I love the fact that Tioman has a heart of solid jungle that can be explored, but must be respected. I spent a long time on Koh Tao in Thailand but found the fact that it had evolved from one vast coconut plantation had left it featureless in it’s interior, but Tioman still has the monkeys, monitor lizards, butterflies snakes and everything that goes with this hemisphere and location.
(more…)Tag: Travel
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Back to the source
It was around 12 years ago that I saw a Norwegian feller on the beach in Tioman with a laptop. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was connected to the web via a sat phone and that he was working.
I decided that if this was work then I wanted to get involved, so I learned how to use computers and got busy.
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Thaipusam
I hung around in Singapore for the Thaipusam festival
where people walk around with big spikes in their bods all wrapped up in a frame. They are asking the gods to give them a hand to overcome lifes obstacles and for certain things like physical protection or wealth, all symbolised by objects, limes, coconuts. It is a heady affair for such a modern city, the contrast between visceral worship with the towering perfect city all too obvious.
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Little India
One thing about Singapore is that you can transport yourself to different parts of the world in theme park style by going to a few of the little enclaves dotted about.
Right now I am in Little India. Little India is like a sanotised microcosm of the mother country where you can absorb the sights and sounds in a few hundres square metres, music shops, shrines, them smell of incense misxed with spicy food. Tonight I chowed down on a mutton byriani and cold iced tea.
I almost didn’t stay through the day though. For a while this morning I missed my lady and felt somehow as if I were negligent in not being in the UK with my brethren for the bad weather and knee deep snow, so much so that I rang Qantas and asked them to change my flight. But just before I gave them my credit card info for the surcharge I realised that I had better finish what I had started and make it through my last week for this winters trip, so I have booked a bus to take me to Mersing where I’ll catch a ferry to Tioman tomorrow.
for tonight I have the treat of the six nations starting so I’ll pop on over to a local bar and catch the game in 20 minutes time.
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Singapore Slings
I’m getting too lazy to shift my arse out of Singapore – It’s comfy here, not as expensive as you’d think if you stick to the food halls where you can buy any food from China, India, Malaysia with even fish and chips on the menu for those missing home. So why move – I have heard the weather is still awful on the island of Tioman so perhaps diving is out of the question so we’ll see – it’s raining here now so maybe this muggy weather will lighten up a wee bit.
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Singapore
I remember once standing on a Thai raliway station with my daughter in my arms as life went on around us. Lady boys flirted on the night time tracks and people milled around until they all started to buzz about like stirred up bees shouting ‘Singapore Singapore’. It was the orient express travelling on it’s way south with it’s carriages full of luxury. A little nest of people sat on a balcony at the back of the train with a waiter poised to fill up glasses with more champagne and for a moment I saw the difference between the life we had chosen to live and the opulence of this little island sat like a jewel in the sea.
And here I am, sweltering in the humidity that marks so many months in this part of the world thinking that the only way to really get to know this place is to take out a bank loan and spend until increasingly chubby fingers are spent.
But no, one will simply nip into Raffles and have a Singapore Sling, anything else would be showing off. How vulgar.
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David Byrne and goodbyes
The friends I am staying with in Perth bought me a ticket to see David Byrne play at the city zoo so we ambled over there via some nachos and a pint and settled in for what turned out to be a wonderful night.
Byrne built the evening up from low key to spectacular in a similar way to the ‘Stop making Sense’ gigs of the eighties, only this time it was subtle. He played a lot of the Byrne Eno songs and I think most people went home feeling like they had seen the best that Byrne could deliver – a few people were shouting for Psycho Killer at the end but I’m quite happy he didn’t do that song, It was always a song for opening the night, end the night on something a little less psychotic.
So here I am waiting to go to the airport. The hospitality I have recieved in Perth has been the best yet, but perhaps that’s because they are valuable old friends I am visiting and a few bridges have been mended. Life is short and we can’t afford to waste such beautiful people, so it is on a note of reconciliation and friendship that I leave this wonderful country on. I am also happy that such a warm welcome was afforded by people from back home, I had begun to think that it was an Australian cultural quirk to throw the doors open with such warmth, but no. Good.
So I am in love with this country, it took me a wee while to get my head around it’s warm and very big heart but I think I have an idea of it’s nature now and feel comfortable just being here.
I think we’ll be back.
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Not So Cheap Car Hire
Ok, so I did rally the hire car (more…)
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The Great Ocean Road
I think I have gotten the hang of why the Australians use the word awesome so much, it’s because so many things are called great that they need a word that is greater than great. The awesome ocean road perhaps, well it lives up to it’s name. Australia is awesome, the word doesn’t feel out of place here, it would feel out of place in the considered and ancient rambling hills of Sussex, not in the vastness down under.
The road was built as a living monument to the returning soldiers from the first world war and was constructed when blokes still used picks and shovels and went home for big cow pies. It is a great construction that would be great to ride on a motorbike as it clings in serpent fashion to the side of plunging hills, but for me I am cruising it in a hired Nissan and it’s still a lot of fun.
I drove through the heat of the day with the windows open and found myself a beach to run along, when I was hot enough I doused myself in the ocean surf and found a coffee shop to kick back in. At the moment I am in one of the comfy Ozzy YHA’s using the internet connection as I have told a friend I will help him out with some work, the only thing that is missing at the moment is him.
There are lovely little secluded beaches around here that you have to hike to and this is where I spent the sunset, in a tiny bay that you could only get to by descending through a gulley that would have been home to Aboriginal people over 10,000 years ago, they don’t spend much time here now so it seems which is a shame.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://cybergypsy.eu/flash/Shelly-Beach_fused.swf" width="496" height="240" wmode="transparent" /]Tomorrow I will head towards the Grampian mountains, but at what speed depends on what I find on the way. Time goes slowly here and will do when we’re gone.
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Australia Day
Fireworks, a gig in Melbourne town centre themed around ‘a cow jumping over the moon’ for some reason that remains beyond me – although one of the performances was by a cabaret group that sang about ‘cash cows’, a metaphor for the greed destroying our little planet etc etc, so maybe that had something to do with it. It was all good fun, but it’s just the way cities promote themselves these days and most large cities seem to have the same script to read from.
What was a far nicer experience for me was cycling around a very sunny Melbourne in the early evening light on a public holiday. The city was virtually deserted so I had the whole place to myself, the often surprising architecture of melbourne University, the gorgeous bright clean light reflecting off of the cluster of tall buildings making up the centre of Melbourne. I had my little moment communing with Australia and whatever that is meant to be as I peddled slowly around it’s deserted streets. We like each other, I’m glad.
