"In my mind there are pictures of a past I can't define, in my eyes there's a light that is my future passing by" Don't Look Away - The Hazey Janes
Normalisation
(entry #007 15:54 31.05.2008)
OH! The temptation to start off with a trite half-assed song-lyric style contradiction is almost too much. Normalcy... is weird. Aaaah.
But it is weird. Everywhere I go there are people living in the strangest of places. People living in huts in the middle of the driest desert on earth, surrounded by the most nothingy nothing you've ever seen. People selling Chinese food next to glaciers where warm winds blow and the local guides have to cut stairs into the living ice every day. People popping out to buy a pint of milk at an altitude higher than the highest mountain in Europe.
There's always a crazy contrast between the wandering, wondering backpacking hoobs and the chaps who hang around in the bonkers destinations to which the aforementioned hoobs roam. The local people themselves are normally a significant ingredient of the exoticism, and of course they take the fact that they live next to a giant salt flat/the biggest city in the world/the ruins of some bonkers civilisation totally for granted.
I was getting a bit tired of being in that state of zoned-out wonder and self-imposed alienation, and had a go at settling down for a while in Cusco, Peru. South America had been treating me with a colossal and varying indifference, shocking me with Desperado-esque desert joy in San Pedro de Atacama one minute, striking me down with horrible sickness in Arequipa the next. After nearly half a year of moving on every few days, it was a blessed relief to sit down in Cusco to some Spanish classes and a slightly more stable social scene.
It also let have a quick taste of what it's like to live in a crazy exotic place for a while. Not a deep, delicious, George Foreman-grilled slice of spam taste, more of the sort of taste you buy a pack of the local wotsits-on-steroids, Cheesitos - light, delicious, not completely nutritional and yet very enjoyable. One of the best things was to be able to acclimatise a bit to the altitude. The Andes are freaking HIGH. Cusco is something like 11 thousand feet - that's what you get if you stack the three tallest mountains in the UK on top of each other. Except Cusco is surrounded by even bigger mountains, and it's a town of about three hundred thousand people. And they all think that being there is NORMAL.
Being up that high, you get out of breath when you climb up the stairs. You wake up in the night and feel like someone is sitting on your chest. You put a lime in a bottle of Corona and regret it, because now you have to sit there with your thumb on the mouth of the bottle for the next half an hour whilst the insane fizzing refuses to dissipate at bloody all.
It's not bloody normal up there! And yet... after two months of nearly dying every time I climbed up to the school, and of buying Pringles imported from places lower down that had popped their lids themselves, it kind of did feel normal. And then, as I finally flew my comfortable little spanish-school nest and left all my new good friends, other insane altitudes seemed normal. And in fact, anything below Cusco seemed like a feeble girly-man altitude. I'm now at about two thousand metres, and in my head it's practically sea level.
My horizons have been so high up they might as well have been in space. It's a relief to come down, but I'll miss the ability to excuse every unfit moment as due to lack of oxygen. And I'll miss having a different understanding of normal. Then again, some might say that a belief that spam is considerably superior to ham, roast beef and yes, even bacon itself, is pretty far from the norm too. But to me it's as routine as waking up on the top of the world.
Upside down revelations
(entry #006 18:12 02.02.2008)
"I wanna fly and run til it hurts, sleep for a while and speak no words in Australia" Australia - Manic Street Preachers
Well, I was wrong. But before I give you all the satisfaction of hearing about the one time in my life I was wrong, here's some quasi-philosophical "I am a traveller" nonsense:
You don't need me to tell you that everything in life is a learning experience. Even those days when you go and do something completely useless and dull (such as accidentally catching a glimpse of five seconds of an Arctic Monkeys video) and say to yourself, "well, I have learned absolutely nothing from that", really, REALLY, you have. It might not be something positive and useful, but you've still got some more info and experience into your brain. And that's always positive and useful. So I guess you should ignore the sentence that started "it might not be something positive and useful", OK?
So as I bussed and planed and boat-full-of-pigsed my way around Asia, I came to realise that I'd heavily overrated the idea of being 'away' in an 'exotic' culture. It's very refreshing for a while, being a tourist, being an alien, waking up and knowing that if your hair catches on fire during a total eclipse of the sun you will have no way of alerting people to the exact nature of your predicament... but it gets old after a while. And you can't learn that much from it (give or take the mildly ridiculous 'learning from things that teach you nothing' philosophy I have just espoused, come on I'm not checking this rubbish back, throw me a bone here).
I also realised that the best thing about being away from home is meeting all the other people from back home who are away from home. I've mentioned it before. It's nice to connect with people (whether it be through conversation, lips or indeed fists/semi-automatic weaponry), and unless you can master about ten different impossibly tonal local SE Asian languages, you're not likely to connect with the locals too well.
So it should have been obvious to me quite a while ago that I was wrong to initially decide to avoid Australia on this trip. Back when I was planning this trip I was scornful of the idea of hanging out there - too easy, just a big desert full of affable drunks with no visible culture. Well, maybe it is, but I liked it. In fact, I loved it. I'm extremely glad I went, and I think I may well go back.
Australia is great partially because it's like home, and I must admit I needed that at this stage of my travels. But it's also great because it's absolutely full of incredibly pleasant, friendly people. Even the customs officials were friendly to me. Even the bus drivers were friendly to me. Even when I fumbled around with the unfamiliar coins like some kind of idiot. Back home the driver would probably have sworn at me in Polish - here he was all 'ah they all look the same huh mate!'. Marvellous.
Australia is also great because it has freaky animals, clean streets and some absolutely excellent hostels. I thought Sydney was blinding; even though I was supposed to be staying in a 'dodgy' area it felt like leafy suburbia to me (admittedly, leafy suburbia with a slight preponderance of strip clubs, but I'm a man of the world, hell I've spent (a little bit too much) time in Bangkok). Shout out to Emma who will never read all this cos she's lazy but if I write M.I.A! M.I.A.! M.I.A! a few times she might scan this line. The Blue Mountains were something else; I went along feeling tired of travelling, but then met so many cool people as I strummed my guitar in the common room each evening, and, on my first day as I sat under an enormous waterfall, it felt like I was refilling the jug of my soul.
And hey, that's a pretty big jug we're talking about.
I suppose I made up for my anti-Australia stance by actually going, although one thing still pisses me off a bit - the place is as vast as Robbie Williams' face is smackable, and two weeks disappeared like *that* <imagine something disappearing quickly>. Next time I want to go back and get in a truck and Wolf Creek it up, give or take being crucified or having my head chopped off. Australia, Australians, I salute you!
The Con Is On
(entry #005 20:09 18.12.2007)
"Hustle hustle hustle, cry cry cry - why has everyone got hustle on their mind?" Hustle - MIA
I've already mentioned a technique I like to think of as 'brain outsourcing' - letting other people take the lead when they have the requisite knowledge and skills to do something better than I can. A less lazy person would probably be inclined to think of this as less of a 'technique' and more of a matter of me being a lazy bastard.
Well, perhaps. Leaping to my own defence, I'd say this: One of the things I wanted to try for the first time on this trip was the art of drifting like a hopeless hobo bum. Normally whenever I go away I like to make sure I know a lot about where I'm going, a lot about where in particular I'm going to go, and have all the times and dates pretty much worked out before I leave. For someone a bit anxious and worry-addicted as myself, it's been a very liberating to let other people take the lead. At first it was actually a challenge to just jump into the river of life and float along like some kind of human Pooh-stick, so there you go. I wasn't being lazy, I was learning to relax.
Maybe I've relaxed a bit too much. My genius plan to spend Christmas in the second Christmasiest place in the world, the Philippines (the first being Christmas Island, obviously) was a little scuppered by the fact I'd completely bothered to think about how insanely busy a Christian country gets around Christmas. Apparently, if I managed to get acommodation in Manila, I'd be pretty much stuck there for the whole Christmas period. Well, I wanted to spread myself all over the Philippine islands like some kind of travel jam, so I decided instead to come to Malaysia for a little while and then back to Bangkok for Christmas.
For the first time in a long time, I found myself travelling into Malaysia (as per my cool traveller formula for creating nicknames for countries, hereon in referred to as The Ysia) alone. Turning up in Kuala Lumpur at one of those hostels that seems permanently and inexplicably deserted, I soon realised that none of my bank cards would work in any ATM any-bloody-where. I ended up wandering the streets looking for a bank that would let me get some cash somehow, getting incredibly hot, sweaty and bothered in the tropical Ysian heat.
Not fun. Multiply loneliness by moneyless fear and... also multiply by other emotional stuff. Stupid whiney feelings stuff about various people, and other stuff. Bad! I was messed up by the time I managed to squeeze some money out of a virgin credit card, plucked in desperation from my money-belt stash of redundant plastic. In joyous celebration of finally having money, I set off to the Petronas Towers in order to, like, look at them. They're tall and expensive looking. And, incidentally (as with a lot of architecture) the design was outsourced (to an Argentian guy).
So, I've laboriously set up the fact that I was feeling messed up, and have done so ebcause it's my excuse for what happened next, as all my travel-based spidey senses deserted me.
I was approached by a Malaysian lady, a middle-aged housewife sort, who seemed very friendly. Ah, I thought, an opportunity for some real authentic local-meeting travel fun. This should have been the first sign that something was wrong with me - normally I treat authenticity like a shop playing Robbie Williams songs, and run away. She sat me down to have a good old chat, and out of nowhere, shopkeeper-in-Mr Ben style, two other housewife sorts appeared, each with progressively better English.
Ooh, so I'm English. Well, their cousin (or was it their sister? I'm sure this changed a few times) is going to study in England. Can you come and have a word with her about recommendations?
Yes, of course, I think. I can give... recommendations. Like, Boots does really good meal deals, Girls Aloud are the pinnacle of British musical culture, and you should make sure you check out Fat Kids Can't Hunt on Ice at the MEN Arena this Christmas. So I'm like, yeah, I'll come with you into the mall.
So we go into the mall. Oh wait, she's not in the mall at all, a phone call has come through. She's... somewhere else. Let's go there!
So then, out of politeness and not being exactly one hundred percent compos mentis, I GET INTO A TAXI TO AN UNKNOWN DESTINATION WITH A BUNCH OF WOMEN WHO ARE OBSESSED WITH EXCHANGE RATES. I can't begin to underline how ridiculously foolish and out of character this is. I mean, I wanted to do out of character stuff on this trip, but was envisaging more fucking people over, gun running, that sort of thing. Safe stuff. Not getting into random taxis with desperate-for-money housewives.
Out to the suburbs we go, where we enter a nice house with a big security gate. Which is, perversely, not reassuring at all. And inside who do I find sitting in an incredibly unrelaxed way, not watching a Discovery Channel programme about fucking, bedrock or some crap... Mr I'm Going To Rob You Sinister Face Man of course!
Mr I'm Going To Rob You Sinister Face Man engages me in conversation as I slowly begin to realise that I've been very foolish and should really try some kind of ninja-like exit of this house at the first possible opportunity. Then the housewife ladies make some food, which I eat a little bit of, to be polite. Because it's always good to be polite to a bunch of creepy con-artist bastards. Some other woman turns up and says I look like someone out of the airforce, which is so meaningless that the only thing I can think of is the other day when someone said I looked like David Beckham. People out here need to buck up their idea of flattery, because it's either really weird and airforce-based or just patently ridiculous and Beckham-based.
Then Mr I'm Going To Rob You Sinister Face Man is telling me about his job as... guess. Go on, guess! Well, he works... on a cruise ship... In... a... casino! He's some kind of freaking card dealer blackjack bloke! Who would have ever guessed? Oh, and I wonder if he's about to propose we have a little card game? "I can show you how to always win at Blackjack" he says. Oh, my foolish con artist friend.
Into the kitchen we go, where we find a table covered in some kind of baizey 'let's play a crooked game of cards' material. Out come the chips, which seem a little redundant given that he's just about to demonstrate a technique for always winning. Now, you can't brain outsource on card games, and for some reason I have a huge mental block when anyone tells me the rules. Especially when I'm scared they might suddenly pull a knife on me and drive me to an ATM (not that that technique would actually yield up any Malaysian ringitt for their trouble).
So he explains the rules, to which I hear 'Blah blah blah I am going to kill you if you had any sense you would run away'. Then he deals the cards, and asks if I need another one...
"I don't know".
"Do you want another card?"
"I don't know! I didn't really..."
"Do you need another card?!"
"I really don't know... what are the rules again?"
"Do you need another card!"
Yeah bitch, you picked someone who's too stupid at cards to even do the preliminary round of the con. Eat that! I am not about to play with money, because I am not about to even understand the round set up to make me think I can win. I am just TOO RUBBISH AT CARDS for this to work. Plus, I've already spotted the way he shuffles - a bit shitly. And the way he spread them out on the table? Aside from being a sinister faced crook, he's crap at his card-sharking job.
I got out. I don't know how, I don't know why they didn't stop me or threaten me or anything, but I just claimed I had to go and call home. They at least (I mean come on, con artists must try harder!) tried to get me into a car of theirs to drive me back, but of course I just walked to the main road and grabbed a taxi, and was relieved to get an honest and friendly driver, who pointed out all the sights in a slightly confusing mix of Malay and English.
I don't know. Maybe I've become soft, too brain-outsourcing-happy. Maybe I just had a bad day and was vulnerable. Maybe I was lucky to get a bunch of people too shoddy to con me properly, and maybe I should be glad I'm very very bad at card games. Needless to say, I got out of Kuala Lumpur the next day and escaped to Melaka, where I spent a happy few days discussing the drinking of one's own urine, whether horses have teats, and the number of countries in the Commonwealth with an international cast of characters, none of whom wanted to con me at cards.
After these last few days I feel like a wiser man; I know to drink from the middle of the stream, that of course horses have teats, and it's something like 54 countries in the Commonwealth right now. Oh and I guess something about not getting into taxis, or avoiding housewives, or somesuch. I forget.
Man vs Beast
(entry #004 00:00 00.00.0000)
"Your lack of trust in all you see will never crush the trust in me" The People That Life Forgot - The Wildhearts
I've been meeting a lot of people lately, and doing so is probably the most enjoyable and interesting part of my trip. Those in search of 'travel authenticity' would probably sneer at the fact that most of them are fellow backpacker tourist slags and not the super-real people of the Cambodian streets, but sadly my ability in Khmer is rather limited and there's little time to practice now I'm off to Vietnam. But I digress.
Something that's surprised me about a lot of travellers is a certain trend of cynicism. I often get accused of being quite cynical myself, but I'd say that's almost completely wrong. I absolutely hate the things I hate, yes, and I feel strongly about a lot of things, but I take a lot of childish joy in existing, and travelling, and whatnot. I think the world is a good place, and I like humanity, and, like, all that. Um, yeah, so, I think a lot of it comes out when I talk about dolphins.
I hate dolphins. They're the most overrated thing in the sea, boring grey bottle-nosed bastards who are meant to be incredibly intelligent but somehow haven't found the time to invent noodles, the internet or Girls Aloud. Not so clever now, you dolphin gits! In Laos everyone was always wanting to disappear off to see the river dolphins, to which I always said 'screw the dolphins man,' (yes, I now talk like a surfer dude, or maybe a sk8er boi) 'I'd come with you if it was Giant Japanese Spider Crabs, but dolphins are weak... powerful weak'.
People then tend to get upset and start talking about how dolphins would do a better job of managing the world, and a lot of travel types will then talk about how mankind has lost his understanding of nature and should go back to a more primitive state, existing in 'harmony' with nature. It's often implied that mankind is 'unnatural', which I just don't understand.
I also don't understand how people can tell me that kind of thing here in Cambodia. In the 70s the Khmer Rouge forced hundreds of thousands of their own people out from the towns and cities into the fields, in an attempt to completely erase all Cambodian culture and create a Maoist agrarian peasant utopia. People with connections to the old government were killed. People who could speak foreign languages were killed. People who wore *glasses* were killed, all because they were too intellectual and too cultural and not 'pure' with regard to the ridiculous ideals of that hideous revolution.
Standing by the site of one of the mass graves at the infamous Killing Fields, listening to children play at a school barely a hundred yards away, I can't believe that people don't have faith in humanity and an understanding that culture, society, technology are all good things. Many would argue that the very occurrence of a hideous genocidal revolution is indication enough that mankind is evil, but the very fact that I could stand there as a tourist in a country now at peace made me feel hopeful and proud of humanity. I don't know how they've bounced back after millions of people were killed, but they've done it, just as other countries have done before and other countries will do after.
There are always people that will try to fuck things up, and attempt to bring out the dark side in the human soul. But when things get worse they inevitably, eventually get better, and that's because humanity is a wonderful thing, and people are wonderful. I've particularly felt it here in Cambodia, where most locals I've met have been as warm and as friendly as the guidebooks say (a first for me, I've generally found other countries around no better or worse than back home - here there is a noticeable increase in warmth).
There are dozens of massive, incredible temples in the region known as Anghor. It's where they filmed bits of Tomb Raider (OK, so not exactly high praise, I'm just trying to set the scene), and you feel like Indiana Jones half the time you're wandering round. The temples are spectacular, stunning, eerie, and incredibly... temple-y. But during my three days exploring the area, what made the most impression on me were the kids who try to sell you knick-knacks, guidebooks and postcards outside each temple.
As soon as you sit down to eat a pot noodle masquerading as 'noodle soup' at one of the plastic-seated restaurants outside a temple, the kids descend upon you. Ranging in age from tiny tiny little things to teenagers, they ask you 'where you from'. 'Where do you think I'm from?' 'England! Capital is London, population (insert random figure hovering around 60 million) now you buy a bracelet'. As soon as you get past the initial sales pitch, which tends to be completely formulaic, you can really banter with them. I'm talking high-class levels of banter too, not the crap you get at a supermarket back home. One girl threatened to kill me if I didn't buy. Another told me I was a 'difficult man' and that's why I didn't have a girlfriend for whom I could buy bracelets. I ended up chasing one kid round a temple-side lake, trying to give back the free bit of jewellery she gave me on the understanding I'd buy one of her cold drinks. 'You're a bad person' I yelled, and she gave me the most perfectly executed evil eye I've ever been unfortunate enough to receive - before dissolving in helpless giggles as soon as I caved in and bought a coke.
Perhaps it sounds a bit like a pain in the ass, and perhaps it's a bit of a simple pleasure, but when we were chatting to these kids about what they learned at school that morning, or the differences between our countries, or (for some bizarre reason) the Versailles Treaty, I felt so impressed with their ambition and enterprise. OK, so I felt ashamed they were speaking to me in perfect English - but then again, I also felt really amazed at how they could do that so young, and how they could actually take the piss out of me with real wit whilst doing so.
So, until a dolphin turns up and manages to sell me a fridge magnet whilst mocking the hell out of my trousers, I'm going to stick with my view that humanity, for all its manifold flaws and foolishness, is still the absolute king of the jungle.
Moodswings and Roundabouts
(entry #003 00:00 00.00.0000)
"Up, and down. Up... and down." Up And Down - The Vengaboys
I felt like a character in a Bret Easton Ellis novel. For once, it was more Less Than Zero than American Psycho. "Buddhas... are cool" I lamely announced to whoever was next to me, walking round a faded temple in the Laos town Luang Prabang. Everything seemed all surface, no feeling, the beautiful, battered iconography of an exotic religion quietly sitting round us on all sides.
Whoever was next to me (and it happened to be an Australian guy called Dylan, who at this point was about the only thing stopping me from retreating right up my own spiritual arse) was whistling the Imperial March from Star Wars, and it seemed to have more meaning than any amount of Buddhist chanting. I felt like Scarlett Johannson in Lost In Translation, crying on the phone to her friend in LA - "I went to this shrine today.And um, there were these monks and they were chanting. And I didn't feel anything. You know?"
Kicking my heels amongst beautiful mosaiced stupas in the light rain, sitting in the soft silence of the main temple hall, stared at by cloned Buddhas, I felt like Renard in The World Is Not Enough. I could clutch at any number of hot rocks, religions, people, but at the end of it I knew all I'd be able to say was a bitter "I feel... nothing".
People don't really tell the truth about travelling that often. There are message boards full of well-travelled backpacker types, and they constantly reassure the prospective gappers, the career-breakers and the life-resetters that every single day of travelling will be amazing. Weeeeell, OK, perhaps you'll have a couple of days where your camera's been nicked, or you miss a plane, but apart from that, yeah, it's going to be wall-to-wall joy.
That's rubbish. Reassuring rubbish, but rubbish all the same. I don't think I've ever even had a weekend break where there wasn't some kind of hefty slice of crapitude. For about half a day, all Barcelona did was hurt my feet. I felt lonelier than I've ever felt sat in my Kyoto hotel watching a program about playing the ukelele that involved no actual playing of a ukelele at any point. Quito nearly knocked me out every time I had to walk anywhere.
This trip is the most uncertain thing I've ever done in my life, and I worried endlessly before I set off. And I still worry now. I've literally been up and down more times than an incredibly cliched figure of speech, and it's already taken quite a lot of self-discipline not to change my facebook status to 'lonely, loveless, lost in Laos'. And yet, it's been equally hard to resist not changing my facebook picture to the one of me in a tribal village, madly grinning kids around my neck, their deep brown skin throwing my pasty ghostness into even more embarrasingly stark relief than usual.
Just because there are amazing highs when you go and see a bit of the world, that doesn't mean there aren't any lows.
As my Thursday in Luang Prabang drew on, our little group strolled from that first temple to the bottom of a fearsome set of steps. Up the steps we went, into a set of shrines and temples scattered across the hill, before arriving at a breathtaking view of the whole city as it sidled up to the Mekong river, watched over by scarily-enclouded mountains. And... I didn't feel like Clay in Less Than Zero any more, because I started talking to people. I didn't feel like Charlotte in Lost In Translation any more, because I stopped worrying about connecting with the local culture. I didn't feel like Renard in The World Is Not Enough any more, because I felt. Better.
Above the town we sat on a bench and took photos of giant moths and giant crickets, and one of the girls we are travelling with, Charlotte, told me 'you worry too much' and she was right. So, after bouncing between elation and depression with almost clockwork regularity, I think today's lesson is this:
"You've gotta take the good with the bad, the happy with the sad, but don't get mad if things don't go the way you planned."
Bradley from S Club 7 said that, you know. I still hold he has as much to teach us as Buddha.