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.