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’

.

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.

Green Sea Turtles

Tourist brochures and adverts for Malaysia always show pictures of sea turtles. We were going to go to Bali for a few days but ended up on Tioman Island instead as an erupting volcano caused our flight to be cancelled.

We found ourselves inside a glossy tourist brochure, staying in a wooden cabin on a nearly deserted white sand beach but with a pleasant beach café, which allowed us to take our own wine, a few hundred yards away. Pulau Tioman is a 2 hour ferry ride off the east coast of Malaysia and when you visit you understand why it was used as the setting for Bali Hai in the film of South Pacific; it is a perfect paradise with barely any development.

A longer beach walk brought us to a turtle refuge and we were invited to see the release of a group (what is the collective noun for turtles?) that were hatched that morning. Without human supervision their first trip down the beach is fraught with danger from birds and crabs who enjoy them as a crunchy snack. They are meant to be very very tasty but no longer on any dinner menu we can access. Apparently it took ages before a giant turtle was successfully taken to Europe because the sailors always succumbed to the temptation of cooking and eating them. Hence in 18^th century England diners had to make do with mock turtle soup.

Those that make it to the sea spend the next few years swimming hundreds of miles in the deep ocean and getting their own back on the crabs which they eat, as well as gobbling up jelly fish. As adults they undergo a complete change of lifestyle and live as herbivores in shallow coastal waters munching sea grass.  We were told that the females then return to the beach where they were born to lay their eggs but no one could explain how this is known.

There is an even more extraordinary claim made for the long fin eels in New Zealand. As adults they have a momentous life decision to make. They can stay in their creek and live a good comfortable but celibate life until they die of old age (like the turtles they have a similar life span to us) or they can swim out to their breeding grounds which are believed to be somewhere near Tonga and never return. The fantastic claim made is that the offspring return from the ocean depths and find their way to the family creek. But where is the evidence? How can anyone know the antecedents of an elver? Mind you it’s pretty clever to find New Zealand at all from thousands of kilometres away; Maori didn’t arrive until 13^th century but the eels have been commuting for more than 20 million years!

Ex-pat essentials

There are still many Orang Asli, the indigenous natives of peninsular Malaysia, living in the jungle and we visited a village in the Taman Negara. I take aim at a teddy bear target with a blow pipe that the men use to hunt monkeys for food. Everything is made from natural materials and the darts are coated in a poison sourced from a rain forest tree.

In the last blog I included an excerpt from The Travel Addict’s Puzzle which noted the bizarre thrill of experiencing an alien culture as an outsider, but back in town we are not just skimming the sights but are immersed in the way of life. So if living and not just passing through, what does the modern ex-pat need to hang onto from his or her own culture in order to maintain that perspective and fully appreciate being in a foreign land?

1)     Mustard: I put a jar of Old English on the table the other day and Liz remarked that it was well travelled. I actually remember being very pleased with myself at finding it in a shop in Nanjing, and so I must have chucked it in the packing for Siberia before it came with us to Malaysia.

2)     Crossword: I get Liz to print off the Guardian prize puzzle for me and, when I am with a group at the golf club and I can’t follow them speaking Malay, I can busy myself with the puzzle instead of sitting there looking completely stupid.

3)     Internet: There is a danger that this makes life too easy and allows us to avoid the challenges of life abroad. We use it to watch UK television, keep in contact with friends and family, download books and even get driving directions. Has it made the world too small?

4)     Booze: Living in a Muslim country we perhaps could change our habits but there is a strong tradition of the gin soaked ex-pat which is important to preserve. The government attitude is that if you want to do things which we disapprove of you must pay us a lot of money in tax, and so the non-halal section of the supermarket sells beer, wine and spirits at a price. Consequently, while Liz is busy at work I have to make regular trips to the island of Langkawi which is duty free. A tough life as shown below.

Eating out

Malaysia is rightly noted for its food but at times something different from the simple eateries serving chicken and rice in various forms, which is pretty much what is on offer in our small town, is required. For Liz's birthday we sought the comparative cosmopolitanism of Ipoh, the state capital of Perak, and ended up in an Irish pub.
This reminded me of passing through Kazakhstan's oil rich town of Atyrau and the following excerpts are from Chapter 8 of The Travel Addict's Puzzle:

I’m not sure what to do about money. I suspect that no one will want Kazakh Tenge once I have left the country, but I may not have enough for lunch and I don’t really want the embarrassment of having to rush to the ATM to pay the bill whilst making incomprehensible gestures, or frantically patting all my pockets searching for cash, which is a routine known in New Zealand as the Australian Hakka. I do manage to find some kind of supermarket and satisfy myself that I can spend any excess Tenge there, and so make a visit to one of the many holes-in-the-wall, and now it is time for lunch.

I can’t decipher anything on the menu but hear mentioned ‘business lunch’ and say that I will have one of those, whatever it is. It is alright but nothing memorable and the waitress keeps trying to get the table lamp to work despite my waving her away. I am unable to raise Liz on Skype but have a conversation with my brother-in-law in England.  I can imagine exactly where he is sitting, in a completely different world to the one that I currently inhabit. This must surely be another reason to travel; the ability not to immerse oneself into an alien world but to skim it- to live it but at the same time to belong elsewhere and to experience the bizarre thrill of the physical world and the emotional being in complete juxtaposition. Before I leave I unplug my re-charged little computer and turn the table lamp back on for them.

In the distance the sun is glinting off golden domes which I first mistake for a mosque, but these have the pinched tops of cake decorations my mother used to use or, for those who never sampled my mother’s baking, of confections such as St. Basils in Moscow or the Brighton Pavilion. The subtle difference in the shape of the dome reflects the divergence of belief; while Moslems revere Jesus as a great prophet, they don’t buy into the Holy Trinity bit, and maintain that there is only one God, which rules out divinity for Jesus Christ (and Mohamed). Of course not everyone has had the advantage of early schooling from Irish nuns, who were able to simply solve the conundrum of there being three-in-one by reference to a picture of a shamrock. With God-the-father in Heaven and Jesus in Palestine I was left with the assumption that it was the Holy Ghost who hailed from the Emerald Isle. As the Christian church survived its first 300 odd years without the idea of Jesus being divine, there is perhaps less difference between these two enormously powerful religions than the media would have us believe.

·       *                           *                           *                           *                           *                             *

I still have loads of time to spend in Atyrau and find what claims to be an Irish pub. This is a worldwide phenomenon and I have come across them, with names like Molly Malone’s or Nelly Dee’s, from New Zealand to China. They may even have them in Ireland. What they are trying to do is replicate the unique institution of the English pub, which is also found in Wales but not in Scotland or Ireland, other than as another attempt at a copy. It may be that they think calling something ‘Irish’ adds an extra layer of romanticism, or else the whole thing is an invention of Guinness marketing, which is quite a plausible explanation for the phenomena. It can never work of course because the English pub is a part of, and grows out of its environment. You might just as well dismantle London Bridge and rebuild it in a desert in Arizona (which for some unknown reason was actually done). The English country pub is something that I still have faith in and something that I miss in New Zealand, where they are just not quite the same.

It is just opening and I am handed a menu. The beer is so expensive that they can sell it for half price in Happy Hour, from 6 o’clock, and still no doubt make a good profit. It is 5.20 pm and the waitress seems to accept my suggestion that I stay sat outside reading until the prices become more reasonable. I wonder if this place explains the large number of banks in town as you would need to negotiate a personal loan every time you needed to raise funds to buy a pint of Guinness. At one minute past six I am at the bar, feeling very thirsty and ordering half a litre of their cheapest beer. They charge me full price. I object and they explain that while my watch shows the official time, and is correct for the train I need to catch, local time is an hour behind. I drink my beer and find my way back to the supermarket where I invest the remainder of my Kazakh Tenge in bread and cheese.

The Travel Addict's Puzzle paperback can be found at www.createspace.com/5714720 or from Amazon as paperback or e-book.

5 golfing tips for the uncoordinated

1) Do it
I actually believe that I am not much worse than the average at sports. The problem is that most people with my level of ability have the sense to give up rather than show themselves up. But should they? Why should taking part in any sporting activity be the exclusive preserve of those who are good at it? And why should taking up a sport put some kind of onus on the individual to become expert in their chosen field? We put far too much value on being the best and far too little on just taking part, this is why the majority of us end up as spectators instead of participants and top professional sports people are paid absurd amounts of money. I have a personal interest in promoting this because if others with my lack of skill persevered, I could take my rightful place as only just sub-standard instead of being totally useless.
2) Do it abroad
I'm now playing golf in Malaysia. The people here are far too polite to laugh outright at my often pathetic attempts at the game and, where in New Zealand I was often the butt of cruel jokes about the standard of my play, here my understanding of the local language is far from good enough to comprehend any insults spoken. They do sometimes ask how long I have been playing the game, thinking that I'm a beginner who will improve, and I have to own up to not being able to use learner status as an excuse as I first wielded a club 50 years ago.

3) Less is more
The harder you try the worse it gets. A career in social work has taught me that problems quickly become crises when the response to them feeds what caused the issue in the first place and a vicious cycle is established. It is annoying when a shot destined for the centre of the green doesn't even get off the ground, but a determination to give the ball an almighty hit is bound to result in greater failure and more frustration leading to a need to belt the thing regardless of the consequences. And this is all because of this totally unfair expectation that if you choose to play a game you must be reasonably competent at it. If it weren't for that I wouldn't have to feel the acute embarrassment at my failure which forces me to try too hard resulting in a total loss of control over my own body. And that is the problem, when your body refuses to do as it is told:
'keep your head down' right
'look at the ball' yes
'swing slowly' okay
whack fuck!
4) Be proud
Sport should be played for fun, winning or losing isn't important; especially when you're no good at it. Those of us lacking hand eye co-ordination can lead the way in championing the proper spirit of sportsmanship while the top players curse their luck and vent their anger on their equipment. Glory in being rubbish, take the high moral ground and remember that those at the top can only move in one direction. What would it be like to be the best at your chosen activity and expected to beat all-comers? I think that then the fear of losing would creep in and threaten to spoil any enjoyment of the game, an issue which I'm sure the All Blacks are currently acutely conscious of.
5 Most important) Do as I say: not as I do

Red menace

The holiday a fortnight ago to celebrate Malaysia's independence was dominated by demonstrators in yellow shirts. Yesterday's holiday had demonstrators in red shirts. Apparently these people are pro government which, ironically as this was meant to be a celebration of unity in the country, can equate to pro Islam and pro Malay (as opposed to Malaysian Chinese and Indian). I was reminded of the political system here this morning as I walked past a cafe advertising porridge with crispy fried innards.
There's little evidence of the clothing companies doing so well in Britain but I did enjoy watching the Labour Party leadership on the BBC world news. At one point the ribbon of writing at the bottom had Corbyn news listed as 'sport' and I was pleased that it wasn't clashing with the Rugby World Cup. The establishment would have us believe that radical policies will never win an election but in the past things have changed; 100 years ago the country was not a proper democracy as less than half the population were enfranchised, 75 years ago most British people couldn't afford a nutritious diet, died for want of money to pay medical bills and a decent education was seen as a privilege and not a right. 50 years ago we were into the Wilson/Heath years and, well, since then nothing of any real significance has happened in British politics.
China has gone from the Cultural Revolution to unfettered capitalism, with the break up of the Soviet Union Russia has moved from being a planned economy to a criminal one, Germany has re-unified, the USA has progressed from Jim Crow (apartheid) laws to electing a black president and Britain is just same same; maybe a shake up is overdue.
In other news my book is now available as a paperback from https://www.createspace.com/5714720 or from Amazon.

The Law of the Jungle

The rolling English drunkard who built the rolling English road got utterly rat-arsed before going up to Bukit Fraser; there are more twists and turns than Agatha Christie could ever imagine and at the top could be Miss Marple’s village. Except of course for the monkeys. We stayed in an olde worlde English inn but lost the contents of the fruit bowl by leaving the window in our room open.

While we were enjoying the climate at an altitude a bit higher than anywhere in Britain, others dressed in yellow T shirts which the government banned the day before, were sweating it out in Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka Square where they were demonstrating their unhappiness about reports that the Prime Minister had trousered $700 million he had found lying around (see blog Cracking Malaysia 30^th July). This action, although totally peaceful, has backfired as the police are now using all their resources to track down the uncouth protesters who stood on a picture of the PM, which according to The Star seems to be far more serious than worrying about that odd bit of money that has been mislaid.

We continued our holiday week-end with a trip to the jungle and read in The Star (which is majority owned by one of the political parties in the government alliance), that a woman had been arrested on suspicion of releasing yellow balloons from the upper floors of a building where the PM and his wife were attending an event. The charge is intentional insult with intent to provoke a breach of the peace. In the Taman Negara they know how to breach the peace. We tried out a blow pipe that the locals use to hunt monkeys once they have added the poison from one of the rain forest trees. The law of the jungle applies to some but not to all in Malaysia.

5 tips for survival at the airport

1) Don’t go 

Flying may have been exciting once but it’s now about as thrilling as trailing in the wake of my wife around Marks and Spencer’s. Forget the airport; catch a ferry, hop on a bus or take the train. On the planet’s surface you can see where you’re going and feel how far you’ve travelled and do it with the ability to stretch your legs or read a newspaper. If of course (like me) you’ve made your home in New Zealand then inevitably you do need to get up to 30,000 feet at some point, but it doesn’t have to be all the way. From China I found an interesting and inexpensive route through Hong Kong and Fiji, and when we moved from there to Kazakhstan I returned home by flying over the Himalayas to Delhi, and then travelling overland to southern India where I caught a low-cost flight to Singapore. Flying should be the last resort to get anywhere. 

 2) Big isn’t beautiful

When the plane is the only option choose to fly from a small regional airport rather than an international hub. They are often staffed by people who have retained some degree of human characteristics and where it can still be possible to persuade yourself that you are on a journey and not being processed for admission to Wormwood Scrubs. Even when they arrange for all the days flights to take off at the same time to reduce manning costs, it is hugely preferable to the crush of somewhere like Sydney. Last week on my way back to Malaysia I joined a long queue to check-in, which qualified me to go to the next stage of a much larger mass of people awaiting inspection at immigration, so that I could then join the army needing to have all their possessions x-rayed. Thankfully they caught the man in front of me who clearly intended to blow us all to kingdom come with his half used tube of toothpaste. 

 3) Arrive later 

There is a presumption that because flying is usually expensive all the documentation should be laborious. Why is it that a train ticket can be bought in 30 seconds but the equivalent for a plane takes 30 minutes? And then, ironically for a mode of transport that has nothing but speed in its favour, another 30 minutes to get from the terminal entrance to the departure gate. But then they say you should be there 3 hours before the flight time! Cut that to 60 minutes and the check-in queue is shorter, and you can arrive in the departure lounge just as the passengers who are worried that they may be forced to stand all the way are forming yet another queue to be first on the aircraft. 

 4) Don’t trust the airport 

 Airports are in monopoly situations and they are open to all manner of ways to rip-off their customers. Just getting there you are expected to pay a premium on any public transport; most blatantly in Sydney where there is a gate fee to get onto the railway. In the terminal some airports do dodgy deals giving monopolies to organisations such as banks, food outlets and of course the duty free shop. Don’t assume that you can always save money in these as they vary greatly depending on whether or not there is any competition and all work on huge mark-ups. Do the arithmetic as it is quite easy to pay more for duty free than you can buy the same item for in the country that you are visiting. The only organisations who expect you to pay more for nothing are the currency exchange people; always look at how large the difference is between the buying and selling rates and then take money out of the ATM instead. 

 5) Be careful what you smuggle 

I usually travel with just hand luggage and assume that the people with huge suitcases are either moving house or smuggling something. Hallucinogenic drugs and machine guns are probably a bad idea to try to take into any country but beyond that you need to know who you are dealing with. In New Zealand for example the main threat to national security is perceived to be from apples. There is a team of highly trained sniffer dogs who earn the government a lot of money by catching miscreants trying to sneak into the country with a Braeburn or Cox’s Orange Pippin. But I doubt that anyone would take the risk for the sake of a Golden Delicious.

The Travel Addict's Puzzle Published

The big day has arrived

The Travel Addicts Puzzle, subtitled Around (most of) Half the World in Forty Days, is now available from Amazon as an e-book for the ridiculously low price of $3.49 or equivalent.

The book relates the adventures I had while travelling alone from Eastern China to Bulgaria on public transport. My present tense progress is broken up with the story of how my wife and I managed to reach China overland through South East Asia, despite having totally different expectations of the journey.  Subsequent travels through China are largely of me chasing Liz around the country on crowded hard-sleeper trains, while she travelled in style on planes and bullet trains for her work.

Cracking Malaysia

The Alfa Romeo braved the traffic to bring us back to Kuala Lumpur this week and I was interested that the country was in headline news on the BBC, albeit not for the right reasons. After seeing on world news that Prime Minister Najib Razak is being accused of pocketing nearly US$700 million from a development fund (1MDB) which he set up, I was keen to get the morning paper and learn more about it; and that was when the real surprise came.

Hari Raya

A positive aspect of religion is that it crosses borders and unites people from different cultures who share in the same rituals and follow a shared calendar of events, (although of course it also has a frightening power to divide). While Ramadan can be tough in the heat and humidity of Malaysia (I know of one person who was hospitalised and put on an intravenous drip because it is forbidden to take oral medication in the day), in Turkey the period of fasting goes from 3 o’clock in the morning until after 8 at night and in latitudes further north the time for eating and drinking is even less. But this can still be turned into a communal event as in Istanbul the whole of the ancient hippodrome, which in daylight belongs to coachloads of tourists, is regained by the locals to break the fast, and every patch of grass is claimed by a group to set out their picnic.

Bulgaria

Our holiday continues to the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria where we have an apartment. Bulgaria is a small but complex country; we first came here in 1993 when the tourism industry was just beginning to flex its muscles after straining against the contradictions of communism. Eschewing the purpose built resorts of Sunny Beach and Golden Sands we found the delightful ancient town of Sozopol with its cobbled streets and old wooden houses perched on a peninsula and with perfect beaches for our young family.

Istanbul

We are on holiday and passing through Istanbul; a city which I love for its time worn buildings and its focus on the waterways where handsome old ferries knit together its constituent parts. But most of all I love it for the feeling of being at the crossroads of the world with the vastness of Russia to the north, the mystery of Africa to the south and Europe and Asia wedded together by the suspension bridge over the Bosphorus.

Cracking Malaysia

“In two weeks we’ve had more contact with our neighbours than the last four years in China and Kazakhstan” observed Liz as she sampled a coconut coated gelatinous confection that had been handed over the wall by one of the young girls next door.

The Chinese, perhaps because of the enormous scale of their country and its population, treat those outside their immediate group of family, friends or colleagues as of no consequence and not worthy of even the most basic consideration. As individuals the people are invariably polite and helpful, but there is no social mechanism to feel any kind of empathy for strangers, and foreigners are often viewed with the kind of interest that would be accorded to a zoo animal.