A traveller's tales

Wat Po temple in Bangkok

Here's a few random thoughts on being a traveller again:

The Ultimate Form of Transport?

You'd think that air-travel was a singularly technology-driven industry these days. What with instant telephone reservations and internet bookings and even being able to check-in online these days. Erm, not always.

Despite their appalling reputation ("It is worth flying with any other airline if at all possible" - Lonely Planet Nepal) and poor safety record (but then flying is the safest form of transport I thought*), I was attracted by Royal Nepal Airlines' cheap prices and decided to book a flight with them for the Bangkok to Kathmandu leg of the Bigtrip. However, deciding to do that and doing it were two different things. Firstly, RNA has no booking facility online. Secondly, travel agents in Australia won't deal with them.

The only solution was to go to the RNA office in Bangkok myself on the morning of the flight to pay for and pick up my ticket.

Finding the office was easier than I thought. Then the bad news. Flight cancelled. Technical problems. No flight until Friday. Maybe I should have expected as much. When the King of Nepal took a tour of Africa in 2005, half of Royal Nepal's flights were cancelled at short notice! Luckily, the beauty of not having booked and paid for a ticket was that I could go to the Thai airways office and book a flight for the next day with a serious airline.

MORAL: if an airline isn't organised enough to allow online booking, you probably shouldn't rely on them to get several hundred tonnes of metal and gadgetry up and down out of the sky to anything resembling a reliable timetable.

*I've since checked - flying is not the safest form of transport. Train travel is safer.

So what do you do when you have an unexpected 24 hours in Bangkok?

Dye your hair blonde and go clubbing with the locals of course. Now I know this is really a Japan thing, but in the spirit of the craze of peoples from Asia with dark hair dying it blonde, i thought "when in Rome..."

I was a bit disappointed to have a day less in Nepal but I had a great day in Bangkok. Really didn't think I'd like this city, but - in spite of the appalling traffic - it was a really great, lively place to visit. The temple pictures on this page are all from Bangkok.

In the evening I went to a local bar where a band played Thai music and passable covers of western tunes. I had a beer and then ordered a whisky and coke, not realising that when you order whisky and coke you are ordering the whole bottle. This mistake seemed to impress the locals. Obviously I got nowhere near finishing the bottle, but it still cost about the equivalent of 3 whisky and cokes in Edinburgh - result!

Weirdest thing in Bangkok happened at the airport. Survabhaiyam (sp) airport opened at the end of 2006 and is an ultra-modern airport intended to cement Bangkok's position as a key hub in Asia. Not that I appreciated that as I had to get up very early for the flight, which always kills me. At the airport I went to have some breakfast at a Thai restaurant. The waitress was the strangest person I have ever met. She kept singing bizarre songs and wanting to touch the bottom of my trousers while I was eating my Chicken Noodle Soup. Then when I asked her not to, she sat behind me having an imaginary conversation with her mother about how she met this man one day and only wanted to touch his trousers because they were magical. I was so tired I could have wept. Luckily my flight was called and I managed to escape with my trousers...

MORAL: if you build the second-largest passenger terminal in the world and have to staff it in a hurry, don't expect to pick from the top of the job-seekers' pool.
(Thailand is famous for its massages. An invigorating hour-long massage is just $3. An aromatherapy massage, including foot-washing, for 90 mins is only $5. You can have a sculpture made of yourself being massaged for just $10. Ok, I made that last one up.)

Out of all the restaurants I could have gone to at the airport, I happened to choose that one. Just chance or, when the coincidinces start piling up, do you need to ask if there is something else at work...?

What are the chances?

It's a big big world. And there are now 6,500,000,000 of us milling about on it. I worked out that, if you said hello to one person every second, you'd have to live to be 175 to meet everyone on earth*. I have had a lot of time on my hands recently now that they force you to check in 3 hours early.

I got onto thinking about that when I was wondering about going to visit the Dalia Lama in India (a visit to the hills around Shimla could be a perfect antedote to India's June heatwave). He must be the individual alive today who has met more ordinary people than any other.

(Modern art or the back of the Buddha's head?)

Anyway, for all the numbers, I actually want to make the point that this is a small world. Bear with me here...

Coincidence 1: I often get the funny feeling of seeing a familiar face when I'm travelling. Bizarrely, sometimes it's someone of a different race who happens to look like one of my friends. (Graeme - it's not just Jools Holland I'm concerned about!) However, this feeling was stronger than usual when I arrived at Siem Reap airport in Cambodia last weekend. As I waited at the luggage belt, an English-looking guy (you can spot travelling Brits a mile off, they tend to look a bit pasty and uptight at airports) seemed very familiar. Eventually we were next to each other in the taxi queue. After a mumbled hello he apologised for giving me the wrong directions when I asked him how to get the tram to the beach in Melbourne three months before! Really, what are the chances...???

Coincidence 2: The other day I emailed my friend Adrienne and happened to mention that I was just about to fly to Nepal for a week. She emailed back to say that she had just changed her plans and would arrive in Kathmandu a couple of days before I was due to leave. This will be second time our paths have crossed since we met in South America. And when was the other time...? When we were both in Melbourne and that guy gave us the wrong directions of course!!

* In fact, with about 20 people born every second, you could never actually get through the 6.5bn at all. (talking of which, if there's not 'one' but one-thousand 'born every minute', doesn't that mean that 99.9% of us should be quick-witted and not gullible...?)

(Lastly, this is a picture of my expensive Merill sandals just before I threw them in the bin in Cambodia. The rot set in way back in January when I wore them to walk across the salt plains in Uyuni, Bolivia. That stuff is incredibly corrosive - it basically ate through my sandals over a period of several months. Travelling can be hard on your feet but even harder on your footwear.)

I can see whales from here, boyo.

(At last - a picture uploaded! Joy! And look at that pec!!)

Keeping this blog updated while on the move is often pretty challenging. Probably the most difficult time up to now was in South America where I never spent more than a couple of days in one place at any time. And that's why it was so surprising that internet availability and speed were so good.

But now at last I've hit a wall. Though Korea has the highest bandwidth of any country in the world, it hasn't spread to the rest of Asia. Uploading photos here in Nepal is near impossible, which is such a shame as I have such great photos to put on.

Even as I type, they've just switched off most of the computers and the lights in the internet cafe here, as i think they are worried about lightning striking the building!! (Weather is attrocious outside). It's difficult to see anything and the light from the monitor glowing in the darkness is attracting every weird insect in this part of Nepal!!

Whale-watching couldn't have a higher profile in Australia than it does at this exact point in time. The population of whales and interest in the animals has gone up to the point where it is a $100m+ industry for Aus and New Zealand. Even more crucially, the moratorium on whaling has come under increasing pressure in recent years from Iceland, Norway and Japan.

(I can't understand Japan's position on whaling. It killed 4,000 whalers last year, supposedly for 'scientific reasons'. Of course, there are no scientific reasons - it's not clear that any serious study is being done of whales (any research needs to be directed at how the animals migration and behaviour are affected by noise and other pollution in the oceans - not easy research to do with a corpse...). This is so transparently false as to be patronising and engenders great ill feeling among a huge number of people. Iceland and Norway are at least transparently stating a desire to hunt whales for food. But feel free to boycott all three!)

Pro-whaling (of which UK is prominent) and anti-whaling sides are both trying to recruit other nations to help with their voting total this year - Japan just persuaded Laos among others to join the voting plebiscite and vote for whaling. Laos is land-locked...

This meeting also happens to coincide with the start of the whale migration season. My last full-day in Australia was also the first day when Sydney's whale-watching operators offered a 'whales or your money back' guarantee. Luckily, I didn't get my money back.

I can't remember exactly how many whales we spotted - somewhere between ten and twenty. The first two we saw were just a kilometre or so from the mouth of Sydney harbour. These whales were all humpback whales and they migrate from Antartica to the NE coast of Oz and South Pacific islands at the start of the southern hemisphere winter.

This migration takes them past Sydney harbour. Whales have the largest migratory journey of any mammal (up to 5,000 miles!) but they seemed happy to take time out of their journey to interact with the watching boats.
(Curiousity on both sides as a whale approaches our boat)

We saw quite a range of whale 'activity' including blowing, diving, fluke-up dives and most-entertainingly 'pec waves' where the whale seems to wave its pectoral fins (think arms) at watching boats.

Latest news - of the two votes on whaling in the last week, neither went Japan's way. Great news for whales! But Japan are now threatening to leave the organisation and set up their own... Anyway, this is probably a bit partial - for the latest news:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6710613.stm

All Over Down Under

Ok. For anyone who likes to tune in to this blog for the travel and adventure side of the blog rather than the emotional rollercoaster and socialising/partying stories, good news! I'm about to be a tourist again. But it would be completely misleading to describe my last week in Sydney without focusing on the huge emotional highs and lows... and erm, the drinking.

(Oh and this isn't a great update for those of you - probably a large majority - who just like the pictures, as I'm in Cambodia now - of which news to follow - and the internet is devastatingly slow at loading pics. In fact, i got a mild electrical shock when i plugged my camera into the pc - maybe that's a hint - so no pics until I'm back in Thailand.) [Ok, since added some photos, but they are pretty random as there's a hefty size limit. Erm, very random...]

There have been some hugely emotional moments in the last 8 moths. It's been continually brought home to me that travelling is about both exporing new places and meeting new people. I've also found out that travelling is also about moving on and leaving behind good friends, new friends and fabulous places.

And that's never been more true than this week.

I made a new friend in the last week that i was gutted to leave behind after just 48 hours of making his acquaintance, and in spite of the fact that I still don't know his name!

Congratulations to Caroline and Chris who on Friday welcomed their new son into the world (that sounds so grown-up for a man who I once witnessed running off with a nuddy-mag under his arm which we had ''acquired' from a Greek... actually, no need to finish that story). On a purely personal point I am absolutely made-up that I got the chance to meet young master Reid as it was looking very likely that my Saturday afternoon flight would arrive before the baby.

So the last 48 hours was full of emotion. Plus, though Chris missed my final final leaving night out (something about labour...), we did manage to wet the baby's head on the Friday night. After a 5am finish the night before I had every good intention of behaving myself and having an early night on the Friday as opposed to going out clubbing, doing jaegar-bombers and getting home at 3am.

Every good intention.

Anyway, I really appreciated the send-off. Thanks to Ed, Smithy, Ness, Willie, Keith and all the usual suspects. I am missing those teapot cocktails already (esp the one with Midori in it).

The last 48 hours was completed by a fantastic trip whale-watching. Normally that's the sort of exciting event that would warrant an update on its own, but it'll just have to get a quick mention for now.

Leaving Sydney has been really tough. Would never have imagined (or hoped) that I'd have so many people here to say goodbye to. I've quit a job, moved out of a flat and said goodbye to friends... all over again.

So it's back to toursit mode now. As exciting as the next part of the big trip is, it seems less worthwhile to be 'just' a travelling vagrant once more. But without jumping ahead, Cambodia has been great so far. Should be some more superb memories to come...

Aussie Countdown

(Sticking on a few more pics from the sailing weekend. Above - attempted backflip gone wrong)

With just one week left to go in Australia, it suddenly feels like a strange, almost sombre piont in the big trip! Down here, the seasons are changing and we're heading from Autumn into Winter. Ditto for my year out. I've got just 3 months left (which still sounds a lot i guess!) and am coming towards the final straight. As with Belize, the fantastic time I've had here in Australia will soon be a memory. Great memories though, thanks to Keith (Coyote) Wylie, Ed(ipedia), Ness, Kate, Jezza, Dave, Jude, Richard, Sarah, loads of others, and of course Chris and Caroline.

Last Thursday I finished my voluntary work at Opportunity International. As with Belize and BCVI, I hope the work I did has some positive impact. I certainly got a lot of it.

So 3 months of holiday with no work at all - way hey! Now that it's just days until i leave, I'm at last getting pretty darned excited about the next part of the trip. Perhaps that's partly because last week it looked briefly as if it might not happen...

Because I've stayed on longer in Australia, I've made a bit of a change to the plan. After some thought I've decided to do:

• 3 days in Cambodia (to see Angkor Wat)
• 1 week in Nepal
• 2 weeks in India, and then...
• 2 month tour round southern Africa

Just as i started looking into flights on Wednesday - my round the world ticket gets me to Bangkok but I have to organise my own flights between Thailand and Kenya - I got an email from a friend talking about their recent trip to India, which was almost ruined because they didn't get their visa sorted in good time. Not having realised that I need a visa for India, this was quite a timely email!

When I checked online i found out that, sure enough, I do need a visa. And, disturbingly, the Indian Embassy website stated that it could take up to "14 working days". And there were just 6 working days left before I was due to fly out. After locating the embassy on the map, i headed straight over to the visa office. Upshot was that they could guarantee I would get my visa in time but only if I could show proof that i had alreay booked flights into and out of India... which I hadn't.

I crossed the road from the embassy 'in a state of high anxiety' and went straight into a Flight Centre travel agent, which just happened to be on the other side of the road. (On reflection, it’s probably there to take advantage of people in my predicament.)

At the counter I accosted a member of staff with: “I need to book a flight from Kathmandu to Delhi, and then another flight from Delhi to Nairobi… NOW!” startling a couple of Sydneysiders who were booking a Club18-30 holiday in Fiji (beats Benidorm I suppose).
I also had to apply for my Cambodia VISA online today. Because I needed to apply straight away and didn’t have my camera with me, I had to take the picture from this website and then ‘doctor’ it amateurishly in Microsoft Paint. Amazingly they accepted it and sent me confirmation of my visa within a couple of hours. John Howard take note…

So almost sorted. I should get my visa back on Thursday and I just need to book my flights to Cambodia now. Otherwise, hopefully it will be quite a relaxing last week here.
(This is just a pic I found from when Alan and I were out on the town in Sydney. Not sure where my Tintin quiff came from)

Lastly, i was recently amazed and amused to find that the Eurovision Song Contest was on tv here, and you even get Terry Wogan's commentary. The voting is always 'interesting'. It used to be just 10 or 12 countries and Sweden did well because Norway, Finland and Denmark always voted for them. This made other countries a bit peeved. (Though I think they also had to concede that the Swedes also benefitted from being a stunningly good-looking race of people. And then there was Abba who could come up with a decent song or two into the bargain...) Now it's a bit silly as there are so many balkan countries these days (about 17 and increasing by one every month i reckon) and if they all vote for each other then places like the UK - who have no friends (I blame Tony Bliar) - are stuffed. I note that Ireland has started to give us a sympathy vote, probably hoping we will reciprocate. Talking of reciprocation, there must be fantastic opportunities for game theory analysis. An infinitely repeated multi-period game with varying participants in each time-period... (thats a joke for economists - we dont get much to laugh about).

Please sign this petition

(After his initial enthusiasm wore off, Tarantino conceded that it had been a bad idea to do the casting for Reservoir Dogs 2 at his local old folks home.)

The finance ministers of the G8 meet this Friday. In case you weren't already aware, the record of the G8 countries in meeting the commitments that they made at Gleneagles, Scotland in 2005 has been appalling. In response to huge demonstrations at the time, the G8 leaders publicly promised to increase development aid for the poorest countries by $50bn by 2010. If anything, these countries have since taken several steps backwards.

A letter has now been put together calling on the G8 to honour their commitments to fighting global poverty. (The letter was organised by a group called Avaaz and the Global Call to Action Against Poverty.) The letter, which has been signed by Desmond Tutu, will run in a big ad in the Financial Times on Friday morning. Click here to sign it:
Http://www.avaaz.org/en/g8_poverty_letter/tf.php

If you'd like to read more about the appalling record of Russia, Italy and the US in meeting their commitments, this article from the Guardian is well worth a read:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g8/story/0,,2080575,00.html

Extracts:
Only Britain and Japan are living up to the promises of the Gleneagles agreement

Attempts by Tony Blair to inject a fresh sense of urgency into the G8 have been frustrated by other rich nations.

"We only made those promises because we felt sorry for Tony Blair after the terrorist attacks on 7/7," [a Russian representative] said, referring to the terrorist attack on the day before the Gleneagles agreement was signed.

Italy should have increased its development assistance to sub-Saharan Africa by 79% between 2004 and 2006 to meet its Gleneagles promises; in reality, it has cut aid by 30%.

A study put out last week by a consortium of European NGOs said that countries were using smoke and mirrors to dress up their spending, counting not just debt relief but domestic spending on refugees and educating foreign students in their aid budgets.

Bono said yesterday that the G8 could not let the campaigners down. "Telling lies to Bob and me is one thing. Putting their signature on a G8 communique and lying to their citizenry is another matter. Breaking promises to the most vulnerable people on earth is real infamy."

If all that doesn't make your blood boil...