After my post yesterday, our TV is being picked up today to be fixed. Do people get their TVs fixed anymore? I'd thought that when the broke you threw them out and bought a new one (based on the economic viability of fixing them v buying them) .... we'll see.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Life without a television
Our TV broke last Friday. At the (very high) risk of sounding like one of those weirdos you should avoid, I am quite enjoying not having a television. No need to go sit in the study/spare room and read while M watches Australian Idol. No need to get angry at TV current affairs. I recommend it.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Northern Territory
Have now returned from holidays and back at work...
The Northern Territory was great.
We didn't spend much time in Darwin but enjoyed the time we spent there. We had a great dinner at Hanuman and the Museum / Gallery is smallish but really good.
Then we hired a car and explored Litchfield and Kakadu.
Our day in Litchfield National Park was really good. Swimming in water holes (and not getting eaten by crocodiles!), hiking through extremely varied bush, driving (fast) past all sorts of scenery. We then had a couple of great days in Kakadu National Park. The Yellow Water Cruise was fantastic (crocodiles, lots of birdlife, fascinating scenery), M&I won the trivia competition at the Cooinda lodge and made Dutch and Swedish friends, we did a few exhausting hikes through spectacular scenery and just generally had fun.
Then the joy of a 2.20am flight back home.
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Cherating
According to the Guide Books, a chilled-out party town on MAlaysia's East Coast. According to M & Tyson, a dead zone better avoided. I thought the many goats wandering in packs [is that the correct term? i presume not...] in the main street of town were sort of cute though.
Our chalet was cute - and right near the beach, located next to a stagnant pond with plenty of life growing inside. Actually it was pretty good. Lots of weird night noises though. And some big lizards nearby. Scotch and warm water was the perfect solution. Well, if not the perfect solution, the best solution available.
Some good Malaysian food at street stalls. And possibly the worst meal I've ever eaten at a faux-Italian restaurant. The town has lots and lots of accomodation and many, many restaurants but appeared to have a total of approx 15 Western visitors and some Malaysian visitors (but they largely stayed away from the beach in a very crappy 'luxury resort' [very loose description] in a separate section of town).
A tourist town with no tourists has a very weird energy.
Darwin
After a reasonably tortorous day in which we left our Chalet in Cherating at 9am and arrived at our hotel in Darwin at 4.15am I am now back in Australia. We felt like we were on the Amazing Race - a 45 min taxi then a 7+ hour bus trip (including a border crossing from Malaysia into Singapore) then a longish walk then a taxi then the most uncomfortable flight I've ever taken (4 1/2 hours Tiger Air Singapore-Darwin - it brings a new meaning to the words 'Economy Carrier') then a shuttlebus. All while carrying this ****** unbelievably heavy stone sculpture I bought in Siem Reap and have now lugged around for about 2 weeks.
In any event, looking forward to a NT adventure before arriving home later this week.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Jungle trekking!
Those few who recall my jungle trekking exploits in Thailand last year (i have tried unsuccessfully to block them out) will enjoy the following trauma. On Perhentian Besar, we found out about a track that would apparently take us across the island to another beach in about 20 minutes. Jungle covered about 95% of the island's land mass, so I guess that meant we had to go through some jungle. But surely lots of people use these paths - they must be pretty well-beaten.
We set out (M in shoes, me in sandals) and after finding the beginning of the path hidden at the back of a set of chalets, started on an indistinct path that quickly became a full-on jungle path through a moist rainforest. Lots of noises in the undergrowth and ants 3 inches long. Vines everywhere that looked like snakes. Clearly the path was not much used and, at times, it disappeared almost totally and was marked only by the occasional stake in the ground.
M bravely led the way, fending off the cobwebs, whilst I brought up the rear and kept a vigilant eye out for any snakes that she had missed and which lay in wait for me. Luckily it was only after we were safely back at Tuna Bay I read in Lonely Planet about the Malaysian flying snakes [they glide].
After we made it to the other beach - drenched in sweat - we discovered that the other beach (Flora Bay) was really nice and possibly the best place on the Perhentians to base yourself if your focus was on diving.
Reflections on Perhentian
An awesomely relaxing experience.
Fantastic weather every day, easy lifestyle, white-sand beaches with beautiful blue/green water.
There are two main islands - Kecil and Besar. We stayed on Besar, which although a bigger island, is the less-developed of the two - presumably becaused there is less flat land. 'our beach' - the strip where our hotel was located - had a couple of hotels, a couple of restaurants, a few general shops and a couple of diving shops - all pretty low-key. Alcohol was available if you asked for it, but not on menus or advertised. A walk over an old stone path led to another beach with another hotel and what seemed to be a site for school or youth camps.
Walking along the stone path our first night, we saw a monster lizard almost 2 metres long - apparently it was a monitor lizard (they look like a komodo dragon if that helps - i don't really know what komodo dragons look like except that they apparently look like the monitor lizard i saw). It looked roughly like a little dinosaur with longish legs. Not dangerous.
Little to report about life at Tuna Bay (our hotel). We ate mainly at a nearby restaurant which had fantastic fish sambal and a really sweet waiter with the hairdo of a gangster flunky in a Hong Kong police flick - a mullet at the back and a fringe at the front with various sections in orange - and the service style of an unworthy acolyte serving his cult leader.
The snorkelling trip made me realise I miss diving, although the reef wasn't so good. Loved following schools of fish, playing with anenomes and clown fish and inspecting some huge clams. also loving zipping around in tiny speedboats.
Went over to Long Beach at Kecil (the other island). Definitely the party place. More like a Thai beach, with crappy chalets and lots of people in their mid-20s lazing around and preparing to party at night. A beautiful beach, however - possibly the nicest white-sand beach I've ever seen with the warmest water.
We heard an Aussie voice only once on Perhentian - I'd guess that the biggest ethic group among guests on the Islands were Italian, followed by Germans / Dutch / Austrians / similar. And quite a few Maaysians staying on the islands.
On the bus from Kuala Besut to Cherating
A five hour plus trip on the public bus from Kuala Besut, the town nearest the Perhentian Islands, to Cherating where we'll be spending the next couple of nights. Marni is sleeping on my shoulder and is the only woman on the bus not wearing a muslim headscarf. The bus is cheap and comfortable (except that the enthusiastic airconditioning has been set to 'arctic') but not particularly easy for travellers / non-Malaysians to use - all info in Malay etc.
Away from the tourist areas, the Muslim conservatism of the East Coast is very apparent. We got speaking to a Chinese Malaysian guy, who mentioned that they don't get a lot of tourists travelling along the East Coast. There certainly aren't any others on our bus or to be seen along the route.
We're planning to spend our last couple of nights in Malaysia in Cherating, a town on the coast about 5 hours by bus from Singapore. According to the (usually reliable) Lonely Planet it's a relaxed travellers village - but it's unlikely to be as nice as Perhentian... we'll see.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
coffee
Having now sampled local coffee across Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Laos I can now safely say they all suck. As a born-and-bred Melbournian I have high coffee standards and wasn't expecting Asian coffee to meet them, but it is uniformly woeful. In fact my uncle Jack, a coffee drinker if ever I've met one, resorted to tea when travelling in Cambodia and Laos a few years ago.
But i am of tougher stuff - I have kept drinking the coffee - and kept complaining - through muddy, thick, foul-tasting cup after cup. Actually I limit myself pretty much to one cup a day - any more and I would expect internal corrosion.
In order from best to worst, I rank South-East Asian coffee as follows:
1. Thailand
2. Laos
3. Cambodia
4. Malaysia
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Perhentian
M and I are presently at the Tuna Bay resort at the Perhentian Islands in Malaysia. Very beautiful - we are sleeping a lot and relaxing and snorkelling and reading and just hanging out and having a great time. A very muslim area - on our snorkelling trip the other day there was an Italian girl in a tiny bikini and a muslim girl who stayed dressed head to toe whilst snorkelling. Not so much to report other than the weather is perfect, there are lots of fish in the sea and life is pretty good here!
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Phnom Penh
Thursday we took a $6 bus to Phnom Penh. A very inexpensive way to take a 5 hour journey. The bus was mostly locals, and about 1/3 foreigners. Not a particularly comfortable way to travel, but a chance to see the countryside and to catch up on the latest Cambodian and Thai pop videos and music blasted through the bus. See my previous posts about the standard of driving. I note also that the bus' horn would have sounded at least 3-5 times per minute throughout the 5 hour journey - a nice combination with the Cambodian pop. The driver sounded the horn each time we dodged a truck, another bus, a car, a motorbike, a bicycle, pedestrians or livestock.
My experience of PP began with being horribly harassed while getting off the bus and trying to collect our bags. The tuk-tuk drivers were very insistent (and even physical) but ultimately we picked a driver and headed off to our hotel (Boddhi Tree - ok, but not special). After we'd settled in we went out to explore the city. Wat Phon, the temple-mountain (a popular attraction) is a horrible waste of time. An extremely unimpressive temple on a little hill, riddled with beggars.
We then walked along an ugly highway and other roads through extremely dangerous traffic until we found the Royal Palace about a half-hour later. You can't actually go into the Royal Palace, but the grounds and pavilion around it, which you can visit, totally suck except for a nice emerald buddha in a pagoda with a floor of silver tiles.
Fortunately, the National Museum was really good and our first positive PP experience. It was not particularly informative, but the pieces of ancient sculpture and other antiquities (dating back as far as the sixth century) were very impressive. A number of pieces from the Angkor temples, removed here for safe-keeping, along with sculptures from other earlier eras. Some fantastic huge stone heads from Angkor Thom and some of the most beautiful pieces of sculpture I've seen.
After that, drinks at the Foreign Correspondents Club (a very atmospheric colonial-feel bar upstairs and overlooking the harbour). We felt very much like we were in a bubble away from the outside PP (for western tourists) of constant harassment - and it felt like a timewarp back to the pre-revolutionary days of the 1960s. Followed up by dinner at Friends, a restaurant run by an NGO as part of a project to train street kids in the hospitality industry (thanks for the recommendation Jon) - a great experience and great food.
Today before we left PP we managed to get to the Killing Fields, the Tluong Sleng museum (S21) and the Russian Markets. The Killing Fields and S21 were just unbelievably depressing - sites of unimaginable killing and torture during the Pol Pot regime. The S21 photos of torture victims (before and after) are horribly affecting, as were the paintings of the torture scenes displayed next to the actual instruments of torture. The place had a very strong feeling of evil and sadness and was absolutely horrible. The Killing Fields don't actually have that much to see - other than the monument with glass walls and filled with thousands of skulls which left me feeling empty and sick and almost numb and a whole series of holes which used to be mass graves.
On a totally different note, the Russian Markets were actually good - they are used both by tourists and locals and gave a taste of life of the Cambodians living in PP.
Overall, we weren't that sorry to be leaving PP this afternoon to begin the next leg of our holiday in Malaysia.
Angkor update
The other day M and I visited Bantei Srei by tuk-tuk - about an hour from Siem Reap. It is a temple that is raved about by the guidebooks, but which we did not love so much. Not helped by the massive number of tour groups visiting at the same time as us, but it just seemed underwhelming compared to the other temples we visited. Also, it seemed a little too well-restored (how much is original?)... The drive was great, though - highways, paddy fields, villages and a chance to observe life for Cambodians who do not exist for the tourist dollar.
After that we visited Preah Khan - which we both loved. COmparatively deserted, it was vast and awe-inspiring as an ancient achievement. It felt like it had retained its atmosphere as a city / monastery and was very tranquil. An optical effect of the very long and symmetrical main passage blew M & I away and everything about it left a deep impression. I look forward to posting some photos soon.
Our last afternoon in Siem Reap we revisited Angkor Wat and Bayon. A couple more hours at Ankor Wat was great (and I was very proud of myself for making it back up to the top and even more impressed I made it down again). The AW complex is so hue and impressive that it is hard to find the words to adequately describe its power. Though much is left, so much is destroyed or badly damaged - it is fascinating to imagine what it must have looked like at its peak - but you can do no more than imagine.
Bayon just before dusk was fantastic. Rain was falling lightly and we had virtually the whole huge temple to ourselves. All the heads of Jayvarman VII (the greatest Cambodian king) staring down at me without a crowd of tourists to diffuse the energy meant it was a very magnetic experience.
Wednesday night we went to a shadow puppet and Khmer dancing show. There's nothing I can say about the shadow puppet show other than that it was a total waste of time. The dancing was sort-of cute, however. The actual dancing was unimpressive, but watching the teenage dancers flirt with eachother and the band members was fun.
7 on a motorbike!
today in phnom penh I saw 5 adults and 2 babies on a motorbike - the record so far. a family of 4 is commonplace (as is a man laden with a full load of building materials) but nevertheless 7 remains noteworthy...
Also today, I experienced the worst road of my life on the way to the Killing Fields. Our tuk-tuk shook, rattled and almost rolled and I hit my head on the roof while screaming "brace!" through gritted teeth to M before each particularly bad bump I could see coming up on the dirt road. Given that it appeared to be a road relatively frequently used by locals and is the road to a major tourist attraction, it was unbelievably bad. My first real taste of why Cambodia is described as having one of the world's worst road systems.
From Cambodia to KL
Am now in Kuala Lumpur overnight, en route to the Perhentian islands on Malaysia's East Coast. KL is a very modern city and a breath of very different air after Cambodia. We're staying at Eight Hotel in the Golden Triangle area - it's a really cool hotel / hostel - the guidebooks love it and I can see why. Very cool.
Neither M nor I are sorry to be leaving Cambodia - it's an interesting place, but after 6 jam-packed days we were ready to move on. Our last few days have been incredibly busy - from massages (great, but i am always left feeling like an indelicate lump of physical imperfection by the beautiful, delicate masseurs) to being caught in a thunderstorm coming back from the temples of Angkor to today visiting the Killing Fields and more in Phnom Penh.
Reflections on Cambodia to follow ...
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