rest of the surrounding kraton, meaning walled city, is rather nice, with alleys lined with trees and small residential houses not shown on any map, where children play and adults nap under tree shades. There are almost no cars there. The whole kraton reminds me of Hué in Vietnam, except they have a much bigger and more beautiful palace. The Prawirotaman neighborhood to the southeast of the kraton is very similar, except that many backpacker facilities like restaurants with "international menus" (that means pizza and spaghetti) are here.

The water palace neighborhood is different; the alleys here are narrow and twisty and people live in low wooden buildings open to the alley. Definitely no pizza here. Children call out, and I talked to a friendly local about life there. When I asked if he needs to leave as the muezzin called out for prayers, he said no problem, he is an atheist, although his ID card says "muslim" because otherwise he'd be branded as a communist and that's very very bad.

Rickshaws have two advantages: they are apparently not bound by any pesky traffic law at all, and while you are in one, you won't be hailed every 30 seconds by other rickshaw drivers. In Asia, you don't hail taxis, taxis hail you. All the time.

2009-10-18T12:43:00.004+08:00

Spent 15 hours in buses. People here work with numbers loosely - eight hours become twelve, and 5,000 Rp is the same as 50,000 except when paying. And we spent over two hours just leaving Bandung's downtown gridlock. And the bus from Bogor to Bandung decided to flit by Jakarta. Arrived in Yogyakarta - or Jogja as people call it here - after midnight.

But the scenery of Central Java was great, even better than on Puncak pass. Many green hills, tea plantations, rice fields, and scenically placed straw huts and little villages. Except for the last two hours or so the two-lane road was snaking up and down the hills with hardly a straight stretch - children were retching into plastic bags helpfully hanging from the roof all around me. I only wish that I could have done only the middle five hours. I have very few photos, unfortunately.

2009-10-18T12:30:00.003+08:00

Puncak pass is at 1450 meters, 25km east of Bogor. The scenery is beautiful - lots of very green hills with tea plantations to both sides of the winding road. Unfortunately much of the scenery in hidden behind something like the world's biggest shantytown strip mall. Only the last few kilometers allow some views.

The bus to Cipana on the other side of the pass isn't so much a vehicle as a mobile vending cart. There are very very long stops, and a procession of street vendors parades through the bus, trying to sell water, fried things, bags with edible things, candy, nuts, watches, tissues, and other stuff. Some put stuff in your lap and collect it later if you don't want it. Three different groups of musicians pass through as well. The minibus back to the pass later offers a miniature version of this circus; the music is supplied by a big man with a karaoke box.

The view from the terrace of the Rindu Alam Restaurant close to the summit is great. The fish is fantastic but extremely expensive: 3.50 euro for 500g. At home I'd pay that much just for the juice. Tried a new juice, Belimbing, very good. The nearby Telaga Warna, the Lake of Many Colors, is in a great peaceful setting that is more than worth the admission, although the many colors are all slightly different shades of greenish brown depending on the direction of the sun. Bright green tea plantations all around.

2009-10-15T20:44:00.004+08:00

Bogor is a town south of Jakarta that is in grave danger of getting swallowed by its big neighbor. The train station spits out passengers directly into a shantytown bazaar made of tarp and corrugated metal, very crowded and dimly lit. At the opposite end of the bazaar, across a small street, is the Abu Pensione hotel with faded awnings and signs that have lost the "i" at some point. But inside the rooms face a nice little garden, and they have two pleasant terraces facing the river flowing in a deep overgrown ravine.

Uncharacteristically for Asia, Bogor's heart is a huge botanical garden, beautifully landscaped with trees and plants from many countries, a lake, an orchid house, and a zoological museum with lots of tired dioramas with stuffed animals and a huge blue whale skeleton (not stuffed). A little dilapidated like the government museum in Chennai but very earnestly done.

On the way back it started raining - Bogor is the City of Rain - and waited it out at the Mata Hari department store. Outside, small barefoot children with giant umbrellas offered their services. One gust of wind and the sky would be full of floating children.

2009-10-14T23:49:00.002+08:00

Took the ferry back to Uleh Leh, VIP class this time. They are running a Karaoke video of '60s rock songs. A becak driver took us into town, chatting all the way.

Banda Aceh is known to the world as the place of a civil war between a fierce Islamic separatist movement and the military of a repressive regime, and the place where the 2004 tsunami struck hardest and left much of the city in ruins, and washed away an entire residential suburb close to Uleh Leh harbor. The pictures on the world's TVs showed a single mosque in the middle of all the rubble still standing. We visited that mosque; it's beautiful ornate five-domed building gleaming white in the sun, with black domes. The city around it has been repaired and rebuilt, and now looks much cleaner and much better maintained than other cities of its kind elsewhere. Even the suburb towards Uleh Leh has been rebuilt with prim little houses, gardens, and driveways with SUVs. Banda Aceh is back on the map; it's not rich or packed with tourist sights but it has become a very pleasant place.

Everyone here is very open and friendly. People keep calling out to us, not because they want to sell something but because they are genuinely curious and would like to chat a little. We usually conclude after a few minutes that we don't share enough English, but that we enjoyed talking, so we say goodbye and smile and wave. Until the next chat. When we were ready to leave for the airport, it started raining and we didn't see a taxi, so some shopkeepers found one for us. The driver later stopped at the edge of the freeway to give us his name and number. It's all very pleasant and relaxing, I wish more of Asia would be like that.Anyone who thinks that Muslim countries are necessarily strict and cheerless places should visit Banda Aceh, and stay a little rather than rushing to the islands.

We flew to Jakarta because the southern half of Sumatra is not interesting; much of Indonesia's oil industry is there. At 19:52 local time, we crossed the equator. Another first; I had never been on the southern hemisphere. We are now in Jakarta, Indonesia's capital on the island of Java.

2009-10-13T15:58:00.004+08:00

There is no beer on the island, officially. Sumatra is Islamic. But they aren't too religious about Islam here so they smuggle beer to the beach, and store it in a separate refrigerator and list it on the menu as "B". A can costs as much as a meal but it's not going to run out.

Elsewhere, like in Medan, you see women wearing a full-body burkha leaving only an eye slit, a fashion I call Black Raven. Which is actually more a cultural thing; Christian Europe also required women to cover their hair and skin five hundred years ago. But medieval customs meet modern technology when a fully veiled black raven is intently pecking at her cell phone. I imagine that she is twittering something like "my burkha itches". Other women wear a veil that leaves only their face free, plus skintight shirt and pants. They'd get flogged for that in benighted countries like Sudan, after the mullahs recover from their heart attacks. Here on the island you do ok if, in the words of a restaurant owner I talked to, you don't swim nude or have sex on the beach. That's only two rules away from some places in Thailand.

Anyway, I digress. Did another dive with Jim, minus the theory this time. It was much easier this time to breathe to control depth, rather than getting oxygen, automatically without thinking, and overcorrection was almost gone. We had 45 minutes to float at a depth of 12 meters, watching corals and fish far more colorful and varied than the ones near the surface we saw when snorkeling. Jim pointed out clownfish (now called Nemos), spiny lionfish that look like flying dozens of flags, toadlike stonefish than change color to match the background, and long thin trumpetfish hanging heads down. It's great to watch the other divers floating in the blue water weightlessly, with streams of bubbles rising up. The surface is invisible.

2009-10-13T08:45:00.003+08:00

No scuba diving today. We rented snorkeling equipment instead and explored the bay for three hours. They have quite a lot of corals close to the beach, green, yellow, brown, sometimes with blue tips; in all kinds of shapes from big mushrooms to spindly treelike ones. Fish dart in and out of the corals and in swarms around them; black, blue, green, orange, white. Blue starfish and black spiky sea urchins cling to the corals. You can just go on and on in the warm water and stare at the scenery below.

For some reason the local cuisine deep-fries anything. Chicken, prawns, any meat, even bananas. But the fruit and juices are great. Papayas at home are very bland compared to what they serve here.

2009-10-11T19:55:00.002+08:00

Pulau Weh is an island in the Sea of India off the northern tip of Sumatra. We chose Kabang Beach to stay. That's just a beach, not a village, and it looks exactly like a beach on a tropical island is supposed to look like: green warm water, a crescent of white sand lined by palm trees, and a few huts with restaurants in front of a hill behind the beach. Perfect. Primitive beach huts are available but we chose the Lumba Lumba dive center, which has a number of stylish, spacious, and comfortable bungalows set back from the beach. The dive center is run by a very helpful and friendly Dutch couple.

The atmosphere was somewhat infectious, so we asked for diving instructions. They had a slot right away, so in the early afternoon we found ourselves kitted out with a wet suit, weights, tank, BCD (buoyancy control device), regulator (the mouthpiece), flippers, and masks, after a 40-minute intro movie and a short diving lesson. They have a liability release form too.

We first practiced the Four Skills in shallow water: breathing under water (NEVER hold your breath or your lungs explode), clearing regulators, recovering a lost regulator, and clearing masks. Also equalizing, which balances air pressure in your ears to keep them from exploding. We then went diving in a reef not far from the beach, ten meters down, and practiced diving maneuvers, and watched fish and corals, including a gorgeous lion fish. The stingray was hiding. We later looked them up in a book. Diving is fantastic, we are trying to get another slot on their schedule.

2009-10-11T19:51:00.001+08:00

Saturday was mostly a travel day. Settled the hotel bill - 65 euro for two people, three nights, and all meals and juices - the ferry to Parapat, a minibus to Medan, and a flight to Banda Aceh. There is a restaurant with a juice bar at the airport, but no matter what you order ou get either orange or apple juice. They have bottled juice too; one list of ingredients says "100% pure sugar". The schedule displays showed a noise Firefox connection error, and the gate displays said "no signal" so the flights were called out by an attendant.

A strong thunderstorm delayed the flight for one hour, and then the airport bus from the gate to the plane got stuck for 20 minutes in traffic on the apron, which led to honking and some daring passing maneuvers in front of the airplane. The Prapat hotel in Banda Aceh looks like an American motel, except that it's primitive, loud, expensive, and has no hot water and no sheets.

2009-10-09T20:16:00.002+08:00

Rented bicycles to ride to Tomok a little south on the island, but it's basically a cluster of souvenir shops. The ride north to Simanindo was much more interesting. The road at first ran between the lakeshore and the mountains, through incredibly green fields and tiny villages, and grazing oxen led by ropes. Later the terrain turns hilly. There are lots of churches and little Christian cemetaries - the Batak people who live on the island are mostly Christian - and older people whiling away their time in bars that scenically overlook the lake below. Everyone here is friendly, laid back, and not at all pushy.

At Simanindo they have a Batak museum with over a dozen well-preserved historical Batak houses with the characteristic curved and pointed roofs that keep the walls in shadow, thatched with straw. Elsewhere the straw has often been replaced with corrugated metal streaked with rust, and modern houses no longer sit on wooden stilts but on concrete foundations.

Overall we rode about 50km. Our Carolina hotel is certainly the nicest resort on the island we have seen, with the best lake access for swimming (photo), but their WLAN access is incredibly unreliable.

2009-10-08T20:18:00.002+08:00

Didn't do very much at all. There isn't really a town on Tuk Tuk, just a long circular road around the peninsula we are on. It takes about 90 minutes to walk the loop. There are lots of small children playing, and they all want their picture taken, posing for the camera, jumping into the river for show, looking at the display and laughing. I gave the camera to one group and they started taking pictures of one another, and getting the hang of it pretty quickly.

The water of the lake is warm, so we spent a while swimming as well. The lake is very deep but visibility is only a few meters.

2009-10-07T18:28:00.004+08:00

Danau Toba is a volcanic lake four hours southwest from Medan and 900 meters up, with an island called Tuk Tuk where all the good hotels are. It's cool up there, and our hotel is a tranquil resort at the lakeshore with small huts built in the traditional style with steep swept gables, in a large tropical garden. The only thing to be heard here are birds singing, there is no traffic at all. Such a relief after the maelstrom called Medan. We'll stay three nights here, rather than rushing from one attraction to the next.

Met a photo journalist on the bus who had just returned from Danang, where a strong earthquake struck last week. Apparently mostly the downtown highrises were affected, but the smaller houses where most people live were relatively undamaged. A lot of villages on the hillside have become victims of slides though. Also talked to Eric from Sydney who showed great pictures from northeast Borneo, maybe I'll go there when my Indonesian visa runs out.

Right now I am not doing very much at all, other than writing my diary on a terrace overlooking the garden and the lake.

2009-10-06T21:42:00.003+08:00

Medan in Sumatra is not a major tourist hub and boasts exactly two important sights. The Mesjid Raya mosque has impressive black domes, and a simple and elegant, although slightly worn, interior. People were sleeping on the carpets. To get in, we had to hide our shorts with sarongs available for tourists at the entrance. A very tenacious guide kept following us, and after deflecting all our attempts to send him away actually got angry when we refused to tip. Not a promising business model.

According to the Lonely Planet, the Istana Maimoon palace is crumbling, but in 2009 it was in good repair. Only two halls were open to the public though. A group of people were being costumed as princes for photos, and a small boy perched on the nose of the seat was proudly circling the palace on a big motorcycle.

Medan not only has the traffic-choked modern district with our hotel, but also a traffic-choked but otherwise pleasant upscale residential district called Polonia, with lots of trees, big mansions, and black SUVs; and a traffic-choked downtown with (possibly deliberately) neglected colonial architecture. The historical Tip Top restaurant had fantastic Sirsak juice, white but with a kind of strawberry taste. Like other cities before, Medan is considerably nicer when darkness cloaks the neglect. The picture shows a slum next to Polonia.

Haggled a becak (motorcycle taxi) to the hotel down from 50 to 15 kilorupees. Walked across the street to buy some water, and got pinned down at a juice stall by a thunderstorm with torrential rain. (Is rain always torrential in Indonesia?) Chatting with the boys running the booth and learned a lot of Indonesian phrases, but not what they mean, which limits the utility of my new skill.

2009-10-05T21:40:00.002+08:00

The boat from Penang to Medan, crossing the Strait of Malacca, takes six hours. It's fairly small, old but in good repair, and rather loud. The passenger deck is dark and crowded with seats, but only 10% full. It's refrigerated and drafty. We got invited upstairs to the pilot cabin ("kaptan") and could watch them navigate, and sit outside under a plastic tarp. The sea was choppy and the boat was rolling; some passengers were vomiting into plastic bags. I caught some sleep.

USD 25 got us a 30-day visa to Indonesia. The visa officer was smiling brightly, good start. This is a Muslim country and Muezzins can be heard calling to prayers in the city, but she wore no veil. The bus ride from the harbor to downtown takes very long; the roads are better than their reputation but packed with nhonking cars. We passed a slum, and there is garbage in the water and at the roadside. Goodbye Malaysia.

The weight of the mighty euro got us checked into Garuda Plaza Hotel, a top-end western hotel with all the amenities. One euro buys 15,000 Indonesian rupees, and one million rupees (about 67 euro) is the most one can get from an ATM; the double room cost 16 euro.

2009-10-04T18:52:00.002+08:00

Penang National Park is at the northwest corner of the island. It's a primeval jungle, overgrown, full of animals calling (why do most wild animals sound like ringtones?), with a few paths leading to the main attractions. The Canopy Walk consists of 250 meters of 30cm wide walkways strung between trees some 10 m above the ground. The bridges are suspended from cables, and shake and twist when walking on them.

Another trail leads to a couple of beaches. Most of it is a muddy, rocky trail covered with roots leading up and down the edge of the water, quite difficult to walk without hiking boots. Saw a few monkeys in the trees; we watched them and they watched us, but we had cameras and they didn't. At the USM Cemac beach, young veiled women in shorts were playing and laughing. We also went to the Butterfly Garden two km away; they not only have lots of large tropical butterflies in a large greenhouse full of tropical plants, but also spiders with hairy legs, scorpions, an iguana, turtles, and assorted other local animals.

Chewing gum is legal in Malaysia but it's still very clean. I saw people sweeping the jungle today with brooms. There are no floating plastic bags and bottles like in so many other Asian countries. Most people speak broken English.

2009-10-03T20:14:00.004+08:00

Cheong Fatt Tze was the Asian Rockefeller a hundred years ago. When he died, he left his huge mansion in Georgetown to his son under the condition that it won't be sold until he dies, so after the family fortune went south they had to sell the furniture and rent rooms to over 30 families. Today it's a museum and hotel, perfectly restored from those years of neglect. Feng Shui dictated that the back of the house be one step higher than the front to simulate a hillside, and the construction includes the four elements, iron, and wood. Actually wood couldn't take the load so the beams are actually iron painted like wood, hoping that the gods won't notice.

Took local bus 203 to Air Itan, which sounds like an airline but is a village in the middle of the island. The Kek Lok Sin temple there is a beautiful and large complex of temples on top of a hill, crowned by the 10,000 Buddha pagoda whose architecture is Chinese at the bottom, Thai in the middle, and Burmese on top. Several souvenir shops are conveniently located right in the prayer halls and pagodas.

After a short taxi ride we went up Penang hill, using a Swiss-built cable car to the top, 700 meters above the city. There is a small but colorful south Indian Hindu temple and a small mosque up there, and a loud and annoying snake show for tourists. The panorama is fantastic. Just as we returned to the cable car station, torrential rains started.

Georgetown looks nicer at night. The darkness hides crummy architecture. The rain has driven many outdoor restaurants indoors though, except in a very short alley near the waterfront where modern clubs and restaurants flash their lights. Malaysia is a Muslim country but some of the women here are dressed very perfunctorily.

2009-10-03T20:12:00.001+08:00

Pulau Pinang, aka Penang, is a large island off the west coast of Malaysia. The main town is Georgetown. Our hotel, the Segora Ninda, is a heritage building opoen to visitors. It's charming but not as cosy as expected, and its heritage DHCP server is unbearably slow.

Georgetown's Chinatown is a Unesco world heritage. It's much larger than the one in Kuala Lumpur, and much less touristy, there are almost no souvenir shops or touts. It doesn't feel like very authentic though because the locals treat it poorly - Chinese obliterate history where they can - it's quite dilapidated except for the asphalt roads that carry heavy traffic everywhere. This Chinatown lacks the bustling life found elsewhere. Lots of parked cars, and closed shops and restaurants, further reduce the century-old houses to window dressing.

Of course, Georgetown also has the usual faceless modern town; and a Little India and a Colonial District that share Chinatown's fate.

2009-10-01T19:23:00.002+08:00

The twin Petronas Towers are the main landmark of Kuala Lumpur. It takes four hours to get tickets and enter, but bwe had reserved tickets at the hotel the night before. First, visitors have to sit through a cheesy company PR video with bad 3D effects and an excited narrator praising the Petronas oil company for seven minutes. We passed through an X-ray checkpoint (can't bring weapons or chewing gum), and shot up the elevator to the skybridge that connects both towers at the 40th floor. Visitors can't go any higher than that, but the view of the towers and the city is fantastic. They only let a few people in at a time. A glass floor would have been even better, even a small one like in the Tokyo tower.

The old Malay quarter is one metro stop and a whole world away from the shiny stainless-steel Petronas towers. It's all old low buildings and shacks, and dimly
lit food stalls under large corrugated metal roofs. We had Menara Condong Nasi Lemak with Chicken Rendang and various appetizers at the Shazana Pau Cafél;. I have no idea what the name of the dish means but it was very good.

Little India in Kuala Lumpur is similar to the one in Singapore, plus a few covered alleys that are even more packed than Chinatown.

The Colonial District is centered on Mardeka Square, a very large lawn with a 95m flagpole at one end where Malaysia celebrates independence since 1957. Stepping on the lawn, or any of a very long list of other offences that boil down to "because the governor said so" carry a fine of 1000 Ringgit (200 Euro) and up to a year in prison. Colonial buildings in a fancy British/Indian style line one side of the sqauer and, strangely, half-timbered houses the other.
110,432 Bot

2009-09-30T21:02:00.002+08:00

I have been keeping count of all the countries I have been in over the years, and this is an anniversary: Malaysia is number 50.

The "executive bus" from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur is spacious, comfortable, and falling apart inside, but I found a seat that worked. The formalities at the border are simple, the bus stops once on the island of Singapore to exit and once on the Malaysian mainland to enter, but the whole thing takes only minutes. We got to the Royale Bintang hotel, with a (partial) view of the landmark Petronas Towers from our room, in the early afternoon and had time to wander.

Like Singapore, Kuala Lumpur is a mixture of modern highrise buildings with thundering traffic, and low-key old districts like Chinatown. This one is fairly small but very lively - four large blocks, bisected by two two pedestrianized streets packed with stalls selling watches, cell phones, bags, clothes, and souvenirs, and there are a number of Chinese hole-in-the-wall restraurants.

We also went to the modern district past Chinatown, but it's basically one big tangle of freeways. Walking is possible but unpleasant. We made it alive to the central train station, and took the elevated monorail train back to Bintang. Looks like futuristic design from the eighties.

2009-09-29T21:49:00.003+08:00

Orchard road is Singapore's main shopping street, but it's unimpressive. The nearby Fort Canning Park is quite pleasant though, although the fort is curiously absent except for one remaining gate, and the little lake is fenced in and hidden, with big red no-trespassing signs showing a policeman pointing a rifle at a stick figure with its hands up. You can see these signs elsewhere too, welcome to Singapore but stay where you are.

Chinatown is divided into a busy modern main road and an old pedestrian area with narrow alleys crowded by small shops and restaurants, with low old buildings. It's odd to see how the vertical modern Singapore alternates with old two-story buildings. At a wide section of the Singapore River, the low buildings between the riverfront and the highrise office towers in the background look like flotsam. The bank towers are here because it's a particularly auspicious place and good omens are hard to come by these days in the banking business.

At the Marina Bay is the Merlion, a statue of a fish with a lion's head spouting yellowish water, and across the river are the Esplanade theaters, with the main building looking like a crash-landed spiky Durian.

2009-09-28T22:46:00.002+08:00

The taxi to the Hangout Hotel on top of Emily Hill is cheaper than the bus for two people. The hotel is simple, clean, modern, and offers free WLAN and a fantastic rooftop terrace.

Bugis street is very close to the hotel. There is a large covered bazaar selling everything - cheap clothes, watches, cell phones, fruit and vegetables, on several floors. There are fruit juice stands, but the red dragonfruit and guava juices were rather bland. Bottled starfruit juice is downright nasty. We also walked to the Indian quarter in the north of downtown and had good Tandoori chicken. I saw two mosques, two churches, one synagogue, and one Krishna temple with gaudy LED ornaments and happy monks daubing a third eye on tourists.

There are large office towers and low two-story and five-story buildings side by side. Everything is squeaky clean - that day I have seen one abandoned plastic bottle, a handful of cigarette butts, and a rusty washing machine. Everything else is spotless. Possession of drugs and chewing gum is illegal in Singapore, but smoking is ok. These people have principles. Street and shop signs are English in Singapore, and it's disappointingly correct English instead of the hilarious Chinglish they use in China, like my favorite in Lijiang in Yunnan: "Civilized behavior of tourists is another bright scenery rational shopping".

2009-09-28T22:09:00.002+08:00

It's a very long flight from Amsterdam to Singapore, 12 hours in a cramped cattle class seat, in a row shared with two obese tourists. The video system had to be rebooted twice, and 500 people got to watch the boot messages. It's an old 2002 RedHat Linux on the world's slowest processor, a Geode, heavily customized by an Ogre with a broadax - tons of errors and debugging output. If that's an indication of Boeing's engineering and quality control, it's a miracle that the plane managed to take off without losing its wings.

2009-09-23T01:34:00.002+08:00

This blog is about to wake up again. I enjoyed a beautiful summer in Berlin, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, and Portugal (see www.bitrot.de), but now it's back to Asia. On Monday evening I'll arrive in Singapore, and from there travel to Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, Bali, and other islands of Indonesia and beyond. Let the odyssey continue!

2009-05-16T11:17:00.003+08:00

Did I mention that my palace suite in Ooty had a fireplace and a jacuzzi? The Residency Towers room in Chennai has neither, it's more like an economy version of a Western Grand Hotel with lots of marble and columns. But it has a pool. Chennai (formerly Madras) itself is not very attractive; there are a few scattered temples with colorful statues piled high on the roof (the picture shows a small detail), and also a Ramakrishna temple with white columns with pink trim around a swami statue gaily hung with purple flower garlands.

It's 42 degrees and humid in Chennai. I really can't stand the heat, the humidity, the pollution, the garbage, the traffic and the incessant honking, the tenacious beggars, the slums, and the barefoot poverty anymore. I feel very tired of southern India, and I suspect I would even if it were 20 degrees cooler. I am told that the weather will stay unchanged for another two weeks, and then the monsoon rains begin.

So I have decided to take a vacation from my vacation and return to Berlin for a while. My flight leaves on Sunday. It's the wrong time of the year to forge ahead here in the tropics; Indonesia will still be there in the fall and much more pleasant. For many years my year was centered on the Siggraph convention; it's a nice thought to center this one on the monsoon season instead.

Also, my brain is full. I had a fantastic time during these two months, seeing so many places in China, Tibet, Nepal, and India, and I will surely return.

So, this blog will hibernate for a while until I return. Thanks for following me, and I'll be happy to answer questions at w4d@bitrot.de. See you all later!

2009-05-16T10:56:00.004+08:00

Made an excursion into the hills around Ooty. Wonderful views of the valley and the hills stretching to the horizon. There are many tea plantations. It's another warm sunny summer day, but I am told that in two weeks the monsoon will bring lots of snow, in June!

Took a local bus to Mettupalayam, a village at the bottom of the hills where my train to Chennai will depart. The bus is a decrepit wheezing dinosaur with flapping metal sheets that have come loose outside, dirty seats and dirtier windows, and it's packed with people. Seven of us squeezed into the back row, and when an eighth wanted to squeeze in, I suffered a momentarily lapse of understanding English and just smiled daftly. Tourists usually get away with that. The ride took two and a half hours for 51 kilometers and cost 17 rupees (27 euro cents).

The express train was one of those magnificent Indian trains that look like prison transports with barred windows. I got a 3AC bunk very similar to the one to Kunming in China; six bunks per compartment, which is open to the aisle. It's less modern than the Chinese one, but very few people in India smoke or spit, and nobody did on the train. It arrived in Chennai at 4:30 in the morning as the sun started to rise.

2009-05-13T21:22:00.003+08:00

Amazing. I actually got a train ticket to Chennai tomorrow. Not the slightest bit sold out. The narrow-gauge mountain train, which somehow got Unesco World Heritage status, is booked solid well into June though.

You don't rush from one temple to the next in Ooty. It's too relaxed for that, and besides there aren't any temples. I spent most of the day in the botanical garden and the rose garden, watching people. Most Chinese women, who tend to wear practical Western clothes (they are all made there, after all), would look gorgeous in these brightly colored two-part saris popular here. But a large number of the Indian women wearing them look like boiled dumplings burst open in the middle. Not the lady in the picture though.

The rose garden is organized very methodically, but the botanical garden just drops lots of pretty flowers everywhere and leaves people to enjoy them.

2009-05-12T22:09:00.002+08:00

The Maharaja of Mysore and I agree that Mysore is too hot in the summer. He owns another palace in Ooty, a hill station 100 km south at 2200m, where it is dry and cool. I like Ooty's palace much better than the one in Mysore - it's older, but a lot more cozy; everything is wood-paneled, lots of antiques, and a 45-acre garden around it. I like it so much that I got a suite there; the Maharaja owns the place but has turned it into a luxury hotel two years ago. It's hugely expensive in rupees and a steal in euros. The Maharaja can't join me today but a minister is here.

It's so good to walk around Ooty's lake in the cool dry air, smelling the pine forests and the flowers. There are absolutely no sights here besides the palace and the hill scenery, which suits me just fine.

The photo shows the palace's modest little salon.

2009-05-12T22:01:00.003+08:00

Mysore's palace was rebuilt in 1912 after a fire, and it now looks as if they got a Victorian railroad engineer to do it. The steel structure is never completely hidden even though they hung tons of Indian ornamentation on it. It's grandiose all right, but it doesn't feel right. Only the throne room is a faithful reconstruction, it's gilded all over.

I am getting really tired of southern India, the inescapable heat and humidity, the chaos, noise, and poverty that seems the same everywhere, and the difficulty of finding good food. I had a pizza today, out of desperation (at least it was a Punjab mutton tikka pizza). I need to get out of here.

2009-05-11T13:25:00.003+08:00

Although I wasn't quite up to exploring Mysore after that 18-hour bus ride from hell, I did walk around town in the evening a little. It's the usual chaotic south Indian town, without much colonial atmosphere. They have a large partly covered bazaar where I walked for a while, striking up conversations with vendors. Most people speak English and are curious when they see a European face. It's really amazing how few Europeans I have met in the past two months of travelling.

One hour per week, the huge fairyland Maharaja Palace is lit up with a hundred thousand light bulbs, and today was the day, so I went there as well and watched the crowds.

2009-05-11T13:06:00.003+08:00

Can't really spend time in Goa without hitting the beaches, so I hired a motorcycle driver for an excursion. Fort Aguada and Candolim are a little west of Panaji, looking out on the Arabian Sea. All the things one expects on any beach of that kind are there - beach pubs, huts for rent, white beaches with palm trees, paragliders and jet skis, and a sun so hot that it sends everyone running for cover. The lassis there are very good. What Candolim has and the others don't is a huge old rusty cargo ship grounded close to the beach.

Panaji's long-distance bus station is a long dusty strip along the Mumbai-Mangalore road. There are no signs anywhere, buses come and go and it took a while to find the right one late in the evening. I had booked a luxury bus but it turned out to be a fairly decrepit old sleeper bus with 22 body pods and some cramped seats. The motor is screaming at high rpm, and the bunks are too short, but at least is reasonably clean and the windows open. I must have managed to actually sleep a little during the ten hours to Mangalore, some 300km south.

They use a filthy hotel as a rest stop in Mangalore. I declined their offers of breakfast. The toilets - if a reeking hole in the ground in an unlit box deserves that name - are across a large courtyard; the space between the garbage piles is littered with garbage. I had decided that I don't really want to stay in Mangalore and gave the driver some cash so he'd let me stay on the bus for another eight hours to Mysore, 200km inland.

The scenery between Mangalore and Mysore is very nice, mostly dense forest with very few villages, up and down the hills called the Western Ghats. When I finally arrived in Mysore at 14:00, I felt exhausted and grubby and checked into a nice modern hotel with AC. I've had enough Indian atmosphere for today.

2009-05-08T21:14:00.003+08:00

Old Goa was a great town once, in the sixteenth century, larger than Lisbon and London. No longer. But the huge elaborate churches, convents, and some ruins are still there, scenically scattered about a very large park with palm trees (one of which tried to drop a huge frond on me but missed), forests, and ponds. Few people live here any more, it's like a giant theme park for colonial monuments. Some of these churches have seen Christian, Muslim, and Hindu services, but today they are well-preserved museums. No admissions are charged anywhere.

The sun burns down vertically (Goa is solidly tropical) so no walls see any sun and there is little shadow. People move slowly, or sit or sleep in the shadow. Even the few souvenir vendors who have made it out here seem lethargic and easily discouraged. I'll catch a bus to Mangalore tomorrow, and then I think I'll escape to the cooler hills.

The picture is from Panaji, a couple of blocks from my hotel. Nice quiet town, hard to believe it's the capital of Goa.

2009-05-07T21:58:00.002+08:00

Goa, on the west coast of the India, surrounded by beaches and old towns that look more Portuguese than Indian, has been known as a 60's hippy hangout ever since the Beatles found their Baghwan here. The hippies are gone, but this is not the place to rush from one church to the next. This is a place to sit idly in a park, chat with locals, ponder where to have lunch, and generally relaxing. I'll stay a couple more days here before I take the bus to Mangalore.

(Actually I wanted to take the train, but trains in India are fully booked. All of them. You need to draw a number at the station, at a cost of 10 rupees, fill out a form, wait in line, and get told that there is no way from here to there. They are good with forms here - my hotel needs a passport copy, and while a SIM card in China is handed over when you put enough money on the table, here it takes a passport copy, a photograph, and nine signatures on four forms.)

2009-05-07T21:50:00.002+08:00

The hotel breakfast isn't very good ("continental", ugh) so I went to Leopold's. That's an old institution in Mumbai dating back to the British rajs. It was one of the targets of November's terror attacks, and the bullet holes are still there. I hope it's the last bullet hole I'll encounter on this trip.

Dharavi in the middle of Mumbai is Asia's largest slum, they say. From above it's a patchwork of gray corrugated metal roofs, packed so densely that there are hardly any gaps, and none wide enough that they could be called streets. They actually run sightseeing tours through the slum, but I was content with the edges, it would feel like a zoo otherwise.

2009-05-05T22:56:00.003+08:00

The interesting part of Mumbai, where nearly all the sights are, is a peninsula between the harbor in the east, and Back Bay in the west. Another, much narrower, peninsula wraps around the other side of Back Bay, and that's where I went today. They have a few very nice parks (where "straineous exercise" is not allowed), and a large rectangular pool with stairs leading down on all four sides. People sit there and talk, or perform religious rites involving offerings, incense, and washing. There are many small shrines around it, and a large area where Mumbai's clothes are washed. Back Bay is open to the Arabian Sea, but that side of the peninsula is very filthy.

Walked to Chowpatty Beach next. This part of town is nice, and I had a great lunch with a monumental chocolate sundae there, but the beach is not. There is an abandoned amusement park, huts made from bamboo and plastic tarp, with an open sewer running down to the water, and children are playing in the dirty water. They came out, smiling excitedly, to shake my hand and earnestly pronouncing their few English sentences, then ran back into the water giggling.

Also walked to the Chor Bazaar, a large part of town crammed with food and clothing stalls, and the ubiquitous cellphone repairmen. Chickens are killed, plucked in plastic buckets, and sold here. It's quite dirty and slippery. There are many women I call Black Ravens - muslims with full-body burkhas and only an eye slit. One lifted her veil to spit on the ground.

Watched the sundown at the Gateway of India, and soon attracted the photo crowd again. I should consider a career as a model.

The bottom photo is from the Chor Bazaar area, and the top is from the Colaba area of town, the back side of the block my hotel is in. Mumbai is a city of contrasts.

2009-05-04T22:17:00.003+08:00

The Gateway of India in Mumbai is a monumental arch facing the sea. It's best seen from the harbor so I took a harbor tour boat. It didn't really work because it's full of Indians; at first I didn't realize why the two seats next to mine saw so much traffic, people constantly getting up and sitting down, until I saw that I was the main attraction and people wanted their picture taken with me. So we turned it into a party where everybody was taking pictures and showed them around. Many people wanted me to take their picture, children were grimacing. (The harbor itself is totally boring.)

I had inquired about rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, a landmark next to the Gateway. But the palace wing is still roped off, boarded up, and shut down after the terrorist attacks in November. The tower wing is open, but it's a boring office tower with some prefab concrete ornaments hung on the facade; it has a barrier, a fence, metal detectors, a gun emplacement, and a bag search station. I am glad I am not staying in this prison camp.

Mumbai, as expected, is a big noisy town with the usual honking traffic chaos. But there are lots of quiet leafy neighborhoods with old buildings that have a feel about them that almost reminds me of some old neighborhoods of Berlin (if they weren't so dilapidated). Mumbai has many trees lining its roads, which hide some of the rundown architecture. There are also grand old palaces from British colonial times, big parks where people play cricket and rugby, and the most palatial train station - Victoria Terminus - that I have ever seen. Inside it's not palatial at all though, and filled with masses of people in a hurry. There is a big bazaar to the north of the train station, with a heavy emphasis on electronic, and in Asia "electronics" is a synonym for "cell phones".

As a Mumbai visitor I am obligated to choose a picture showing the Taj and the Gateway. It's the #1 postcard motif here, and Mumbai doesn't have a huge selection of those. But I like the one above better. I hope it looks good, this PC is unbelievably creaky. The shift key is missing too.

2009-05-04T22:13:00.002+08:00

The original idea was to take the bus to Varanasi in India, but that would have meant about three full days in buses in places that aren't very safe (they still have communist rebels in the Terai and in northeastern India), and it's difficult to go south from Varanasi too, so I reversed my schedule and flew to Mumbai (formerly Bombay), where I am now writing this post. Not much to report.

2009-05-02T21:06:00.004+08:00

Kathmandu is only one of three royal cities in Nepal. The other two are Bakhtapur and Patan, each of which has a Durbar Square similar to Kathmandu's. Smaller, but much less commercial, and there are few tourists. (I seem to be fairly lucky on this front so far.) The Bakhtapur temple complex contains an Erotic Elephant Temple.

In Patan, the Machhendranath Festival is on, which involves carting an icon around for a month in two huge temple chariots with two-meter wooden wheels, and a huge tilting tree-like thing on top. It looks thoroughly impractical. They move so slowly that children play under the carts. The purpose of the whole thing is praying for rain, which has a good chance of success because the monsoon rains are approaching around that time of the year anyway.

Returning from Bakhtapur was tricky because two bombs were found on a bus there, and police were rerouting traffic away from the Kathmandu-Bakhtapur road. Rumors flew that an army convoy was blown up, but actually the bombs didn't explode. So instead of seeing that filthy third-world slum road a third time, the taxi (yes mom, I don't use local buses in Nepal, I don't want to get squeezed to death by goats) had to detour through the villages. And they aren't rich, but clean and pleasant. Maybe my initial impression of Kathmandu's suburbs really was too negative. We also saw long lines at gas station, they have fuel shortages.

What is Tiger Balm anyway? Half the town sells that stuff.

2009-05-01T21:16:00.004+08:00

Got a thunderstorm in Pokhara last night unlike any thunderstorm I have seen before. Strongs wind bent the trees, there is torrential rain, and lightning. At home you can estimate the distance of a lightning flash by timing the delay between flash and thunder. Not so here. There are many flashes per second, far too many to count. The sky flickers like a broken flourescent light.

And it cleared the sky. The next morning I got up at 5:00 and took a taxi up on Sarangkot, and was rewarded with a last view of the Himalayas - the Annapurna range in the background and the holy mountain of Machhapuchhare, shaped like a perfect pyramid, light up in the morning sun. Pokhara is at 800 meters and the peaks rise up to 7000m. As the sun rose, the mountains once again faded into the mists like apparitions. The pictures aren't sufficiently impressive so I'll show the sunrise instead.

The bus ride back to Kathmandu took seven hours. Not much to report there; various accidents, huge trucks belching black smoke as they creep up the mountains, and the delight of returning to Thamel's chaos. I am staying at the Tibetan Peace Hotel again, in the same room overlooking their lovely quiet garden.

2009-04-30T18:21:00.004+08:00

PG50. Some material in this post may not be suitable for parents.

A van took me up 600m on top of Sarangkot Mountain. I got a harness that is clipped into my pilot's harness, I run a few steps down the hill, the parachute inflates and we are up in the air above Nepal's Pokhara valley. We were circling for a while to find the thermals rising up from the valley, and they carry us up a kilometer above the valley. The views of the mountain ridges, the valley, and the lake are fantastic. Unfortunately it's still hazy; on a clear day the Annapurna range of the Himalayas is visible from here. The flight is quite smooth, with only a little buffeting above the mountain ridges. My pilot is a paraglider acrobat but I decline his offers to show me how to drop 30m per second. After half an hour, we stop circling the thermals, and gently float down to the lake, and land in some fields where the van waits. Totally exhilarating!

2009-04-30T18:05:00.003+08:00

Walked around the dam into the hills. There are no signs, so I work like a wild west trapper - broken twigs, a paletr shade of brown leaves, scratches on stones - and of course the trail of plastic bottles, soda cans, candy wrappers, and chips bags also helps. I always know after 50m that I lost the garbage trail. Got rowed back across the lake by two children, who, like everyone else here, speak English.

Also walked to Old Pokhara, where real people live and nobody sells souvenirs and trekking tours. It's fairly dirty, especially in between, where people hammer on radiators, lay in oil puddles under buses, cut trucks into small piecesand recycle tires are way past recycling. If there was such a thing as subsustence engineering that's what they would be doing. It's a long, hot, and polluted march. The old downtown itself is fairly nice, a no-frills neighborhood with a little market, and the Seti river which is very narrow but flows so fast that it has cut a 50-meter deep gorge through the town. You hear it but it's difficult to see deep down.

Spent a little time on the monastery-and-temple circuit, but it's quite unremarkable.

2009-04-28T20:34:00.004+08:00

Not much to report today - the bus ride to Pokhara takes seven hours. The bus is supposed to be the best they have but it's wheezing up the mountains at 25 km/h. But it's clean and everyone has a seat, unlike on Nepalese local buses, which pack as much people, bags, and animals as they can fit inside and on the roof. Trucks, buses, cars, motorcycles, animals, and people carrying impossible loads (picture) share the narrow road. We passed eight army checkpoints because of some Maoist rebel activity, but everything is quiet at the moment so there is no delay. (As I type this, a small group of demonstrators carrying red hammer-and-sickle flags shouting paroles walk past the Internet cafe.)

Pokhara is touristy, as usual meaning many souvenir shops and trekking agencies but not a lot of actual tourists. An amusing number of teenagers do their very best to look like their hippy parents back in the sixties. Pokhara is supposed to be like Thamel but it's far too relaxed for that, and much more spacious. And warmer. Unfortunately it has become hazy again so I can't see the mountains; Pokhara is located at the Phewa lake in the Annapurna range of the Himalayas. Maybe tomorrow.

PS. Now it's dark and I can see the mountains, at least where the forest fires burn.

2009-04-27T20:33:00.003+08:00

There's more than Kathmandu in the valley. Swayambhunath, a.k.a. the monkey temple, sits on top of a hill with a very long stairway leading up to it. Visitors get waylaid by souvenir vendors every 20 steps or so. The main stupa totally looks like a huge birthday cream cake with a candle in the middle. And the usual prayer drums, statues locked away in little shrines, and butter lamps. The temple is clean because they literally throw all garbage over the walls, where lots of monkeys sort through it.

Speaking of garbage - on the way to the monkey temple I crossed Kathmandu's Vishnumati River, which is so dirty that there is more garbage than water on the surface. I am beginning to like Kathmandu's chaotic, loud, and crowded Thamel downtown, at least they are taking care of it.

#2 temple of the day is Boudha on the other side of Kathmandu. This one is the mother of all cream cakes (pictured), on top of three huge terraces. It's surrounded by a circular ring of buildings, most of them souvenir shops of course but there are few visitors. Their style, if not the ornamentation, feels almost mediterranean and is very pleasant to walk. This is a Tibetan community, and it very much feels like Tibet except that you can say "Dharamsala" [the Indian exile of the Dalai Lama] without risking to get arrested.

Back in Kathmandu, I checked out Freak Street, but it's a tired shadow of its '60s fame. All the action, piercing and tattoo shops, forlorn-looking rasta youths, and hasheesh hawkers are now in Thamel.

2009-04-26T18:50:00.004+08:00

Kathmandu's Durbar Square is a temple complex centered on the old royal palace, now a museum. Dozens of pagoda temples with tiered roofs and stepped terraces, some low and some nearly as tall as the pagoda on top. Plus a shining white neoclassical palace in the middle that looks quite out of place there. The pagodas are made from wood, mostly cracked and without paint. The carving is incredibly detailed and really deserves repair. Cows, dogs, and pigeons wander freely; have to watch out not to step on a sleeping dog. It's quite hot.

Cars, motorcycles, and rickshaws go through this Unesco World Heritage, honking all the time to get the tourists out of their way. I saw an open army truck, four soldiers standing in front and eight in the back, and lots of handcuffed people in between.

This is a fantastic place if only they had shielded the place from the encroaching city and its traffic better. And spent more effort on restoration. The whole of Kathmandu I saw has many little temples, old houses with the same fantastic intricate wood carving, and beautiful old plazas - but it's all neglected, decrepit, and not too clean, especially outside downtown. The Rata park is positively filthy. Like in China, people drop their garbage where they stand, but unlike China the armies of sweepers are absent.

[Added pictures to the previous three posts. Check out the Himalaya picture two posts down.]

2009-04-25T20:33:00.003+08:00

Zhangmu is built up a hill on both sides that is so steep that the houses seems stacked. In my hotel, what's first floor in front is fourth floor in the back. I had to leave early because the border station is only open in the morning. After the first checkpoint, we walked down a road with many switchbacks (one of which is closed so we had to climb down the side of the mountain for a while) to reach the immigration building, where my guide checked me through the formalities. Then I said goodbye and crossed the Friendship Bridge high over the small river that marks the border. I step over the red line in the middle guarded by motionless soldiers, and I am in Nepal.

The small Nepalese village on the other end of the bridge is small and primitive, but the officers are friendly and relaxed, immigration only takes a few minutes. I set my watch back 2 hours and 15 minutes. They run pickup trucks to Kathmandu from here, so I share one with three Chinese visitors for 600 Nepalese Rupees (Rs); 1 Rs is a little less than 1 euro cent. It takes five very scenic hours through the mountains to reach Kathmandu because the road here is no better shape than the Chinese version. Can't be done without a 4WD.

In past blog entries I have complained about China's faceless and sterile cities. Kathmandu isn't like that at all. It's a noisy chaotic maelstrom and we pass through suburbs that look a little like a third-world slum, complete with smoking garbage dump fields with scavenging animals. Downtown is ok, but still very crowded and cars are squeezing through impossibly tight alleys, honking at everything that moves. Kathmandu is so alive with chaos that Beijing feels like a mausoleum in comparison. It's also very warm, and 4000 meters lower than yesterday so I hardly have to breathe at all. Same odd feeling I had when reaching Lhasa, only in reverse. Now I understand why bicycle athletes train in Peru.

I am staying at the Tibet Peace Guesthouse at the edge of the Thamel downtown region. It offers what seems impossible here - it's quiet, it has a fairly spacious garden with flowers and little tables to relax (and which my room overlooks), and I hear birds sing. I did walk around Thamel for a while. Once some guy came up to me and whispered, "hasheesh?" Ah, Kathmandu...

2009-04-25T20:07:00.003+08:00

A travel day. Tola pass at 4200 meters, Gatso pass at 5200 meters, and later another at 5100 meters. Passes are marked with spiderwebs of prayer flags strung over the street, from poles, or even power masts. The sun is hot but the wind is very cold. None of the blue-black skies again. The mountains are all bare of vegetation, but shine in red, brown, black, and yellow hues. People plough fields with horses, but I don't see any plants. My guide and I have lunch in a Tibetan restaurant as usual, but my driver is Chinese and eats only Chinese food, and only at Chinese restaurants, even though he has been living in Tibet for five years. So he eats alone every time. In the Tibetan restaurant, a sheep's dried leg sits on the counter with tufts of hair at the hoof still on it, but most of the meat is gone. Beef jerkey Tibet style. They also rent rooms but the bathroom smells like the sheep died there, so we continue.

We were supposed to overnight in Tingri, but at 17:00 my guide's agency in Lhasa notices a mistake in my travel permits - the departure date is wrong, I have to leave the country tomorrow! And they are *very* strict about that. So we pack up and leave for the border town of Zhangmu. Tingri is no loss, there is nothing to see there, and I couldn't get the Mt. Everest permit anyway, but we'll spend a lot of time in the car.

At Old Tingri, the smooth blacktop road ends and we must use a dirt road for the next 132 km. Occasionally the road is closed and we must go off-road; I have no idea how the driver finds his way. One day, the road will be open and paved all the way, they are working on that, I have seen several people with shovels! The driver loves to go over bumps at speed, and once we hit a big rock. He decided that we can continue after an inspection. The views of the ice-capped Himalaya range in the evening sun is fantastic, I keep asking to stop the car. There are several police checkpoints.

Soon it's totally dark and the ride gets interesting. Once we were faced with three huge yaks in the middle of the road after turning a corner, but stopped in time. There are also unlit dogs, horses, and sheep from time to time. Asphalt returns for a short time, but there are rocks that have fallen from the mountain everywhere, so we must go slowly. One boulder more than a meter across had smashed through the retaining wall, scattering debris all over the road and coming to rest in the middle of our lane. Just before Zhangmu, we reach a narrow, dangerous, unpaved, and very rutted section of the road. There is lots of traffic going the other way because the road is open only from 20:00 to 1:00, mostly trucks. People with torches run around, we need to inch our way backwards and forwards into tiny turnouts without falling off the mountain to let the trucks pass. My guide says this usually takes 2-3 hours at this point but we managed to pass after less than an hour. My driver really knows his job and doesn't mind a smoking clutch. We arrive in Zhangmu at 23:30.

They call this the Friendship Highway. Can't be much of a friendship.

2009-04-23T18:23:00.005+08:00

It's a short drive to Shigatse, famous for its large monastery founded by the first Dalai Lama, and seat of the Panchen Lama. The complex is huge - much of it is old whitewashed quarters for the 600 monks. Three large white stupas are a memorial to the people killed during Mao's cultural revolution; people circle it clockwise (always clockwise...), turn the prayer drums, and keep count with little piles of pebbles.

In the main hall is a 26 meter gold Buddha, dimly lit by many butter lamps tended by monks. On the side several old monks sit and chant scripture. Tibet at its best, the effect is hypnotizing. In the next hall they get down to business: there are long benches where a dozen monks sit cross-legged, large scripture books open in front of them. You can make a donation, and the head monk will read your name, donation, and preferred scripture section aloud, and the monks begin to chant that section. They have many very young monks, but they do all the work around the temple while the old monks just sit there and chant. Reminds me of work at home. Another hall houses a huge shrine with a drum on top containing the bodies of past Panchen Lamas. The monastery is beautiful, serene, and a place of active worship. It has impressed me a lot more than the Potala in Lhasa, which is far more imposing but really just a big, dark, and dead museum.

Can't post pictures with this computer, will follow later.

I spent the rest of the afternoon walking in the old town at the foot of a steep hill with the governor's palace on top, and circled the monastery on a path just outside its walls, with thousands of prayer drums spun by old women walking with me.

2009-04-22T19:58:00.004+08:00

Tibet, roof of the world - I always thought that was hyperbole. But after our car left Lhasa and climbed out of the Tibetan Plateau to over 5000 meters, passing through valleys with the Himalayan mountains on all sides, I can see how apt the expression is. The horizon is incredibly clear and the sky there is a perfect blue. Looking up and away from the sun, the blue color of the sky turns so dark that it's almost closer to black. There are a few small but brilliantly white clouds, and they seem very close. I half expected the space station to swoosh by.

There are lots of beautiful vistas along the way, and little lopsided shrines with prayer flags strung on long lines, and people with yaks trying to get some money from tourists. There is not a lot of snow where we drive but glaciers shine brightly at a distance.

Gyantse is a small town at a mere 4000 meters. It has a mild case of Chinese architecture pest - the roads are too wide and the buildings are mostly new and, yes, sometimes covered with those nasty white bathroom tiles, but few buildings have more than two floors and it all looks like a sleepy village. The main attraction is the Baiju monastery, built up a hil crested by a wall. Many halls and shrine rooms filled with Buddhas and statues; not unlike the Potala but on a much less grand scale. And photography is allowed, after paying a fee (one per room!), so I catch up a bit.

There is also a conical building that looks like a large stupa, and I swear this thing is far bigger inside than outside. It's supposed to contain 100,000 Buddha images and that number can't be far off. Six floors, maybe a hundred rooms with Buddha statues from 1.5 to 6 meters tall, and no wal space wasted. There is also a beautiful view to the steep hill crowned by the governor's palace, but it's being renovated so I skip it.

2009-04-21T19:03:00.003+08:00

The Potala Palace is certainly the most famous building in Tibet. Ten of the fourteen Dalai Lamas ruled over religion and the country from here. It's supposed to have 999 rooms but it felt more like 999 stairs in the thin air. Many rooms are quite small, including the personal apartment of the Dalai Lama; there are also large throne rooms, and several long and high galleries with Buddhas, other statues, and the tombs of several Dalai Lamas. The 5th Dalai Lama has the largest; he unified politics and religion under his rule by calling in his pal, the Mongol emperor, to do the dirty work.

All walls, columns, and the roof are brightly painted or hung with brightly colored silks, in the five colors that symbolize the elements - red for fire, green for water, blue for the sky, white for clouds, and yellow for the earth. There are many small tapestries hung from the ceiling that look like necktie shop displays. Despite the bright colors, the rooms look solemn and a little gloomy; all light comes from a few lightbulbs, and the ubiquitous Yak butter lamps. Professional lighting would work wonders on the Potala, but professional lighting is unknown in China. Only the top throne room in the Red Palace on top gets bright light from windows. In front of the throne is a huge pile of donated money; I estimate about half a cubic meter. We only get to see a small number of rooms; many others are empty or are used for storage. Nobody rules from the Potala anymore.

My guide is great - he explains the things that really matter, while the English signs and the Chinese tour guides are rattling off facts like how many square meters a room has, how many ounces of gold were used on a Buddha, and how much the things are worth. The Chinese guides even mix up statues and even temples. This annoys my guide greatly, he is Tibetan and prays at several shrines.

Ended the day at the Summer Palace, a much smaller palace in walking distance with airy bright rooms, set in a nice park. It's for the Dalai Lama only, there are only a few buildings. The decoration is similar to the Potala, but simpler and less overwhelming.

2009-04-21T18:18:00.008+08:00

Lhasa has a forgettable Chinese new town, and a Tibetan old town called Barkhor that is centered on the Jokhang monastery. The first thing you see is people prostrating themselves at the entrance, flat on the ground. The main room inside is dark and gloomy, with a biog golden Buddha in the center. People move clockwise around it and visit the many little shrine rooms adjoining the hall. Large stone bowls are filled with liquid Yak butter used as candles; pilgrims constantly refill the bowls from their brightly colored plastic thermos cans.

Had lunch at an old Tibetan restaurant: Yak butter tea, Yak meat dumplings, potatos filled with minced Yak meat, and sliced Yak meat. Yak Yak Yak. Great, except it turns out I don't like Yak butter, let them burn it.

There is an inner alley ring around Jokhang that is for tourists, mostly Chinese and pilgrims. The #1 article is prayer wheels, lots of people here who keep spinning them. I exhausted the souvenir circuit, checking every stall and every shop in an unsuccessful search for a specific article. I got hundreds of "hello lookee" calls for my trouble. I am fairly certain I missed nothing because tourists don't stray and don't explore. Just five meters away from the circuit the prayer wheels and other souvenir junk disappear instantly and sensible things like shoes and flashlights are sold. (Just had a power outage.)

At every entry to the old town, at all major intersections inside, and in all large squares are posts with five or more policemen, an euphemism for Chinese army. I was warned that they must under no circumstances be photographed.

2009-04-19T20:06:00.004+08:00

On the train to Lhasa, I had to sign a plateau travel health declaration. Among other things, I had to certify that I am not a "highly dangerous pregnant woman" and that I don't get "the heats are above 100 times per minute". I can see how that would be very exhausting. The Chinglish is getting better all the time.

I kind of expected dramatic high mountain scenery of the kind I visited in Kashmir, but the scenery is mostly flat plateaus with mountains not so very much higher on the sides. Snow starts to appear at an altitude of 3000 meters. The train is modern and smooth, and I sleep well. I got the equivalent of a first-class compartment (they call that soft sleeper), expensive but worth it. Each bunk has its own TV; I watched Harry Potter in Chinese. Each bunk also has an oxygen socket, they hand out "nasal oxygen cannulas". The next morning I woke up at an altitude of 4700 meters, and when it reaches the highest pass at 5072 meters there is an announcement. It's the highest train pass in the world. The train is not pressurized; the train toilets have open windows (which is a blessing on a 45-hour train ride).

I had never been much above 3000 meters. I don't get altitude sickness, but I got out of breath quickly, and had to breathe deeper and faster than normal. But not the way one does on a hard bicycle ride, where your lungs hurt - it's just like normal breathing, only more of it. Strange. I am too macho to use the nasal oxygen cannula (but there really isn't any need).

The train restaurant's idea of twice-cooked pork is a big quivering mass of pork belly fat without any discernible meat. The vegetables were good though. Close to the Tibetan border, my cookies exploded. (Go ahead, read that sentence again, it may be a while before you come across one like that again.) They are shrinkwrapped and the air trapped inside expanded at the high altitude until the plastic ruptured. I have a pre-explosion picture where the formerly tightly packaged cookie roll looks like a blimp. Ok, it was more a pop than an explosion.

I was picked up at the Lhasa train station by my guide for the next week. He is Tibetan, quite young, and very friendly. I'll have to be careful to avoid mentioning touchy political issues to him... I am staying at the Kailash hotel, an uninspired modern but comfortable affair whose main distinction is its bizarre English brochure that ends with the words "Wish that you prick the West Germany bridle".

2009-04-17T17:51:00.003+08:00

Mopping up some remaining temples and parks in Beijing. The Temple of Heaven is the most famous temple in the world, says the Chinese guide. If you didn't know that, kindly consider yourself informed now. It's very pretty and harmonious. For the ancient Chinese, the earth is square and heaven is round, so there are many round temples here, with blue glazed tiered roofs, built on white terraces. The emperor held ceremonies here requesting a good harvest, and they sacrificed animals. I stood on the Supreme Ultimate Stone in the middle of it, I suppose all the other stones in the world are either less supreme or less ultimate, or both.

My Tibet expedition is all set. I have my permits and will pick up the train ticket later. Tonight I'll be on my way to Lhasa, riding the train for 48 hours over passes in the Himalayas more than 5000 meters high. Tibet travel is tightly regulated, more so than in recent years: all my stops had to be approved, and I'll have a guide at all times. I'll spend two nights on the train, three nights in Lhasa, and one each in Gyatse, Shigatse, Tigeri, and Zhambir (sp?) on an overland jeep trip to Kathmandu in Nepal. I had to join a tour group, it can't be done any other way. I am the only member of my group. For money they'll sell anything.

Not sure what the Internet situation is in Tibet, I'll try to blog if I can. Otherwise see you all in Kathmandu!

2009-04-16T20:22:00.003+08:00

The Emperor didn't want to be holed up in his little Fobidden City all the time, so he also had a summer palace north of Beijing on the shore of a fairly big lake that he had dug. The layout and architecture is pretty similar to the Forbidden City, minus the big reception halls, but a lot smaller. On the other hand it's scenically built up Longevity Hill, which they created with the earth excavated to create the lake. No expenses spared. The three-story theater is basically a copy from the Forbidden City.

Much of it was destroyed by the Western allied powers in 1860 and rebuilt for Empress Cixi's birthday parties. Cixi was faced with an unsolvable problem - repelling Western invaders with far superior weaponry - but she had a knack for not solving them in singularly inept ways, like squandering the treasury on her lifestyle. The money for the summer palace was supposed to be used to create a navy; she had a huge ugly marble boat built instead. When she died, she named a hapless three-year old boy, Pu Yi, as her successor, but the game was up three years later and more than two millennia of Chinese emperors came to an end.

The palace is in a quite pleasant park. There are lots of tour groups here, even though it's a Thursday and I am still surfing the edge of the low season. Fortunately tour groups never stray far and clog a few major sights while leaving everything else blissfully empty.

Also went to the old Bell and Drum Towers, the center of Beijing in Mongol times. Lots of old hutongs (narrow lanes) around them. There is lots of repair and construction work done there - it looks as if China had decided that Chinese culture and historic quarters are valuable after after all and worth preserving, not only the buildings but also the style of the neighborhood (Dirk, your cue). Shadows of Pingyao. (But only shadows.) The quarter could do with fewer pizza restaurants though.

2009-04-15T20:35:00.005+08:00

These days, the Forbidden City is forbidden only to smokers. The big sights that everyone knows come first - three huge halls, separated by gates, and the gigantic yards with the elaborate stairs leading up to them. After that it gets down to business; lots of smaller halls, the bigger ones with thrones for the emperor, the smaller ones for princes, concubines, and government functions. They all have flowery names like "pavilion of mental cultivation". The smaller buildings are in the back of the Forbidden City, and look a little like the Pingyao youth hostel, except bigger, more elaborate, and less well maintained. They show huge collections of jade, silver filigree, bronze, gold, precious stones, and ceramics. They also have a pretty bizarre clock collection; one can paint Chinese characters with a brush.

In regular intervals there are loudspeaker announcements in Chinese, introduced by a chime that every time makes me expect something like "flight 444 is now boarding at the Gate of Supreme Harmony".

I spent seven hours in the Forbidden City, it's just endless. The audio guide makes it interesting, it's quite good except when it gets confused and plays the wrong message and I don't know what it's talking about. There are a lot of guards in military uniforms; two of them patrol the outer wall with walkie-talkies set on full volume, noisily squeaking instructions punctuated by short beeps. Sounds like two Apollo capsules slowly orbiting the city. I don't know how they manage to look so prim in these stuffy uniforms, it's another hot and sunny day.

Outside the Forbidden City is a pleasant park, admission charged, with many old trees, ponds, and lots of flowers and blooming trees. Lots of Chinese photographers with gigantic cameras take pictures of tulips.

I had dinner at the Wangfujing snack street. Lots of food stalls there that sell everything on sticks; you point at some and they fry them: chicken, pork, tofu, tentacles, sausages, starfish, seahorses, live scorpions, toads, and thumb-size grubs. I am not kidding. Apart from the tentacles, nobody I saw bought the more exotic options. I loved the sweet ones with what I thought were strawberries, but were some other tangy fruit with large hard seeds.

2009-04-14T20:35:00.004+08:00

The Chinese Great Wall is not like a road. Roads follow convenient low paths like rivers. The Great Wall, on the other hand, unfailingly picks the most impractical and difficult points of the terrain imaginable - the highest and steepest ridges and peaks no matter how they curve. I wouldn't want to have to carry even one stone up there, but they built 8000 kilometers of it in 1368 to 1567, of which 2000 kilometers remain today.

Most tourists visit the wall at Badaling close to Beijing, but that's a crowded zoo crawling with tourists and souvenir vendors. I joined a group that went to Jinshanling, three hours by bus north of Beijing. We hiked ten kilometers on top of the wall to Simatai. There are very few people here, and the group quickly disperses until I rarely see another visitor. There are at least a few people selling warm water, Coca Cola, and beer (it's a hot sunny day again and the Chinese neglected to properly plan the wall with power outlets).

"Hiking" doesn't properly capture the situation though - since the wall is constantly climbing some hill, so are we. There is never a flat section, always stairs that are often extremely steep and in poor repair. Away from the endpoints, it's sometimes just rubble; even the crenellations are missing in some places. There are guard towers in regular intervals; a few are in ruins. It's quite exhausting but the views are fantastic. How they could ever hope to move an army up there to the right spot to defend the wall, without satellite reconnaissance and back roads, is a mystery to me. The wall was not very effective repelling invaders, but if nothing else it makes a terrific Unesco World Heritage site.

At Simatai we need to cross a river on an Indiana Jones suspension bridge, complete with wooden planks with gaps high above the river. There are no natives shooting arrows at us and hacking away at the cables though. Past the bridge, there is a dammed reservoir fed by the river with mountains on both sides. I could have walked down to a little village where the bus waits, but I hear some people in mid-air over the lake scream and whoop, so I investigate and opt for a cable ride across the lake.

You get a belt harness, basically three loops of rope around your legs and waist, which is hooked into a steel cable that runs across the lake. You sit down on a ledge high up the mountain on one side, looking down the precipice below with cables descending steeply, wondering if this was a good idea after all. Then you kick off and rapidly shoot down the cable across the lake with the mountain panorama all around you. It's totally exhilarating, and over much too quickly!