The King is dead; long live the Sultan

The region has lost one ruler but gained another. On the day after the worlds longest reigning monarch, King Bhumibol of Thailand passed away, here in neighbouring Malaysia a new Yang di-Pertuan Agong (Supreme Lord) was elected.
Following the mysterious assassination of his elder brother 70 years ago, Bhumibol Adulyadej became the King of Siam; but his resemblance to Yul Brynner was not easy to spot.

In Malaysia we have a new Agong but isn't an elected monarchy an oxymoron? not when you have a superabundance of rulers. The nine sultans who preside over most (but not all) of peninsular Malaysia take it in turns to sit on the big throne and rotate every 5 years. As it is not seemly for any of them to lose an election, they go in a set order and Muhammad V of Kelantan is the country's new ruler.

Kelantan is to the east of Perak, where we live, and has its northern border with the part of Thailand where Muslim separatists set off bombs on a daily basis. But the fighting in kelantan which has been in the news recently is a stand off between loggers and orang asli, the indigenous peoples.
On any journey along the expressway we overtake lorries lugging giant trunks of hardwood and wonder where yet more rainforest has been cleared to make way for the ubiquitous palm oil plantations. For us it is a saddening sight; for the orang asli it is the destruction of their way of life, as they have lived in and lived off the forests before even the Malays arrived in the country.

So in Gua Musang the orang asli took matters into their own hands and built a barricade to block the loggers from taking the timber out of the forest which they describe as their ancestral land.

It is estimated that 40% of the nations timber is cut down illegally, either poached or through corrupt officials. Last year 8 Kelantan Forestry Department officers were arrested for taking large bribes from a logging contractor, but the current operators have a legal concession to harvest the trees. In a bizarre twist the villagers have been hoist with their own petard. While their own barricade has been cut down by loggers with chainsaws, they have now been

blockaded in themselves with Forestry personnel preventing outsiders, such as a lawyer who is trying to represent them, from having access to the track that leads to their village.

The root of the problem is the actions of the Kelantan state government in awarding logging concessions with little regard to the environment or to the needs of the indigenous people. The Federal Government has a committee on indigenous land rights but, while other states have followed its suggestions, its leader has said that they have hit a wall with Kelantan. The wonderfully named Centre to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (abbreviated to C4) found that logging activities are the main source of income for the state and that this is unsustainable, as well as lacking transparency and being prone to corruption.

So now that Muhammad V has become the the country's ruler as well as the Sultan of Kelantan will the 9,800 hectares of land approved to be gazetted as orang asli reserves actually happen? I wouldn't hold your breath.

On The Buses

An old friend, sadly no longer with us, was fond of saying:

"If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess"

I am just back in Malaysia after several weeks travelling around America and Europe, where I acquired a UK old person's bus pass. With just one day available to use it, I opted for a policy of excess and set out on a journey from Sussex to Heathrow Airport.

The first bus, to Tunbridge Wells, had an advert on the back which read 'Ride Regency to Days of Steam'. I pointed this out to the driver when we broke down with steam and hot water emanating from the rear end. Once I reached the town I boarded a bus bound for Bromley. It took nearly 2 hours as we waited patiently for the most decrepit people in Kent to heave, hobble and wobble their way on and off. I used to believe that old age was better than the only alternative but this journey made me think again. I hadn't realised that humans could still function in such an advanced state of atrophy. They all, of course, had the same bus pass as me.

My research indicated that I should next take a bus to East Croyden. I couldn't bring myself to do it. The very name of the place induces in me a feeling of stultified dullness. Instead I chose a route that would take me through Central London.

On the top deck of a bright red London bus there was a good mix of ages and ethnicity but the rate of progress was still painfully slow as stops seemed no more than a couple of hundred yards apart. Fortified with a bacon and egg sandwich at Catford I hopped onto my fifth bus, to Victoria, and noticed the suburban houses getting progressively older as we neared the city centre. I was struck by the neighbourhood high streets which have retained the same size rows of shops which I remember from my childhood growing up in Twickenham; but where there was a butcher a baker and a greengrocer there is now an estate agency an ethnic cafe and a betting shop.

I got off the next bus too soon and walked through Hyde Park, full of sunbathers enjoying a glorious summer day which would have put nowhere on the Mediterranean to shame. Boarding a 94 in Oxford St I was looking at my watch as the journey had taken over 5 hours and I was still a long way from the airport. At Goldhawk Rd we were all told to get off. I don't know what the problem was but the bus was abandoned in the gutter and, after consulting the information board, I caught the next 237 to Hounslow. On this journey an announcement was made that the bus was on diversion, which seemed to mean that it chose traffic choked streets and stopped at places which didn't display its number.

I had a long wait at Hounslow for a 111 and was sorely tempted by the adjacent Piccadilly Line, but a bus pass is just that; it doesn't include the underground and I needed to complete my mission. I eventually reached my destination, with not too long before I could board the plane for Kuala Lumpur. It took 8 hours travel on 8 buses and is not recommended for those in a hurry, but if you have all day to get somewhere, the buses can provide a good platform to watch the world go by and add a bit of a puzzle to solve in navigating a route.

Brexiteers, Trumpeteers and donkeys

We are in America for the first time in 26 years and admire the view from the 35^th floor of our 1920’s built hotel. We’re in the true home of the skyscaper; not New York but Chicago. It’s a surprisingly pleasant city centre with the river artery opening up the foreground of the architect’s creations, but it’s so clean and tidy that the imagination struggles to make the romantic link back to bootleggers and gangsters with violin cases.

Down the road in Ohio the Republican Party is forced to make room for the cuckoo in its nest as Donald Trump gets the presidential nomination and immediately goes into a prolonged sulk because the man he calls ‘Lying Ted’ fails to sufficiently enthuse over his elevation. If the petition supported by both Donald and Ted to allow everyone attending the convention to carry guns with them hadn’t failed, they could have settled their disagreement in an honourable fashion and to the benefit of the rest of the world.

Politics has erupted in America and Europe spewing some sparks but a lot more smoke over the populaces. In London we sat on the top deck of a Boris, the new buses commissioned by the ex- mayor, and spoke politics with an elderly couple who sat behind us. The reserved English manner has been put on hold for Brexit, but strangers approach the subject with extreme caution; it is too raw to get into an argument over and comments begin as mild remarks and only escalate as common ground is found. When we got off I had a proper view of our companions and realised that we’d been talking with the multi-talented Jonathan Miller who used to regularly appear on UK television.

The Brexiteers and the Trumpeteers seem to have a lot in common, which many people see as small minded ignorance and xenophobia. But there is also an element of a stubborn refusal to be pushed around by the establishment and listen to those in power who consider themselves to be their betters. From Chicago we now drive down to Kentucky where a friend we met in Kazakhstan helps us to properly get under the skin of small-town America. Lunching at the truck stop we see that the news has moved on to the Democrats convention but not all is well. The predominantly young supporters of grey-haired Bernie Sanders boo their hero as he tells them that they must now switch their allegiance to support Hilary Clinton against a far greater evil.

On a pub crawl of the tiny cathedral city of Wells, drinking English beer in a suburban Bristol garden and sat around the table in a Devon farmhouse kitchen we’d spent the previous week mulling over the rights and wrongs of another left-wing grey haired old man who was elected leader by young idealists, but who is now struggling to find enough support amongst his MP’s to form a realistic shadow cabinet. The donkey is the symbol of the Democrats but there are also plenty of asses in Britain and while the Tories are in disarray, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party is just a total bloody mess.

Travelling north towards Minnesota we drive through an Amish village, these are people who generally keep themselves apart from mainstream politics and in the current situation can be envied for that.

But while the parties on both sides of the Atlantic are polarised there is a common theme which makes the right and the left opposite sides of the same coin; all their supporters are fed up with mainstream politics and want something different, but the establishment is hell-bent on denying it to them.

In Britain Theresa May was craftily manoeuvred into position and it seems that Conservative party members are too polite to ask why they never got to use their vote. The United States go to the polls in November but will America settle for the equally dull but safe establishment figure of Hilary Clinton, or will enough Republicans manage to hold their noses to tick Trump’s name? Politics has never been so exciting- or so dangerous.

An evening at The Club

Whilst eating a baguette stuffed with a tasty herb omelette in Cambodia, The Travel Addict’s Puzzle records that colonialism, although abhorrent to our modern set of values, has simply added a greater depth of interest and colour for the intrepid traveller.

The book also notes, when coming across the ubiquitous Irish pub in Kazakhstan (found everywhere in the world except Ireland), that it is impossible to replicate the English pub outside its native habitat. Our colonial forebears must have recognised this limitation and so instead they created The Club, the fortress from which expats exuded Britishness and gin in equal measure.

Where we live the Royal Ipoh Club, established in the 19^th century, is still going strong. The membership has completely changed but curiously some of the attitudes and behaviours are still relevant to a Somerset Maugham story. We were invited by the owner of our apartment; a Chinese Malaysian businessman and ex local MP.  In the wood panelled bar he produced an expensive bottle of scotch which I was sorry to see left behind when we moved through to the restaurant. I needn’t have worried as he had instructed a girl to follow us with a tray carrying our drinks and jug of water. After the meal she was again employed as an acolyte as we made our way to the Palm Court, overlooking the padang, (the sports field essential for any British club) and joined a table of men also drowning and downing de-luxe whisky in tumblers of water.

The racial make-up of the country allows Malaysians to celebrate holidays from an assortment of cultures and this evening was Vaisakhi, the Punjabi New Year. Once the Explorers Edition Johnnie Walker was finished we were shown another pub area featuring a long bar made out of a single piece of wood. The original was burnt for fuel by the Japanese who, insensitive to its charm and presumably unable to play cricket, used the building as a laundry during the occupation. The current long bar was provided by a very wealthy Chinese tin miner who happened at the same time to become the first non-white, other than the Sultan, allowed membership.

We seemed to be the only Europeans at the function but, as our tour of the club ended in the billiard room, I was left with the feeling that nearly 60 years after independence the spirit of the British Raj somehow lingers on. Royal Ipoh is a friendly place, full of fun and laughter and nothing like the dusty drear club of George Orwell’s Burmese Days. And yet I couldn’t help thinking of another of his works; as Malays, Chinese and Indians have taken over the club, some animals are still more equal than others.

VI ET NAM

Liz and I had a one week holiday in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, an area we had not previously visited and one which may not last too much longer as climate change takes its toll; it produces most of the country’s rice but raised sea levels has already increased salinity and rendered much of the land useless.

I can think of no other country in the world with a name as emotionally charged as I noted in Chapter 11 of The Travel Addict’s Puzzle: 

               Vietnam: a place full of exotic images, global political power play and horrendous deeds. It was a huge name for my generation and a place that ultimately helped to define us. Although the Labour Government in Britain had the good sense to stay out of that American adventure, that did not stop us from indulging in the cultural orgy of anti-imperialism which swept the western world. Maybe all emerging generations need to challenge the existing order, but we did it as no other. ‘Make love not war’ was a slogan created by the conflict in Vietnam, and with Flower Power and transistor radios we wrested control from the Establishment and never looked back. Even today music from the sixties and seventies rules the radio waves; music which from Bob Dylan to The Beatles was typically written by the performers and not spoon fed them by corporate institutions concerned only with making money. With the body bags returning to America it was there that the main protest movement was generated. But it wasn’t just an injured cry for change; it was also a seizing of power by the sheer force of adolescent hormones erupting in a very different cultural revolution to that getting underway in China. The penetrating discordant nasal tones of Dylan spelt it out:

      Come mothers and fathers throughout the land                                                                                              And don’t criticize what you can’t understand                                                         

      Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command                                 

      Your old road is rapidly agin’                                                                     

      Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand                                               

      For the times they are a-changin’

                                                                      

When the Americans ignominiously fled Saigon it was not just a victory for the Vietcong, it was the victory of my generation over what we saw as an old fashioned and narrow minded view of the world. But of course over the years we’ve gone soft; our idealism has been worn away with mortgages and television soap operas, …..

Saigon somehow managed to be bustling and relaxed at the same time and felt much preferable to the skyscrapers and motorways of Kuala Lumpur but, as ever, the best experience came from visiting the rural areas. In particular a place where we stayed with delicious local food served at tables and chairs overlooking one of the myriad branches of the river which had a constant flow of barge transport, but then the tide went out and left one heavily laden vessel stranded until the moon dragged enough water back to re-float it.

Getting off the beaten track

According to The Man in Seat 61 it is possible to get from Bali to Jakarta by bus, ferry and train in not much more than 24 hours. I had 2 weeks for the journey so clearly needed some slower transport and more interesting route. Day one started with a car to the bus terminal and a minibus across the island to the ferry port. Arriving in Java I took a bemo (something resembling a car but gutted and filled with wooden benches) followed by a bus heading north. The only available transport from where the bus dropped me was the trishaw pictured above. When this broke down I started to walk but was given a lift by a girl on a motorcycle in exchange for a dollar's worth of petrol money. She took me to the ferry terminal for Madura Island but that day's ferry was long gone and so my first full day of travel had got me a satisfactorily short distance.

 

I always say that I love travelling on boats and I enjoyed the first couple of hours on the Madura ferry (picture above), but for the next 5 hours I was looking forward to getting off. If I'd stayed on the mainland of Java the train to Surabaya would have taken less than 7 hours but via Pulau Madura, where it seemed that they had never before seen a foreigner, it took 3 days. The second night I stayed in a fishing village where everyone wanted to talk to me. Unfortunately they had virtually no English and, although it is very similar to the Malay language, I only knew a few words of Indonesian. This didn't dampen their desire to communicate and I found their unabashed openness to be refreshing after being more used to the Chinese reactions to foreigners as noted in Chapter 3 of The Travel Addicts Puzzle.

  .....the Han Chinese childlike fascination with anybody who is not exactly the same as them. In the smaller towns people stare openly and are unfazed when I stare back at them. In the larger cities many people try to be more subtle, by keeping their heads straight when passing in the street but following with their eyes, which actually gives them a rather furtive appearance. Another group want to express their delight at finding something as extraordinary as a foreigner, with exclamations and enthusiastic greetings, as if you had suddenly appeared wearing a particularly clever form of fancy dress. This can be irritating when you are just trying to quietly go about your business, but the reaction that I really don’t like is the parent pointing me out to their young child as if I was an exhibit in a zoo. If they are small enough they can hold them up to get a good view of you and they then expect you to smile sweetly at their offspring as if to say ‘look at me aren’t I a funny sort of creature’

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Walking along the beach I came across a cottage industry of rope-makers (above) who smiled and greeted me but it was the fisherman themselves who were determined to get a closer look at me. I acquiesced and climbed aboard a boat on the sand at low tide where they were repairing their nets.

 

Getting off the beaten path means giving a bit of yourself rather than just absorbing what is around you, but maybe that is what true travel should be.

Back in NZ

Now that the holidays are over I’m on my way back to Malaysia from New Zealand. With son Henry in Austria and daughter Emily going to her boyfriend’s family for Christmas, there was a distinct danger that we would be celebrating the festive season as a sad old couple on our own in our converted Bedford bus, dreaming of a white Christmas in the middle of summer. So instead of going straight home we flew to Queenstown. Christmas Eve saw us bouncing across Lake Manapouri to get to Doubtful Sound which has no road access with the rest of the country. This is Fiordland, New Zealand’s most isolated area and the one significant part of the country that we had not visited before. Arriving there felt like we had entered through the looking glass, or the wardrobe or hopped on the train at platform nine and three quarters; we were in an imaginary world. In a few miles we had gone from barbecue beach parties on the sunny shore of Lake Wakatipu with its dazzling sapphire water, to a place where even a devout atheist like myself could sense the stirrings of the spirits in the swirling mist as it performed the dance of the seven veils with the majestic rock faces. We had booked an overnight cruise on a motor/sailor built specifically for the task and we were quickly under way, nosing through the coal black waters. Fiordland is far wetter than anywhere else in the country and its average seven litres of annual rainfall causes the Sound to be refreshed with many waterfalls which provide a layer, a few metres thick, of fresh water on top of the briny. Even if there is a sunny day in this other-worldly place the water remains stubbornly black. Real Journeys gave us a nice balance of adventure and luxury with a comfortable cabin, good companionship and excellent food. The icing on the cake came Christmas morning when we were joined by a pod of dolphins playing in the bow wave. The New Year looks good for travel. I’m currently in Indonesia finding my way back to Malaysia and then I will be planning a trip for us both to America for a friend’s wedding, probably calling in at Austria and England and maybe even the Caribbean where another friend is sailing a catamaran. There is a lot of euphemistic drivel spoken of Senior Citizens and Golden Years, but 65 is actually a very good time of life; a regular pension going into the bank without the need to work and still young enough to make the most of whatever opportunities arise.