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.

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.