Any day you dont find yourself playing Russian Roulette in a Vietnamese prison cell can’t really be described as anything other than good. Whether or not today was going to be one of these days I was about to find out. By some strange, possibly deliberate, bureaucratic quirk on my Vietnamese visa I wasnt quite sure that I hadn’t overstayed my welcome in the country.

I wasnt in the mood for any mishaps so I jumped on the first plush air-conditioned tourist bus bound for Phnom Penh. Ordinarily I might have commandeered the back seat and sprawled my geographically atypically long legs out down the aisle but for some reason this bus had assigned seating so instead I found myself seated next to a blond Dutch girl who we’ll call Erika. In an uncharacteristically loquacious mood I chatted merrily with Erika as the giant behemoth of a bus ploughed through the late morning traffic of Ho Chi Minh city. As it turned out she had followed an almost identical route from Europe as me, with the exception of a short detour to Thailand for a course in massage therapy. Which, she claimed also contained an additional optional component in “handjob techniques” she informed me smiling. Whether or not she opted in for this I didnt inquire.

Long before we could see the Cambodian border we could feel its approach as the usual ramshackle collection of wooden slates and corrugated iron roofs which constitute the standard Vietnamese roadside dwelling began to deteriorate into barely habitable junk heaps.

Eventually the bus pulls up to the crossing for the usual tragicomic farcical pissing contest that characterises a border anywhere in the world. Marched single file and eyed suspiciously for the probable drug smugglers, anarchists and welfare frauds that we most likely are we entered the immigration offices. Ah border guards my old friends, how I have missed your Molotov cocktail of boredom and spiteful malice.

Stepping up to the counter, the guard looked at my passport then at me then at my passport then back at me, I felt like a fly looking back at some drooling snot nosed child about to pluck my legs off for the sheer hell of it. He motions to hand back my passport, moving slowly, almost reluctantly as if his mind, realizing that this was his last opportunity to inflict some horrible damage on me was whirring madly trying to think of some devious ploy which would see me rotting in a prison cell.

Back aboard the bus for a journey of several meters before disembarking once again the driver herds us as though we were sheep being driven into a corral. The crossing on the Cambodian side went considerably smoother than I’d expected, I suspected this had perhaps something to do with the driver extracting a vague fee from everybody onboard for “travel agent” expenses, and collecting all our passports to allow him to engage in what you might term cash based diplomacy. There was no point in arguing we were now entering one of the most corrupt countries in the world where backhanders and greasy palms were considered to fall under the broad and honorable umbrella of “doing business”, oddly enough a, more than any other South East Asian country actually reminded me of another country with which I am intimately acquainted.

On the other side an ultra smooth super straight road in perfect condition ran  right through the landscape in front of us. I suppose its not difficult to keep a road in perfect condition when there is virtually no traffic on it. A few cyclists and motorbike scatter like panicked chickens as the bus straddling the center line barrels down the road at full speed. The driver seems to never take his hand off the horn, I didnt know buses could go that fast.

The contrast between the country we had just left and the one we had entered was immediately apparent, waxy green vegetation sways and dances in the breeze and the countryside looks wilder and less intensively farmed. To my surprise the people too look dramatically different from the Vietnamese and Chinese before them, with much darker in some cases almost Indian coloured skin and bigger rounder eyes. Amidst the smiling faces and waving palm trees this idyllic rural scene from the vantage of the air-conditioned bus could easily be mistaken for some sort of pastoral paradise. But there is an unshakeable feeling that something sickly is waiting just below the surface, a queasiness in the sweltering tropical heat. As the bus stop to refuel we are immediately swamped by hoards of child beggars and hawkers. The door open with pneumatic hiss and the wet humid heat of midday pours in accompanied in single file by a troop of these tiny slightly comical fruit merchants chanting with an almost sing-song refrain “Hello Mister, you buy my pineapple? You buy my pineapple? Hello Mister. Now or maybe later, you buy my pineapple?”

Child Beggers in Phnom Penh

Getting off the bus I tried to swat off one girl wearing a funny pink peaky cap, “maybe later” I replied, fatal mistake I quickly realised the purpose of “now or maybe later” as she followed me back and forth around the bus stop stall chanting “how bout now? how bout now? how bout now?”, ducking and diving between fellow passengers but to no avail I couldnt shake off my squeaky tail. Eventually I stopped and turned to face her, she looked up at me with what was probably a well rehearsed doe eyed expression and said “you no buy my pineapple you break my heart!”. I gave a sigh of exasperation, “why aren’t you in school?” I asked looking down at her, “I go to school in the morning” and without skipping a beat added “you no buy my pineapple no have money for school”. I had the feeling that this was a well anticipated response to a very common tourist question.

Little did I realise that my four foot fruit seller had tired of her current sales approach and was about to resort to her nuclear option. “You like Polly?” she asked, “Wha-” “Polly?” she replied “Holy Mother of effffffff” I roared silently in my head, before I had a chance to react she had reached into her pocket and placed a hideous hairy tarantula on my chest, I could feel its weight pulling on my tshirt as it just hung there. “Okaaaaaay” I answered slowly, “so how much did you want for that pineapple again?” trying to play it cool but in actuality I was standing frozen like you always see people doing in those stupid old films when confronted by some horrible stinging, poisonous creature. I was willing to accept an asking price of anywhere from one to one hundred dollars as reasonable, given the circumstances of course. One dollar sufficed and I was grateful, and it was a very nice pineapple indeed.

Now for some gratuitious music, here’s one by that annoying cue ball Moby, I feel its appropriate since it was used in the Bourne series of films. In fact in many ways Im actually a lot like Bourne or Bond or one of those other legendary nomads, that is if Jason Bourne were to have had a deathly fear of spiders, insects and contracting malaria.

So my day had started much as the previous had ended. Willy had in a single fluid almost gentle motion slipped his boxer shorts down over his boney concave buttocks, whos cheeks gently met and parted threatening to reveal unspeakable horrors as he hunched over his bed fixing the linen. In the bunk above me lay a petite Spanish girl with nothing but a flimsy magazine cover spread open unwittingly shielding her from unblinking brown eyed terror beneath.

Later that day I somehow got roped into traveling along with Willy to the Cu Chi tunnels. The tunnels were used by Viet Cong irregulars to penetrate right into the heart of American bases, attack and disappear. The tunnels were tiny and filled with booby traps, I pity anybody sent down to die in that muddy hell. Willy turned out to be relatively normal for a solitary older single male traveler but who knows the most sinister and dangerous learn to cover their tracks. We stopped at a food stall on the side of the road in Saigon where Willy attempted to strike up a conversation with a monosyllabic Belgian man with a tiny Vietnamese girl who looked she’d raided her mothers makeup cabinet, and in a big hurry too. The Belgian looked like a classic pervert you’d expect to see in a Viz magazine or something, big bald head, jam jar glasses and a permanent lupine leer plastered over his sunburnt face, just like my old PE teacher actually. My ears felt violated by his rapist deep tones followed by jarringly incongruous high pitch squelling laughter as he bellyached over some private joke in his own head after every response he gave to even the most trivial of questions. I was unfortunate enough to cross paths again with this man in Cambodia, what he was doing there I never found out although another young looking girl appeared to be sharing his room.

Incredibly load gunfire from Ak47s at the tunnels added an interesting imaginative factor. I purchased 10 rounds off some old guy who had probably killed people with the gun I fired and shot the hell out of some stuffed animals. A good day was had by all.

I met Sophia sitting at the bottom of the steps. Her eyes were red and puffy,  she had been crying. “Its so horrible” she whispered. Andy was sitting a few feet away, his head hanging limply between slumped shoulders. “How can people do such things? Babies, children…..”. I sat down beside her, resting my elbows on my knees and starred outwards into the traffic chaos swarming around the War Remnants museum. My mind flitted between thoughts and clouded emotions as I tried to think of something comforting to say but instead settled into a wordless stupor.

The museum was filled with photos of atrocities from the war, only those committed by American featured of course not that it matter, the horror of some of the photos left you numb to such trifling details.Bawling, malformed victims of Agent Orange, photos of grinning marines with severed head trophies, that iconic photo of the screaming child with her clothes burned off running from advancing infantry. One photo showed an aged Senator Bob Kerrey, his face looked gaunt and haunted, his eyes fixed in the distance, beneath the photo was a plaque describing how Kerrey in his later years, tormented by the past admitted that as commander of an elite Navy SEAL unit he had partaken in the cold-blooded murder of Vietnamese families, many of whom were knifed to death during a raid on a peasant village. I was reminded of a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Our time together was drawing to a close and as night fell, not wanting the atrocities of the museum to be our last impression of Vietnam we decided to let the childlike innocence of the Vietnamese water puppet show be our last memory together. The next day Sophia was to fly home to Paris and Andy was to push onward into Cambodia, I had decided to stay an extra day in Saigon ostensibly to visit the CuChi tunnels but in my heart I knew it was to allow some road between myself and Andy. There was no animosity in it but from the limp promises to meet up in Penomh Penh we both knew it was time, I was sure I’d meet him again somewhere along the trail but where we were going now we had to go alone.

“He was comin’ at me like a hoor on a honda” the immortal phrase uttered by a former classmate of mine in reference to some nonspecific  drunken brawl which took place in the back streets of Dublin several years ago. It had lain dormant in the darkened recesses of my memory for all this time, till now a sudden stir of echoes and it resurfaces again into the light.

“Masaaaaaaaaaaaage, maasaaaaaaaaaaage?” Two young ladies in miniskirts and high heels suggestively straddling a revving motorbike pull up alongside me as I walk back to hostel through the streets of Ho Chi Minh. “Ah Im alright, thanks” I reply, undeterred the dark haired beauty on the back of the bike kicks her right leg far higher in the air than seemed nessecery, pivots impressively on the seat and leaps off the bike. Motioning she indicated that I am to take her place and allow the pouting driver to whisk me off to god knows where for purposes unknown.

My pace, which had begun as a brisk walk, then a gentle trot had picked up to a full blown sprint as the motohookers pursued me down the street mounting the footpath several times in an effort to cut me off.

Just prior to this encounter I had been drinking in some late night neon plasterd bar. Standing at one of the bar tables minding my own business, a small Vietnamiese girl catches my eyes and smiles over. Dancing with her friends she works her way over in my direction and grabs me by the elbow and pulls me into their group. Thoughts such as “Hey I must be some sort of super stud” began circling in my mind, just before her friend whispers in my ear, “you take her to hotel, you pay.” “Hmmm I should have guessed” as I back away her friend makes one desperate last-ditch attempt, clutching at my shirt, she screams “But she love you long time!” “Oh my god she didnt actually just say that did she?” ” I come too if you like?” It’s a steep learning curve in this part of the world.

He saw the townlands
and learned the minds of many distant men,
and weathered many bitter nights and days
in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only
to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.
But not by will nor valor could he save them,
for their own recklessness destroyed them all —
children and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,
and he who moves all day through the heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return. . . .

The entire horizon illuminated before me in a ghostly silver-grey light, little fishing boats strewn about the bay blinked silently into life then vanished back into the blackness.

I waited, counted and calculated, but of the cataclysmic fury far out to sea no sound reached the shore, except for that told by the bristling rage of the solitary palm trees dotted along the beach. Walking until the sounds of music from the bar became garbled and muffled by the breeze I sat down in the sand.

After a while a figure approached picking its way delicately along the shoreline, holding her shoes in one hand and bunching her billowing skirt over the spray with her other. “I thought I’d find you out here staring into the sea, my god you’re so moody” Sophia laughed kicking sand at me. “I came out here to look at the storm” I replied brushing off my shirt. “No you didnt!” she howled, “you came out here looking for the meaning of life, I know you did, admit it!” “Grrrrrr” she said as she pressed her knuckles against her forehead in mockery of intense concentration. She moved to kick another pile of sand in my direction but instead lost her footing and collapsed in a heap on top of me. “Somebody’s been enjoying the cheap cocktails, so what happened to the Russians?” I said. “Oh, they realised why everybody was laughing at them and the bouncers had to drag them out the door”, “And the ladyboy?” “Still there dancing like always” “Ha! another story for the blog at least” I thought.

“Vietnam is such a magical place, why do people have to work, why cant they just travel from one adventure to another all the days of their lives” said Sophia wistfully. I began to wonder if we only ever recognise our own folly when we see it expressed by another. “What are you smiling at? Are you laughing at me?” The sight of her angry pursed lips and glowering eyes caused me laugh even harder, she began beating me over the head with her hands in response to my insolence. I had hoped to sing some wild paean to freedom, to irresponsibility, to the infinite possibilities of life untethered but knew I had failed. “Nasty, brutish and short” “what the hell are you talking about?” “Did I tell you that when I first started out, I met a grizzled traveler in St Petersburg who had journeyed in darkest Africa. In Tanzania I think it was, while passing by in a truck he happened upon an angry mob who had cornered a thief. He had been stripped naked and trapped in a river of filth. Eyes white with terror he didnt even bother to cover his genitalia as he ran frantically back and forth to the delight of the jeering crowd. He was beaten to death and his body burned.” “That is disgusting! Why did you tell me that story!” “I dont know, Im not sure” I replied and I was telling the truth. For momentary flicker, in the half light I saw it, the creature on the bridge, I remembered, just a single image less than a second, it turned and looked at me but instead of eyes there was nothing, I couldnt shake it off, that haunted apparition.

Returning now the to the bar, Andy had struck up a conversation with an English builder who appeared to be celebrating his birthday alone in Muine. As it turned out we had seen the same doctor in London before leaving to travel. He made it clear that whilst not only respecting her medical acumen, he considered, too, her mammaries worthy of favourable comment. Carrying the jocular tone I commented on the unusual profusion of beautiful women populating the beach resorts of Muine, but then it was unsurprising that the less attractive were disinclined from strutting about virtually naked.

The night was soon drawing to a close and the blue hue signaled the approach of dawn. Now the road ahead too was becoming clearer. Tomorrow we would reach Ho Chi Minh city and then we would all part company, time once again to go it alone, to experience life’s rawness untainted.

Prising apart the soft pink flesh with my fingertips as I pressed it close against my lips, the dragonfruit burst suddenly revealing its secret inner fleshiness. Juices spilled freely down over my chin and neck staining my shirt. Few things were as evocative of the mysterious Asian southeast as its bountiful bizarre and utterly exotic array of fruits. Once a fruit had been an apple or an orange or maybe even a peach now surveying the enormous fruit bowl at the poolside bar I had a choice between the luscious mangosteen, the bitter sweetness of vermilion tinged spiky rambutan, or might I dare the infamous pungency of the “King of fruits” the durian. Oozing with juice and dripping in the heat, I thought to myself, it never actually said it was an apple, perhaps, although the Dragonfruit of Original Sin didn’t have quite the same ring to it.

My favorite, picking out a fresh young coconut, the bar girl hacked away savagely with a machete exposing the milky clear juices within. Waiting, I scanned the bar, the usual array of lost souls populated this Eden of the fallen. A weird mix of white kids with dreads who can play that one Bob Marley song on a guitar glowering in righteous indignation at a smattering of beer bellied middle-aged geezers with beautiful young lithe-limbed locals. Rootless and rudderless I’d drifted to this aeolian isle of damned, a beach bum kite boarder hangout on Vietnam’s southern hook and the wrong side of paradise, Mui ne was about as far from the sort of travel I had originally envisioned as I been so far.

Rising, the moon was high now and the strong gusts fleeing the typhoon out on the South China Sea set the palm trees lining the beach swaying in unison giving the night a frantic harried atmosphere. Soft sands kicked up from the beach filtered in and scattered across the white marble floors.

Delicately balancing my coconut, skirting around the barside pool I made to the cushioned seated area overlooking the sea where Andy was sitting with the latest addition to our entourage a young doe-eyed French girl of barely twenty named Sophia. We had found Sophia wandering alone in the foothills of Dalat. Her family had once owned a plantation in Vietnam before the war, she had returned here now alone chasing some fantasy of a past she had never known. Given the vast multitudes of freaks, weirdos and miscellaneous hungry wantful creatures I’d encountered wandering the earth, I was glad that we were the worst things that she’d met.

Reclining back against the purple velvet, striking a matching and cupping it from the wind, I lit a cigar and signaled to Sophia, “looks like we’re in for some entertainment tonight…….”

Mickey danced every night at the Sankara bar in Mui ne. A passerby on the street outside looking in would see her silhouetted beyond the shimmering oasis of the pool bathed in the cool blues and greens of the soft mood lighting, twisting and gyrating with her eyes half closed as if in wild rapturous trace to the music. With long luscious black hair tumbling down over her bare slight shoulders, with her beguiling brown softly oval eyes in the impassioned heat of the night many man could be forgiven for making the mistake.

Already she had caught the eye of two Russian skinheads who’d been drinking vodka by the beach all day. We looked on watching in bemusement as the Russians staggering onto the dance floor began circling in ever tightening spirals like sharks closing on a kill. The bouncers too had caught wind to something afoot, realising the danger they began shifting uneasily, signaling for backup. Puffing on my cigar I sat observing from the shadows. Soon the whole scene was awash with muscular heavily tattooed men fanning outward in concentric circles surrounding one semi naked Vietnamese girl who, seemingly oblivious to the threat had now dropped to ground, and with impressive agility, balancing on her fingertips and stilettos began thrusting her hips repeated upwards in a rather unambiguous fashion – blood in the water, I chuckled softly to myself. as she stood up pouncing in a pincer like movement one of the skinheads towered over her from the front whilst the other, encircling her narrow hips with his enormous hands began grinding hard into her from behind. Uncaring and in reckless wild abandon with her arms raised towards the heaven she continued writhing sandwiched between her two pursuers. Word had quickly begun to spread around the bar and small groups of onlookers had begun to gather, pointing and laughing – adding fuel to what was already a dangerous and incendiary situation. It was only a matter of minutes before one of the thugs ground up a little too closely on Mickey sending the spark which would blow the lid on this powder keg.
Chomping down on my cigar, I chuckled softly to myself, this was about to get interesting…………

Sliding in closer against the green baize, with great care and deliberation, I sized up the shot. Bringing the cue parallel to eye level, mentally measuring distances, angles and calculating expectations of all probable future scenarios.

I paused, a Zen-like omniscience descended. I became aware suddenly of the lizards creeping in the rafters, of the rats burrowing in the cellar, of every grain of sand sent fleeing before every stray ocean zephyr born on a butterfly’s wing beat, even of the rotation of the earth herself. Inhaling deeply, I took my shot. Rolling forward less than an inch the cue ball came to a gentle halt sandwiched between my two remaining striped balls. “You bloody Irish bastard!” shouted Andy swinging his cue over his head as if to club me.

We had become pool degenerates. Perhaps it wasnt so much the game but rather the unsettling cabin feverish rivalry which had gradually begun to envelope us. It had now become all-pervasive, twisting and consuming every activity from pool to trivial things like skimming stones across a pond to finding our bearings in a new town, engulfing and sucking the joy out of everything. In the downtime between these bouts we would engage politely in conversation, hoping the other would miss the furtive glances about for the next opportunity to administer a pool beat down. Eventually it all become a bit tiresome.

What had started in Hue over a jovial game of darts had grown into a monstrous rampaging beast following a most brutal smackdown on the chess board dished out by myself in the hostel bar. Andy’s forfeit involved drinking a shot from a bottle aptly labeled “Arse”. It’s sickly salted taste lingered on the tongue and bored into the soul.

It probably would have ended there and then had he not consistently defeated me at connect-four which sent me spiraling into deep brooding rage tinted meditation on the subtle strategic aspects of the game. So much so that months later the far-famed bar girls of Bangkok who specialise in fleecing those foolish enough to try quickly learned to refuse to play me.

“Alright lads!” The door of the bar swings open in march two Welsh lasses from the valleys, “play ye for the table”. I look at Andy, given our intense pool battles over the pervious days, these newcomers should be easily dispatched, we agree to the challenge. I line up the triangle and place the cue ball, the noise fades away until there is only Shunyakasha, no sky, the divine vibration of Om in the shapeless void. I strike, two balls fly off harmlessly leaving the majority of the triangle intact. Damn. Grabbing the pool cue, one of them swigs back a huge glup from her pint glass of lager, with her legs spread wide, cigarette hanging from her lower lip she hunches down low resting her pendulous breasts against the baize and wallops a ball into the far left corner. Andy tries to look nonchalant but I see the faint trace of concealed horror brush like a shadow across his face. She proceeds to clear the table and we beat a hasty retreat in ignominy.

In another bar we encounter two separate groups of Irish guys and a middle-aged American going by the name of Filthy Frank. Detaching himself from a group of other Americans Filthy Frank stumbles over to us glowering half eyed with the drink. For some reason unbeknownst to me this brings howls of protestation from some of the Vietnamese girls in the bar who begin whacking me with their hands. Backing away as I try to fend them off Filthy Frank grabs hold of me by the wrist, “Listen good to Filthy Frank son” he sputters at me, “the women in these here parts, they’re all looking for the same thing” “Whats that?” I ask recoiling in disgust. “Something BIG!” he roars as a film of saliva coats my face. I stumble backwards out the door into the dark batting away Filthy Franks grasping hands and the hoards of shrieking Vietnamese girls.

Our mighty chariot

I take the early morning bus to Hoi An, a city famed for its tailoring industry. Having been fitted for a nice cashmere suit I became dimly aware and somewhat troubled by the fact that it would almost certainly not fit me once I returned from traveling. I found it strange that despite the fact that I was consuming about as much food on a daily basis as the average South East Asian family, I was perpetually losing weight. With several tiny Vietnamese girls crawling over me, tugging and pulling at the suit, one of them was even standing up on a stool just to reach my shoulder, I decided I`d rather just get it over with and would worry it later. After several, what would ultimately be futile, back and forths over the next two days for refittings, eventually I was presented with a fancy cashmere suit to be posted home.

The ancient city of Hue

Hoi An itself is impressible picturesque, on the banks of a river with many restaurants specialising in colonial era French cuisine. Walking back in the orange sodium lite haze to the hotel through the deserted market drove a furious scurrying of rats ahead of me. In my room I lay on the bed watching the lizards moving in their funny stop start weaving motion along the ceiling before drifting off to sleep.

Down along the river bank in Hoi An

I spend the next day wandering around the market places and the old city. My hair had become impressively dishevelled and I finally managed to get it cut. The following day myself and Swiss Andy are back on the road to Vietnam`s beach bum city of Natrang. The bus journey is predictably horrible despite managing to seize the largest bed at the back. It turned out to be a poisoned chalice anyway, it was a stinking fetid mess enseamed with the crusty filth of several decades of grimy travellers. I arrived early in the morning in Natrang with tales of roving bands of youths robbing unwary tourists with tasers ringing in my ears.

Relaxing at day`s end

The marketplace

The unwelcome guests

I briefly trifiled with continuing the suggestive nature of the converation, perhaps adding some Kenneth Williams inspired rejoinder such as “I bet you like a bit of snake inside you” or some such shite but instead I began edging slowly away from her. Anyway, – that’s what she said

I was now in Hue having broken with my prefered means of transport since I was unsure of the extent of the train network in Vietnam, I had joined forces with Swiss Andy and bought a sleeper bus ticket which would eventually carry me down the entire length of country. In the fluorescent half lite horror of the first night journeying from Hanoi to Hue, it was a purchase I soon came to regret. The driver with his hand poised like some striking cobra hovering above the horn played chicken with fate, the old tin can of a bus hurtled its way down the centre of the highway over taking everything in its path. Surprisingly I had enough leg room in my chair/bed/coffin compartment even after shoving my wallet, passport and laptop under my feet for safe keeping. I closed my eyes and tried to blot out the random swerving and lurching from side to side but some found myself shivering in that sickly wheezy chill of an airconditioned cold sweat.

Miraculously I did mange to snatch a few precious fragments of sleep albeit punctuated by disgusting drips of condensed moisture from the cooling compartment overhead. At one stage I awoke to find myself airborne as the bus momentarily left the road thanks to some large unseen object. Swinging my legs over the side of my bunk, I somersaulted out of the upper compartment to stretch my legs. At the last second I manged to grab hold of the opposing row of beds as I noticed something strange on the floor beneath. The aisle, I gasped, it’s a made a people. My foot was dangled in midair, suspended about an inch above the chest of a sleeping Vietnamese man. The space between the beds was crammed full of people sleeping and bags of rice.

There is nothing much left to say that anything ever happened here. The mist clings close to the hills around Hué bathing everything in a perpetual dampness, the wood, the stones, the lush green vegetation everything drips. You could drive on by on a motorbike and never notice a thing, but digging in the earth might tell a different tale, twisted bits of metal, shards of shrapnel, blunt nosed bullets, maybe even pieces of bone.

Across an ocean, thousands of miles away, in a very different world the name of this drenched abandoned hillside is still seared into the collective consciousness of a nation. For 77 days from the 21st of January to the 8th of April 1968 US marines dug in at the hilltop outpost of Khe Sanh Combat Base, pinned down and surrounded on all sides by three divisions of the Peoples Army of Vietnam came under a sustained and relentless attack by ground, rocket, artillery and mortar. “When you’re at Khe Sanh, you’re not really anywhere. You could lose it and you really haven’t lost a damn thing.” so said Brigadier General Lowell English one of the principle US military commands, indeed looking out around the cloudy green hills there is just nothing there and nobody to be seen. Yet this narrow sliver of land stretching from the Laotian border to the south China sea is one of the more intensely bombed areas on the planet. Just fifty kilometers south of the, in true military absurdist style named, Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Vietnam along the 17th parallel, the hills and the environs around Hué saw some of the most pitched and bloodiest of the fighting during the war.

The battle of Khe Sanh itself was largely a concerted collaboration between the US army and the North Vietnamese military command to produce a real life sequel to Joseph Heller’s farcical World War 2 era novel Catch-22. In this respect they were both wildly successful. The US military decided to defend Khe Sanh Military Base whatever the cost, mainly because the Vietnamese wanted it. Angered at American efforts to defend the base the Vietnamese supreme command decided they had to have it no matter what and subsequently hurled wave after human wave at this insignificant barren rocky outcrop. Eventually, deciding that neither really wanted it anymore, both sides reached a truce, effectively agreeing that the other guys were welcome to it and thereby leaving Khe Sanh utterly abandoned. Not before thousands of soldiers lost their lives there of course.

The old military base has now been converted into a tiny deserted propaganda museum. Pictures of marines climbing into a helicopter has been given the caption “Marines fleeing in terror from the Vietnamese liberators” and photograph of marines at a prayer service bears the title “Marines praying to God to get them out of this hell”

I was strangely surprised and perhaps a little disappointed that, unless you sought it out, so little remains of the war. But such is the conceit of the traveler, why should people want to be reminded of a bitter history, forty years is a lifetime and to the young population of Vietnam the war is as distant as the ruins of Angkor. Torn down, burned or swallowed whole by the land only faint traces can still be seen.

Heralding the end of the simplistic comic book hero image of American imperialism which followed on from World War 2. Vietnam ushered in the muddied era of moral relativism and realpolitik, the trauma of the war signified the end of innocence and the frightening loss of certainty which accompanies the twilight childhood and the unwelcome encroachment of adolescence. A nation which woke up suddenly and found itself adrift in a world where there are no baddies and no goodies, and some Indians are cowboys and some cowboys are Indians, with all its idols slain confusion and fear stalk the land.

I looked out into the mist of the surrounding valleys trying to imagine what it must have been like for the marines perched like sitting ducks atop a hill, surround on all sides, peering out into the white swirling morning mist. Or for a young Vietnamese conscript listening the ominous growl of unseen death from above. But try as I might I could feel nothing. No roar of B52s overhead, no bursts of machine gun fire, no mortars nothing, only silence. The land has reclaimed the bomb craters and the smell of napalm has long since blown away. The passage of time is a curious thing a place holds no horrors over the graves of men, the grass still grows and the birds still sing. The armies vanished as quickly as they had come leaving the hills to the trees.

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Finally I reached breaking point, the absurdity of the situation had become intolerable, I cracked first. “Ok, so what part of Ireland are you from then?” I had been talking to two Irish girls on the deck of the boat for the past ten minutes without either of us mentioning the big green elephant in the room. There must be some genetic nomadic predisposition amongst the Irish as they are absolutely everywhere, vastly disproportionally represented amongst the traveling peoples of the world.

An interesting feature I was slowly becoming aware of was how you can tell a lot about how long another Irish person has been traveling by how they react to your accent. If they’ve been traveling less than a month, then they’ll be shocked at hearing a familiar voice so ridiculously far from home, the person will then insist, without fail, on meeting you later in “the Irish bar” for a “few scoops” where they will be wearing their local GAA jersey and have a few of their precious Lyons teabags at hand along with some Jacob’s cream crackers.

If they’ve been traveling longer than a month or two like these girls had been, then they’d have already graduated into the too cool for school club, as soon as you open your mouth their faces will immediately glaze over with a practiced indifference. Yeah your Irish, Im Irish, big deal, Im soooo traveled, have met sooooo many Irish people, doesnt phase me. In fact as far as they are concerned there is nothing cooler than meeting, having a conversation, then parting company without ever broaching the subject.

Its with the truly traveled, for whom it is no longer an issue, that nationality is quickly mentioned as though it were some minor curiosity and rapidly dropped.

“We’re from Cork” one of them told me, “really, Im from Dublin” “Oh right, wouldn’t know too much about that” came her rather snotty reply! I couldn’t believe it, all the way out here, sailing Halong Bay thousands of miles from home, where Dublin and Cork could barely be distinguished on a map, strange rivalries still featured.

The other man on the deck was about seventy with close cropped grey hair, thick glasses and a thin wiry build, he looked and sounded just like an old English headmaster. That said I haven’t met too many English headmasters with large elephant headed Ganesha tattoos encompassing the entire area from their upper arm to shoulder as was wholly exposed by this mans singlet top. I was intrigued as to his circumstances and nosily attempted to probe, in my mind I began constructing a fictitious history for him I’d imagined he’s make a great character for a novel. He was a formerly respectable Oxford don who had traveled out east and fallen under the sway of some sinister Indian mystic, or so I imagined, I didn’t discover much about him other than that he was divorced and divided his time these days between Thailand and Amsterdam -just sayin’.

“Yes, tattoos are all well and good…” he waxed philosophically, “so long as neither you, nor the person doing them, is too high at the time”. I’d seen some pretty odd tattoos in my travels it must be said, perhaps this sentiment succinctly explained a lot of them.

Later that day we joined a larger group and traveled by bus to a hilly wooded area, Tom the tour guide told us all to be back at the bus by four as we had quite a strict schedule to follow. Sure enough come 4 when everybody was sitting in the baking heat of the bus waiting to leave, two people were still missing. Sitting near the front of the bus I could see Tom was getting increasingly alarmed, “where is the Israeli couple? has anybody seen the Israeli couple? the boats will be sailing soon, I said to be back at four”.

We sat gasping in the heat until forty five minutes later, finally, a heavily built man and his slightly dopey girlfriend came ambling along in no rush whatsoever down the trail. Had they stopped to smell the daisies it wouldn’t have looked out of place. Climbing onto the bus he rudely pushed past Tom and went to sit down the back. Half in jest but also as a reprimand, just as a semi-comical slow clap was breaking out, Tom said “Now you must apologize to everybody in the bus for keeping us all waiting”. Rounding furiously on the tourguide the man roared “why should I apologize? You should apologize to me? Your responsibility, you are the tour guide”

A stunned silence fell over the whole bus, looking around everybody was sitting bolt upright, lips curled back and nostrils flared in looks of utter disgust, nobody said anything. Tom was left reeling completely powerless to rectify such a public dressing down and a total loss of face. As I traveled down the length of Vietnam I’d run into this couple over and over again, so appalled I was by their behavior I couldn’t even bring myself to look at them. There are some parts of the world where those who travel by the same roads are a relatively small and close knit community and your reputation can travel surprisingly far.

20th Nov
“So…… did you watch the footie last night?”, it was phrase dropped in conversation with all the effect of some casually tossed hand-grenade. Even after all these years I winced like some traumatized war veteran at a twenty one gun salute. Can there be any greater shame than being young, male and having not watched “the footie” last night? Im twelve all over again, in the barbershop, “I said, did you watch the footie last night?” repeated the barber with increasing annoyance. “Err no, I dont really………. I dont really……. well I dont really watch football much” I answered with eyes downcast in shame. An awkward moment would then pass in which the older man would silently label me as “as bit odd”, “not really one of the lads”, and most likely a latent homosexual. “More into yer computer games then is it?” would come the eventual smirking rhetorical reply. I briefly considered explaining how I was an avid participant in many sports and was formerly a member of both a football club and an elite swimming team but as he leaned over me cutting my hair and resting his belly on my arm instead glumly I just answered “yes”. “Must be good for building up the strength in the auld wrists eh eh?” “I suppose so”

Attempts at bluffing my way out of the situation usually just lead to greater disaster and further humiliation as ironically my knowledge of football was in fact derived from a computer game, Championship Manager ’88 for the Amstrad 6128, and as far as I was concerned Peter Shilton was still the bomb. Eventually with much practice in the interleaving years I had perfected the art of making polite masculine conversation by pretending to have an opinion on something whilst in effect saying the bare minimum so I was prepared when the big NewZealander who was traveling with a large troop of off duty holiday reps leaned over the bus aisle and said “Hey man you’re from Ireland eh? So what do you think of Theirry Henri?” he had an incredible flourishing mustacheo-sideburn combo and some interesting tribal tattoos “I…….. (studying my questioners face for a clue as to why I should feel one way or another) I…….. hate the bastard? “Yeah I bet you do!” he roared with laughter, bang! I whispered to myself under my breathe, right on the money, clearly Theirry Henri had done something bad to Ireland. “We met some Irish lads last night, they were going crazy, even youse are in it they were saying to me – Im from NewZealand” he said in an exaggerated Dublin accent. Ok another piece of the puzzle, Theirre Henri had knocked Ireland out of the World Cup. Fair enough, It was amazing how little it mattered to me, so far away from home it seemed like news from a distant planet.

It’s disappointingly cold in Hanoi, not cold by any usual standards of what people might consider to be cold, but cold as might be felt by somebody who prematurely send all his warm clothes including his coat home by post from Hong Kong. Pretty much anything under the sun can be bought and sold in the city markets, except for items of clothing measured for my uncommon dimensions. Eventually I found one individual willing to sell me a shiny navy tracksuit bearing the logo of a large pouncing feline not unlike a mountain lion or say perhaps a puma. The label claimed to be triple extra large however it clings to me like a bodysuit and when I sit down the legs creep absurdly half way up my shins making me look like some overgrown comic-book oaf. Briefly I consider searching for a propeller hat to complete the look before returning to the hostel.

So Id already seen John McCains prison cell, a B52 crashed in a lake, and Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, the last big thing on the list was the drowned landscape Halong Bay. The karst limestone pillars of southern China stretched down from Yangshou into Vietnam and fell into the Yellow sea at Halong Bay. The effect was a spectacular maze of thousands of stone columns rising for miles out to sea.

Up early for the bus to Halong Bay and to meet my fellow travelers. It didnt look good at first, the tour seemed to mainly comprise of a large group of holiday reps out on the lash, I had a faint feeling of trepidation that the following few days would be a blurred haze of enforced beer pong, toga parties and the endless whipping of bare arses by cruel locker room towels. But I was unfairly stereotyping, they turned out to be fairly sound with no real high jinks planned apart from some vague notions of feeding Valium laced bananas to the macaques of monkey island.

On the bus a friendly young Vietnamese introducing himself as “Tom” was to be our guide. The plan was that we were to take a “bootyful” drive out into country to Halong Bay, where we would board our “bootyful” boat and have a “bootyful” sail around the “bootyful” bay, perhaps visit some the “bootyful” caves, do some kayaking around the karst pillars, swim in the bay if we were feeling brave, sleep on the boat, go for a hike the next day and visit some of the islands, stay on one of them for a night then return to Hanoi. It was all going to be so “bootyful” Tom reassured us. On the way i got talking to some of my fellow passangers, including Mustafa from Kuala Lumpur and his Czech girlfriend Monika, Mark a lawyer from London and Andi from Switzerland. I’ve always had a particular interest in the lost, forgotten places of the world and was especially intrigued by Mustafa’s descriptions of the forbidden mountainous lands of his birth country Pakistan which border Afghanistan. It was a place of incredible natural beauty which sadly would perhaps be off limits to any Western traveler for at least a generation, an unforgiving land steeped in conflict, names like the Kyber Pass and the Hindu Kush which once resonated throughout history and now observe a tragic silence. I decided Id visit someday if I ever got the chance.

Striking up a conversation with some of the holiday reps I learned that they were from such far flung places as South Africa, Australia and NewZealand.

Arriving at Halong Bay, it was cold and blustery and we quickly boarded a wooden ship not unlike a pirate galley and were soon sailing amidst the foreboding limestone pillars which emerged suddenly from the mist bursting out of the muddy brown waters. More football related embarrassment was soon to follow as I was sharing a cabin with Andy and Mark who was an avid Arsenal fan. Like some embarrassing tattoo, I had so far managed to conceal my Blackburn Rovers wash bag until finally Mark noticed it, “what the hell is that?” he asked pointing at the blue bag on my bed. I quickly managed to defuse the situation by explaining that I had needed a bag and this one was, for some reason, the cheapest bag in the shop, to all round laughter.

So much for that plan

To the horror of the holiday reps who hailed from warmer climes in the Antipodes, myself, Mark and Andi went for a swim along side the boat. The brown muddy water was utterly impenetrable, what lay beneath was anybody’s guess but thankfully it was quite a bit warmer than the air. Later in the evening masked female pirate pulled up alongside our both hitching ropes to the ship and tried flogging beer and food. The night finished with shamefully renditions of Gangster Paradise and various Vanilla Ice abominations on the karaoke machine.

“Before you check in, first – Im afraid I’ll have to see your dong” giggled the girl behind the counter. Sigh, I guess it doesn’t matter how long you live here it never gets old. “I dont think I have enough” I reply shrugging my shoulder and displaying my upturned empty palms like some kind of hapless pauper, its a gesture I’d have practiced to perfection before Id arrive home, “Ok well there is a bank machine around the corner”. Predictably it didnt work, the next one refused my credit card for some reason, finally after trans versing far more moto frogger runs that I would have liked, I get my hands on some more of the unfortunately named Vietnamese currency. Every single note depicts a benign smiling Ho Chi Minh, a grandfatherly gaze belies the man who would defy a superpower, I quickly note the similarities between some large denominational notes and some of those of smaller value, I wonder if countries deliberately design their currencies to trick unwary foreigners.
The hostel seems like a real party zone with loud music pumping from the rooftop bar filtering down somewhat annoyingly into the dorms beneath, luckily I have my ever trusty earplugs on hand should the need arise.

Hanoi is particularly famed for its cuisine, blending elements from two great culinary traditions namely the French and east Asian. I was particularly excited about this especially considering how cheap Vietnam was relative to the west, for about three or four dollar I could eat an entire family sized meal and did so on an alarmingly regular basis. In fact looking back on photos from Vietnam its inexplicable how emaciated I look give that I regularly consumed as much food per day as an entire multi-generational Vietnamese household.
After dark i wandered down past the big lake in the center of the city to seek out some of Hanoi’s best restaurants, in particular to try the far famed green papaya salad and the Vietnamese spring rolls.

I decided that I would visit the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison the next day, apparently they still have the jumpsuit John McCain was wearing when he was captured.

Ok, take a look over at

http://otherthingsentirely.wordpress.com/

After sometime we reach the border, the usual security screens, swine flu disclaimers, thermal ray guns under-calibrated to avoid hassle for the official; show everybody suffering from hypothermia, my body temperature is 34 degrees celcius apparently, bag xrays etc.

Outside the military outpost travelers are ushered into little golf carts which drive them over to Vietnam. Half way along the 100m journey we cross a yellow line painted on the ground, the division between China and Vietnam. The Chinese side is flawlessly smooth, polished and even, the other side of the line is all smashed up and chipped away, upon crossing the golf cart lurches comically from side to side over lumps and potholes

Ive never had any problems crossing borders but just in case I have my trusty decoy wallet, packed with a couple of dollar bills, at the ready. Its not unknown for officials to demand unspecified “fees” which coincidentally often amount to exactly the amount of money you should happen to have in your wallet at the time. Perhaps these stories are apocryphal, Ive crossed about thirty borders back and forth in asia without any difficulties, but worth being prepared just in case.

Passing through customs I am saluted by a soldier dressed in a bright green body length military coat with green furry hat, he looks like something out of a bad Cold War era spy movie. I salute back and keep my opinions on his attire to myself.

Boarding a noticeably inferior bus on the otherside we are soon on our way to Hanoi. The countryside is similar to southern China except much wilder and less rigidly maintained. It looks similar to the poorer ragged fringes of China. Children cycle along side the bus and generally run free or lounge about idle. Thinking back I couldnt remember a single instance in two months of seeing children hanging around doing nothing in China.

Dusk and the bus arrives in Hanoi. My first impression of the city is one of faded glory. But first impressions are often wrong, look closely beneath the crumbling grandeur of the French colonial townhouses and you’ll find a tireless industrious people, cobbling old boots or fixing engines, selling bits of cloth or cooking over open fires. A frenetic energy lingers in the ramshackle hovels clustered under the awnings of the glories of yesteryear.

As the bus trundles along through the warren of streets, I try and fail to get my bearings. Disembarking, my fellow passengers disperse immediately living me prey to the predictable army of taxi touts. I resist and decide to walk a few blocks to try to flag down a regular taxi. I am constantly hampered in my efforts, literally at every turn by idlers reclining on motorbike with what I would soon learn to be the bane of every traveller in Vietnam, the catch cry of “Hello Moto?”.

Crossing streets in Vietnam is a precise art form which takes quite a bit of getting used to, I hang back and watch the locals do it a few time before summoning the courage to try it myself. Some streets consist of six to eight lanes of constant unbroken flow of motorbikes and the only means of transversing them involves taking a deep breath and slowly and determinedly wading out into the traffic, walking at a steady pace with your eyes fixed dead ahead. The stream will in general part around you as you walk, like I said, it takes quite of bit of getting used to.

Further up the street a gust of wind whips up curling smoldering black ash which seems to hang gently in the air. Ahead a tiny girl kneels on the path bowing and casting bright multicoloured paper money onto a fire, sending it to her dead ancestors. All around me in the twilight I notice small glimmers of streetside fires and black ash stains on the broken footpath.

Now another chapter draws to a close, so its goodbye to Renee singing along to Lionel Ritchie at the desert border crossing, and to Eoin and Ashling and their worries for my safety, never fear two months and going strong! To Jo and Michelle and what ever paths you have chosen, to the Scots and to Efrat where ever you may roam may you always find your way back home. To the crack smoking Dutch girl, to Alex the war vet and Jacob and the Crazy Aussie, I can still see you all standing there forever under the neon haze of a Beijing September’s twilight; where are all these people now? Farewell Jess and co of Chengdu, and to Sylvia and the Dangsters of Kunming, memories to last a lifetime. And its goodbye to HongKong Tom fortune smiles on you, not that you need worry- as a man who makes his own, as for Manhat, Dillsworth and Barry Chuckle, well, ye the children of a lesser god, someday picking through the shattered glass of your lives may you find a kind of fractured peace somewhere out there, this cruel world was not made for creatures such as you. To all the chancers and the oddballs, to all the failures and the fuckups, to the degenerates, the displaced, the disillusioned, the disenchanted and to all those damned to wander for all eternity, to the hiders and to the seekers and to all those who fell in the in-between lost and never to be found, never forget that the world needs you, you are the colour in the grey and I for one am forever grateful that we met.

I haven’t slept much, my sleep is besieged by a peculiar and cryptic dream which had been reoccurring frequently under various guises ever since that night I first crossed the desert to China. It seemed somehow appropriate that I should dream once more, again as I slept on a train and on the cusp of finally leaving China behind me after two months. The morning found me in a strange and contemplative mood, neither joyous nor sorrowful; although once my initial relief, that my bags in the open hard sleeper hadn’t been razored whilest I slept, had subsided I could feel the gradual darkening of gathering cloud. A sudden urgency gripped me, to get out of China as soon as possible, it would be the only thing which could stave off the burgeoning and possibly debilitating slump. I became strangely fearful of the prospect of spending a night in Nanning, I had to leave soon, today if possible.

This was the lowest point of my travels, I felt I was in for a rough ride over the next few days with gloom setting in, and with so many days, seven months, and so many miles to go it seemed like I had an immense task before me, although in truth I never felt like turning back and just returning home to be honest, I did however imagine what it would be like if I did. Back in cold and rainy Ireland, staring out the window on a miserable November afternoon with nothing to do and nowhere to go, imagining myself back here with the whole of southeast asia left unexplored and me trapped back there, it would have been crushing. Here I was alone, but it didnt bother me as low as I felt I didnt need the comfort of others to help me through, I had learned from my travels on the trains that I had high tolerance to loneliness and indeed ofter sought it out. I can honestly say that in all my ten months of traveling alone there was never one day where I felt I missed the comfort of home.

Back to the task at hand, examining my out of date Lonely Planet, it wasn’t quite clear if I could catch a train to Hanoi given that I was to arrive in Nanning in mid morning or for that matter what I should do if I could not. Bungling off the train I was swept along by the throng out the door to the stations entrance. i wander around lost for a while looking for a ticket booth for something like the “friendship train” or whatever bizarre Chinese euphemism the cross border train is called. Eventually an elderly lady comes to my aid, she has some sort of semi-broken english and claims to be living in America now. She brings me to the ticket box, the girl behind the counter says something which she claims means that the train wont be running again for another five days. Damn, what do I do now? Looks like Im spending the night in Nanning one way or another.

Wandering the street across from the train station, it seems the hostel indicated on the Lonely Planet map now longer exists. I ask at the hotel next to the address but they cant understand what Im looking for. I wander a little into the city trying to figure out my next move, but eventually the weight of my bags persuades me to concede defeat; I return to the hotel and using my severely limited Chinese skills somehow manage to book a nights accommodation. The room is spacious, sterile looking and without the unnecessary additives of character or homeliness which most budget Chinese hotels tend to forgo. Momentarily slumping on the bed in an exhausted stupor, I quickly pull myself together, I have to figure out how to get to Vietnam, one night here is enough. Leafing through my Lonely Planet it would seem that even they struggle to find anything much to recommend about Nanning, there is some halfhearted mention of a museum containing the world largest bronze drum collection or something and a slightly unusual fountain somewhere but the overriding message is just get the hell out of there as soon as possible.

Right, time to formulate a plan of action, the map shows a tourist information office not too far away, surely they can help me. Weaving through traffic and enduring the usual gormless stares I eventually arrive, the girl in the office speaks a sufficient amount of english to inform me that I would need to send my passport off to the Vietnamese embassy and consequently give them some money too. “But I already have a visa” I explain, “no, no, the way is now bad” she smiled sweetly, “you must get another check – and give us money”, hmmm this didnt seem right to me. Her boss emerges from the back office “yes, yes, the way is now bad, you must check from embassy, – and pay us money”. “Ok, I dont think Ill be doing that, thanks.” Leaving the office I hadn’t got a clue what to do next. I was sure they were trying to scam me, it wasn’t so much the money but rather the delay which irked me most.

There was a long distance bus station outside the city somewhere but I wasnt confident Id be able to direct a taxi there. I wandered deeper into the city with growing exasperation not sure what exactly I was looking for. After several hours of fruitless search I suddenly remember that there was another agency nextdoor to the first travel agency but it seemed to cater only for Chinese, might as well give it a try, what else can I do?

Sure enough the girls inside had no english and I was left flailing with my phrasebook. Then they begin shouting into the back of the office and out comes a young lad, “Alwight mate, how can I help you?” he asks in a dodgy english accent. Finally! A stroke of good luck! Turns out the guy had lived in Brighton for a few years. Explaining my difficulty he helps me out, writing down the characters for the taxi driver, for the ticket office at the station and even went so far as to call a taxi for me. What a hero, I wish I could remember his name, I’d write it here so he could be listed on the Lonely Planet’s website as one of the best things about Nanning, apart from the drum museum and the fancy fountain of course, I think he called himself Aaron. He didnt seem to know anything about the way which was supposedly “now bad” either.

Having booked a ticket for early the next morning, I return to Nanning, as night approaches its getting cold, I buy another alarm clock to wake me in time to catch the bus in the morning, smashing my previous one against the tiled floor, “you’ve have failed me once too often”. It would be one of perhaps twelve alarm clocks I would buy before I would return home, all of which would desert me in some crucial hour of need.

Nanning Train station, as viewed from my window

Settling in for the night the hotel takes on a creepy dissonance. It has the feel of some baron soulless place used by long distance businessmen. Each floor consists of a single enormous corridor which fifty rooms evenly spaced along the length. It reminds me of how mental hospitals are always depicted in films, cold echoing with unseen disembodied voices, sudden incomprehensible shouts and random wild uncontrolled laughter, in the distance at the end of the corridor for some reason there is always a hunched shambling figure floodlight beneath flickering florescent lightening, clutching at a sweeping broom but never seen to be actually sweeping. Inside my room I frequently get phone calls from breathless female voices, “eeeekkkk?” comes the surprised response when I reply in english. Eventually I pull the phone out of the wall to stop them harassing me. The mummers in the corridor are occasionally broken by the clip-clip-clop of stiletto high heels as scantly young ladies comes and go from rooms.

Checking my email, I received a nice mail from Eoin and Ashling saying that there were to be married, having gotten engage in Borneo. They’d traveled a long distance since Beijing and here was me just about to leave China.

16th Nov

I lay in an almost catatonic state pressed against the roof of the second class hard sleeper. Trying to talk down my restless mind, I made a silent promise to myself, that no matter what – months from now when this was all over, it wasn’t the end, someday I’d roam again. Such was the profound effect of my experience that the thought of it all ended became as unbearable as a life sentence.

Here I was once again, going backwards. The train out of Kunming to Vietnam hadn’t run in over two years, or so I’d been informed. Something about a landslide on the track which nobody could be bother doing anything about. I was faced with two alternatives, either head south to the Lao border or make eastwards once again and cross from Nanning. Since the time was already ticking on my Vietnamese visa I opted for the latter.

Looking back on my travels with the advantage of retrospect every decision now seems like the right one, had I chosen another route at any fork in the road then every subsequent happening would have never come to pass. But then who knows what lies down the road not taken, what matter anyway, time to go, the word was that I was to be tried for treason. So goodbye China, and to all who live there, for now.

I had gone travelling to sate a hunger, to slay a dragon, but instead I’d become a junkie, been consumed whole, I knew I’d never look on a normal life the same way again, and writing now many months later it still holds true, I still dream of the distant shore.

“Whooooooo!” the girls in the doorway screamed, “is everybody ready to paaaaarty!” she shouted throwing her arms in the air and allowing her body length black shawl to fall to the floor revealing two inch stiletto high heals, fishnet tights, hotpants, a bare midriff and a overflowing corset jam-packed and on the brink of going supernova. “That’s the birthday girl” Sylvia whispered in my ear, “uuuuh these aren’t your typical Chinese girls”. “You dont say…..” I replied surveying the room.

The Kunming phenomenon known as “The Dangsters” (or the dance-gangsters as one of them later explained to me) had entered the building. She strode into the center of the room flanked by half a dozen similarly provocatively dressed girls, without warning they suddenly simultaneously broke into a choreographed hip-hop dance routine. If you travel for a long period of time very far from home, every now and again something will happen something so bizarre and alien that you become acutely aware of the passage of time and distance and relive all at once your journey in its entirety to this point. This was one such moment. “How the hell did I get here?”. Well that’s a long story.

It was at this point that Lady Fanny entered the room, that’s what she told me her name was – who am I to judge. She crept into the room and positioned herself with her back to the wall. She was wearing a long knitted black gown which she held closed clasping at the front with her hand, this, combined with her strange furtive movements gave her the appearance of a person who’d just stepped out of the shower only to inexplicably find all their relatives standing looking at them and began desperately trying to conceal their nakedness with a flimsy towel. She began a strange stilted conversation with a Portuguese/Belgian guy with the most peculiar handlebar mustache/side burn combination Id ever seen who was sitting next to me.

I didnt think much more of it and resumed by foraging amongst the bowls of assorted snacks, hey when you’re traveling on a budget moments like this are a boon you must appreciate. Several minutes later I heard a sudden sharp intake of breath from Sylvia, “oh my god” , turing around to see what she was looking at I noticed that PortoBelgie was sitting on the couch with a frozen expressed not unlike a very surprised rabbit in a some very bright headlights, “that girl’s wearing a porn stars dress” she whispered. Indeed Lady Fanny had discarded her outer layer and her modesty thereafter. What lay beneath was effectively a stretched black leather strip of material barely wound around the type of curves which have driven men to mad acts. “Good god!” “Exactly…..” said PortoBeglie, “and now I ……. cant stand up, at least not for a little while” he added as Lady Fanny tottered away as though she were walking on a tightrope in her heels.

More on this later…….

Back in Guilin I leave my luggage in the train station and set about gathering supplies for the overnight journey westwards. A big water, a bag of miscellaneous mystery meat dumpling bought off a bunch of guys cooking over a flaming barrel, some dates and a much regretted purchase of a disgusting traditional sweet cake object which tasted like compressed sugar infused sawdust and crumbled to pieces in your hands as you tried to stuff it into your mouth.

There is bitter chill on the wind and in my shorts and tshirt I am attracting even more stares than usual. I find my myself repeatedly explaining to fur wrapped street vendors that I “meiyou” any warmer clothes. Finally I take refuge in the train station wincing at the howling gusts brought by the opening of the doors. A TV screen over head shows snow and ice in the north, Beijing, Xian even Chengdu. I couldnt find Kunming but I knew it had a mild climate and hoped for the best.

As dusk fell the train boarded and I found myself sharing a four bed soft sleeper compartment with a soft spoken Australian couple. It was quite a surprise and the first time I had found myself traveling with anybody other than Chinese. They had made a quick stop in China on the way to Laos. As the night wore on I regaled them with tales of my exploits over the past two months, they are clearly awestruck by the fact that Id traveled alone on the trains all around China. I hadnt considered it especially difficult until I talked to other people about it but I had to admit to myself that I was looking forward to southeast asia and becoming a tourist again instead of a wanderer, at least if just for a little while. We had dinner in the dining car where again my ability to order in Mandarin must have seemed awesome to somebody with no knowledge of the language, even if it was restricted to pointing at the menu and saying “Me want rice, she want pork, he want beer”, I could have been reciting Confucius for all they knew. Retiring to the cabin we played a strange game of cards common amongst travelers and one which I would repeatedly learn and forget and learn all over again over the next few months.

12th Nov

Editorial on Oct 1st

Which one is the joke? all you can do is laugh sometimes.

The scene resembled something out of a horror movie. The frozen angry scowling death grimaces left me under no illusions; those dogs had died hard. Brandishing a huge meat cleaver, gleefully a man hammered away surrounded by what Id imagine the end-product of a stick of dynamite and a barrel full of dogs might well look like. A stacked mass of entrails, paws, sinewy joints, on hooks skewered and left hanging by the jaw, dogs hung in a progressively advanced state of dismemberment. Scanning from left to right along the macabre array gave the stomach churning feel of dog-disassembly flick book. From a whole dog on the far left through to just the top half of a dog to eventually just a hanging head still snarling even in death. Alongside lay a stack of cages with the dogs quivering brethren, having bared witness to the fate of their kin they now awaited their turn.

I tried to make a video of the Yangshou market but unfortunately it came out crap. Sure the scene was pretty gross and I doubted those dogs had been treated humanely but Id never understood why it was considered such a taboo to eat dogs. I always thought it was funny how people got so bothered about killing baby seals or pandas yet couldnt give a shit about ugly animals like rats or dung-beetles. What about a “Save the Dungbeetles” campaign?

Later on I took a local minibus full of tubercular old people out into the wilderness to Yangdi. Since the Li river was at half strength my intention was to walk along the dried riverbed to Xingping and take a bus back to Yangshou.

Walking along the river the rustic tranquility was frequently spoiled by itinerant Bamboo raft people who would drift along side and constantly harrassed me insisting that the river up ahead was impassible and I would have to employ their services. Eventually I took a raft for a while and managed to communicate with the rafter using my basic knowledge of Mandarin and the creative name for the various stony peaks such as the nine horses, the old man eating the apple and the giant rock penis.

The last leg of my hike brought be away from the river bank and I soon found myself wandering through the countryside surrounded by fruit growing fields. I walked along enjoying the peace and quiet occasionally meeting an old woman trundling along hunched under an enormous hay rick or a large bundle of twigs.
Eventually I found myself trapped on the wrong side of the river and had to search out a local fisherman to ferry me across to the other bank. The ferry he assured me wouldn’t be running for several hours. Of course no sooner than Id reached the far bank the ferry suddenly appeared behind us.

I dipped my foot absent mindedly in the pool and traced small semi circles in the water. “So where else have you traveled?” I asked her. Taut and pressed tightly against her slight frame using arms for supported the Chinese-American girl dipped her legs down into the water. I had smiled when she told be her name, Bea.

“Where havent I been?” She replied evasively with a hint of mischief. Beyond the palm trees the sun was setting low over the Pacific’s infinite stillness. The dying day flecked a faint trace of flame across her raven black hair which tumbled from a top knot down over her bare shoulders and along the arch of her back. It was a scene of ethereal beauty all the more so because of the awesome coincides which had lead to this. But I was enjoying this, for the moment I decided I’d keep toying with her.

“Have you been to the Phillipines? I asked “Yes” she replied, “what about Laos? “Yes” “…”Burma?” “Myanmar?…. yes” “You’ve been to Myanmar really? what was it like?” “Incredible” she replied wistfully her gaze falling away out to sea. “How about Mongolia?” “That’s the one place in East Asia I haven’t been!” she replied crossly feigning annoyance.

“What about China?” I asked “China? Yes, Ive been to China” “Really?……… What parts?” “Oh you know, the east, the west, the north ……… the south” “Really?” I said slowly, “when was the last time you were in China?” I asked I could see a flicker of confusion at the sudden change of questioning from playful to direct.
I had noticed her immediately when she first arrived on the island and knew who she was. A sudden flash of recognition, a dusty country road thousands of miles behind me, I’d been waiting to talk to her as soon as I saw her get off the boat from the Fijian main island, surely it couldn’t be her, could it? It was too incredible a chance to allow it to pass I had to find out. Although Ive never remembered anybody’s name the first time i heard it, I’ve often freaked people out with my memory of faces, a face I’d never forget as long as I lived.

“About seven or maybe eight months ago I think it was in……” she replied. “November” I interrupted. “Yes, November in…….” “Yangshou” A sudden flicker of shock passed over her face, “I thought it was you, oh my god! have you been traveling all this time!” We both started laughing in disbelief.

Seven months earlier I had rented a bike in the hostel in Yangshuo and cycled off into the Chinese countryside to explore the karst scenery along the Li river. I cycled alone though massive brooding limestone pillars and past farmer laboring in the fields. Exhausted and thirsty I stopped off in a small restaurant at the base of Moon Hill. A Malaysian girl and the a Chinese American were sitting at the table opposite me, I initially assumed they were locals until they called me over to join them for lunch. The very same Chinese American girl who who be sitting beside me on a beach in Fiji thousands of miles away seven months later.

Cycling around the Yangshuo countryside was one of the most memorable experience of my time in China. It was my only experience of seeing of seeing very rural China up close and not prepackaged for tourists. I cycles along the main road, buffeted by enormous trucks and tour buses until I found a small dusty road leading off to Moon Hill and onwards towards the Dragon Bridge over the river Li. Unfortunately I calculated that by the time I reached then bridge night would begin to fall during my return journey to Yangshuo so I had to abandon halfway through.

Look very closely to the right just above the arch

8th Nov

“Ok, no problem, follow me, Ill show you how to catch the bus”

“You’ll show me how to catch the bus?” I repeated slowly to myself as I followed the hostel girl out the door. This definitely sounds ominous I thought and my fears were soon shown to be well founded.

Already encumbered, the plan was to stand amidst several lanes of traffic in the centre of the road and flag down a bus bound for Yangshuo. After waiting five minutes a long rickety bus moves into sight further down the road. As it approaches through the traffic and without stopping a woman hangs out the door jabbering rapidly, “Yangshuo, yangshuo, yangshuo” I bellow between breathes as I run alongside the moving vehicle. Grabbing hold of a wing mirror I heave myself in the door like some boxcar jumping hobo. Finally I was out of this smog clogged mayhem and on my to the tranquility of the countryside.

Maybe an hour or so later, after driving through sloping terraced rice fields, the bus arrives in Yangshuo. It seems like a relatively small city with a quaint old town section explaining its appeal to the backpacking community. Wandering down through the old town, I look for a new hostel nestled down a side alleyway which had been highly recommended by hostel world.

At the end of the alleyway a strange encounter awaits, a woman with a shaved and unusually round head dressed in rags sits on a doorstep staring intensely at me. “Where you going?” she curtly demands, “to the hostel over there” I tell her, “why you go there?” she asks in a staccato clipped rapidfire , “the rooftop bar – they steal my idea, they steal Monkey Jane’s idea, come to Monkey Jane’s, I give you good price”, “ah no its ok, I already have a reservation there” I lied. So this was the famous Monkey Jane, I was to see her name on many tshirts and hoodies throughout South East Asia.

The hostel was clean and very new like most I’d stayed in China, dumping my bags I rapidly ascended the staircase to see the much lauded rooftop bar. The view from the top really lets you know what all the fuss about Yangshuo is all about.

A frozen procession of petrified giants, lonely karst isolated hills march away from the flood plane on the banks of the Li river. Enveloped in wispy vapors with the dying embers of the day painting the hint of enigmatic expression. A fog horn sounds on the river far below reverberating amongst the mighty stone pillars and in my head, a humming droning sound and a sense of what I would learn to be known as the Hindu sense of Om, no sky, the void, formless and without beginning or end.

The bar had an interesting policy of being unmanned most of the time and allowing guests to simply pour their own drinks, albeit under the watchful gaze of a CCTV camera. As night fell I am joined by a the crazy girl known as J.C whos responsibilities include running the bar and generally kicking up mayhem. She carries about a pink stuffed pig called Zhu le Hai (happy pink pig literally) with her everywhere she goes with whom she frequently confers and forces you to use as an intermediary should you wish to address her.

We are joined by an Irish couple later on, I recognize them by their accents but take my time revealing myself, and an English couple. I overheard part of the English couples conversation to the Irish concerning staying at Monkey Janes, apparently they stayed there before, “yeah you know, she was just jumping about the whole time, making Oooh Oooh OOoh noises and acting like a monkey, we got a bit weirded out by the whole thing and left”

The Getaway

The city of Guilin was noticeably poorer than any of the other areas in China I’d traveled through. Gritty and dusty, smog choked and traffic clogged, walking about is distinctly unpleasant, not least because of the standard Chinese sick joke of pedestrian crossings or the footpaths which, after luring the unwary walker out into the middle of nowhere, cruelly, almost mockingly, crumble to dust leaving you stranded.

After Hong Kong’s nonchalance, getting stared at again takes some getting used to. Two little feckers slow down their moped, “waigoren” roars the one on the back, they speed off giggling hysterically. Walking past a bank, glancing in the door, three girls are lounging about gossiping. One, sweeping her gaze about suddenly noticing me walking past outside and does a double take. She frantically taps her friends on the shoulder gesticulating wildly out the door. I keep walking but look backwards waiting to catch them gawking. Sure enough three heads pop out the door one by one and stacked cartoon-like in a vertical row wide eyed and giggling.

Wandering up to the Seven Star park place which according to some 1237-places-to-visit-before-you-go-senile type guidebook is one of the greatest naturally wonders in Asia. I really wonder who writes these guides, do they really just want to keep all the actually good places to themselves, or perhaps do they realize that their books are only bought by people who never had any intention of actually going anywhere themselves and are perfectly content to look at pretty pictures. Predictably its rubbish, the park is cute enough but nothing special especially compared to some of the places I’d already seen, the caves are ruined with ridiculous Santa’s grotto style lighting beloved of all Chinese national tourist attractions. I follow along behind a guided tour given in Mandarin where the guide points out the usual contrived “amusing” caves features like “the old man eating the penguin” or “the big horse choking the duck”, when in actually fact they all really just look like penises.

I spend most of my time in the adjoining “zoo” watching tourists torment the red pandas by pretending to feed them. Eventually I walk back to the hostel, a Herculean feat which takes me several hours walking in the midday sun, a few inches away from speeding traffic.

Later that evening I get talking to some of the other travelers, an Irish girl with her Australian boyfriend and mother. After several drinks and before the conversation descends into the usual bitching session about getting ripped off and stared at everywhere, I retire to bed. I wonder why some people bother traveling at all, if you already hate people you aren’t going to like them much anywhere else.

Guangxi the war ravaged mountains border of the Chinese Civilization, to the south the indomitable Vietnamese. Amongst the the far famed limestone karst peaks, old men fishing with tamed cormorants on mist drenched rivers, Guangxi is old mythical China of picture postcard, and it was to be my last taste of the mysterious Orient before I headed south bound on a one way course into the tropics.

I catch a bus headed for Zhuhai just over the border. I am the only person on the bus. The driver drops me at the border crossing where I take my bags pass through immigration and presumably meet him on the other side, although this is not entirely clear. The crossing is quick and relatively painless, immediately on the other side a change is apparent. It feels grayer, gritter, dustier and more industrial. I was reminded of how I felt crossing from Mongolia into China almost two months ago, its funny how its the small subtle differences you notice first, a particular brand of lemon juice or a funny seaweed flavored packet of crisps.

Its late morning, my plan was to bolt for Guangzhou and get the hell out of there as soon as possible, hopefully fluke a ticket for the train to Guilin that very night. At the other side of the border predictably there is no sign of my bus, I sit around for a while pondering my next move.

Eventually I see a young girl walking around jabbering loudly with a sign held over her head, I recognize the characters for Guangzhou. A bus rapidly pulls up along side, myself and about thirty other people barrel inside, I repeatably ask my fellow passengers – Guangzhou right? Guangzhou yeah? Im generally met by silent quizzical nods. Im acutely aware that its the culture in Asia never to admit to not knowing something, people may not have a clue what you asked them and would simply smile and nod anyway. With this disturbing thought we pull out of the border crossing bound for god knows where, my single consoling realisation being that well realistically on the bright side it didnt really matter where I ended up, there was no where on earth I had to be.

Maybe an hour or two or perhaps three later we arrive in Guangzhou, crossing enormous bridges over the Pearl River delta we are afford an incredible vista of the sprawling enormous cityscape. Through the bus window I search desperately for landmarks cross referencing with my compass trying to fit various rivers and bridges to my Lonely Planet map to figure out where I am and how far to the train station. The bus pulls into a station and everybody disembarks, I have absolutely no idea where I am. Several lanes of noisy traffic encircle the station, I stand on the edge of the road and after a surprisingly long amount of time manage to flag down a taxi. “Wo yao dao houchezhan qu” (I want to go to the train station.) i tell him. He looks at me dumbfounded, I repeat it again and again and again permuting the various intonations in the hope of making myself understood. “Ya wha’?” he replies. An awkward standoff ensues with the two of us staring at each other in silence for about twenty seconds as I tried desperately to think of something. “Sorry bud, you’re on your own” says the taxi driver closing the door and driving off. Bloody taxi drivers, the same the world over.

What the hell am I going to do now? For the first time in my travels I was absolutely stumped, I didnt know where I was or how to get out of this situation. I think the people in Guangzhou speak mainly Cantonese, perhaps I could draw a picture of a train or flag down another car and start making choo choo noises and hope the driver didnt call the cops or bring me to a lunatic asylum.

Thankfully the second taxi I stopped seemed to know what I was talking about and I shortly arrived back in the Guangzhou railway station of two weeks ago much to my relief, there was no time to waste in getting a ticket. Its dusty, crowded, people swarming everwhere. I really want to get out of Guangzhou tonight; the thought of having to stay here feels me with dread. Fighting my away to the front of a roaring mob I score a second class hard sleeper ticket to Guangzhou for eight o clock in the evening – bang! And leave my heavy bag in the station storage.

Taking a walk about the nearby city districts I notice many Westerns hanging about in hotels, coffee shops and restuarants, unusual for a Chinese city. They are mostly business people attending various trade shows and textile import exhibitions. The whole place reeks of exploitation and Im grateful to have a ticket out of this place.

As nightfalls Im tucked into the top level of a triple bunk, six bed compartment. Its distinctly less comfortable than the four bed soft sleepers. My head is about half a foot from the roof making sitting upright impossible, there is no door either instead the compartment opens out to the carriage which contains perhaps ten such rooms.

Laughing quietly to myself, I lie hidden above the unsuspecting people passing up and down the train corridor below. Adios Guangzhou ha ha made it, here I am again alone amongst the crowd, the fearless adventurer, the indominitable explorer and so the journey continues. With the moleskine cover pressed against the cabin roof, I write some words in my journal. “We are changing at an ever increasing pace. So glad that I got to see the world as it is first hand before this all vanished. For sure I believe that more change will happened in the twenty first century than all previous centuries combined. Id be surprised if thirty years from now cities, money or even countries still exist and much less the Guangzhous of this world.”

Blending in there seamlessly my friend

This is getting ridiculous

Any solitary male traveling alone in Asia sooner or later, most probably sooner is going to encounter that hard truth about the asian south east, that sex is a commodity as openly sold as fake rolexes and fresh young coconuts, there is simply no avoiding it.

Over time I’d built up a repertoire of crude rules of thumb, rough and possibly offensive stereotypes forged in the fleshy pits beneath the fifteenth parallel which had managed to keep me out of trouble, by the time I’d reached Macau however I was still but a babe in the woods.

The first was tattoos, nice asian girls dont have tattoos, having one implies that you are either a) gang affiliated b) a hooker c) a ladyboy d) all the of the above.

The second was smoking, nice asian girls dont smoke, or drink for that matter. In Singapore following an especially odd series of event I had become friends with a local woman. Walking through the central bar district she suddenly doubled over in a paroxysm of laughter, I thought her appendix had suddenly burst. When I asked her what she was laughing at, she pointed over at a group of people, expats and local girls sitting around a table, I couldn’t see anything especially unusual about the scene, let alone something side splitting hilarious. “Whats so funny?” I asked, “ha ha ha the girl” she replied, “what about her?” “ha ha ha shes smoking ha ha ha…..” Earlier we’d encountered a troop of ladyboys in a shop, “those were men werent they?” I asked “yes” she replied matter of factly suggesting it had barely impacted on her senses.

The third was the fact that there were in a bar at all. I’d lost count of the number of times I’d been sitting alone in a bar having a quiet drink when a local girl would teeter over wobbling on her high heels and ask if she may join you for a while. At first I didnt know what to say, “no, I think you’re a prostitute” seemed blunt and unfairly presumptive, what if she’s just friendly or want to improve her english? I thought at first. Several months later “no, I think you’re a prostitute” seemed just fine.

In fact now that I come to think of it Im almost tempted to add a fourth axiom: shes actually talking to you.

Well back to the story, I’d first noticed Candy at the traffic lights on the way to the casino area. A tall, statuesque impossibly lean figure, she was talking to a creepy looking bald white guy who bore an uncanny resemblance to the pervert psychiatrist from Requiem for a Dream. She handed him what looked like a note, he nodded his head and walked off, I noticed a curling dragon tattoo peeping out from under the arm of her ultra tight clinging tshirt. “Uh oh” I thought to myself giving her a wide berth.

I spent some time wandering around the casinos observing the madness at the poker tables and cursing that I couldn’t afford to risk losing anymore money. On my way back I approached the traffic light area with caution peering over a small wall, no sign of her I sighed with relief. Suddenly I hear a throaty “hellooooooo” right behind me! “Christ Almighty!” I almost leapt out onto the road in shock. “how are you, where are you from?”, “Im ….. Im fine” I stammered, “where are you from?” “Im from the Philippines” she replied. “Ok, very nice” I replied beginning to walk away. “Would you like a massage?” she asked, “no, Im ok thanks” This is where the start of this post finds me.

She followed me for what was probably five minutes but seemed like half an hour. As she followed me up the street pleading begging and mouthing obscene offerings I realized that I couldnt go back to the hotel, she’d probably try to follow me inside, I had to get rid of her. Batting away her hands as she tried to grab at me, she pulled back, just as I thought she’d finally given up she made a second lunge, grabbing her by the wrists to stop her groping me I suddenly noticed how strong they were, wiry muscular without a trace of fat or fleshiness. “Christ, you’re a bloke!” I shouted. “No. no Im not” she replied pouting and feigning woundedness, “look, Im only doing this for a year to get some money” she replied, picking up a discarded bank receipt off the ground, “Candy” she wrote on it followed by a phone number, “if you get lonely” she said handing it to me and finally walking away. I waited till she was around the corner and out of sight before chucking it in the bin wondering if that bald guy was in for a big and unwelcome surprise tonight. On my way back to my hotel, the squared areas of Macau, beautiful and picturesque by day took on a seedy sodium lit horror by night, crawling with carnal offerings . “Looking for a girlfriend, honey?” one lady sitting on a fountain asks as I hurry by. I’ve had enough of Macau, tomorrow I’d collect my passport with my new Chinese visa and make my way back into China and onwards to the famous Yangshou.

-4th Nov

The Street of Happiness

I’d broken ever rule in the book exhausted, emotional, semi intoxicated, running hot with scared money, I’d even violated the cardinal rule of the poker player, never play outside your bankroll. Of course that was easy, I had no bankroll. Surrounded by Chinese millionaires having money fights with each other, the amount on the table in front of me alone could probably have bought a small allotment of land on a palm oil plantation in Indonesia.

My nemesis, the iceman, sat impassive at the opposite end of the table, sitting upright facing straight ahead, if he was looking at me through his round tinted spectacles I couldn’t tell. A stone faced older man with a narrow pointed bread sipping a green tea, he cut a stark contrast with the other younger men at the table whooping it up around me all night. I silently cursed myself for having got involved with the only good player at the table, I could have just sat there with a vacuum cleaner hoovering up all the other fools chips all night, now I was about to bet the farm and kill the golden goose.

I glanced down at the cards again, yep still the 4 and 6 of clubs, what the hell was I thinking. I ran the hand through my head again. One call in mid position, loudmouth guy doesnt know what hes doing, its folded around to me, Ive been sitting waiting for good cards too long, I bet $80, we are deep stacked but I think this is hardly good play. Iceman calls $60 from the big blind.

The flop falls, 8h 6s 4h

A dream flop. Iceman checks, I bet something like $150, he could have put me on anything, it would have looked like a standard continuation bet, no way he could have known that I’d hit the flop so hard given how tight I’d been playing. The board could get scary on the turn, no point messing about. Time to reel him in.

He raises me $350, what? What the hell is this? A set? Two pair? A draw, nothing at all? Ive no idea. If I raise, he’ll probably fold and I get a middling pot, he reraises then what they guy can get tricky, I decide to call, its not worth risking getting too much in just yet.

The turn comes the king of clubs. He checks, I bet something like 3/4 the pot. My hand is vulnerable, I cant let him in cheap, but what if he check raises me? Then its all going in. if he doesnt then I perhaps I can still fold if things get crazy on the river.

The river is the 3 of hearts, he checks, I decide the correct action is clearly to check. But stupidly I get greedy and decided to to extract a little bit of value out of his probably weak hand, I bet one third of the pot. In one fluid motion he reaches back and shoves his entire mountain of chips over the line, I get that funny feeling like when you are rocking back on your chair and then all of a sudden you’re back too far, you know you’ve passed the point of no return, but you dont just accept your fate and tumble dignified towards the earth, no instead you hang there in mid air, pull a funny face and linger just long enough to realize what a fool you are.

I run his range through my head, he may have me beaten, but Im calling, everything about this hand had gone wrong, why stop now. He flips over a pair of tens, bang! and the moneys mine the whole place is in uproar when I flip the two pair.

Still jittery in an adrenaline come down, counting my monster stack quadrupling the table buy in, I realized that in the two years which had passed since Id last played poker Id clearly forgotten how to play the game. You’re not supposed to be happy about winning a hand, you either made the right decision or you did not, emotion shouldnt enter into it win or lose.

A few minutes later some guy makes a royal flush and bizarrely gets a round of applause. Id seen it happen once before at a student tournament, some guy was smugly nodding his head as if to say “Thank you, yes, yes I am the man” with half the room clapping and the other half looking on bemused.

Several hands later I looked down to see the king of spades and the suicidal king of hearts staring up at me. When I first started playing poker in the free rolls in the Fitzwilliam cards clubs many years gone by, flipping over a pair of kings would inevitable cause some preternaturally wizened guy in the corner to mumble “cowboys!” apparently to himself and shake his head a little as if imply he was thinking about all the incredible memories he had with this particular hand. he also probably thought this made him look like a seasoned pro and most probably would also called threes “treys” and pairs of twos “ducks” if he were to be given the opportunity. Of course if you’d played more than several hundred thousand hands of poker the thought of any particular hand or even scenario eliciting any emotional response at all is almost laughable.

“Cowboys” I mumble to myself

Bet I say. throwing some chips in the middle. The action folds around to a guy dressed in a white suit he stole off Jet Lee’s character in Lethal Weapon 4. He jerks forward and shoots me a wild eyed expression, raise he says almost vomiting the chips over the line, reraise I shout back at him, pushing several stacks in, all in he roars the man pushing several thousand dollars into the middle, christ almight! is this the hardest fold in poker, KK preflop? Id never done it before but this was sick, the guy was was out of his seat like his hemorrhoids were going nuclear, leaning across the table at me with his cards in his hand, salivating onto the felt below, dying to flip them. Call and be damned! I say, flipping my kings. All hell breaks loose when sure enough he flips the aces, Ace Ace king king reverberates around the room, the men at the other tables stand up and huddle around, no help on the flop, another ace on the turn and Im drawing dead. Its game over boys and Im all out of quarters. The hooting and hollering continues for what seems like five minutes, white suit basks in the favor that the gods have dealt him shouting what I imagine to be Muhammad Aliesques “I am the greatest”s in Chinese. Eventually he settles down and offers be a muted apology.

I try to remain philosophical on the walk of shame out the door, at least I got to play poker in a casino in Macau, that was pretty cool. As I walk towards the door I notice a woman in a long white coat with silky black hair walking briskly in high heels on a trajectory to just intersect me as I reach the door. Reaching the exit without stopping she looks sideways at me and smiles “Hi” “Hi” I reply, “where you from?” “Ireland, you?” “Malaysia ….. you want a massage? I have a place down by the docks” “Err you’re alright there but thanks” “Ok, you sure? I give good massage, I massage you, I massage you gooooood??” “Nah, your grand” As she walked away briskly it suddenly hit me, wait a minute, that was a man!

So its time to bid farewell to the manic mother and daugher duo from Shanghai, the Israeli man Id helped the day before gave me a warm embrace, adios to Magic Tom. Shaking Dillsworths hand I wish him well, who knows …. but for the grace of god ……. Even Barry Chuckle comes around to help me locate a weighing scales for a parcel containing all my warm clothes which I was to send home. I wouldnt be needing them from this point on. It was a vaguely emotional, almost sad moment as I bade farewell I felt like Hermann walking out on the Munsters, sure you can go but deep down you know that you’ll never fit in anywhere else, this is where you really belong, here amongst this menagerie of freaks. Farewell ye lost pilgrims of the road, may life fill your sails with fair wind, support your hulls in inviting seas, guide your hands upon the tiller toward pleasant places and bring you home, to a safe and loving harbor for you were the only family I’d ever known, apart from my actual familiy that is.

After an alarmingly large amount of time spent wandering about an obstructing shopping center with my compass in hand, I eventually find the ferry terminal to Macau. Im intrigued as to what Im going to find there, a Portuguese version of Hong Kong? Some sort of Chinese version of Brazil, I cant imagine how this could possibly work.

The ferry is a high speed comfortable catamaran with a sealed air conditioned cabin capable of holding maybe one hundred people. Its largely deserted which seems somehow appropriate to me, Macau was a place I knew almost nothing about nor had I never met anybody who’d ever been there, it just felt right that nobody seemed to be going to this strange and esoteric place. But of course thats only how it seems to a westerner its a very popular destination for Hong Kong residents and Chinese, not mention as an obvious visa run.

Settling in to the comfortable seat and catching up on some note taking in my journal, my tranquility was soon broken by a filthy looking white man in his sixties pushing a much younger woman into the row of seats in front of me. My senses, now keened to subtleties of Asian ethnicity, figured her for Filipino. Unable to drag my eyes away, I sat transfixed by the grotesque scene unfolding in front of me. The bestial satyr stroked, pawed and groped at the poor woman who sat rigid and unflinching as though she were some prize winning collie.

An unfeasibly thick mat of dirty red hair obliquely poised at a peculiar angle to his crown, joining the nape of his neck it ended incongruously in an improbable step falling away like a cliff face to a speckled pinkish flesh below. The entire matted carapace seemed to cling, in bold defiance of gravity, miraculously glued fast by a substance which appeared to be a natural secretion. This semi gelationous ooze extended down his face staining the foul smelling tee-shirt clinging forlornly over small deflated breasts and a rotund pot belly.

The woman responded meekly to the man constant cajoling. Eventually she managed to fend him off saying in her lilting Filipino staccato “I am tired now, I will need energy for the rest of the holiday” This seemed a satisfactory reply for the Bile monster, taking it as some sort of double-entendre “oh! right you are … right….. you …… are !” he chortled salivating with anticipation and poking her with in the arm with an exaggerated deliberation which I presume he mistook for a playful and balanced blend of both affection and lechery. Turning her face towards the window and out to the sea, a partially concealed look of abject horror was plainly visible in the reflecting glass. Horror and resignation.

I turned, looking out the window to distract from the joy sapping show in front of me, wondered what Id see when I finally reached the honey and fleshpots of the SouthEast in a month. Pulling out of the harbor, the enormous brooding arc of the Chinese mainland came into view hemming in the tiny bubble of Hong Kong against the South China Sea. It reminded me of how I had read when Deng Xiaoping was negotiating with Thatcher over a particularity illfavoured aspect of the 1998 handover he had simply bluntely stated that he could have tanks on the streets within the hour quashing any arguement, indeed and what could anybody do about it? I take the time to scribble some notes in my journal, soon even China fades away as we travel out into the blue.

After some time the boat arrives in Macau harbour, I cant figure out which harbour or when I am on the map but choose to ignore these tachnicallities, afterall how big can Macau be? After 45 mintutes spend in fruitless wander, I eventually flag down a taxi and tell him to take me to the center of the city, to the Rue de Felicidade (the street of happiness; the formor redlight district). Lonely Planet tells me of cheap accomodation to be had. As viewed from a taxi, Macau is quite a strange place, as though a Chinese city had sprung up on the ruined template of a South American Portugeuse colonial town. From a distance twisting cobbled streets of shuttered windows and whitewashed walls nestled beneath the shadows of crumbling cathedrals and imposing balustraded hill forts. On closer inspection, the shops are selling chickens feet, insense and little red lanterns, its jarring to the senses.

Eventually I find the street, a high sloping street its distinctive white painted building fronts with red trimmed windows were used in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In the later part of the twentieth center it found its former use, as the red light district of Macau defunct, or more approrpriatly usurped, usurped by the entire of Macau itself that is. As I was soon to discover, by sunset the whole place is absolutely crawling. The smell of money and desperation draws them here in droves from the entire of the asian continent.

Up a narrow set of creeking stairs, I found a mute man with a laminated set of multilingual instructions on paying for accommodation, showers laundry etc. The hotel was spartan to say the least, apparently it had been used in several films due to its horrible oppressive clustrophobic feel, why a hotel should market itself as such was not immediatly obvious to me I must admit. The place was essentially one large flourencent lit room, partitioned into bedrooms by a thin green wooden decorated by a disturbingly randomly holed paneling which didnt reach the roof. Random disembodied chattering muffled by the constant whirr of fans resonated about the hotel late into the night. For obvious reasons this hotel was apparently popular amongst exhibitionists, voyeurs and other lost souls.

Time to check out what Macau is most famous for, the casinos and for what was to be an eventful night.

With a growing sense of vanity I began to think of myself as a hardcore veteran of the road. A mysterious traveler for afar on some hidden quest for purpose unknown. There has a always been a certain romanticism attached to the loner, the belief that there are truly great people existing in the shadows of society, withdrawn and refusing to participate, keeping their own council and their thoughts to themselves. The lone wolf who hunts without the pack, the quasi-mythical Man with No Name riding across a barren empty landscape.

But then I began to think of the class of misfits with which I now an associated member and the reality began to sharply diverge from fantasy. Its rarely mentioned how the lone wolf has often been driven from the pack and spends most of his time savaging amongst partially digested leftovers and how the solitary rider, upon closer approach, is actually a deformed vengeful leper on a donkey. Like the Binrooter man I had noticed cycling about a university where I had once worked seemingly combining both these mythologies in the one person, and who knows a possible future incarnation.

Where had ManHat gone? He’d just vanished, suddenly he wasn’t there anymore, all that remained of him was his black hat. Instead he’d been replaced by an Israeli man in his fifties who worked himself up into an apoplectic rage when he couldnt get his newly purchased laptop to function has he desired. A string of curses and screams prompted me to clamber out of my bed and come to his aid if for no other reason that to shut him up.

I asked Dillsworth where ManHat had gone. He said something about he’d on an excursion into mainland China to visit a girlfriend and conduct some deals presumably for tens of billions of dollars. This explanation was mockingly interspersed with “Yeaaaaaas”, “supamans” and “my brothers” in Dillsworths recounting as he mimicked ManHats peculiar verbal mannerisms.

The previous day Id decided to try delve a little deeper into ManHats strange existence. I asked what his family made of him dealing in such vast quantities of money, predictably they didnt appear to know anything about it, since according to him they wouldn’t understand. His wife had long since divorced him but his daughter had stuck with him. He was regarded as the black sheep of the family by his brothers who were all doctors and lawyers, again this hardly came as a surprise.

I wondered could you just lose it some day, snap and walk away leaving everything behind. Having lost my phone barely a fortnight into my journey, it was almost as though the final umbilical connection to the familiar had been severed and in its place stood another world of alien languages, utter solitude and the rhythmic hymn of the endless track, the lonesome song of the long distance traveler. What sort of people do you meet on the road? An ever morphing chameleon adapt or die, both an introvert to survive the loneliness of the empty spaces, the time spent lying on your back staring at a blurry world lights passing in the night, the empty hotel rooms, the deserted beaches and an extrovert to move with ease through the bawling ever shifting human landscape. It is the capacity to sway with with your surrounding that is the overriding trait amongst those who travel, an unlikely mix of diplomacy, compromise and mean unyielding streak of pure stubbornness.

Big Tom had left for the airport enroute to Australia, leaving behind a bag of muesli, a spoon, half a loaf of bread and several broken hearts, inquiries from many a young lady as to his whereabouts soon followed in his wake. He told me to drop him a line when/if I made it over but of course we both knew that would probably never happen.

I took the subway to Wan Chai in the evening just as the light began to fail. Curious feeling in the dying light of a world in transition, I had been to Wan Chai earlier that week to drop my passport into an agency which would sort out a Vietnamese visa for me and hadnt noticed anything particularly unusual about the place. As twilight approached and suited business people hurried home pouring from all sides into the subway station, the darker side of Hong Kong began creeping into life.

To my annoyance the agency told me that although they had sourced me a visa my passport was still at the embassy, which was closing in half an hour, but not to worry the traffic was heavy but they would dispatch a rider on a motorbike to fetch it for me. “Fine” I said, barely concealing my annoyance, “I’ll go for a walk and return later” I told the agent.

Strolling around the block I noticed a side to Hong Kong usually hidden in the day light hours beginning to wake into life. Bars bathed in pink neon light with names like Paradise Beach Bar and Miami Love Club. Outside lined up stood groups of immaculately groomed Thai, Filipino, Lao, Vietnamese, Burmese girls chatting away.

As I walked down the street the wind picked up suddenly into a howling gale, outside one neon lite bar an array of Fillipeno girls dressed in tiny matching purple cocktail dress shrieked as the wind whipped up a fury with their long silky black hair. The wind died as suddenly as it had come and the girls resumed their chatter amongst themselves, their Hispanic toned language sounding curiously like the babbling of a stream. I reflected on how Id been conditioned to think of prostitutes as inherently bad people – dehumanized like bank robbers or drug addicts. I thought it strange to see them there with their painted pixie faces huddling together to hide from a gust of wind, it made me sad.

As I continued walking I began to notice signs outside some of the bars like Exotic Boom Boom Room welcomes the crew of the USS Nimwitz or whatever ship was pulling into port. The thought of those tiny girls about to get absolutely pummeled made me feel ill.

Rounding a corner I noticed one bar without any girls outside had a sign selling two beers for the price of one, as I paused to read it an enormous fat woman with oddly blond dyed hair previously concealed in the doorway pounced on me grabbing hold of my arm. “Two beers – you like?” “I dont know” I replied as I tried in vain to pull myself free, I still wasnt sure about this place. “I am the mamasan of this place, I say you get two beers – you get two beers!”. “Ok, I said looking at my watch, I still had twenty minutes”

Inside the bearded red face of Guan Yu greets me, poised like a striking snake perched atop a fruit and burning joss stick bedecked shrine. Guan Yu the furious and uncompromising legendary warlord of ancient Chinese lore – and patron saint of the triads. I had no doubt as to on whos pleasure I was here.

Seated at the bar, I looked about, soft velvet furnishing, low lighting, but no girls. The only other patron was bloated white man in his fifties sitting silently at the other side of the bar. He looked like my old P.E teacher who I had hated, salt and pepper greying hair, blocky head with a dead soulless stare caged behind pervert jam-jar glasses perched on a beaky nose. Curiously every middle-aged man Id meet traveling alone in South East Asia looked like a P.E teacher.

Suddenly I became acutely aware of a presence on my right hand side. A slender Filipino girl in a pink cocktail dress, which looked like it had been painted onto her body, hoisted herself up and the bar stool next to me. “Helloooo, what is your name?” she asked in flawless Spanish tinted English

I thought rapidly, err Paul I said, in honor of Paul Theroux who seemed to find himself in these situations with alarming regularity. “Do you haaave a girlfriend here in Hong Kong?” “Ahhhhh well actually…….” “Maybe hI cen beee your girlfriend Paul?” “Maybe hI cen beee your girlfriend for toniiiight Paul?” she purred in my ear. “Just……… havin my beer!” I said nervously grabbing my beer for emphasis as if it completely explained away the whole situation. “What age are you?” I asked her “Me, I am twenty three” she replied in lilting spanish intonations. “Do you have family back home?” “Yes I work here to send money to them” I caught a glimpse of us sitting at the bar in the mirror, the situation looked absurd, I was facing dead straight ahead into the bar sitting bolt upright, between myself and the girl who was a leaning directly towards me, we formed an almost perfect right angle. An awkward silence descends for a minute during which I was horsing the beer into me like we’re in Dublin, Im doing my best Shane McGowan impression, and its one minute to Good Friday. She places her head on my shoulder “Would youuuuu likeeee to goooo with meeee to our hotel?” “Err why?” I asked “There weeee can make love” “Ahhh Im afraid I dont have any money” “There is a bank around the corner” “Ok” I replied knocking back the rest of the beer and hoping that this would satisfy the mamasan blocking my exit. “Just going to the bank” I shouted rapidly turning sideways to squeeze between the mamasan and the door. Glancing backwards down the street, I skipped around the corner and back to the travel agency, thankfully my passport had now arrived.

Opening it and discovering the new visa gave me a momentary fleeting sense of triumph, the same sense of fading joy like when your team wins and amidst the cheering and jubilation it suddenly hits you, who cares – your getting old and your going to die – standing there with your stupid flag in your fool hand and other people have to get pounded by a boatload of sailors to make money.

Hong Kong consistently had the ability to surprise me, very different was it from puritanical zeal of mainland China. Even as I walked back to Nathan Road I was shocked to see Falun Dafa members who would have faced “reeducation” just an hours journey away freely handing leaflets on the street.

: : : : : : : : :

“I had sex last night in a cupboard” pulling the sheet off my face I notice Big Tom standing there, his array of cuts and bruises seem to verify his story. “The security man wouldnt let me into the building”

“The walk back was absolutely horrible, I was marooned out on some peninsula where nobody speaks English and couldnt find neither taxi or a drink of water. We were so hammered last night weren’t we? It was ridiculous, remember when I said I was going to deck that guy? That’s when I realized I was completely gone. So how was the night in the loony bin, eh Tommy boy? Everybody sit around masturbating in their own feces?”

“Actually yes, thats surprisingly accurate, thats pretty much what we did alright” replied Magic Tom. I look at the rusted watch Id bought in Beijing, miraculously still ticking, and indeed it would keep working for the duration of my travels, until the strap fell off in New Zealand and it finally met an undeserving ignominious ending in a New York dumpster eight months later when I accidentally sat on it, crushing its face. It was almost noon and everybody was still lazing in bed, something about the oppressiveness of the room kept its occupants motionless usually till late morning as if acknowledging that another day had passed and another begun was simply too difficult to accept.

I decided to be cheeky and call in one of those idle offers people make in hostels which they never had intention of honoring. I emailed Stef an American expat Id met in Chengdu who promised to show me around Hong Kong whenever I arrived. Shes having a party some friends and invites me along, I bring ladykiller Big Tom along with me, Im sure they wont mind.

I do my usual wandering during the day, through a street filled with curios and eventually find a strange marketplace where I eat a whole variety of unidentifiable creatures. Eventually returning in the evening to find Tom. The subway is utterly packed with revellers, it seems as if the whole of Hong Kong is out in force and everybody is dressed up, except for myself and Tom that is. Halloween seems to be a massive thing here, the amount of work put in to some of the costumes is almost frightening. Arriving a Stefs apartment, which is located very close to the main bar area, we climb up onto the rooftop and enjoy the view of the masses swarming below. The police have closed of large sections of the streets, implementing a oneway pedestrian system with large side streets effectively serving as feeder queues to the central bar area. People are queuing all the way up the road to get into the main street in the center.

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After a few drinks on the rooftop we descend amongst the unwashed horde below. An Indian friend of Stefs owns a bar nearby, he gets us through the police cordon and brings us up a stairs into a small ultra cool night club. After five minutes I notice that Tom seems to be in a heated discussion with the Chinese bar manager, wandering over I discover that the manager is demanding the $200 entrance fee, “no, no its all fine” I tell him, “we’re friends of the owner” I said pointing over at the Indian guy talking to the two girls in the corner. He disappears, but is back five minutes later and again insisting on payment from Tom and one of the other girls we brought with us. “What the hell is wrong with this guy?” Tom asks, “didnt we just explain”. We walk over the Indian guy asking what exactly is going on, “its all fine” he says “The guy keeps asking us for money” I explain “its all fine” he says again batting us away, telling the girls that the bar manager is just being a bit over enthusiastic. Tom taps me on the shoulder telling me that earlier on he overheard the owner ordering the manager to get the money off “those guys”. “Id rather be out on the street, amongst the crowd” says Tom “Me too, lets get out of here”

We leave bringing some of the girls with us and agree to meet Stef later on. The entire of central Hong Kong seems to be on party mode, everybody seems to have opted for Club 7-11 which afforded the best opportunity to wander about admiring the interesting costumes on display.

As the night winds down, we end up in a night club where people are permitted, in fact encouraged to dance on the bar top. A girl with a man sit down beside me. I glance over, the man vanishes into the crowd leaving the girl sitting alone next to me. She leans over to initiate conversation. At first its the usual polite introduction but quickly her sorrowful eyes and the tell tale submissiveness of her smile gave her away. When she realises that it isnt going to happen she vanishes quickly, time is money in her profession I guess. Tom had vanished with two girls by the time i was looking for a taxi.

Back at the Mansions and into bed, I was awoken shortly by Big Tom, who woke me up to apologise for waking me up it would seem. He had returned to the club after the two girls he left with had started laughing at him in the taxi, he searched for me and found the Mongolian witch I was talking to wearing the witches hat Id found earlier and learned that Id already left.

So the day ends much as it had begun. I am awoken again for a second time by Dillsworths’ disturbed dreams, murmured echoes of a lost life. The sad eyes of the prostitute in my mind, I wondered what tragedies lay behind these people.

: : : : : : : : :

I awake, the first site of the new day which greets me is Dillsworths ass peering outwards from his bedding like a great smiling moon rising silent oer some tranquil pastoral nightscape. He dozes in an alcohol induced coma and all is right in the world.

But wait, something is amiss, there is a new presence in the room. Enter Tom, a big handsome rugby playing lad from Blackpool, and semiprofessional blagger. As the room begins to emerge from their beds, with the obvious exception of Dillsworth, myself, Magic Tom and ManHat engage him the in usual hostel run-of-the-mill intro conversation. As it turns out he has just arrived from India where he did a two month stint in a charity dedicate towards combating child labour, the experience had left a dramatic impression on Big Tom, “Yeah, I started my work with the charity all like yeah oooohhhhh child labour is bad, child labour is terrible, but after working there for two months I kind of came ’round to the idea, to be honest. Its not really such a bad thing at all, I mean what else would they be doin’, not like they’d be goin to school, what do they do in the west other than sitin round playing on their playstations” he explained whilst eating museli out of a plastic bag filled with milk. He was only in Hong Kong for a few nights, his purpose being to investigate an inflatable boat factory across the border in Schenzen, ostensibly as part of his work for the child labour charity , when I asked him how he hope to achieve this without being in  possession of  a Chinese visa his response more or less centered around him successfully talking his way through immigration into China. As it later transpired his real motive was that he had convinced the factory’s owners that he was some big name buyer from England and required a “sample” boat which would be “tested” by himself and his mates on the Colorado river before they would place a large order for many such boats. I was impressed, he’d even brought along a cheap suit to complete the look. His interest in the child labour policies of the factory in question didnt stretch beyond the little fingers working on his stitching. After he’d finished eating his muesli he told me he was off to use the gym and the pool, when I asked for the location of such facilities in Chungking Mansions he explained that he was just going to walk in to the Holiday Inn next door, and who knows, perhaps avail of their buffet breakfast too while he was at it.

I spend the day exploring the more residential areas of Hong Kong island and return in the evening time to find Toms Magic and Big have hatched a new plan. Big Tom has abandoned his plan to visit the factory and instead we are going to Disneyland, not before finishing off a large bottle of vodka I’d been carry since the Transiberian and Magic Toms disgusting bijou rice wine. Our plan hinges crucially on Big Tom seducing the girl at the ticket desk thus allowing us to gain entry for free. As far as I see it, there is nothing which can go wrong with this plan.

Two hours later we are back in the Lan Kwai Fong bar district on Hong Kong island and down a return fare on the subway. Never fear explains Big Tom, there is always plan B, Club 7-11, this was involves buying beer in the 7-11 shops and smuggling them into bars.  This proved to be largely unnecessary since the streets are packed a preHalloween party with people congregating in large groups outside the bars. Big Tom is in flying form bouncing from one group of people to the next chatting up every girl with a heartbeating in her chest. He is especially fond of the Chinese girls who mysteriously manage to strut about wearing practically nothing yet still retaining their alluring yet innocent aloofness.

“Is it just me or are we staying in a madhouse?” asks Big Tom. “Glad you asked, I was beginning to wonder if it was just me” I replied. “What about that Dillsworth character? I said asking Magic Tom, “he’s like some sort of loser straight out of a Graham Greene novel”

“Im not really sure who he is, I think he is looking for English teaching work in China, all I know is that I dont like him” he replied.  He went on to detail how himself and Dillsworth went out one night for a friendly drink. At first Dillsworth seemed alright, until he drew Toms ire by referring to the Indian hawkers in vicinity using a common racial slur for Africans. “Do you think of them like that?” he asked Tom. Noticing that Tom didnt share his bigoted opinions Dillsworth quickly backpedaled furiously “good, good, me neither……” he said wiping his brow and tugging at his collar. The night quickly degenerated from that point and ended with Dillsworth swigging back a bottle of vodka outside a 7-11 and roaring Chumbawumba songs and the same racial slur into the faces of various terrified passersby.

Big Tom told us about his encounter with Barry Chuckle and a man wearing what appeared to be tea cosy on his head in the kitchen earlier that day. He learned that Chuckle had been staying in the hostel at least 2 years. They were later joined by a very elderly German man who complained incessantly about the Israelis stealing his food from the fridge.

Eventually, after possibly breaking up one couple and almost ending up in a fight, Big Tom sets himself to work on two dim American girls wearing some colouredy feathery get up. A group of filty lecherous Irish dirtbags sniffing about them first have to be dispatched. As it transpires, rather disgustingly, the group consists of a father and son duo out on the pull and their two friends. The son grotesquely paws the bluefeathered girl as he talks to her whilst the father looks on with approbation. The whole scene reminded me of a hideous rumour a friend once told me about some guy who’d allegedly  “double teamed some bird in Bangkok with his dad”.

It quickly became clear that the girls wanted rid of these pests. Repeatably rebuffing their irritating attempts at finding a commonality with their fellow countryman, a sign of the poorly traveled if there ever were one,   The night ended with Big Tom vanishing into a taxi with both girls and myself and Magic returning for whence we came; the loony bin.

I get up and walk into the kitchen, a topless man with a dodgy looking mustache, sort of like that sported by Barry Chuckle of the Chuckle Brothers fame, is frying an egg in a saucepan. Arching his neck around without turning from the cooker he looks at me, his gaze lingers uncomfortably for several seconds before he turns back to his egg. “Im not a lord” he tells me as I search for a toaster for the rather forlorn looking piece of bread in my hands. “Right you are” I reply. “My fathers a lord but Im not” “Sure thing there” I answer. “But they got my girlfriend” he adds flipping the egg in the pan, “who has?” I ask, – “the yakusa” he says adding some seasoning, “reeeeeeeally ……..”, “yes” he replies, turning to face me he pauses momentarily and looks me directly in the eyes, “they’re raping her……” I freeze not sure how to answer “she’s in prison, but its ok Im working on the case to get her out” Barry Chuckle continues. “Well best of luck with that one” I reply retreating backwards out the door with my limp and untoasted slice of bread in my hand.

“wahhhhh huh wahhhh huh wahhhhh huh pilubber lubber lubber” reverberates from the shower and throughout the echoing corridors as I leave the hostel bound for the remote outlying island of Lantau. With some minor difficulty I eventually find the correct ferry and am soon sailing out of Hong Kong harbour. Lantau, quite a large island with a proper road network and several large towns is soon in sight, the ferry dock is on the far side of the island so Hong Kong is no longer visibile, instead the forbidding swell of the South China Sea stretches outwards before me, what adventures lie ahead of me beyond that horizon I wonder.

Everybody disperses almost instantly at the ferry terminus leaving me alone in a gather dust storm with a strong sense of deja vu. Eventually I managed to decipher the bus time table and soon am on a local bus headed towards one of the large beaches. The bus makes several stops picking up school children in stuffy English public school type uniforms, many western children too, I get the impression that the island possibly houses many of the well to do families of ex-pat working in Hong Kong.

The beach was almost entirely deserted. “The coast around Lantau Island is patrolled by from everything deadly sea snakes to great white sharks” or so my Lonely Planet informs me. Hmmmm I probably should have read that before swimming outside the shark nets.

On the return voyage I mistakenly board the slow boat back which turns out to be a blessing in disguise as I am once again awe struck by the sight of the enormous ocean cargo ships lined up in the shipping lanes. The little ferry weaves its way in and out of the paths of these behemoths as the sun sets over the sea turning it a shimmering bloody red mirage. I curse my stupidity at witnessing one of the most spectacular sites in my travels that I had forgotten to bring my camera. Night has fallen as we pull into Hong Kong harbour and the skyscrapers lights come into view.

I creep back to the hostel hoping not to disturb the looneys sleeping in the rafters. In the lift I meet a guy who Id assumed was Chinese, turns out he was from San Francisco, he ridicules my enthusiasm for the beaches of Hong Kong, perhaps being from California its understandable. I meet him later on down in the Irish Bar nextdoor, he turns out to be a real live wire, hitting on all the waitresses, roaring with his head thrown back and hooting at his own jokes whilst slamming the bar with his fists. He began telling me about motorbiking alone across the dodgiest parts of central america occasionally interrupting his narrative to show me photos of him in different places with his manic expressive face giving two thumbs up surrounded by random guys with machine guns. “All my friends think Im crazy” he tells me, “but screw ‘em, you know what wrong with them” he adds, I realise that now he was taking me under his wing, that he had decided that myself and him were perhaps cut from the same cloth, “you know whats wrong with them, its not that they dont have the balls to do what we do, they dont but thats another issue. Whats wrong with them is that they dont believe in the fundamental decency of humanity thats why they’re afraid to travel. These guys with the machine guns they’re just some regular guys like you or I. Call them on their macho bullshit, guilt trip them, I show them some bingo cards when they ask for my ID” he says, roaring with an ear splitting laughter and slamming the bar with both fists.

Some serious real estate

It was almost impossible to believe a place like the Peak could exist, its almost as if an enormous volcano suddenly sprouted out of Central Park in New York, below through the smoggy haze the skyscrapers of Hong Kong islands lay stretched out before me like childrens toys, behind me wild green wilderness. I continued on my hike up to the peak of the peak and to my surprise found myself almost entirely alone for the first time since Tiger Leaping Gorge. I sat for several hours upon the promontory watching the sun setting on the South China sea, churning the waters a pale bloody red, transfixed by the colossal cargo ships waiting in the bay or drifting silently by, following an unknown course by hidden instructions. Perhaps it was the culmination of the madness of the past few weeks but it felt almost like a spiritual epiphany, as though from far up high I was peering deep into the gears of the world. The enormous cargo ship docking were the interface between the world in which we live and the untamed wildness of the sea. All the complexity of modern life, the food we eat, our cars, oil, the essential of daily life stemming from this single link, sever it and the entire edifice crumbles away.A wedding couple arrives for photographs, awkwardly I always seem to be in their photos no matter where I stand, were this mainland China I would have presumed it deliberate.

The funny thing about travel is the vaguely unpleasant notion lucking in the back of your mind that somehow somewhere you’ve missed the boat, its one which is difficult to dispelled and I was getting it quite bad as darkness began to fall. When was the last cable car down I wondered, I didnt fancy the prospect of walking down the main road in total darkness. Realizing the was nobody else around I decided to quickly make my way back to the visitor centre which was further away than Id remembered, upon arrival and realizing I was safe I decided to get dinner in the Bubba Gump Shrip company.

The ships in the harbour

They had some loser dressed as Forrest Gump on the door with trousers about 3/4 of an inch too short and a idiotic stepped crew cut which I presumed cruely he’d be forced to wear when not on duty. I imagined him attempted to chat to a young lady in a bar and desperately trying to explain it away. “Im Forrest Gump, people call me Forrest Gump” he mimiced frantically waving his hands aping Tom Hanks in the film. I recoiled from in abject horror at this hideous spectacle, this broken down man, this grotesque degradation of the human being. As families, cheering and waving, posed for photographs nobody noticed my haunted wraith-like figure ducking around behind the pillars and frantically dashing into the restaurant. I couldnt even stomach to exchange pleasantries with this hollowed out creature. Once inside I numbed my mind with a nice Malibu coconut cocktail and gazed out at the Hong Kong skyline.

27th Oct
“Well Ill contact my people and then we can get on to the banks through the brokers. Yes well of course we are going to need certain assurances before I can release the codes to the accounts”
“Yes, yes, I understand that, of course my brother……..”
“I’ll arrange a transfer of two billion dollars from the account and we can start shipping the oil tankers”
“Supermaaaaan, that should keep the Russians satisfied until we can get the crude through, peace out my brother”

The monologue continued for another half an hour in a similar vein. At the other end of the room Manhat was talking into his laptop, ostensibly to another human being at the other end, although I must admit I never managed to confirm this. I glance over at Tom, he was staring impassively at this own laptop suggesting that this was not an unfamiliar or unexpected occurrence. Once the phone conversation terminated I decided I would engage Manhat in a friendly if subtly probing conversation to discover what exactly was the nature of his work. I managed to determine that he worked for a well known religious organisation which he referred to simply as “The Church” and claimed to be involved in the distribution of vast quantities of money which he curiously described using the possessive pronoun whenever it was alluded to.

“Really?” I said glancing around at the squalor of our environs and trying to keep the scepticism from my voice. “And so do you meet with your clients here in Chungking Mansions?” I asked immediately realising how farcical this conversation must sound.

“No, this is where I live, I met them around in the Sheraton”

“Riiiiiiiight” I replied. I guess living here must count as a form of self flagellation I figured.

Suddenly the door opens and I finally get a look at the young lad who’d been out on the tear the last few nights, except that it wasn’t a young lad at all, instead, to my surprise, it was a man in his mid forties with strawberry blond curls the cherubic face of a degenerate aristocrat who stood in the doorway.

“I say, Is that bloke who screams at himself in the shower at it again?” I was momentarily taken aback by his plumy upper crust English accent. It jarred sharply with his circumstances and our general surrounding. I imagine his name to be something like Bumblesbee Dillworth or something. In any case I could now no longer dispel the encroaching suspicion, Id ended up in a madhouse for sure, or perhaps a refuge colony for fading British thespians.

“Waaaahhh huhh waaaaahhhhhh huh pillubbbbber lubbber lubbbbber pillubbbbber lubbbber waaaahh huhhh” a hideous guttural cacophony followed him in the door from outside.

“Perfectly normal the rest of the time, saw him out drinking and playing cards with the rest of them earlier on, just when he gets in the shower, goes nuts” he added.

Almost unconsciously I begin noting the position of various sharpened utensils and blunt potentially bludgeoning objects which may be called to serve should the need suddenly present.

At 8pm I venture down to the harbour and witness the cheesetacular Hong Kong light show. Several tall building across Hong Kong island participate in what should have been, were it not for the dreadful music, an incredible coordinated light show.

Returning from the show, I notice Dillworth is loping along the street in front of me peering into jewellery shop windows at eighty grand Rolexes, I begin to suspect that he might be some rakish English lord who gambled and drank his entire inheritance and ended up in the hellish pit of Chungking, I decided to follow him for several blocks, ducking in and out of doorways until I tire of the silly game and wander off in search of food.

Beats Charlies

Eating in the filthiest street restaurant I could find, ordering seafood and reasoning that I have my hepatitis A shots and will be staying put in Hong Kong for the next few days so it doesn’t matter too much if I get sick. Quickly the table is covered a mat of spindly legs, beady eyed prawn heads and shattered shells. Drunk and licking my fingers like some baleful thing I stagger back towards the market and eat another plate of delicious eggplant, it was mighty fine.

Now thats good eatin'!

Now Im back! Expect more frequent updates……..

Suddenly a woman appears from the sleeping dorm and starts babbling in what I later learn to be Shanghaiese or at least incomprehensible Mandarin. She offers me a bed in the dorm and suggests I pay her some money, unsure as to what exactly is happening, I ask the English lad if the woman works here, “no idea mate” he mumbles into his cornflakes without looking up, “cheers bud” I reply making the universally understood gesture of onanism at him and his precious cornflakes.

Eventually the bowlegged attendant arrives, his deportment suggesting that the alerting phone call had found him anesthetized in the broom closet with an empty bottle of gin by his side. His shifty habit of never making eyecontact immediately sets me ill at ease. Explaining that Im looking for a bed, he grumbles something under his breath and directs me to the bed that the Shanghaiese woman, who is now grinning inanely, had already shown me. The room, small, grey and very grotty contains ten beds in five bunks, five of which are occupied by slumbering figures, a fan beside the building internal window drones like a distant helicopter, otherwise a heavy silence hangs in the air.

Leaving the Mansions I return across the harbour and retrieve my bags, by the time I return some of my roomates have awoken. “Big man! How ya going?” asks the Australian accent coming from the mouth of a man reclining in the lower far bunk. He’s about 60, wearing round purple shades with a black goatee and shaved head under a wide brimmed black hat. His appearance would suggest that he is either lounge pianoman or a high priest of some dark malevolent god. “Im err going fine, thank you …… moderately sized man” comes my hesitant reply. I had noticed that he borne an uncanny resemblance to an illfavoured astrophysics lecturer of one of my previous incarnations. “Yeaaa supamaaaan” he replies.

Opposite to him was the Shanghai woman with her school uniform clad teenage daughter, they clearly live here long term given the quantity of cooking utensil and various condiments strewn about their vicinity. Opposite me on the top bunk lay a beautiful partially disrobed Russian girl sleeping, in the bunk beneath her was the famous conjurer and wandering magician Tom de Voe. He specialized in Derron Brown type mind tricks and performed a few impressive feats of mind reading for me. Despite near constant harassment over the next few days to my annoyance Magic Tom refused to divulge his magic secrets to me.

The other bed in the corner opposite the door was occupied by what I had assumed was some young lad out on some mad bender although I couldnt see his face as it was covered with an eyemask and pointed in towards the wall. However I had managed to gather from the other two that he slept all day, left alone in the evening and didnt return until he’d well and truely torn the arse out of the night and would stumble about swearing in the dark, Magic Tom, who seems have a particularly unfavorable opinion of him, claims to have seen him standing one night alone outside a seven eleven with a bottle of vodka in his hand raving at passersby.

Its the usual perfunctory conversation with ManHat and Magic. “So where have you been traveling?” asks ManHat. “Oh you know the usual, St Petersburg, Moscow, Irkutsk, Baikal, Ulan Ude, Ulan Bataar, Beijing, Xian, Chengdu, Kunming, Lijiang, Shangri-la, here”. “Thats quite a journey!” he replies, a pregnant pause follows, he stares at me as if he is trying to assess something in his mind. “So what are the girls like up in Beijing?” Ah for christs sake, I think to myself, here we go again……. “Yeah, there is this eighteen year old up there, she thinks she’s my girlfriends …… ” he starts, “brilliant” I reply disinterestedly, rummaging in my open bag and deciding that I’ll probably be writing my journal entries in Irish for the next few days in case anybody tries to read them. I manage to bring the conversation around to nice places to eat in the locality, “Im on my way out now my brother, I’ll point out a few places for you, supamaaaan” says ManHat.

On the way out of the lift sleazy idlers previously dawdling about the place spring to life greeting, chatting and high fiving ManHat. “This guy has, how many is it now?, Seven wives?” he says slapping one Nigerian fellow on the back, “Oh no no no…” says the well dressed man backing away in a mock display of terror, he throws his hands up in the air “Wasnt me!”

“Stay away from that place” Thats all she said about it, this and no more. Of course if she actually meant it it was the worst thing she could have said, this was like a red rag to a bull, now I was intrigued. Had she told me it was boring then perhaps I might have listened but dodgy, dangerous, seedy? Now you’ve caught my attention. Sylvia had sent me a long and detailed email of places to visit and more interestingly places not to visit in Hong Kong. This was how I came to find myself at the bottom of Nathan Road on the tip of the Kowloon peninsula staring into the infamous vertical warren of Chungking Mansions.

Leaving my heavy backpack in the relatively expensive guest house on Hong Kong island, I set out on a reconnaissance mission to scope the place out. It was considerably cheaper than anywhere else in HK, could it really be that bad? Down at Causeway station, octopus card through scanner, on the subway, this cant be China – nobody is staring at me, I check my ghostly reflection in the glass window, still there. Within minutes Im under the harbor and surfacing at Nathan Road station.

Eyes glazed and fixed on the middle distance, I run the gauntlet of Indian hawkers selling fake rolexes and dodgy tailored suits. They congregate in such profusion here that Im convinced rolex must be code for something else, how can there be so many people selling rolexes every two meters and still make a living out of it? “My friend, my friend, cheap price for you? Nice suit? Nice watch? The ladies they like the rolex, my friend??”

Ground floor

Suddenly and unexpectedly I find myself confronted with an enormous shopping center sized building taking up an entire block. “Chungking Mansions” read the tacky metallic gold lettering. “Tharr she blows!” I exclaimed triumphantly, home sweet home.

Nothing about the cold grey exterior, expect perhaps the thronging multitudes swarming in and out the entrance like bees from a hive, could alert the casual passerby of the millions of intersecting stories unfolding within. Had somebody told me that Chungking Mansion was in fact a building of magic doors to every place on earth I might have found it believable, because you could easily travel the entire planet without ever setting foot outside her silent grey walls. The closest familiar thing I could compare it to is probably an airport terminal, constant movement everywhere, everybody was transplanted from somewhere else, enroute to somewhere else but somehow got lost in this her claustrophobic echoing corridors. A vertical labyrinthine city of the lost. The whole screaming bawling mess of humanity is here, a city of lost souls enroute to somewhere else who fell between the cracks in the road and never made it out.

Walking around the ground floor, it appears to be laid out in a grid of small shops and stalls, people queue at the four corners of the building for the elevator to the higher floors. The small shops sell a startling array of merchandise often catering to people looking for items from their mother countries. Besides the shops there are numerous Indian restaurants, next to money changers, sim card/mobile shop fixerupers, spice venders, fruit stalls, bootleg DVD stands, sex toy shops everything you can imagine.

By just observing the variety of people wandering about it would be impossible to guess where on earth you were. There are bearded sikhs, arabs with desert sands swirling about their robes, indians smelling of exotic spices, dodgy looking geezers with tattoos and slicked back hair idly chewing on tooth picks, inscrutable chinese, drug smugglers, pimps, whores, hustlers of every description, layabouts, angle shooters, pornocrats, chancers of every description and the odd frightened looking backpacker. My mind was made up, Im staying.

The view for the internal windows

Ads for various guesthouses, hostels and travel agents hidden in forgotten recess of the towers litter the ground floor, as I approach the lift Im swarmed from all side by offers of cheap accommodation but Ive already decided Im staying in Travelers Lodge hostel. Its the cheapest accommodation being on the top, and therefore most likely to die in a fire, floor. As the lift rises it stops halfway up opening into a shadowy echoing corridor and revealing an enormous man almost seven foot tall dressed in what appeared to be traditional African goat herding robes ambling along presumably in search of his herd.

On the top floor I emerge out into a small hallway, it feels like an attic with its sparse bare walls and low roof, following a sign post I quickly find the Travellers Lodge. To say the place was flithy would perhaps be unfair but that it sure is ugly; I doubt anybody would dispute that.

23rd Oct
Dark and silhouetted, silently a junk sails across a half sunken simmering golden disc. Dawn she spreads her rose red fingers across the South China Sea, in my minds eyes I see her. The gate of the Orient approaches fast, in the frothing of the maelstrom, in the quickening of the stream, East and West collide, the old the new coexist observing an uneasy truce. I felt it long before I arrive, its influence everywhere, as though the approach of hidden rapids. Hovering quasimytical in my conscious, the smell of unknown spices, saffron, the swirling smokes of burning joss sticks, a flash of smiling exotic eyes, honey dripping lotuses and burning opium, whispers of illicit pleasures, the heated breath of South East Asia on the back of her neck, the eastern tropics a place burning boundless in my imagination my entire life. Finally here I was.

Blown away, the dark clouds of a vagrants melancholy. Vivid flashes of imagination of the path ahead. I feel it now, excitement, rising fast, I struggle at the helm alarmed at being swept upwards into the recklessness of the hypomanical zephyrs and like some untethered balloon, blown to god knows where. There is work still to be done, Im not in Hong Kong yet.

Its approaching noon as the train pulls into the station, Guangzhou, one of the tear drenched sorrowed filled hidden places of this world. An enormous factory city, it is here that Hong Kongs unpalatable necessary is preformed, a places where people are debased to the level of a beast of burden. Every crappy disposable “Made in China” throwaway probably passed through the exhausted skeletal fingers of somebody here in this city. Sylvia had warned me of this place and urged me not to linger long.

I bid farewell to the Chinese Adams family of whom I was an unwilling adopted son these 24 hours past. Its smiles and good humor all round, little do they suspect the evil thoughts which besieged my mind as they slept. The first thing I notice is the vegetation, the sparse leafed brush of the mountainous west have been replaced by lush greens and waxy palms. Outside the station its utter chaos, people are milling about with enormous bundles of textiles on their hunched backs. I sympathize with them, even my backpack is beginning to hurt as I sweat profusely in the midday tropical heat. The place feels like a warzone, people lie everywhere stretchered out on their massive burdens, a barking voice blears of a loudspeaker. Im lost, how do I get to Hong Kong? I wander back and forth outside the station looking for an obvious ticket desk, gangs of idle youths wave mockingly shouting “hello”. I reply in kind with a middle finger salute and a sarcastic grin, they probably dont know what it means anyway. Quickly curbing my reckless mood before it lands me in trouble I manage to figure out that I need to get to Shenzhen first and from there I can walk across the border into the promised land, the New Territories of Hong Kong. Ill be glad to see the back of this place, remembering reading that Guangzhou was a place where there was a market for absolutely anything, apparently childless couples came here where children were abducted to order, it didnt surprise me that wolves gathered here at this bleeding severed stump, the fractured tectonic at the collision of worlds.

Walking towards the entrance of the station I notice a western man, in his mid thirties I imagine, shaved head looking not unlike a football hooligan walking out of the station lugging a suitcase, in front of him struts a statuesque Chinese woman pulling a wheely bag behind her, she would have been beautiful had she not been slutted up so much. Her stiletto heals added several inches to her height she wore a ultra short mini skirt which flapped upwards in the breeze and a bizarre top which hung down like a pair of curtain drapes clearly and completely exposing her breasts beneath as she walked, but nobody seem to pay any attention. What the hell is this place?

Shortly afterwards Im on board a fancy high speed train enroute to Shenzhen, my journal tells me the journey took and hour and three quarters but my memory is of a much shorter transit. The staff of pretty uniformed girls fastidiously maintain the train pacing up and down the aisle every few minutes sweeping and dusting, its quite bizarre. Unbelievably Shenzhen turns out to be an even worse place than Guangzhou, resentful and envious, locked out but within sight of the affluence next door, 22 million people teem here in this swollen border city. The border crossing is on high alert due to the swine flu pandemic, the officials all wear facemasks and latex gloves, being a nexus for the entire planet diesese is an ever present fear here. The crossing is relatively painless, my single entry Chinese visa is retired and a new 90 Hong Kong stamp issued, no questions asked. Now I could worry about a second Chinese and a Vietnamese visa at my leisure here. On the other side of the border the change is immediate, english is once again omnipresent, along with Mandarin and the more intricate Cantonise characters. I feel like I could be back in Europe again but with an eastern twist. The money was interesting too, looking too intricate to be real with funny transparent plastic bits. Its quite jarring after having traveled virgin China for so long to suddenly find here at the end of it all once again the vestiges of the British empire waiting for me, mocking my travels. Its almost as though I’d drifted upon some profound revelations after months of confusion, suddenly everything make sense, all the exotic elements were retained yet now fitted neatly into a framework which was familiar and reassuring, China for beginners.

Bewildered as to what to do, now that I was officially in HK, I whip out my trusty Lonely Planet which informs me of a wealth of accommodation options existing near the Causeway metro station on Hong Kong Island, still quite a distance away. I board a metro at the border and travel under the Kowloon peninsula, under the harbor to Causeway, despite having been in HK for over an hour at this stage I havent seen anything on the surface. A dull aching pain has now spread from my shoulders over the entire of my back, my bag is ludicrously heavy at this stage loaded down with a traveling library Id gradually acquired over the past few months, I decide that this will have to be addressed before I leave this city.

Surfacing at Causeway is a major system shock. Narrow streets, traffic, people everywhere, flickering street signs a wild frenetic energy, dusk begins to fall amidst a neon haze. Foreign yet familiar Im immediately fascinated by the place. The place feels old, very old, layer upon layer of history heaped on top of each other in the warren like alleys, vapors of mystery in the sidestreets, every street corner has a story. It was here that I first noticed something which I would often find myself remarking upon in my subsequent travels, generally to myself since that was usually the only person present (although in my less lucid moments I did give consideration to inventing a lovable imaginary if thinly vielded racial stereotype sidekick; a Passpartout to my Filias Fog or a Man Friday to my Crusoe as required by all self respecting adventures, who would cheerfully endure my self important babbling whilst in reality thanklessly steering me clear of perpetual calamity). What Id noticed was sadly how to see the real mark of Chinese civilization you so often had to leave China. Like the ruins of the Roman empire stretching across Europe much of ancient China survived throughout South East Asia as the criminal insanity of the Cultural Revolution swept away the embarrassment of the old and outmoded at home. Far from home, disconnect and isolated Id find it again far out in the Straits of Malacca, mummers in the kongsi secret societies of Penang, and in the chanting temples of Borneo. The Chinese influence is everywhere, subtle and all pervasive shaping the imagination of the nations, the Greeks of the East. Hong Kong is such a place, where the old has found sanctuary and is everywhere to remind you that many have stood here before you and many more will come after you have gone.

After much trekking about with my map and compass in hand I eventually find a guest house, which exists as a series of rooms over several floors within a towering city block, the room is small, cramped but comfortable, space has a premium here in Hong Kong. Infected, the lure of boundless possibilities, my exhaustion quickly dissipates, I set out into the Hong Kong night…………

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Probability of primary chute failure 1/1000, probability of simultaneous failure of both primary and emergency chute failure 1/1,000,000. It does happens. But at those odds it means that it doesnt happen to you. And on the bright side, even if it does there is a chance you might survive, if you land in some bushes or a tree or something, not in a lake which impact at terminal velocity would be like hitting concrete.

A parachute jump these days sounds like something commonplace even reasonable, that is until you actually give serious contemplation to actually doing one. Pause for a moment and actually think about it, imagine yourself hurtling towards the ground from 12,000 feet relying entirely upon a bag attached to your back to open and save you from almost certain death. Its a long way down, believe me you’ve got a lot of time to think about it. From 12,000 feet you’ll freefall for 45 seconds, tumbling and spinning watching the plane shrink above you, knowing that no matter what your fate is sealed and come what may, there is nothing absolutely nothing you can do.

The perspex door of the tiny plane slide open, looking down at the mountains and lakes far below, from the moment I first touched down in New Zealand I knew this moment would come. Like me, other travelers Id met on the buses all talked about how much they’d love to do a skydive, and then followed with the usual set of excuses, about how it was too expensive or how they’d do it some other time in some other place – in some other life, but deep down everybody knew there was only one excuse, people are generally afraid to throw themselves out of an airplane. When I caught myself repeating these excuses, angered by this realization I knew I had to do it, it was something ingrained in my personality I couldnt tolerate this failure. I was in Queenstown on the south island, renowned for its adventure tourism, the bungy jump was invented here. Something adrenaline charged had to be done. I decided it was either going to be the extreme canyon swing bungy or the skydive. I worked out that the canyon swing had only a 3.5 second free fall and would be over before you realised so I went for the skydive.

Flip-floping back and forth for a few days I eventually decided I didnt really want to do it and had resigned myself to that fact. Until walking past the shop on a Saturday morning, on pure impulse I went inside and told them to sign me up immediately for the next available skydive before I had second thoughts. The bus to the airfield was due to leave in 2 hours, I would be within the four hour chicken out window thus past the point of no return in my mind. If the money was going down then dammit so was I.

Once the deal was done everything was dead calm, there was no more uncertainty, nothing more needed to be done I was surprised by the sudden evaporation of all fear, my decision was made and it was final.

Returning to the office two hours later, I was ushered into the back room to meet my fellow death wishers and to sign the usual forms asserting the company’s innocence in the event that they kill me. “Skydiving is a hazardous activity, there is a chance that you will be killed or severely injured…..” fair enough I said signing the bottom line without bothering to read the rest of it, should anything go wrong it wouldnt matter much to me. The others in the room were twitching and squirming about in their chairs in anticipation both craving and loathing the executioners call to the bus.

Its twenty minutes to the airfield, the journey seems longer, everybody is fairly non-communicative. Arriving at the field we are greeted by the sight of a jumper hurtling towards the ground on a small chute before breaking out of the fall into a graceful swoop arcing earthwards and landing immaculately on his feet. You feel it deep in the pit of your stomach, there is something impossible about seeing a human body falling through empty space unconnected to anything towards the flat expanse of an open field that the brain cannot fully grasp. Its something unsettling, wholly alien and utterly wrong.

After forty five minutes of a waiting and watching more bodies plummeting from a tiny silver sliver indicating a plane far above eventually I got the call. I walk into a large room like an aircraft hanger to see people crouched over packing parachutes, put on my jumpsuit, goggles and hat. I mistake some guy wearing what appears to be some sort of ghost suit as my instructor, he’s going up in the plane and jumping with us too, as Id expected he tries to psyche me out, I laugh politely at his lame jokes about how there hadnt been a death in at least a week and all the instructors were learning on the job etc etc

Im jumping with three other guys, I’ll be the first to go. The plane is really tiny, the inside looks about the size of a bathtub, we all pile in literally lying on top of each other. Five minutes later we are cruising over the spectacular lakes and mountains of Middle Earth, not bad as the last thing you’ll ever see I think to myself. Ghostjumper continues his attempts at humour but at this stage, entirely focused on the task at hand, I can barely hear him and reply in monosyllabic grunts, mentally I make a note to punch him when we hit the ground, my eyes are fixed on the altimeter 10, 11, 12 thousand feet, suddenly I feel the plane level out. The perspex door is slide back and a gust of cold air hits me in the face. Ghostjumper shifts himself towards the door, twists sideways and is gone in an instant. Then is my turn the first of the first timers. Im jumping thats for sure, there is nothing left to think about, its easy. I sit in the door way and look down, its seems unreal like looking into a painting. I curl my legs under the body of the plane and arch backwards. My instructor pushes me forward and we both slip out of the doorway. Theres a sudden rush as the I accelerate rapidly and the plane shrinks away overhead. Stretching my arms outwards it feels almost like floating into a strong wind. Falling at this height seems to take forever, the ground seems almost stationery below, how long have I been falling? I start counting, surely its been forty five seconds by now? Suddenly the primary chute opens flawlessly and I feel a gently pull upwards. Several minutes later the airfield is in view, the building, the people watching down below getting closer and closer, then we on the ground. Two guys run along side disconnecting the parachutes, Ghostjumper is beside me “Congratulations bru,’ welcome to the club, not many people will ever get to do that”.

One thing you learn quickly is that its impossible to feel down whilst traveling, a fatalistic melancholy sometimes, riveted to the spot wonder struck to the point of tears perhaps but never depressed. Arriving in a strange and uncertain place burns it out of you immediately. There is just too much to do to sit around and brood. The past becomes a distant country when there is nothing to remind you of it.
The minute I get on that train Kunming will vanish forever behind me. I cant go on, I’ll go on.

23rd Oct
Ugly and soulless, China represents the horror of answered prayers, a peasants greedy dream of development. Unable to see beyond the Louis Vuitton stores and the Maseratti dealerships this is what Paul Thereoux had to say in dedicating just half a page to Kunming in his Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. But then when you come up with such clever aphorisms how could he ever have seen it as anything but, such is the conflict between fact and presenting an entertaining if predefined narrative.
Why would I want to listen to people boasting of their greed and promiscuity? He asked himself as he left Kunming, describing it as a vulgar place infested with prostitutes; I never found it to be so, but then Thereoux always had a special talent for finding them. When he first visited in Riding the Iron Rooster, back then the trauma of the Cultural Revolution was just beginning to sooth, he had found the place small and habitable, the Green lake area was nothing more than a swamp were desperate lovers found solitude, a scarce thing in China. Kunming may now be a neon bathed urban sprawl but somethings never change, I find myself laughing noticing that number eight in the top ten bestsellers was entitled Finding Happiness in Loneliness.

What is it that makes a city beautiful? Fountains, trees or other mockeries of the nature replaced? Maybe there is really no such thing as a beautiful city, they are all blights on the landscape after all, Ive heard many described as such but all Ive ever seen is people pushing against one another in a rush to get somewhere else. What makes a place memorable is the people you meet there and their memory which infuses the place. Goodbye Kunming. The siren sounds, the train pulls out of the station and soon the city thins and drops away and we are sailing in a land of gently sloping rice terraces.

To my utter horror the carriage attendant moves out the other three occupants of my compartment and replaces them with a mother/father combination with their screeching child. The father is quiet to the point of appearing mute, he has a disgusting single elongated nail on one little finger, Id seen this before, its only purpose as far as I could gather was to root out stubborn earwax and nasal blockages. The kid who is about four has a ridiculous looking turnip shaped shaved head with a solitary tuft at the front and a long rat tail giggling off the back. His annoying impish face reminds me of something Super Mario 2 might have dug out of the ground and hurled at his enemies. The kid constantly for several hours attempts to climb around the cabin, running back and forth screeching. His mother repeatedly reprimands him with a buckbuckbuckbawwk noise rising to a screech like an angry hen attacking a blackboard. This usually prompts a screaming tantrum from the kid, in which the mother joins in. They are driving me crazy. After five minutes I have a thumping headache from the noise with another 24 hours of confinement with these cell mates to look forward to.

Mercifully as night falls they slump into an exhausted stupor, my headache subsides and I can finally get some peace. As I lie on my back in the upper bed and stare out into the fading blue I wonder if there is anymore pleasurable a form of transport than a long distance train, there is a peaceful contentment in knowing that you are getting somewhere and doing the absolute maximum that can be done right now, right here, whilst lying on your back and doing nothing at all.

Well of course it doesnt really bother me, if things like that really got on your nerves then you’d never make a traveler, I would have given and gone up long ago. The traveler requires a very high forbearance for chaos. Anyway, here I am in New Zealand. The views on the flight over were quite stunning, looks like I might enjoy myself here. Unfortunately the pics didnt come out right with the light.

19/20/21th Octhttp://news.google.ie/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn
Ive always hated nationalism where ever I have found it. Perhaps its a consequence of growing up in Ireland in the 80s and seeing its bloody progress played out on the news every night but more likely because I always thought it was stupid and illogical and generally it was the stupidest and most illogical people I knew who where its most feverent adherents. There is something inherently nasty about nationalism, it is fundamentally adversarial in its intent. Pride in your species or the collective achievements of the human race is practically unheard of, after all where is the fun in that. Unless there is somebody somewhere to exclude and belittle then there is hardly any point at all. Nationalism at its core is about “we” with the specific exclusion of “you” and generally most celebrated by those who feel deep down that “me” has precious little worth talking about.

Its an issue which must necessarily be tested, strained and ultimately subject to metamorphosis in the traveler. Ive met many Irish who travel abroad and are suddenly stuck with an inexplicable desire to learn Irish and drape themselves in the tricolour, to proudly proclaim the achievements of other people who happened to be born in relative close proximity to themselves as though they were their own and feel that they are probably due some sort of credit from the other lesser nations of the earth as a result. For others the recognition of the commonality of people regardless of nationality is not such an alienating process, there is a difference between knowing something to be true and really realizing that it is true, it is this realisation which comes with extensive travel, that you are not your country, you are not your race, you are only you and on the world stage you stand alone.

But in China nobody is an individual, everybody is a member of a family, to be alone is to be an outcast. In much of the East, the family has primacy and the nation is its extension, perhaps this is why nationalism in China can seem especially virulent. As the old adage goes you can criticize your own family but you dont like to hear others do so. Chinese history undoubtedly lends itself to much of these feelings of ill will as indeed does history anywhere. China like the schoolyard whipping boy, returning from summer vacation to find himself suddenly bigger and stronger than his former tormentors has some old scores to settle. And in China’s case the list of humiliations is centuries long.

I find myself in conversation with a Kunming local, he has invited us for dinner which he pays for entirely as is customary in China. When he finds out Im from Ireland he starts asking me about the situation in Northern Ireland, again its almost of though he were singing off the same hymn sheet as the policeman Id met in Beijing comparing the British-Irish relationship with that of China and Tibet, afterall Britain can shut up about Tibet; they did the same thing in Northern Ireland as far as he was concerned. I didnt feel that the analogy was particularly valid, if Britain had done the same thing then it was three hundred years ago, centuries later the introduction of people through those historical plantations had considerably complicated the issue. Of course China was following the exact same prescription now by transplanting millions of Chinese into remote Tibet thus effectively Sinocising the province and creating a generation of Chinese with no other place to call home. The reason being, apart from the vast resources of the region, China historical paranoid of threat from all sides, in particular the waking dragon to the west, nuclear India.

Eventually I found the conversation growing tiresome as he continued to press how the Tibetans really ought to be grateful for all the nice things China had done for them including building roads, the incredible engineering feat of a train all the way to Lhasa, favorable entry to university etc etc as though these were the only things which should matter to a people. I began to feel myself slowly suffocated beneath the irresistible weight of a billion opinions. Such was the power of nationalism that even here two thousand kilometers from the capitol on the south western frontier I could still have been talking to that policeman in Beijing. Why waste your time studying history when its destined to repeat itself.

DMT. dimethyltryptamine, an hallucinogen found in abundance in nature yet to science still an obscure and little understood molecule with a remarkable resemblance to the neurotransmitter serotonin, similar in both structure and in its psychotropic effect to LSD and psilocybin but with one crucial difference, its natural occurrence in the human body. What was the connection with the pineal gland seated deep inside the brain, did it secreat DMT directly in the center of the brain? Why did the brain have such an intricate network defense instantly breaking down the hallucinogen into harmless inert compounds, and why did it have such an incredible affinity for DMT? There had to be a reason. THere had to be something of fundamental importance to human bevahiour involving DMT. I had read that scientist had recently begun to revisit hallucinogens after having fallen out of favour in the 60s largly due to abuses by researchers who ended up using the drugs themselves and compromising their objectivity resulting in demonisation by the media, inevitable political interference and subsequent funding restrictions and a fatal strangulation of security protocol.

My attention was drawn to these questions as I recalled an interesting anecdotal report of a man who had cured himself of cluster headaches, a horrible affliction which I had suffered myself, using psilocybin. Something else had been bothering me lately too I began to think of all the travelers Id met on the road and tried to draw them together in my mind, searching for a unifying thread of commonality, there had to be something, I remember once reading a neurology paper about altering the dopamine pathways in the brain of lab rabs, inducing a state of perpetual seeking. All of this paralleled my growing interest in eastern religions in particular altered mental states accessible through Buddhist meditation and tantric sex. I had read recently about a hypothesis that at certain traumatic life events such as birth, intense sexual experience, near death occurrence and profound mystical/religious experience the brains defenses against DMT become overwhelmed and the mind becomes aware of a deeper order threading the entire universe, the presence of the omniscient consciousness that all religions struggle to described. Why were relgions no matter where they originate, no matter how isolated from each other so similar, it was something which always fascinated me. I spent many hours in temples and amongst monks observing and made a mental note to consider these things later when I ahd the time.

Perhaps religions were custom bulit tailored effectively, usually by trail and error through generations and perhaps occasional by certain dangerous insightful figures to hit certain resonances in the brain. How easy would it be to make one, after all relgions had been created from nothing even in the enlightened 20th century. I briefly imagined myself seated upon a golden throne being fed grapes and surround by my ten thousands concubines. Maybe DMT had a role in creativity the way manic depression or schizophrenia had, I remember reading after the death of the physicist Francis Crick that he was under the influence of LSD when he first conceived of the double helix structure of DNA and that many of the worlds scientist and intellectuals secretly used it to enhance their powers of imagination.

Clearly I had a lot of free time as I wandered the backstreet of Kunming. I began to feel myself sliding backwards, not a frightening sensation, more like one of gentle intoxication, I know if I lie down to long I might never get up again, everyday which passes the great unknown of the road ahead becomes more daunting and I slip into a lulled sleep. I do very little, catch up on some blog and journal writing. relax, lounging on the rooftop terrace reading writing thinking about general nonsense and take a holiday from my holiday.

Several hours later, arrving back at the Hump in Kunming, I find Sylvia working on her laptop in the common area. She tells of a nightclub just nextdoor called Pandoras Box which really has to be seen to be believed. As nightfalls on the city revelers head to JinMaBieJie square to forget for just a while about their lives, and indeed its no exaggeration to say that not since the fall of the Rome of Romulus Augustus to the Visgoth armies of Odoacer in 476 has the world seen such a display of unbridled decadence. If hope was the only horror to plague mankind which didnt escape Pandora then it is to be found here in abundance.

At first I didnt know what to make of the place, it was utterly jammed with people up dancing on the tables and the bar tops, at the other side of the room a tiny girl in a school uniform gyrated up on a podium. As far as I could figure the place was probably 60% gay, 30% straight, 10% which ever way the wind was blowing. Of course we are the only nonchinese in the place and thus instant celebrities, people appear out of ever angle thrusting bottles of beer in my hand.

Two gay guys who Sylvia had met here last time suddenly materialise out of the throng and attempt to drag us up onto the countertop to dance like caged beasts for the entertainment of the masses. I back away frantically slapping at their grasping hands whereas the ordinarily shy Sylvia appears to be in her element as the queen of the show is up dancing straight away and loving it. To add to the madcap mayhem of the scene every 15 minutes of so a troop of soldiers wearing white space invader helmets march through the center of the club just to be sure that everybody is being a good communist. This was a side of China Id never seen before!

Comically some guy next to me tries to flash me a gang sign during some gangster rap song, unfortunately for him, not understanding the significance, he gives me two middle fingers, “cheers pal” I say, turning away, the next minute he is giving me more free beer.

Suddenly a cheer goes up and out comes the “stripper”, shes up on the podium dressed in some sort of police uniform with a cap pulled low over her eyes and hair. She moves slowly and seductively in rhythm with the music, the music bursts into life as she tears off her cap and her hair explodes upwards with a sudden flick of her head. Just when it looked like it was about to heat up in here, to my horror some porty bespectacled Chinese chap is for some reason up there beside her. What the hell is this? I think speachless to myself, she handcuffs him to the pole and proceeds to strip him! Down to his white y-front underpants, then mercifully stops, not before prodding him suggestively and in a wholly unnecessary manner with her riding whip.

Just as my inexorable descent into madness seems assured, I feel a tug at my elbow and look down to see a startlingly beautiful little chinese girl, in good english she asks me who I am, where Im from and what am I doing here, with all the free drink the answers to these question werent as immediately apparent as you might expect. As Im finishing my response to the third of these three question, she abruptly cuts me off, grabbing my hand and commands me to come with her, who was I to argue? She leads me up onto some raised dais, two burly guys step aside allowing us to pass, behind them an older man sits like some roman emperor surveying his kingdom, the school girl dancer purring at his side. I get the feeling as though Im in the presence of some sort of triad chieftain, who decided that the only white guy in the place would make a nice addition to his collection of bling. The conversation was difficult owing to the fact that he spoke no english and the noise was so loud, after several more obligatory free drinks I make good my escape.

The place is really starting to creep me out at this stage, in the bathroom some guy comes up behind me as Im washing my hands and begins massaging my shoulders. Outside the toilet another guy, who appears to have been waiting for me ask if I’d like a drink, no I reply and run back to Sylvias protective umbrella. We’ve had more than enough of the place at this stage.

In the perfume scented heat of the night, I awake, too quickly, between sleep and wakefulness still I can hear it, the eternal click clack of the track, a low mournful whistle receding into the distance, the vanishing sounds of a missed train.

As unfashionable as it is in this age of social networks, where every job application requires buzzwords like outgoing, fun, teamplayer, an era where introspection is held in suspicion, as the mark of a flawed person or worse a perversion, I must admit it that its rare that Ive ever travel with somebody who didnt make me wish they werent there. With the exception of a handful of friends the effort of making even the tiniest compromises to another persons who you barely knew soon proved intolerable after several days. It didnt matter to me where Id read extrovert I always read shallow, where Id seen people person it always sounded to me a lot like bullshit artist.

I met Ofir for breakfast and avoided yesterday mornings mistaken by not ordering the odious yak buttermilk tea. Afterward we met the guy who owned my homestay, he took us to the bus station in a taxi for 10 kuai then confirmed my suspicions that he was a bit of a chancer by asking for another 10 kuai to get himself back home, Im pretty sure he walked. As expected he proved fairly unnecessary at the station too as we’d gotten by just fine up to this point by ourselves.

Ending up on a small local bus, I didnt even mind the tuberculous ridden passengers hocking up on the floor around us, it was worth it for the fact that the bus engine, probably pilfered from a lawnmower could barely pick up any speed on those treacherous roads.

Arriving back in Lijiang several hours later, covered in soot I bid farewell to Ofir, he was headed back towards Chengdu so our paths would surely never cross again. Ofir was a good travel companion, neither of us ever felt the need to say something to break the silence for fear of being considered boring. We shook hands and wished each other well, I was glad there was no bullshit, no exchange of emails or promises to link up on facebook and no I wasnt welcome to “come round and stay in his gaff” should I ever for some reason find myself in Israel, just goodbye and good luck.

The cold Lijiang dawn greets me bringing strange paranoid haze, my first instinct is to hole up here in the hostel of the day. Outside the constant stares and laughter would normally wash over me but in this fragile mood seclusion seems preferable. Its one of those rare occasions that the constant hustle and impermanence of travel begins rub raw, but I recognise it as a temporary state, one which will pass. I have to soldier on, Ive been in Lijiang long enough, gritting my teeth I pack a small bag for Shangri-la, living the already oversized main bag at the hostel. Sighing I knew that its going to be an ordeal getting there of course travel in China is not for the faint hearted but rewards those who persevere.

At the bus station as expected I am the only foreigner. I constantly show my ticket to every official looking guy who walks past since Im not sure of the Shangri-la characters or ever if its the final destination of the bus which I will be taking.

The journey up the mountains is the usual predictable fanfare of deathdefying madness. Despite the fact that the transit time is supposed to be in the region of five hours I manage to read about 30 pages of Thereouxs Ghost Train to the eastern star so distracted I am by the utter carnage unfolding on the road in front of me. Further to my annoyance the bus tv suddenly fires up with another shit Jason Statham film. I dont know what is the Chinese obsession with the guy? I never knew he made so many crap films until I came here, seems like every bus company has been rooting around in the straight video bargain bins. Im not quite sure what the plot is since its badly dubbed expect that it involve many shots of Stathams shiny macroencephlic head roaring in a redfaced constipated rage at the camera. Just when I though bar the bus plunging off the ravine to our fiery doom the situation couldnt get anyworse. Directly in front of me a child leans nonchalantly over the edge of the seat and despite the presence of a bin he instead chooses the far more satisfying option of vomiting all over the floor while his mother gazes bored out the window as though nothing at all is happening. The driver pulls into a service station and everybodt disembarks including the mother without a word of an apology so the driver can hose down the bus.

Just as the credits roll on Statham we enter a long tunnel and emerge into another land above the clouds. My enthusiasm is short lived however as the dvd switches and almost unbelievably another Jason Statham film starts playing. How is this possible, maybe, I speculate that it has something to do with the fact that you could easily imagine Statham on a break between films reverting to his true calling, that is driving hte 78A. Perhaps he is held in a particular fondness amongst the bus driving community. Perhaps all bus drivers sort of imagine themselves as being a little bit like Jason Statham, the Phil Collins of the martial arts world.

Although the real name of the area is Zhongdian, the otherworldly feel of emerging from the whispering death of the jagged horrors of western Yunann into the rolling hilly plateau, a hidden isolated land ringed by mountain earns well the name Shangri-la. Hairy yaks populate the landscape, monks walk serenely along side the road. Prayer wheels and coloured flags decorate the roadside reminiscent of Buriyat Russia. Many signs are written in the bizarre Tibetan script, alien like Chinese but more mysterious for its unknowablity as though it were the voices of some forgotten civilization.

Even the beauty of the landscape cant divert my eyes from the ungodly hypnotic quality of Stahams latest abomination unfolding on the screen above my head. The plot as far as I could gather revolved around Statham playing a taxi driver to some really rich family who infant son gets kidnapped and only Statham can get him back. It is also implicitly insinuated that Statham is most likely doing the wife, who clearly is into a bit of bus driver rough, this with the tacit knowledge of the husband who, recognising Stathams superior handling of both large and medium sized public transport vehicles, politely steps aside. Furthermore the kidnapped son bears an uncanny resemblance to Statham, being possessed of both a receding hairline and heavy stubble.

As night begins to fall I realise that if I dont want to end up deep in the Himalayas Im going to have to ask somebody to tell me when to get off the bus. The woman next to be indicates that I have arrived so the bus stops, I get off then it speeds aways into the gathering gloom. Once again I find myself lost and disorientated. Eventually I find a taxi who takes me into the center of the town. The places really feels like another planet compared to the spralling metropolises of Beijing and Xian, Im amazed by the diversity in what had always seemed to me a relatively homogeneous nation. Animals stroll amongst monks, tractors belching thick black smoke chugg up the street. The roads have that harsh broken gritty feel underfoot of a place that has experience severe swings in temperature reminding me of Irkutsk.

The place Im staying is a homestay run by a Tibetian guy who speaks good english, having lived a number of years in an Indian refugee camp with the Dali Lama. Interestingly its quite easy to distinguish Tibetans from the Han Chinese who have been encouraged to move here in recent times. The Tibetans look almost like a mix of Indian and Chinese in many cases, many dont even look vaguely Chinese at all. The owner isnt there at the moment, instead his cousin, who speaks no languages, is holding the fort, by this I mean he is sitting in the front room watching the entire anthology of James Bond films, he grins serenely at me not quite realising that I may require his assistance. When I arrived he was on Sean Connery, by the time I left he had worked his way up to Timothy Dalton.

I wander about the town for a while, at 3300 meters the mid Oct night here is quite bitter while just several hundred kilometers away the nighttime revelers of Kunming enjoys the evenings warm embrace. Altitude sickness is a concern at this height but so far I seem to be ok, walking of the steep street however requires more effort than expected.

Rounding a corner into a large open square I find hundreds of people dancing in a circle to a peculiar sounding, almost Indian music. I stop into a restaurantrun by street children for an incredibly delicious yak burger and some other Tibetan delights of who names I know not. Later on I find myself in an underground Tibetan nightclub, Im not going to say exactly how I found myself there the graveity of the sitation was explained to me in depth by some random punter in the club. Nobody talks about the Tibetan issue for fear of bring serious trouble down on themselves, informers were everywhere. Nobody dared broach the subject with me, instead preferring to circle the issue referring to it in only the most abstract of terms. That is of course apart from one incredibly drunk guy who having been picked up off the dance floor for about the twelfth time cam over and sat beside me, he proceeded to place his hand on my shoulder and spit in my face for about half an hour about how this wasnt China this was Tibet while his friends gave uneasy sidelong glances at each other.

Eventually I found my way back to my accommodation, on the walk back I found myself thinking about how much more polite and accessible the Tibetan were than many of the Chinese Id met, perhaps its a characteristic of a people force to the fringes. As with Mongolia, I was surprised how the people in general had much more english and were considerably more welcoming of outsiders than the people of the conceited giants of Russia and China being afforded the luxury of insularity.

My sleep was besieged by night terrors, Jason Statham had been selected as the next James Bond. Orwight sunshine its Bond, James Bond my son, do me a favour guvnor.

One of the more interesting paintings in the temple

The rest of the trail involved further death defying antics including walking through a waterfall spilling over the edge of a precipice. I met an old Tibetan man and his son out hunting birds with a slingshot and stop briefly to ask them of directions, which was a bit pointless since unless I was prepared to abseil down the rock face I was effectively walking a straightline, anyway I was at least reassuring to know I was still on course, having to retrace my steps back through that waterfall would have been most unwelcome.

Here is an image I took from another site

A few hours later, after a steep decent, sliding down parts of the trail, I finally reach the bottom of the gorge and wait for a few hours for a minivan to pass by and take me out of the gorge and back to Lijiang.

Sun breaks into the gorge

The road into the gorge

12th Oct

Looking up I watched the planes blinking light vanish over the looming black mass of the mountains. Its was strange to imagine all those people up there, sitting in comfort, being served by airhostesses, a bubble from the modern world here in this place of incredible remoteness. Night had fallen over tiger leaping gorge, free from the light pollution of the cities the starscape overhead was truly breathtaking, the milky way clearly visible over the foreboding black mass in front of me, I imagined the people I knew so far away looking up and seeing the same sky. I stood alone on the balcony of the Tibetian family guesthouse high up over the gorge by legs aching after the days climb, still anxious about the day ahead.

I suppose Id ended up in Tiger Leaping Gorge because some random american guy id met in a hotel lobby in Beijing had sang of its praises most convincingly. Its funny how these things happen, it had never been on my itinerary despite being one of the few places in China Id actually heard about before arriving in the country. i caught a small rickety minivan to Qiatio or somewhere, (cant quite remember how its spelled) which is on the edge of the gorge. On the bus I met a Swiss guy I was talking to in Kunming, since he was traveling alone he chickened out of doing the gorge trek and had decided to travel the low road through the gorge then head back to Kunming. I was surprised to here this, especially coming from somebody from such a mountainous country, it did however give me pause for thought considering how I too was traveling alone and without a mobile phone, which Id lost in a hostel in Russia many months before. Should I slip and fall in the gorge, nobody would ever know what happened to me. Beforehand Id been reading many accounts on the internet about how dangerous the trek was, many kilometers along a sheer mountain ledge, many people slip and fall ever year, many more killed in landslides.

I trekked for about seven hours and saw maybe three/four people coming back along the trail against me, apart from a few residents of the gorge living in shacks selling water and fruit. The scenery was really incredible, unfortunately my camera really cannot do it justice, the loneliness and desolation of the place is simply impossible to capture. Much of the trail winded around mountain ledges a few feet across with a sheer drop into the valley on the other side. Whilst trekking to appreciate the vertigo inducing surroundings I had to stop and cling onto rocks. Many times Id round a bend on the cliff and look in disbelief at acrobatics require for the road ahead.

hmmm something is not right here

You have got to be joking

Despite the gorge being essentially a straight line I somehow managed to make a small detour off the track for about forty up a steep hill until some thick brambles and the presence of an angry barking dog compelled me to retrace my route. All the while I was constantly checking my watch to make sure I made the guesthouse before nightfall as the temperature would drop quite sharply at this altitude, not to mention the obvious difficulties of walking along a mountain ledge in total darkness.

Eventually, very relieved I arrive in a deserted mountain lodge run by a family seemingly entirely consisting of extremely cheeky teenage girls.

More photos to follow

I spend the day wandering the old town, its incredibly picturesque but every single shop sells useless trinkets, local “handicraft” produced in a factory and various other tourist junk like traditional ethnic costumes which if you were to bring back home and actually wear would result in your family ostracizing you and your inevitable institutionalization.

I wander around the park area and climb elephant hill. Back at the hostel as I type away at the computer I hear somebody calling my name, looking up Im shocked to see Michelle of trans-siberian fame. Its quite an enormous coincidence given that Id last seen her over a month ago and thousands of kilometers away in Beijing. I hadnt even known she was in these parts at all believing she was in Vietnam by now, we were even sharing the same dorm room. She had been traveling with another tour group up until now although she appeared to be unsure of exactly where she had been, including not knowing if she had been to Xian at all or whether or not she had seen the terracotta warriors.

Later that night, seized by a sudden fit of morbidity, I became utter convinced beyond consolation that I was destined to fall to my doom in Tiger Leaping Gorge, given that sole of my shoes after walking for several months was now close to perfectly friction free surface I decided that I had to find a pair of hiking boots. Dashing frantically from shop to shop on my fruitless odyssey, I was literally laughed out of several by tittering floor staff when I told them my size. Eventually I found one shop stocking a single pair of what appeared to be novelty sized Yao Ming basketball shoes most probably for display only purposes. The staff find my predicament hilarious and gather around laughing and hooting incredulous at finally having sold the comedy clown shoes. My attempts to haggle for the price resulting in a derisory look from the sales girl which seemed to say “are you taking the piss? These are the only shoes on this entire continent which will fit you”.

Mighty fine, id eat a whole sheeps worth of these things before Id leave Kunming

10th Oct
I start the day in a very good mood, back on the road and on to adventures anew. Today I decide to take a bus to the western Yunnan city of Lijiang just for the hell of it. I dont know much about it other than its enroute to the famous and feared tiger leaping gorge. The guide book says its known for its old chinesey village feel which is actually total artifical since a well timed earthquake in the mid ninties detroyed the old town affording the govenernment the opportunity to rebuild it enitrely as a tourist site. If my memory serves its altitude is something in the region of 2300 meters, the threshold for altitude sickness generally being 2700 meters, Kunming being 900m above sealevel may help a little towards aclimatisation but walking up hills at this height will still be fairly strenuous. After Lijiang and the gorge I intend to press on to Zhongdian or Shangri-la as the chinese goverment have decided to rename it in a bizarrely sucessful tourism campaign, at 3300 meters altitude sickness can strike at his height. Zhongdian is essentially Tibet in all but name.

The bus station does nothing to disabuse me of the opinion that a horrible subspecies of the human race inhabits these places the world over, a dirty stunted branch of the our collective family tree, continieing on from when man first diverged from apes then decided to rejoin the simian tree before making the break for good. The spawn of this union has surived to this day and lives on lurking about bus shelter hoping to waylay any who tarry there. A woman and her five year old sun sit down near me, she appears to have given him a tube of superglue to play with. After he pours it into his eye she holds his eyelids apart as he screams in pain. Im not sure what exactly is the purpose of this display, I assumed it was some sort of sympathy play to gain money but everybody seems to be largely ignoring them, eventually they dissapear.

I feel a tugging on the leg of my shorts and look down to see where it has snagged. The sudden unexpected appearance of a legless begger commoding himself by lying flat upon a somesort of wheeled bread pan gave me a terrible start from which I never quite managed to recover. The whole place is rapidly descending into madness as I stubble towards the bus soon which luuckily arrives just in time, unfortuntely the gods have decided that I havent suffered enough for today and must endure futher hardship and terror.

People working in the fields

The bus to Lijiang is the express bus, its an enormous behemoth, a truely impressive piece of machinery. The word express is justified not by the route but rather by the fact that it is simply the largest fastest most badass vehicle on the road. In china the rules of the road are simple, might makes right. Everyother thing on the road implicitly knows this unwritten rule of the jungle and accordingly gets the fuck out of the way if it knows whats good for it. By sheer virtue of its size and the fact that anything which meets it head on will suffer a whole lot more than the bus it is essentially entitled to drive on whatever side of the road it so pleases. The driver drives with one hand on the horn blasting at anything even oncoming traffic driving on its correct side. Overtaking on blind bends is the norm, its should probably be pointed out at this stage that to the immediate left of the bus is a sheer drop into an enormous gorge for the majority of the 8 hour. Once the bus screeches to a halt after round a mountain bend and finding a truck barreling around from the otherside. I make silent promises to myself that I will never again find myself in a sitation like this, how exactly I expect to manage this given that I have to return by the same route is not considered at this moment in time. Perhaps induced by sense of fragility against the utterly awesome savage unyielding mountain scenery, a strange morbidity takes hold and would colour my behavior for the next few days. The bus careers about on the road overtaking a vehicle on average every thirty seconds, its not that the traffic is heavy rather that much of the road is occupied by small little hooffa dooffa type tractor engines rhythmically belching pitch black smoke, the fan belt clearly visible with entire multigenerational families clutching on at all sides. The scenery is truely breathtaking, I just dont want to end up as part of it.

Eventually we arrive in Lijiang, just about right on time suggesting that the madness Id observed on the road was considered standard procedure and in fact required for the bus to be on schedule. I never like arrving in a strange place without accommodation after dark but thats just how its worked out. THe bus pulls into a remote station outside of town, everybody else dissipates into the darkness, the bus pulls off leaving me unsure where I am or what exactly I should do. The station consists of a single ramshakle building with a errie flickering florescent light, a solitary dog barks in the distance adding to the creeping sense of foreboding. Eventually I managed to hail a passing taxi, he has no idea where I wanted to go, fortunately I have a phone number of a hostel, they direct him somewhere and a girl mets me and leads me to the hostel. I am bloody grateful to say the least. Lijiang old town has an creepy feel at night, the streets are narrow paved alleyways unlit expect for dull red laterns silently illuminating the street from shop windows. Its utterly deserted and too dark to see exactly where I am so I decide to call it a day. The hostel is called Panba hostel, its essentially imaculate in everyway, the staff are incredible helpful and courteous, the only thing about the place which throws the whold place out of sync is the toilet. Dont get me wrong, its perfectly clean, its just the curious chinese trait of efficiency and practicality at the expense of niecity seems to be epitomized by this peculiar contraption. Its a squat-shower combo toilet. Showering is performed by placing your feet either side of the toilet and allowing the water to drain into the poo hole, thus in effect simultaneously cleaning both the toilet and yourself. Its a small price to pay, Im at journeys end, at least for today the gods will leave me be. They send mosquitoes in the night to torment my sleep.

Feel like Im scraping the roof of the world

Backstreet in the old town of Lijiang by day

So I wander about the city, and a very pretty city it is too, I eventually find the green lake although the musicians dont seem to be around at the moment. In the evening I find a fantasic resturant recommned by Lonely Planet, tucked away down a backalley way, “La Gare du Sud” which despite its name seems to specialise in mainly Yunnan cuisine with a couple of snails thrown in to justify its name. Over the course of 45 mintues I devour a family sized meal consising of 4 plates of food, two bowls of rice and four bottles of Qingdao beer as the staff look on in astonishment. All the while I am scribbingly notes in my journal, tasting the food, pausing deliberating then writing more notes. Hopefully the staff assume I am a writer for the Lonely Planet or a food critic thus ensuring the best possible service, at least thats my intention. The food was absolutely delicious, I shudder to think what this level of gourmet cusine would cost in Dublin, at La Gare du Sud, it cost be something in the region of an incredulous 7.50 euro. The best almost free food Ive ever eaten

7th Oct
Writing about travel from the birdeye view of retrospection is a funny thing. Its life in microcosm with the entire road between then and thepresent moment stretchingout clearly before you. There is an acute awarenessof how every little randomly chosen path or decision made in haste were crucial componants of how you come to find yourself in your current situation. This is how I ended up in Kunming and by extension I suppose, ultimately where I am now writing from.

Morning and Im looking for a ticket, anywhere it doesnt matter, Ive been in Chengdu too long and its time to press on to pastures new. Its still the national holiday so my prospects look grim. Once again I try the high road to Kanding but am informed that it is “broken” by the young lady at the bus ticket counter. I know this is bullshit, as is later confirmed by an email from a hostel owner, but there is little I can do beside if sheis telling the truth the prospect of spending the night wandering in subzero temperatures at altitude is unappealing. So I move on to plan D, try to get a train ticket to Kunming the captiol of the much famed Yunnan province but I dont fancy my chances. Miraculously I manged to get a soft sleeper ticket on the 3:35 train.

Taxi to the station, a little bit edgy as we are caught in heavy traffic, I do not want to miss this train. Im ushered into some sort of VIP section since soft sleeper is techincally VIP, although its really more a nessecity for me rather than a luxury as I have learned on the russian trains, hard sleeper bearths have my legs protruding out the bottom into the aisle insuring every person wishing to use the toilet in the night will inform me by way of brushing off my feet.

As I walk into the waiting room a little girl stands up in her seat pointing at me shouts “waigoren” to the delight of the entire room which erupts in laughter either at her antics or at me, Im not sure which. On the train Im sharing with some guy and a young professinal seeming couple. Seems like Im a big celebrity once again with the kids who ruun up and down outside the cabin using some chasing game as a pretense for staring in at me, there is a lot of noise coming from their parents cabin, who seem to be drunk or having a party or something, there are numerous loud references to the laowai. Eventually the mother of the children comes down to the cabin to ask if she can close my door in the hope that her children might actually go to bed.

8th Oct
Its quite jarring, arriving in a strange alien place and suddendly see your name written in beautiful calligraphy being held up on a sign by a small Chinese girl. Although I usually just show up in a city and wing it on the hope of landing somewhere to stay, this time Id booked ahead and sent them my train number so they could arrange to guide me from the station. We take a bus to pecularily named “The Hump”. The hostel is named after the deadly streach of the Himaylayas between British controlled Burma and Japanese occupied China flown by pilots in WW2. The mountains served as the supply chain to the resistance in China and was especially hazardous to pilots with an insanely high casualty rate. The uncharted remote valleys and gorges of Northen Burma and western Yunnan with powerful turblence and unpredictable weather at times claimed an astonishing 50% of all aircrafts used in some months. It was virtually a suicide run. I guess you’d probably expect the hostel to be a whole lot less hospitatlbe then. It has a very nice feel to it, with a large bar and pool table of which I would have many a fond memory, and a wall dedicated to WW2 memoriablia and war stories.

Im led to my room. Its a four bed dorm, quite plush by hostel standards, even by the luxiurious standards Ive come to expect from Chinese hostels. The room is empty after from a tall completely bald guy who looks to be in his mid forties, sitting on his bed he appears to be tunelessly strumming a guitar and plucking random notes, he looks up at me and gives some sort of grunting acknowledgement but appears to be utterly engrossed by his random noise making.

I decide to have a stroll around the city. Kunming is easily the prettiest Chinese city Ive been to so far, although thats not really saying much admittedly. There is a much more laid back feel to the place and the people seem slightly more polite (by that I mean they generally look away when you catch them staring). Although the city is apparently popular with foreigners I dont see any on my first days wandering. The Yunnan province is famously beutiful and the home to many minority groups, in fact I think minorities are majorities in Kunming and throughout the province, although unless they are wearing some fancy clothes they are generally indistinguisable from normal chinese to me to be honest.

I wander about for a while looking for the famous green lake area and despite the help of my LP map end up hopelessly lost once again. It was then that I made what was to be the most brilliant purchase of my trip to date. Finally after searching in vain in Chengdu, randomly there it was, on an outdoor stall, a compass. I managed to haggle down from 25 kuai to 8 (80 cent euro) for this incredibly useful object. Time and again Id find myself hopelessly lost in a foreign city and saved by judicious use of my new found friend. I also try some delicious skewered lamb on a road side stall. You pick a few skewers of raw meat which are then pasted in chilly powder and bbqed, my lips were burning afterwards,but very tasty and all for something like 30 cent euro a skewer. Later on I get hit by a woman flying around a bend on a moped, she is very apologetic even though I wasnt expecting traffic from that direction and had stepped out in front of her. Back at the hostel I meet Sylvia, a german girl who was just about to start work for an NGO in the province, we talk for a few hours in the bar and get on very well. I begin planning my next travels, my goal is onwards to Lijiang then Tiger Leaping Gorge and eventually to Shangri-la on the border of Tibet. Seems like a cheap and easy way to see some of Tibet without having to go through the hasstle of buying permits etc.

The gate of Jin Ma Bie Jie square (golden horse jade chicken)

The stairway to heaven

5th Oct
I awake around 5:30 before dawn. Outside the monastery is bathed in the deep blue of early morning, everything is incredible still and peaceful, illuminated golden buddha statues smile silently inside the temple. Chanting, gongs and drums sound with the breaking of the day. At breakfast Jess and Tierney are feeling unwell so I decide to go back down the mountain with them, the rest will continue on for a little bit more but since their flight is later on that day they wont be getting very far.
Before heading back down the mountain, first its time to visit the monkeys. Im curious to see them, at this stage they’ve been built up in my mind by the monkey stick hawkers to be verging on King Kong proportions. Having learned to equate tourists with food the monkeys come running as soon as we enter the area. 

They certainly dont disappoint, they are quite large, incredibly intelligent with humanlike expressions and seriously mean nasty bastards. Looking into their eyes you can see that they are searching, processing, thinking, as you are looking at them they are looking back at you appraising. 

Especially the giant king monkey strutting about with a look which seems to say, go ahead I dare you throw your shit at me I just dare you. One grabs my camera bags opens it and searches inside for food.
At first its all a big laugh, everybody is having a great time feeding the monkeys and chortling at their silly gambols, then suddenly there is at first an almost impercievable shift in the atmosphere, then the mood rapidly darkens. I look on as the king monkey casually leads over and takes a bite out of the shoulder of the man who had previously been laughing and feeding him and was now empty handed. 

I leap into action swinging my monkey beating stick, the king monkey recoils with an look of utter indignation. The other monkeys at this stage, realising that the food is running out, are starting to go ape shit. Running around the place screaming and shouting. 

before

Two adolescent monkeys come hurtling down through the trees, the park warden woman clearly has a history with these two boyos, she begins shouting, waving her stick and eventually throws a rock at one of them. They retreat hissing and screaking, all the monkeys are screaming and going crazy at this stage, along with a few women and young children, I think its time the hell out of here. 

Run for your lives

I make a dash for a pagoda like structure leading to a rope bridge, just before I enter something alerts me to look up, there up in the rafters is one of the nasty adolescents hissing down at me, I swing my stick and run for it.
Back at the monsatary we down play the shear awesomeness of our monkey experience to the two sick girls. 

We take the bus back to the hostel, they leave later that night. 

Several weeks later they traveled to Tibet where one of their number was to die tragically from altitude sickness. 

6th Oct
I spend the day plotting a new course. When good friends made depart hostels take on a strange empty feeling, full of old ghosts, people are contantly coming and going, new people arrive with bags on their backs oblivious to those who’ve been their before them. Im the only one left now and cant summon the energy to talk to anybody else. This seems to not be a problem for Fat Dave, a loud Chinese American man who has enough energy for both of us. Im trying to figure out how to make it to the pristine Juizhaiguo national park, its about 10 hours north of Chengdu but the roads are in bad condition after the earthquake. Ill have to see where I can get to tomorrow, train and bus tickets are hard to come by given that its the national holiday, but one way or another Im out of here tomorrow. 

Places where the sickly white underbelly of humanity lies clearly exposed, places like Irkutsk, Guangzhou; Hong Kongs evil hidden twin, grief stricken places like Sihanookville and the errie litter strewn backstreets of Phnom Penh. On the sad faces of the girls of Patpong humiliating themselves for the pleasure of men and looming large in the bone strewn fields behind waving cambodian children. A horrid ravenous feeling of life feeding upon itself clings to these places, places where people are debased to the level of hungry animals. Its hard to write without emotion about such things.

Id met many unsavoury characters in my travels and one true psychopath for sure; charming manipulative shallow and utterly amoral, occasionally the mask would slip and behind it the cold leer of the wolf waiting to carry you off for meat. With him I had an uncanny sense of something other, afterall what is a human with no humanity.

The burgeoning mentally ill too are drawn to travel, searching for or running from something, ultimately they cannot outrun themselves it catches them alone someday down some forgotten road. In my travels Id met several text book schizophrenics they tend to congregate in Hong Kong especially in the echoing maddening halls and corridors of Chungking Mansions.

Its no coincidence that so many legends, horror stories and fearful old wives tales centre around the wanderer, the solitary loner a traveller from afar whos motives are unknown bringing misery and pestilance. People have a natural wariness of the outcast.

Reading back in my journal, Im not entirely sure why these thoughts, or thoughts similar to them as I had yet to visit either Hong Kong or Cambodia were flickering in my mind as we traveled early that morning to Emei Shan. Maybe I was concious that I, as some unknown vagrant, had somehow attached myself to this group of closely knit clean cut college kids. They had invited me along, shared their food with me, even Jessica was now resting her head on my shoulder, she was coming down with a cold not good considering the hike to the top of the mountain was supposed to be three strenuous days, it was touching how quickly they had warmed to me, but I guess I really could have been anybody. I wondered had travel, instead of broadening my mind, made me hardened, calloused.

The current plan of action was to hike as far as we can get in one day, sleep in a monastary by night then continue the next day or take some manner of cable car somewhere. The trip to the mountain was about three hours, we then had to pay in, pay in to a mountain that is! It was to become a common theme throughout my time in China.

“Yizhi houzi” shouts one old woman stamping and growling and brandishing a large green bamboo pole. Indeed I reply handing her “san kuai”, the monkey beating stick was surely scaremongering, or so i thought at the time, but it would double as a decent walking stick I figured, and if any monkey should dare attempt to relieve me of my food Id give him a beating he wouldnt soon forget.

We hike for most of the day through some beautiful scenery over waterfalls and along winding moutain paths. Ocassionally the smell of buring incense would lead us past a briiliantly dcorated mountain monastery. There must surely be something in Buddism, the monks, depite living perched on a mountain ledge, in bitterly cold winters without any of the comforts of modern life are the most serene and happy people you will ever meet. Everytime we pass one we’d get a huge grin and a wave the likes of which I’d never seen on anybody over the age of twelve after the onset of the disease of adulthood.

After the days climb we had reached the border of the monkey territory and decided to wait till first light to do battle. We found surprisingly nice, if a little damp lodgings in a nearby monastry which included a delicious vegetarian dinner. The monks stayed with us for dinner chatting away and even gave us some nice Buddist necklaces for good luck. Till tomorrow my monkey friends, till tomorrow ………

 photos to follow…..

So remarkably my holiday photos and accompanying random musing have attracted more than three and a half thousand views since this blogs inception back in those heady days of july of ’09, how distant it all seems now. Starting from 1 view every two or three days to a peak of 100 views on the 20th of Dec. So Im left here wondering who are these silent onlookers peering in at me from the aether as I watch the world. Email or comments are most gratefully received …… driftervagabond@gmail.com

Proper update tomorrow

Im seven years old again, I sit with my father in the Stags Head pub off Dame street, its the late eighties the world is still new. A sip of his pint has me grasping for my coke, its disgusting, I vow never to touch the stuff, my father is laughing.

Now its early Friday evening, the after-work crowd gathers in Mahaffey’s pub off Pearse St. People scurry between doorways in the unrelenting Dublin drizzle. Taxis splash huge puddles up onto the footpaths perilously close-by. Then inside rubbing hands together to get the circulation going. The smell of damp coats and spilled Guinness, there is an excitement in the air, work has finished and the promise of the weekend ahead whispers seductively. Most of the old gang are there and the rest are on their way.

The sharp tang of the Tom Yams lime and coriander bring me to my senses. The old gang are all gone now and Mahaffy’s has long since close down.

Today myself, Paul, Stephen, Kung Fool and an Australia couple waste the entire day traveling in a cramped minivan to see the worlds largest buddha. Yeah its pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, a large giant buddha, the only notable thing distinguishing it from the ten thousand other buddhas Id already see at this stage is that yes its bloody big. This is just about enough to hold my attention for approximately seven of the ten minute boatride around its base which doesnt quite justify the six hours in total spent in transit there and back again. On the way back the driver takes us on a 45 minute detoured towards the airport apparently with the sole purpose of pointing out what appears to be a sex shop. Partly because I was largely responsible for the organization of this particular misadventure had fallen on my shoulders and partially because Im the only one who can communicate in any way with the driver much of my fellow travelers’ ire is directed at me, presumably with the intention that I subsequently pass it to the driver although this appeared to be optional. Back at the hostel we console ourselves with large quantities of local beer whilst trying to convince each other that we actually had in fact a fantastic time.

This was when I first met Jessica, she was with the rest of the americans but I hadnt met her the previous night since she didnt drink and usually went to bed early (although I later corrupted her into trying a (double) shot of Baileys, Im sure Ill burn in hell for that one). Now Jessica and I hope I wont cause undue embarrassment to her in saying this, is probably the sweetest, gentlest girl you could ever possibly meet, nobody however on the other hand has ever saw fit to employ the use of such dulcite adjectives in the description of my person, especially might I add, whilst under the influence, as I most certainly was of that fine autumnal eve, of the quare spirits. Suffice it to say that I was speaking forcefully upon a whole range of sensitive topics with an authority bestowed upon me by the Tsingtao national brewery. Alas I suspect that I may have played no small part in her decision to retire even earlier than usual that evening. Although perhaps as different as night and day, little did I know then that she would be one of the dearest friends Id make in my travels.

3rd of October.
Sober, I awake to the pitter patter noise of rain falling amongst the leafy garden canopy. My head hurts, my throat parched and there is something in the back of my mind I was supposed to be embarrassed about, oh yeah now I remember, damn…….

It rains the entire day, the first rain Ive see since St Petersburg as far as I can recall. I find Jessica sitting out on the balcony and spend most of the morning apologizing for my obnoxiousness. We say our goodbyes to Stephen “who will mail me when he gets to Beijing” this is as certain as night following day he assures me, depend upon it!, and to Eugene who is stopping off briefly in Bangkok for undisclosed purposes on his way back to the american mid west, “after all its going to at least another year” he enigmatically adds slapping me on the back. The americans invite me for dinner later that evening and ask if Id like to accompany them to the sacred Buddist mountian of Emei Shan the following day. Its a two or three day climb and they intend on sleeping in monasteries during the ascent. I leap at the opportunity and arrange to meet them the next morning. Back at the hostel I read up on Emei Shan on wikipedia, which informs me that it is the tallest of the seven sacred Buddist mountains of China. I grit my teeth as I read that my arch-enemies – the lesser tibetan macaque monkeys regularly set up road blocks to mug tourist of their food, bring em on I whisper quietly to myself in the half light of the computer screen. Several people nearby overhear me and begin staring over.

Two days ago I slept in what, as far as I could tell, appeared to be a homeless shelter. I noticed that despite turning out the lights at night the room retained a strange errie illumination, this is when I first noticed the holes in the floor boards revealing the street below, it was shortly after this I noticed the cockroaches crawling out of these holes. I was awoken regularly throughout the night by mosquitoes buzzing in my ear, by morning time I had about a dozen bites.

By a most fortunate twist of fate tonight I shall be spending my night in a luxury condominium in KLs “golden triangle” including a virtually private infinity swimming pool with a view of the KL nightline. Id like to think that deep down, somehow, I deserve this but Im coming up blank at the moment, any instances of guilt assuaging good deeds on my part which may somewhat justify this are most welcome at this stage

So I spent the evening enjoying the solitude of the pool + jacuzzi. Unfortunately I was eventually forced out, perhaps I had finally angered the gods of luck and chance with my intransigence , even given my run of absurdly good fortune this past month swimming in a rooftop pool during a tropical thunderstorm is probably pushing it a bit too far.

Hey and earlier today I visited the worlds largest enclosed bird park. Afterwards at the restaurant I noticed that a 20% reduction had been included in my bill, foolishly I decided to inquire about this. “Shhh” said the waitress pressing her finger to her lips, “I included the reduction for the locals in your bill, you didnt look like you had much money”. I wasnt quite sure if this was a good or bad thing, but upon opening my wallet i discovered that she was in fact correct. Anyway, happy days.

If people were forced to think of one word to describe me then stubborn Im sure must feature highly on many peoples list. Ok well perhaps several less neutral adjectives may ultimately win out but it would surely feature up there somewhere. It was this tenacity which saw me trudging through along the wide leafy avenues of Chengdu despite the fact that my nose was running like a leaky tap, my airways choaked with a phelgm of tar like consistency and my legs feeling as though lead weights had been attached. My mystery ailment of several days prior had finally revealed itself as swine flu, or so I had decided. My voice, never the most melodious at the best of times would now make Ronny Drew sound angelic by comparison, my eyes red and bloodshot such that children flee in terror screaming upon my approach – more so than usual.

The worlds largest and possibly most stoned looking Buddha

So the canny people at the bus station are wise to my plans towards skipping over the high western moutains and I cant get a bus ticket in that direction for love nor money. Realistically its probably just as well since swine flu at altitude is probably a recipe for pulmonary edema.

Later that evening I met some very nice American students studying in China back at the hostel. They introduce me to blowjob,, which involves blowing cards off a bottle with some undisclosed forfeit for failure. This game is followed by another risky game involving a deck of cards, shots of vodka and intimate probing questions, luckily Eugene was playing so everybody looked good by comparison. The game quickly took a sinister turn when Kung Fool used it as a vehicle to ask inappropriate questions of the girls present. The girls however seized on the opportunity, coyly alluding in an oblique way to threesome, one night stands and even a potential foursome. It certainly had Kung Fools ears pricked anyway thats for sure.

Other things which happened today include the big military parade in Beijing for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state. Without even the slightest hint of irony The china daily newspaper features a large frontpage photograph of tanks rolling along the Square with the caption “parade of tanks representing peace and harmony”. The entire affair is televised with people huddling in shops and on the corners of deserted street to watch, the whole thing creeps me out no end. A smiling young girl hands me a red yellow stared flag as I pass by.

Well maybe there is a good reason why the poet is forgotten but I must say that Ive met many people in my travels and saying goodbye can be difficult indeed. I had to laugh as I said goodbye to Stephen in Chengdu, we’d discussed this very topic, how people in hostels always exchange emails, say come and stay in mine if you are ever in town and so on but never really mean it. So we exchanged emails as he left, told me to look him up if im ever in london, I could stay in his afterall!. And sure he’d mail me once he got to beijing. That was the last I’d ever heard from him of course!

So now that Ive arrived in Kuala Lumpur I plan a couple of lazy days to get some through some of the piled up “office” work, By not talking to anybody at the hostel I have successfully managed to work myself into the now coveted role of social leper, as was my intention, now Im that guy that nobody ever seems to be talking to which means there must be a good reason therefore I dont have to worry about getting distracted. All too often Id show up at a hostel with good intentions of getting some writing done till suddenly some dude barges into the room and the next thing I know Im in a bar sucking a noxious mix of vodka and red bull out of a container the size of a childs sand bucket.

The last month has been absolutely hectic and left me a shattered husk of a man but now as Thailand receeds into the night hopefully once I reach Kuala Lumpur Ill get back on course.

“Yeah, and then afterward she showed me her dick”. It was with this immortal line that the whole edifice of Eugene’s (not his real name, but a strangely appropriate one) carefully cultivated mild mannered demeanor came crumbling down. It took maybe 3 local beers to open the sluice gates, but once the deluge had started we knew they were not shutting again till every last deviance had been aired to the light of day. And so we sat there like priests in a confessional until Eugene had finally cleared out his entire stable to a group of people young enough to be his children. This did nothing to reverse my long held deep suspicion of all middle aged western men traveling alone in asia; sex tourists the lot of them.

Myself and Stephen were initially having a conversation some distance away following Stephens freak out over an enormous spider which had emerged from under the beer fridge. “I learned my lesson, these days I always drop a hand down first, just to check you see” “But it was just waving it in my face gloating” continued Eugene, I recoiled as he began shaking an empty beer bottle under my nose as if for symbolic emphasis. We looked at each other shocked at what we were hearing, it was a classic beer induced Jackal and Hyde transformation. “They take hormones so it was tiny and all pathetically shriveled, but it was still there!”. “Be careful guys out there, Thailand, its a dangerous place, its like a drug, one hit and theres no going back you’re an addict for life, but seriously they are the most beautiful women on earth, many a man has made the mistake, many more than will ever admit it, but here I am now” he said nodding sagely with his hand cupping his chin, I looked at Stephen as if to say well this is going to be one for the blog for sure.

He continued, admitting candidly that he traveled in asia purely for sex and little else, forget about buddas and temples and ruins and whatever else. He visited thailand as regularly as possible and was only here in china for a short change of scene. I was intrigued, it was after all my first encounter with a confirmed sex tourist, I didnt know at the time but it was to be the first of many, and they werent all as outwardly pleasant as this guy. On the surface Eugene seemed like a standard middle aged man, married for thirty years with one daughter. His marriage had not so much collapse as gently eroded away over the years, although he and his wife were still the best of friends they both led separate lives and holidayed independently, her with her church whilst he sought a very different salvation in the gogo bars and massage parlors of south east asia. He was heavily involved in some very worthy charitable causes which defied any attempts to categorize him as a predator, he seemed to exist in some moral limbo beyond good and evil and living life freely according to his own set of personal ethics. Ultimately as I and my current set of disposable friends discussed afterwards, nobody could really find it in their hearts to fault the guy, oddly he was such a nice man.

How exactly did this tale with the ladyboy happen I asked Eugene, I mean how could you have not noticed? What the hell were you doing? Well it was dark and I was drunk, he replied sheepishly, it sort of felt the same. Ok this was one can of worms i didnt want opened so I quickly tried to change the subject, but Eugene was clearly going for broke on this one and just wouldnt let it die. Ill spare you the gory details dear reader.

No wonder they're going extinct, totally useless.....

What is it that really separates the brave from the mad? When I first started drawing my plans for this adventure Id been accused of both in almost equal measure. Perhaps to embark on solo travel in the darkened unknown reaches of the world requires a person to be slightly touched. To my mind, having observed many travelers and heard many a tale from the road, the difference is that the brave understand the risks and do it anyway whereas the mad see no danger. With this in mind I decided it was time to try something a little bit reckless, to venture illegally over the high mountain passes of western Sichuan towards Kanding, the wild forbidden frontier of eastern Tibet. The entire region was locked down by the military and totally off limits to foreigners during the national holiday but mummers had been reaching chengdu of a few lunatics who’d managed the journey dodging soldiers and hopping from bus to bus on the four day high altitude journey down to Kunming. The high passes would freeze solid in a few weeks with the first snows of winter, it was now or never. I began fishing about for information at the hostel, sidling up to people, glancing about like purveyor of dirty magazines before slipping them the question, any info on this particular route, nobody seemed to know anything. That was until I approached a wild haired Bulgarian guy. Sure it was possible, even easy he claimed, in fact he had just arrived from hitch hiking illegally across the entire Tibetian platau, it was at this point that I started subconsciously placing all solo travelers I encountered into one of two categories, the brave or the mad.

Still no photos, upload speeds in the Indian Ocean are abysmal …..

After a bus ride in which our driver almost killed several cyclists and a terrifying moto-rickshaw journey we eventually arrived at the curiously titled Panda reproduction center. Was there ever a more useless creature than a panda? They truely are a crap animal, there diet solely consists of a food so lacking in nutrients that there are forced to lounge around all day constantly eating just to survive, they’re fat, dozy and not particularly bright. So repulsed are they by each other that they almost never mate and when they do they’re so dumb that they often forget to feed their babies. Really the only thing pandas got going for them is that they are so damn cute, were it not for this they would surely have followed the dodo into oblivion long ago. In fact in China pandas are generally considered cuter than people and killing a panda is considered good enough grounds for the government to kill you.

We first enter the panda love education center where we, along with many chinese families and their young children watch a panda film featuring graphic scenes of panada rape and infancide accompanied by errie jinggly nursery music. Afterwards we wander around the park looking at pandas sitting on their asses chewing bamboo. Most people are more interested in taking photos of us rather than the pandas, they have a sneaking habit of focusing their cameras on the pandas then quickly snapping a photo when they think we are not looking. Im anxious to get out of there before the park staff round us up and lock us in a cage.

Back at the hostel I meet english Stephen and a french canadian, I cant remember what his name is but he sort of looked like a young version of Chris Farrelly from that awful film Kung Fool with more or less the same mannerisms. We are shortly joined by some other people including a interesting retired canadian guy enroute to Tibet to do some photography and a middle aged american man named Eugene (not his real name). I didnt know it then but the mild mannered laid back Eugene would later prove to be the star of the show.

Kung Fool manages to disgust and alienate everybody at the table with a particularity distastful story from his adventures in western Sichuan. The Sichuan province borders on Tibet and is essentially Tibetian in everything but name and Kung Fool had traveled over the mountains roads from the west through from Kunming to Kanding and into Chengdu. On his journey he had encountered a sky burial, it was something I had already read about, a religious ceremony practiced by a certain branch of Buddism whereby a persons finally act of generoisity was to give their body back to nature. The priest takes the corpse, smashed open the skull and carves up the limbs high up on a mountain ledge. Vulture, considered incarnations of the sky god then descend and carry the body into the sky in their bellies. It has been practiced in western Sichuan for centuries but rescently some particualily sick tourist have been trying to turn it into an entertainment spectcule. Kung Fool claimed he was on a bus with dead bodies up on the roof enroute to sky graveyard but denied he witnessed the ceremony, although this seemed to be due to bad weather rather than a lack of desire on his part.

pictures to follow …..

How good was Ankgor Wat and his lesser well known buddies? Well suffice it to say that it would be no exaggeration to say that were you to dump the pyramids in the middle of Rome and have the Easter Island statues the Eiffel tower and Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory perched on top, this place would still piss all over all of them. Them and all the other places Ive never been to. In fact I may as well just go home now, the entire rest of my life will surely be an anticlimax.

map

There is something wrong, Im not quite sure what exactly yet but the act of packing my backpack shouldnt usually leave me gasping for breath on my bed like some landed fish. Even allowing for the ever present snorer less than one meter away, Ive slept as well as can be expected in a dorm room but yet I am still exhausted. I book in for half a day to afford me the opportunity to lie down later on if I need it but I will be on a train bound for Chengdu in the evening, this is the first major deviation from my original itinery. I dont think there is much point in having decided upon a strict route through a country before you arrive, the best way to travel is to listen to the stories heard on the road, this is what has steered me towards Chengdu.

Eventually I summon the strength to walk down to the muslim quater to fill my usual train food prescription. I pick up some dried kiwi fruits, which are essentially slices of kiwi embalmed in suger as far as I can tell, a big water, as Ive started calling it, and some weird dried peanut cake thing which they are selling everywhere here.

On my way back I notice a peculiar advertisment in the underground passage under the bell tower. Its a rather distastful ad for plastic surgery offering removal of the asian double eyelid and a pointening of the nose into a perfect pyramid.

Judging by the before and after photos the overall intention is to turn a normal looking girl into a living anime doll. I caught a glimpse at two of these Chinese Micheal Jacksons in a shop window for wedding clothes, at first mistook the doe-eyed freaks for a pair of dummies.

Eventually after a number of daze induced errors, including finding myself on the wrong bus out of the city, I find the train station and my train in good time. The train is less impressive than the Beijing – Xian and reminds me much more of the old Russian transiberians, with the Chinese twist of a squat toilet. I share the cabin with two middle aged Chinese guy and some hip looking young chinese guy who keeps playing ringtone music on his phone. Its 16 and a half hours to Chengdu.

29th Sept

I awake around 6 having slept relatively well by train standards. The landscape outside the window is dramatic steep moutain gorges, steamy lush green subtropical Sichuan. The province is world famed for its spicy food which I look foward to sampling, the northern part of the province was devestated by an earthquake last year killing more than 100,000 people, Chengdu itself was hit too but not quite as badly.

I strike up a conversation with the young chinese guy with the aid of my dictionery, he doesnt speak a word of english. He is from the province of Helilongjiang not too far from Korea but works in Chengdu as a dj in a nightclub, he says he loves Chengdu which he compares to a beautiful girl, an allusion he seem to employ frequently, at various times describing Chengdu, his home town, his iphone and the dried kiki fruits I shared with him as such. I thought it might be a translational break down on my part however his repetoire clear extended beyond this allegory, I realised this when he described my dried peanut cakes as not so much like a beautiful girl but more akin to “something which falls from peoples’ bottoms”. Throwing them in the bin, I was forced to conceed that he may have a point. I asked about the earthquake, he told me that he saw the buildings shaking. He asks where Im from, when I tell him, he mentions something about whiskey, riverdance and drunkeness, is there nowhere I can go?

Seems Im a big celebrity on this train, one mother brings her precocious young daughter to me to practice her english. She is actually surprisingly good, every five minutes she shows up at my door with a new question, where you from? where you going? what you doing in Chengduuuu? Whenever I replied and asked her a question she’d suddenly get very shy and run away. 

I arrive at the hostel, its quite a large hospitalble place called Sims Cozy garden, the owner Sim is a korean who is very helpful. The place looks quite beutiful and the service is excellent. Chengdu is quite a large city which much greenery suggesting it gets quite a bit of rain. Nonchinese are very rare here and outside the hostel I generally never meet any. Stareing has become common place here too, Ive learn not to bother returning their gaze since they dont look away when you catch them leading to strange awkward standoffs. Or worse, laughing at that fact that you are actually staring at them! Its hard shaking the western notions thats its an act of aggression. Meet an israeli guy I met in Xian for dinner, its funny the amount of israelis travelling in china, perhaps its just that china is a fairly adventurous destination which might put off others, seems like every second person I meet is israeli, or irish, there are quite a few of them about too judging by the accents I hear. He tells me that the hostel location has moved from the previous editions lonely planet leading us to wonder if it had been damaged in the earthquake. We agree to meet tomorrow to visit the curiously titled Panada reproduction center.

My new best friend in Chengdu

I meet another guy in my room early in the morning. He is a small amicable Swiss guy who bears an uncanny resemblance to Pat Shortt’s psychotic Fr Ted character. I decide to take a bus to see what all the fuss is about over these famed Terrcotta warriors. This requires taking two buses, at first I catch a local bus going the wrong direction and end up at the terminus outside the city. I get off the bus into a crowd of teenagers who react as though a UFO had just crashlanded in front of them and its occupants had emerged and started breakdancing.

The bus journey takes two hours, Im the only foreigners on the bus as per usual. The terracotta warrior site consists of three big pits where thousands of terracotta warriors were discovered by a farmer in the 80s or something like that. Each warrior has a different face and are arranged in battle formation. They were supposedly ordered by the tyrant emperor Qin Shi Huang, the great thing about tyrants is that they eventually die, which is what happened to Qin Shi Huang. Tyrants, generally used to getting their way have a hard time accepting this eventuality so often see no difficulty in the assumption that their earthly dominion extends over the laws of entropy and construct pyramids or mausoleums or great big pits full of soldiers to serve them in the afterlife. Undeterred by the facts that the soldiers are just made of stone, and he would actually be dead, thats more or less what Qin Shi Huang did. Still its surprising that no chinese record in all of history ever mentioned these terracotta warriors, and that there just so happens to be a big factory just down the road pumping the things out, just though Id mention these incidental and completely unrelated facts.

Anyway, cant say I was exactly awestruck by the whole thing, sure there are lots of them, big deal, their entire existence is a testament to the obscenity of an untrammeled power turning inward on itself whislt ordinary people starved to death. Their construction is a monumental exercise in stupidity and time wasting.
Afterwards I eat at the Subway sandwitch place inside the compound, the staff are entirely chinese which makes me feel like home.

Back at the hostel I go for dinner with Pat Swiss and some slightly lecherous French guy. Afterward we come across some chinese doing calligraphy on the ground with a waterpaint brush. One of them offers the brush to Swiss, he dances about merrily for what seems like five minutes in a series of seemingly unconnected motions. One of the painters asks me what he is drawing, suddenly I see it, ya zi I reply, Donald Yatzi of disney fame to be precise. They stand around it in a circle contemplating its significance as we slip away into the night.

27th
Go to the big goose pagoda, sure it sounds like a blast but unfortunately doesnt live up to its promising name. Its basically just a moderately large tower. I stand at the base for about 5 minutes flitting back and forth between whether to climb it or not. Eventually I decided to climb, when will I be back at the big goose pagoda afterall? About 6 minutes later I found myself at the top slightly out of breath, squiting through a small window and somewhat angry at myself. The monastary next to it was quite interesting though with weird funny chants.

I also visit the drum tower and the bell tower which were fairly pointless to be honest. At this stage Xi’an is seriously starting to grate on my nerves, the pollution is awful, a thick grey-white haze seems to permanently blot the sun, crossing the road is an absolute nigthmare with traffic light few and far between and generally ignored when it comes to pedestrians. I decide its time to move on as soon as possible to somewhere a little more tranquil. I return to the hostel and being plotting a new course.

Hostel social politics are always amusing, when you first arrive if travelling alone you have maybe one night max to ingratiate yourself with the cool group. Should you fail in this regard you become immediately cast as a social pariah, some guy everybody keeps seeing around but nobody is talking to, which probably means your a weirdo and thus nobody will ever talk to from then on. Given the density of oddballs in hostels this is probably quite forgivable and indeed I must confess I have been guilty of such prejudices myself from time to time. Anyway at this particualar hostel so it would seem I have found myself being thus labeled. I spend some time assisting a middle aged chinese woman with her english until she is eventually thrown out of the hostel for some reason. Later on I strike up a conversation with a middle aged English guy who looks like he might have narrowly failed the audition for the sex pistols and never quite recoved from the blow. Several drinks later he starts explaining his personal philosophies to me which predictably are the usual set of feeble excuses and tired cliches. Although his peculiar decision to emphasize certain issues in relation to morality begin to make me deeply suspicious and suspect that his words and his actions were in fact polar opposites. Anyway I wont go into details or lonely planet will surely blacklist me for good. Later on he explained to me that the reason he had left his deadend job in some depressing north english factory town was that a fortune teller had told him to start life anew in a country beginning with C and also that despite being an atheist he was in regualar contact with the spirit world however, as he did concede, he had done a lot of drugs in his time.

I agree that some of the content of my blog isnt pretty, but then neither are many aspects of life and certainly not of the world in which we live. Ive just returned from a visit to the Cu Chi tunnels and the War Renaments museum in Ho Chi Minh city. Here on display are things far more obscene than anything I could have ever written. I am merely an observer and write about what I have seen not what I want to see.

The road beckons, once more I hear her sweet siren song singing me to shipwreck. Bag on my back, bottle of water in hand, dried fruit and instant noodles. Farewell Beijing, I have to keeping moving, I have to go, see you again some day.

I pick up a ticket for Xi’an, the place was really put on the map by the relatively recent discovery of thousands of terracotta soldiers buried in big pits by the first chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, apprantly the place will absolutely blow you away, at least according to the lonely planet, this remains to be seen. I dont know where I’ll go after that my original itinerary had me heading down Chinas eastern coast but some american guy told me Chengdu was really worth a visit, even if it was hit by a massive earthquake last year, that would really knock me off course but then Xi’an was also to the west anyway, more thought on this will be required I think.

So I hang around for most of the day till it gets dark then flag down a taxi to the train station. This is my first journey alone in China. The station is hectic, people here are traveling to all parts of the country and tend to stare much more at me, not being from Beijing themselves. There are many people carrying enormous sacks with goods presumably for sale. There are no other foreigners that I can see wait at my gate which begins to feel quite alienating, Im getting a feeling that Im about to head out into virgin China now severely unequiped and under prepared, Im really not quite sure what Im getting myself into.

There are several travelling classes on the train, hard seat which is probably as horrible as it sounds, soft seat, hard sleeper and soft sleeper, I opt for soft sleeper, four bed bearth which Is sort of VIP class in China where hard sleeper is the norm for most people. The seat classes are reserved for those types of people who enjoy hammering nails into their genitals. Im relieved when I discover that Im in fact on ther correct train. There is one other guy in our four bed comparment, neither of us acknowledges the other. I read for a bit about the road, then drift off to a dark and dreamless sleep woken only occasionally by severe jolts in the track.

25th
I awake in a strange mist enshrouded landscape, its as though Ive been transported into a painting of the China of old. This is mythical china, a land of steep green terraces, lush misty and mysterious. Passing silently by the widow it takes on an otherworldliness. I feel like im in China proper now

(cont) The city of Xi’an is surround by a huge wall several kilometers long, it really is quite impressive. My hostel is called Shuyuan hostel or something and is situated inside the wall at the south western corner, its probably the most beautiful hostel Ive ever stayed in. The interior of the hostel is a leafy open air green courtyard with vines running up the wall and overhead. Birds sing in cages and turtles and fish swim around the water features. Its amazing the amount of work that has gone into the aestheics of the place considering Im paying less than 4 euro a night to stay here.

I rent a bike and cycle around the top of the city walls. It was good fun affording me the opportunity to stare in peoples windows as I passed by and watch people going about their daily business from upon high. Although since the walls surface is entirely made from cobble stones Im walking like John Wayne by the time I get off the bike. As I cycle around I am repeated ridiculed by a middled aged australian couple lounging on the back of a golf cart.

Afterwards I wander down to the Muslim quarter, the place is utterly chaotic with motorbike emerging out of every recess blowing their horns. People definitely stare far harder in this city than in Beijing, I spend the entire day walking the city and see maybe a handful of westerners. I walk past one group of men playing cards on the side of the road. One looks up at me and shouts “hellooooo”. “Hows she cuttin” I roar back, pretty sure thats never been heard in Xi’an before. I leave them to ponder over its many meanings.

Later on back at the hostel talking to people starts giving me ideas of visiting Tibet.

At the temple of heaven

23 Sept (32 Days on the road, 12,000 + ? km from home)

Get up, get out of bed, run a comb across my head. Meet Crazy Aussie in the bathroom, he has a strange stilted shyness to him when he is sober, the sort of mannerism of a man who has possibly just committed some heinous reprehensible act against you and still isnt quite sure if you’ve realised yet, I dont think it was anything personal but I had a good look in my backpack just in case. He asked me what I was planing on doing today, I made the fatal mistake of telling him I was going to the temple of heaven instead of saying somewhere I knew he’d already been and was greatly annoyed when he suggested we go together. The conversation throughout the morning was boring and stilted as it slowly began to dawn on each of us that we didnt particularly like the other guy. His main stories involve working in a ski resort and stealing hash out of rich people chalets.

Bored afterwards I decided to amuse myself by bring CA to the pearl market, having already visited the Silk market I was armed and ready, I knew it was exactly the sort of thing which would shake CA right up. The marketplaces in Beijing, depending on your personality will elicit one of two extreme reaction. To me they would provide a quality afternoons entertainment, especially since being accompanied with CA who I knew who swing to the opposite end of the spectrum. You really need a fairly robust sense of humour to cope with the markets, the place is packed full of teenage girls screaming at you from every angle in an attempt to flog everything from fake shirts to fake iphones. They can be quite aggressive, outrageously rude and extremely persistent, pouncing on any sign of weakness or equivocation. They’ll try to rip you off mercilessly if you give them half a chance but its possible to haggle a 90% reduction in price if you hold fast. Sometimes its not easy as they drag out into their stalls, barracked you inside with their buddies then plead, cry, bully, threaten and beg you to buy their merchandise for ridiculous prices. One girl threathen to kill me after I joked I didnt want the tshirt she’d crawled under her stand looking for. Afterwards she pinched my nose and demanded I buy her an icecream since she’d given me such a good price. As you walk away you can hear them laughing at how much they ripped you off for.

It began pretty much the moment we walked in the door, a chorus of hey handsome man you buy my shirts, hey sexy man you buy my shoes etc etc from all angles, I could see CA was getting freaked out already. His self esteem was too fragile to allow him to buy anything for fear that he was getting ripped off and they’d all be laughing behind his back about it. Eventually we leave, I bought a memory card for a euro which disintegrated three days later.

The next day I bring him to the silk market where he plans to buy a fake iphone for 40 euro, obviously hed be better off burning the 40 euro. But CA has a dangerous look, I see vengeance in his eyes, clearly he is hoping on righting the indignations of yesterday and is going to play some hardball with a bunch of four foot something adolescents. He appears to be wearing some sort of wife-beater get up, which for the first time allows me to get a good look at the tatoo spanning his upper arm and shoulder. It has to be the dumbest looking tattoo Ive ever seen in my life, and Ive been to Limerick. It would appear to depict a stoned cockeyed dragon locked in mortal combat with a special olympian shotputter wearing what looked like the top half of a batman costume and a viking helmet. Well the girls in the marketplace seemed to like it anyway, anytime we’d approached a stall the girl manning it would remarkable favourably upon its aesthetic quality, before saying something rapidly in Chinese to her coworkers. Shrill, mocking laugher would quickly ensue from anybody within earshot. Later on I heard him discussing it with a girl at a stand, apparently it was something to do with the battle between good and evil or something, surprisingly the words “drunken” and ” terrible accident” didnt feature anywhere in the explanation. CA feeling like a big man after threatening to hit one of the girls pulling out of him eventually buys a fake iphone. Back at the hostel we discover that it has 1mb of memory and the touchscreen barely works.

We meet another Aussie in the lobby later on. He’s slovenly rotund with a tangled mop of curly hair giving him the look of some sort of hobbitlike creature, he is a real country aussie with a very strong drawl, in China on some ag business thingy, probably lives on a sheep farm of a billion acres in the middle of nowhere. He starts telling us about their trip to Macau where some of “the boys” were getting massages, normally afterwards “they just flip you over and …..” his eyes become fixed on some point in the middle distance and glaze over as he begins making frantic jerking motions with his right hand. An awkward silence descends as this continues for several seconds longer than was probably necessary with his mouth slightly open, drooling and his tongue protruding and grotesquely curled between his pursed lips. “Yeeeeeeeeeaaaaa…..” He says quietly in his thick Australian accent trailing off as if fondly recalling some past event. I feel my gorge rising as he repeat the disturbing sequence of actions again for no apparent reason.

Later that evening I find myself talking to a policeman for some reason. He starts asking my opinion on the whole Tibet issue. He frequently makes an analogy between Tibet and China and Northern Ireland and England. It wouldnt be the last time I’d hear such a comparison over the next two months, its was almost as if he were reciting some prescribed mantra. CA absconds to Hong Kong on the train the next day owning me lots of money, at least my backpack is still clean I suppose.

Predictably Crazy Aussie doesnt feature in todays episode, we eventually seen him around 5 or 6 walking with one shoe and a bag full of vomit stained clothes to the laundrette, in the mean time myself and CC have uploaded the vidoes from the night before onto youtube. He is also highly excited about a new arrival at the hotel above the hostel to whom he was speaking earlier. His name is Alex, born in the Ukraine, grew up in a German POW camp lived most of his life in America, he is a 76 year veteran of the Korean war and either the man whos life “the most interesting man in the world” was based upon or is suffering from a highly advanced case of Munchausen syndrome.

We take Alex for dinner where he entertains us with some of the most debauched stories Ive ever heard in my life. At one point I asked him, given that he was a

paratrooper and machine gunner in the Korean war, if hed actually ever killed anybody, sure he replied, “afterall it was my job. And just between you and me, you might think this is a little obscene, but there is a certain satisfaction in squeezing the trigger and watching somebody do the meat cha-cha. You dont think of them as human”. It was fairly startling to here these stories of out the mouth of a seemingly nice old man. Other stories he told were utterly depraved, I could see he was really delighting in shocking us. We quized him a bit to make sure he wasnt just bullshitting but he seemed to know his stuff. His claim to having a much younger wife I verified a few days later when I met her in the hotel.

Later that evening whilst wandering around the hutong I came upon a strange sight of a Dutch girl hanging out with some of the locals, she seemed to have fully incorporated herself into the community. I got talking to her, she was an interesting individual, I could see similarities in personality between the two of us, a sense of curiosity a searching for new and interesting things. While my curiosity had led me to trying dog meat the day before, hers had brought her to smoking crack cocaine in a drug den in Mexico city, which she admitted, in retrospect probably wasnt the brightest thing shed ever done. I found it funny that she said she could never bring herself to eat dog, crack cocaine ok, dog no thanks.

Being an animal lover I strongly advised her never to visit Beijing Zoo, which I had done at some stage over the last couple of days. I knew it was supposed to be bad so I visited really out of a morbid curiosity and to see just how bad it could be. Yeah it was fairly horrible alright. The favored children of the zoo, the pandas have it ok, the rest of the animals are clearly there just to constitute the world zoo. There are more employees tending to the grass and bushes than looking after them. The bears stand up and beg you to throw food. The big cats are trapped in tiny prison cells, continually pacing and generally going mental. The whole place smells like shit. All the while an errie happy happy gingle plays continuously over loudspeakers with portraits of Mao staring down like some creepy beardless santa claus, giving the whole place a nightmarish fairground feel.

On the way back I meet CC with McHotpants, the poor girl doesnt speak a word of english. CC is clearly delighted by this fact and spends much of the walk back to the Hutong opening degrading her in english,

I awake early, my roommates are lying sprawled in the their beds, I dont expect them up anytime soon. I wander around Beijing for a while eating jiaozi (dumplings) from street venders with little stalls with stacked steaming bamboo baskets. Security on Tianamen square has noticeable been ratcheted up a notch, bags are being xrayed on entering, nobody is going to rain on their parade thats for sure.

After a while I return to my hutong, the room is empty now but after a while one of its other inhabitants returns. A heavily tatoo australian named Jim, he looks like a cross between Wayne Rooney and an Irish rapist. We go through the usual perfunctory conversation, a conversation which would be played out countless times over the next few months, who are you, where you from? where you going, what do you do? etc, feigning interest while in reality attempting to ascertain the liklihood of the other guy taking a dump in your rucksack early some morning while you are asleep, a possibility I estimate as being as high as 50% for this guy.

We decide to go for a beer despite it being only 5 in the afternoon, on the way out we meet another, and who would prove to be pivotal, misfit in the hotel lobby. Jacob a partially insane manic french canadian nutcase who for a some bizarre reason is also apparently fluent in Chinese. He has a dangerous glint in his eye which puts me ill at ease, the look of a man who probably enjoys farting in the elevator just as it reaches his floor. He spoke a continuous babble at about 200 words a minute with almost no cohesion between sentences. The conversation seems to center around him haggling with a hooker over a $1 “happy ending” massage the previous night and the funny pills Crazy Aussie bought the previous night from some Nigerian dude outside a club which had him speaking in tongues. I had a hard time following precisely whats going on. Along with another french guy we decided to go get some dinner.

We eventually end up at a Korean bbq, nicely sauced up on rice wine at this stage. When the menu arrives I joke that we should check out the dog. Through the drink induced haze my idle comment was misconstrued as some sort of masculine call to arms prompting a chorus of hell yeah Id eat a dog. Id unleashed a monster and it was too late to back out now even thought it was quickly obvious that everyone was having second thoughts. So dog we ordered amongst a few other normal dishes which were delivered raw and bloody to the table for us to barbecue. Whatever breed it was it must have been some fatass dog, the little meat that each slice of fido was stringy and came apart easily after being cooked having the texture and consistance of old mutton. It wasnt particularly tasty, the beef proved far more popular, maybe there is a reason why people dont usually eat dogs.

Fido, centre stage, top

All the while we continued our drinking and eventually ended up in a seedy looking karoke bar most probably because either one or both of my companions had mistaken it for a brothel. The place was utterly deserted most likely due to the ridiculous prices ( beer was close to dublin prices which was madness considering you could buy it in the shop around the corner for 30 cent a big bottle). Myself and Crazy Aussie were anxious to move on but Crazy Canadian was busy flirting with a bar girl in a tiny pair of hotpants thanks to his fluency in chinese.

Several beers later we get a taxi to Hohoi the bar area in Beijing, Crazy Aussie is very drunk at this stage and making a general ass of himself, hes one of these guys fairly quiet while sober compensating with alcohol and losing the head with a bit of drink taken. He is prancing up and down the road running into oncoming trafic and generally acting the fool with the perplexed locals passing by.

Arriving in Hohoi, we disassociate ourselves with Crazy Aussie after he steals a bottle of whiskey off a table by reaching through the window. He runs off and we find him later swigging from it, in conversation with a police man who was continually refusing his offers to join in with him. After about half an hour more of this nonsense the effect of the spirits begin to take hold and Crazy Aussies legs start to fail him. This leaves myself and Crazy Canadian in a difficult predicament. We couldnt just leave him there, afterall in the unlikely event of him somehow surviving the night he’d still have ample opportunity to shit in my rucksack, although it must be said that the lift-farter was perfectly happy with this solution, so we drag him back to the taxis. I stand on the footpath with CA while CC argues with the taxi in Chinese, eventually we agree to pay 100 kuai for the cleaning of the taxi when CA inevitable throws up the dog meat he was eating earlier. All the while Chinese are filtering past laughing pointing and taking photos of CA sprawling out on his back on the footpath with his shriveled genitalia protruding out of his unbuttoned pants.

I attempt to force his head out the window as he starts throwing up during the return journey, eventually I give up and deftly use his bag as a vomit shield. Gingerly dodging chucks of semi digested dog I clamber out of the taxi at the hostel and myself and CC drag him feet first along the rubble and shit strewn alleyways. I believe at one stage he may have soiled himself but I cannot confirm whether this was the case or did we simply drag him over a large pile of human feces. At the hostel we are faced with the difficulty of getting him up a series of steps, a nice old chinese lady hovers around offering advice in chinese, I imagine her to be saying wise old chinese proverbs to us about the folly of associating with mentally unstable australians, but ultimately proves ineffectual. He is absolutely flithy at this stage and appears to be missing a shoe, neither of us wants to touch him, after about 20 minutes were steel ourselves, pick him up and drag him into the hostel, it should be stated that all the while during this escapade he was projectile vomiting.

Understandably the other people sleeping in our room arent too happy when we arrive at the door with our associate. My quip that perhaps we could just leave him in the corridor is met with eager approbation. We drag him into the room, I roll him on his back with my foot to stop him choking to death, there still seems to be a large amount of vomit in him.

Was wash our hands and return to the seedy bar where CC pick up where he left off with Chinese McHotpants.

Finally peace and tranquility reign.

There is somthing deeply frightening about the bufoonery of military pageantry. Observing it up close you cant help but feel that you are looking upon some great and powerful simpleton an enormous muscular brute with the petulant mind of a child. Military show, long since regarded as obscene in most other parts of the developed world is still rife here, especially with the imminent approach of the 60th aniversary of the founding of the state. Unsurprising perhaps since the marching bands, the ridiculous goosestepping soldiers absurd in their funny costumes, bizzare in their postures and terrifying in their unreasonibility, are really manifestations of mens need to demonstrate might to hide the deep foundations of insecurity.

If they can make men willingly look like idiots then having them kill you isnt much of a leap further.

For every military display there is always an accompanying insecurity. I wondered where the insecurity lay as I watched row after row of soldiers marching in single file even when in small groups of six or seven on their way to the rehearsals, who were they trying to impress, who were they wooing? The tanks the guns the nuclear missiles with a range long enough to strike the heartland of america or so I read with disbelief in a communist daily mouthpiece, disbelief not at the veracity of the statement but rather at the disgusting boastful language in which it was couched. Was it world they strike to terrify or their own voiceless people they move to awe?

So I moved out of the hotel near the lama temple, it was costing about 18 euro or 180 RMB a night for a single ensuite room, given that that wouldnt buy you a pot to piss in in London I naturally thought it was a bargin. But even 18 euro a night is expensive when you’re travelling for 8 months so I sought out even cheaper accomodation, hearing of a hostel at the otherside of the city costing only 4 euro a night for a bed in a dorm. So I loaded up and headed for the subway with my map in hand. The hostel was in located in the dank basement of a hotel in a hutong south of Tianamen square. The hutongs are warren like tiny narrow streets chaotically spawning off the main arteries of Beijing, to an untrained eye they may well resemble slums, this may perhaps be because they sort of are but wonderously functional slums with a hidden charm which sucks you in once found. They are slums the way only chinese can do slums. In fact should you find yourself alone in something resembling a hutong in any other city in the world, if searching for an adjective to describe your environs sphinxter-loosening or bowel expediating may well appear as apt description. But not here in Beijing, they look grotty but are perfectly safe (apart from the fact that 7 tourists were stabbed two fatally whilest I was there but this was highly unusual). They are the old real Beijing sadly being tossed aside in the name of progress. Each hutong is a community in itself with everything you could possible need crammed inside a little labyrinth, their resturants look absolutely filthy, places you’d never eat in in a million years back home but serve the most delicious and incredibly cheap food. None of them have toilets, in fact neither do any of the houses either, but a public toilet is always close at hand and easily located by their truly rank smell exfumiating out into their surroundings. I found myself eating like a king for around 2 euro everyday. The hutong was to be my home for nearly two weeks not because Id planned it like that but rather because I found it hard to leave.

On the way home

I was supposed to meet Tracy at English corner, thought it would be a good opportunity to inteact with some Beijingers but the entire of central beijing was shut down under police cordons, the hotel staff advised me not to leave the hotel because I may not be able to return that night as the ring of steel gradually increased leading up to the rehearsal, I found this an absurd prospect and ignored their advice. After walking for more than an hour and failing to find a single unoccupied taxi I eventually gave up and returned to the hotel. Convoys of buses, more than one hundred strong lined the streets ferrying soldier and children to the rehersal, the scale was staggering. Turning in to the street leading to my hutong I found my way blocked by a police cordon. Balls was the immediate thought crossing my mind. People were angrily milling about the cordon arguing with the police to be let through. I figure if I entered the melee there was no chance Id get perferential treatment so I sidled up beside a young sympathetic looking officer explain my predicament. I knew the way to my hostel along this road, the alternative braving it though the hivelike hutongs at night would surely see me hopelessly lost. So he put it to his immediate supervisor a slightly harder looking slighter older looking man, who incidentally was standing right next to him who then put it to his immediate supervisor, who incidentally was standing right next to him and was an even harder looking even older looking man, who then in turn put it to his supervisor again who was standing next to him — he looked like a Chinese version of Brian Cowen, bollocks I thought as I turned and walked off. About an hour later after groping my way in the dark throught the backstreets I stubbled by fluke on the hostel.

By roommates bungle in around 5 in the morning making no discernible effort to keep quite. As it will transpire they will turn out to be truly the finest assemblage of freaks that have ever been thrown together by chance possibly in the history of the world.

By evening time Id reached Hanoi. My first impressions are somewhat disappointing. Having traveled hardcore for two months across china, surmounting an enormous language barrier, coping with the difficulties of Chinese characters, the perpetual staring everywhere I went, the shouts of Laowai and Waigoren, this place is really just too easy. The place is crawling with Westerners. The hostel is full of dreadlocked bedecked rich kids who think they are hippies. The class of traveler in china tends to be older and much tougher which is not surprising given how daunting travel there can be, I almost didnt make it today due to either a misunderstanding or an attempted scam, Im not sure which.

Having come from Nanning, a city of three million Chinese and one white guy (me), I have to check myself from sneering and thinking pfff ……… tourists.

Whilst traveling in Mongolia he was with two doctors who strictly forbade him from attempting anything so foolish there, while his group were off riding he spend that day alone fishing in a little lake.

Furthermore he said camping in Mongolia was also dangerous too and told me about a girl who’d been eaten or partially consumed by a wolf recently in the Gobi.

A closer call than perhaps Id thought.

Perhaps their fears were well founded after all, or so I was forced to concede strolling back along Tianamen Square when not 24 hours after Eoin and Ashling had left I got scammed. I wasnt especially annoyed with myself since Id unwittingly blundered into the trap and managed, once it had been strung, with a little cunning to salvage the situation and escape relatively unscathed from what could potentially have been a far worse outcome.

Id spent the day indulging in one of my favourite pastimes, wandering around the city and sampling the various eateries and oddities. It was around 9 in the evening at this stage and dark. Most of the chinese, who eat around 6, had gone home so the streets were beginning to empty out. Hello, where are you from? I hear shouted out from a group of people waiting at a bus stop. Earlier some girls had tried to scam me into attending their caligraphy exhibition which i was specifically warned against in the guide book, so I was on high alert. Its a short chubby spectacled chinese girl, my second concern, was this a prostitute could quickly be ruled out, she was dowdily dressed and if she was Id imagine she’d have gone hungry some time ago. Im an english student do you mine if we talk for a while so i can practice. Sure I said why not, Id nothing better to do now that I was on my own. But since I was getting hungry I thought hey maybe it would be a good idea to ask the local for a recommendation, she could come along, watch me eat and practice her english its a win win for everybody. What harm could it be, after all if it was too expensive Id just leave. Well she must have felt like a fisherman who just noticed a particularly large and succulent fish had jump out of the water fried and filleted and right onto his boat. So we ended up and one of the infamous teahouses which I would be hearing many more travelers cursing about all over china over the next few months. The menu seemed reasonably priced so I said ok, she then suggested we do the tea cermony, I had a look, it consisted of about 15 teas, each priced at roughly 6 euro for two. THe pricing was actually per shot which I think many tourist might not realise since they would be expecting a pot of tea. So I said no. There was some back and forth between my supposed friend and the waitress. The waitress vanished then reappeared with a plate of watermelon and a plate of snack like things, she poured out some tea which I assumed to be complimentary. After three shots of tea and some funny motions like rubbing the tea cup on your eyes and dancing around I asked if this was the tea ceremony, she asked the waitress who said it was, i told her to stop immediately and bring the bill. I also noticed that the plate of watermelon and snacks written in small on the menu were 10 euro each! The bill was enormous by chinese standards, in excess of fifty euro and could have been many times worse had i not stopped the ceremony.

At this point I realised I was screwed, where was I? down some alley way in a place proficient in scamming tourists, would complaining or shouting really get me out of here without paying? Surely there were probably a whole room of guys with meat cleavers nextdoor in the kitchen. But no fucking way was I paying that bill. So I decided to play it cool, pretend I was a dumbass and not wise to what was going on. So we talked a little more, I found it sad that the people in beijing with some of the best english were the ones trying to steal your money. I kept saying I thought the meal was very expensive, she disagreed saying it was about standard (my accomodation in the hotel was less than 20 euro a night, when i moved to the hostel it was 4 euro a night). I was pretty sure when i went to pay that suddenly she’d have forgotten her purse or something and id be shafted for the whole amount, so i pretended to be really embarrassed and not have enough money, Id go to the atm once we got out if she could cover it. I knew once the bill was paid and we were outside I would be in the clear. I told her I had some russian roubles too which maybe I could pay with, she said sure I could which was a dead give away that it was a scam since I how could she know that, I couldnt change them in any bank in china. When she asked me the exchange rate I told her a slightly inflated one but still not too big to trick her into thinking I still trusted her, if I told her the russian roubles covered the meal then I was sure she’d be suspicious that I was on to her, I threw about 1.50 worth of roubles on the table saying it was worth around a tenner so we were still far short. She called the waitress in, pulled out her wallet stuff with 100 yuan notes and paid the bill. Outside I told her I knew she worked for the place, she denied it, why hadnt she waited for the change then I asked, in her eagerness and greed she barged out the door after me thinking we were on our way to the bank. Then she knew the game was up and I hunted her quickly back into the night, prowling for more victims. So be warned unwary traveler there be predators out there on the world who think not like you or I.

The best picture I have of the forbidden city, Im a pretty crap photographer

15th Sept

So we get the big one out of the way. The three of us head off in the morning on a guided tour of the great wall. Our tour guide is a cute little chinese girl called Tracy. Tracy speaks good english when she is recieting her little speel but when you ask her a question waves of confusion wash across her face. At one point we asked her how long the wall was, about 1000km she said, then just the section of the wall we’d walked, this was also about 1000km, which might explain why we were so exhausted after trekking along it I suppose. I was talking with her for a while, she said she liked sports and was an attendant at the beijing olympics, she asked me if I like basketball, I laughed assuming it was because I was tall, then she said she liked basketball which I found even funnier since she was barely five foot tall. Although her favourite sport was hip hop dancing. I told her I was trying to learn chinese, she suggested I go to the english corner in Renmin University where everybody had tospeak english, i wasnt entirely sure how this would improve my chinese but it would be interesting anyway, she regularily went and said to ring her if i couldnt find it.

Anyway the wall itself was pretty impressive, how they got all that stone up there is quite incredible. It also amazing how despite all the work it required it turned out to be essentially useless, Gengis Khan simply went around it.

Eoin and Ashling were pointed towards a super fancy beijing duck restaurant by a food critic they met in a Starbucks. I can safely say that it was the nicest meal of my entire life. A chef comes out with the duck and carves it up on your table. They even had a ridiculous crazy food show at the end with people skipping with dough and some guy marching on stilts shaving bread off his head and the like. We were almost falling off our chairs laughing, the other patrons were applauding politely.

Did a whole load of other tourist crap like the forbidden city and the lama temple, I couldnt be arsed writing about them. My chinese language skills grow exponetially by the day. although thats quite easy since they started pretty close to zero.

People praying to a budda at the temple. This photo is probably deeply insensitive and sacrareligious

16th
Go to the olympic village place, a strange a depressing area. The annoying olympics gingle plays incessantly over loud speakers on a huge deserted concerte wasteland where once stood hutongs demolished. Its strangely appropriate that the place feels like a graveyard. There are pictices of the winners all over the place. I find the whole celebration strange, cant help but think about the 90% of competitors who after years of effort and pain won nothing and returned home in ignomy, this means that I have the mind set of a loser. The olympics and competitive sport to me has always been weird. Some guy can run with an egg and spoon faster than anybody else on earth or something not all that dissimilar and is treated like a god, why dont they include beer pong and the three legged race and other such events?

17th
Ashling and Eoin are fed up of cities, wanting to lie on a beach for a while they’ve booked a flight to Bangkok leaving me all on my lonesome once more. They invite me to come along since they are relucant to leave a hapless fool like me on my own. Its definitly tempting, I feel I’ve got on really well with them, they’ve been great fun and the easiest thing in the world would be to simply tag along, but thats not what this trip is about for me, I really need to travel alone and China was a major part of my itinery so I really cant skip it, now the time has come to strike it out alone. Early in the morning we say our goodbyes knowing that our paths would not cross again until we are all back in Ireland, they will be far ahead of me since Im not planning on reaching Thailand until at least January. So time to go it alone, what adventures lie ahead? Time to get to know the ins and out and the dark dirty secrets of China…….

The ruins of St Pauls in the background

I was asked for a few pics from Macau, the place must be truely unique, a curious blend of Portuguese and Chinese. A sizable minorty of Portuguese still live here. The next post will be back in chronological order.

Its a very beautiful place by day, but at night the streets are crawling with prostitutes. Ill write more about it when by blog catches up.

Display of peace and unity

The unification of our country, the unity of our people and the unity of our various nationalities, these are the basic guanantees of the sure triumph of our cause.

- On the correct handling of contradictions amongst the people Feb 27, 1957, Mao Zedong

For some reason whilst reading this passage I hear it punctuated with farting, breaking wind and horrible plonking noises. I cant help but imagine the great helmsman sitting on the toilet whilst eager sycophants jockey around to scoop up every scrap proffered. I bought the little red book of Mao quotations from some street vender, its full of this sort of nonsensical platitudes which seem to be sort of saying something then suddenly just fall flat leaving you grasping at straws and with no memory of what you’ve just read. So China is a communist country where everybody is equal and nobody has anything to hide. Those is search of privacy and other such burgeois notions concocted by the capital running dogs of the West and their sinister imperialist master are rightly viewed with suspicion. These werent quite the exact thoughts running through my mind as the guy dropped his pants, squatted till his butt cheeks were within an inch of the tiled floor and let out a god awful huuuummmmfff noise of exertion, the entire time never once breaking eye contact with me. Maybe this is what Mao was talking about, perhaps he feared that the process of erecting partitions between the toilets may perhaps hastened the day when China returns to medieval feudal serfdom. Anyway toilets in China are a significant source of culture shock. I was told by a Chinese person that in school going to the toilet used to be a communal activity, in fact there was even a going to the toilet song to be sung during the excursion as they all held hands and skipped merrily along. I guess this helps build that “unity of the people” spirit.

12th Sept Get up, managed to impress myself by booking the hotel room for another few nights entirely in Chinese. I then walk into central beijing, to get a feel for the city, this takes about 2 hours. Closer to Tianamen square the places takes on a erriee feel, the streets are all cordoned off with soldiers manning the line every few meters, their eyes follow you and you walk by. Many people are wearing red armbands with the Orwellian sounding euphemism “Public saftey volunteer”, they are the decendents of the infamous red guards.

13th Sept Feel weak and sick, spend most of the day in bed. Receive an email from my surrogate parents, Eoin + Ash to meet for dinner.

14th I dont know what I did this day, there is no entry in my journal so it mustnt have been much. The only notes is about how Chinese babies have a particularly unique item of clothing, its a pants with the arse missing to allow their parent to hold the babys ass over a bin or a drain or just the footpath. I found this very funny.

Im currently living in an enormous vertical labyrinth lunatic asylum called ChungKing mansions. I have some unbelievable stories about this place if I ever get around to writing them up.

Home sweet home

We awake to a dramatically changed landscape, high jagged hills, dry desertified in places but intensely irrigated elsewhere and above all else heavily cultivated. Finally after months of waiting I have my first opportunity to test out my self taught Mandarin on a real live Chinese person. Women hui kan ChengCheng ma? I ask the carriage attendant, inquiring if we can see the great wall yet, although depending on the inflections I may have told him I wanted to eat his children for all I know. Meiyou he responds in the negative. Delighted with myself I return to may cabin, basking in glory of this incredible triumph as I so saw it, five minutes later my confidence is shattered when somebody points out what appears to be a large continuous wall snaking around the mountains and off to the horizon, I really wonder what I must have said to that guy. Anyway Ill have plenty of time to improve my Chinese over the next two months.

Eventually we pull into Beijing around midday. Initial impressions, as the capital of a nation of 1 billion, the place is unsurprisingly enormous. Very modern looking, wide open highways, overpasses etc. Our hotel has been moved out of the central Tianamen square area up towards the Lama Temple since the entire area is closed doing for the 60 aniversity. Get into the hotel, basic but ok. I take a wander about for a while, walk for two hours without seeing a single Westerner, surprising, also people seem to speak very little english in general.

We are to meet up at 8 for a farewell dinner before we all go our separate ways out into the world. Its the end of the road for Renee who will be back in the office in Syndey in two days or something. Likewise for Brian, he’ll be around for a couple of days then back to Scotland. Avril and John too have reached journeys end and are flying back to New Zealand the very next day. Of the rest of us, Michelle and Jo are booked into another tour around China for 10 days or so, Steven and Shanita are heading on in a few days to Shanghai then on to Vietnam and eventually to Australia. Ashling and Eoin are planing to stay a few days then maybe on to Xian. Efrat is back on the job the next day and back to St Petersburg for a trip through central asia. Then finally theres me, I have halfbaked notions of learning Chinese in Beijing and will surely linger here in China the longest, the rest will undoubtably be half way around the world by the time I leave. Here begins the adventure proper.

The meal was incredible, plates and plates of delicious food, due to my relative proficiency in the use of the chopstickes I managed to eat several times my fair share for less than five euro. We say our goodbyes, it even manages to bring a tear to the eye of our ex Israeli army sargent.

Afterwards we head to the pub and get ridiculously drunk on less the a tenner. Predictably at the end of all its only the Irish left standing. Eoin confesses to me that several members of the group had expressed concerns to himself and Ashling, the general theme being “you guys arent going to let him travel the world on his own, right?” The him in question being our hero, this author, yours truly, can you imagine! But he said “he saw through the act” and realised Id been taking the piss out of them all the whole time and that “Id had him in stitches laughing”. Indeed I replied, let me play the fool! Twas but a mask, my comical exaggerated ineptitude. Certainly I had played it up for laughes but was secretly taken aback that everybody genuinely thought I was some sort of clueless buffoon, I suppose the fact that Id somehow cut myself off a door earlier that day didnt help things. (And here I am now having travelled across the length and breath of China alone on buses and trains all the way to Hong Kong!). Anyway I was also touched by their concern too I must say.

Several member of the group tell me that they are pleased to see that I hadnt expired during the night, I thank them and inform them that I share their enthusiasm. I ride the ox cart with a number of others back to the road, by the time we arrive those seated near the front are spattered in ox shit, its a small price to pay for being able to breath I suppose.

So its back to the hostel, and predictably its still full of the same collection of freaks. We split up and explore UB individually, a number of people comment that Im still looking rather poorly, I suspect some people might be still wearing their horse hair covered clothes as I begin to find myself breathless inside in the hostel once again. I stagger around Ulan Baatar in a daze, I quite like this city despite the obvious squalor, the people are friendly and the city has a interesting rough hewn energy, stubbornly clinging to existence out here amongst the swirling sand and dust storms. UB is also very cheap, another nice contrast to Russia, you can do your entire shopping in the supermarket for something like two euro and eat like a mongol king in a restaurant for something like a fiver. I go visit the large statue of Gengis khan, revered here, considered a brutal tyrant almost everywhere else, his face adorns all the curency.

Night falls, back at the hostel I am greeted by more hideous choking gargling noises as Weird Indian via his nostrils once again channels a gateway between this plane of existence and the ninth layer of hell. I put my earplugs in an drift off to sleep.

September 10th
My earplugs have fallen out, I am awakened to the same noises as last night as weird Indian begins his daily ritual. We get up and get packed, its onwards to the train bound for Beijing. Eoin has another run in with Freaky Dutch. The kitchen contents were supposed to common to everybody in the hostel. After he had pointed out that the milk on the table in the kitchen was empty, Freaky Dutch turns to Eoin and coldly replys “The milk, unlike the serving girls, is not communal”, ok I may have added the serving girls bit, but you get the idea.

Then is onwards to the train. In principle its the same train as the Russia train as far as I can figure, the cabins have exactly the same structure apart from a few superficial changes however its a Chinese train and a world away from the dreary grey horrors encountered in Russia, the staff are polite and the dining car is beautifully ornate and welcoming. As we pass through the Gobi desert, either due to the heat, the experience of the last couple of nights or the impure nature of Mongolian beers, Im feeling drunk after three, retiring to the cabin I sleep for an hour and to my amazment awake with a mild hangover.

I spend much of the rest of the day staring out the window at the vast open plain of the Gobi, the heat is seering when the blinds are up. Maybe its a result of coming for a small country like Ireland but wide open spaces have always had a strange entrancement for me. We travel encapsulated in a bubble across the hostile expanse, in all directions the desert stretches away, boundless and bare.

At night we reach the Chinese border, the train pulls into a shed to change the bogies, Russian and Mongolian trains uniquely use a large gauge than the rest of the world, a factor instrumental in halting the German advance during the second world war or so I am told. We are locked inside as the carriages are separated, raised and the wheels changed. The whole process takes something like two or three hours include clearing customs.

My first taste of China is the warm winds of the desert night as we stop at a station just beyond the border. A weird synthesizer version of Auld Langs Syne is being played over the station speakers followed by Lional Richies Say me Say you much to Renees delight, inside there is a shop selling an enormous variety of brightly packaged goods most of which are unidentifiable to me. Many vacuum packaged dried meats and bizarrely flavored packs of crisps including kiwi, blueberry and cucumber flavoured Walkers crisps, its funny how subtle differences are most keenly noticed.

Accross the river I rode and over rocks and hills doing my best John Wayne impression. Later others, frightened by the experience, confessed that they were thinking of another horse riding celebrity, Christopher Reeves. Our first stop for lunch was at the ger of a shamans, she had become a shaman following a personal tragedy, the death of her son. She described dreamlike visions calling to her and how the gods had been angered by her initial refusal to answer their calling and taken her son. She fed us a delicious meaty broth of potatoes and sheep, boiled on a fire in a large pot.

onwards we rode, picking up to almost a gallop. It was then that I first began to hear it, a deep wheeze emanating from within my chest, a disturbing lingering after sound following each inhale and exhale like the sound of escaping gas. Immediately I rode back to the ox cart and dismounted. I climbed up on the cart and quietly hoped the situation would resolve itself. Two hours later we arrived at “Mr Bald’s” camp of three gers. Mr Bald is a giant of a man, a former champion wrestler he looked for all the world as though he could be a direct descendant of Gengis Khan himself. His lower lip was swollen to grotesque proportions from a bee sting giving him air of brutish comedy. He ambled slowly about from one place to the next never rushing never hurrying, for he truly was the lord and master of all he surveyed.

As the day continued fears of breathing continued to play upon my mind, but sitting down by the clear air of the river the wheezing subsided and I felt at ease again. Lying back against the bank I paused savoring the incredible beauty of the Mongolian landscape, the hills teem with life, herds of sheep goats, cattle roam freely, a group of horse are drinking downstream in the river and slowly making their way to the forest on the opposite bank. Peaceful, idyllic I write in my journal.

The dinner was delicious, huge chunks of meat boiled in a large broth, much to the dismay of strict vegetarian Jo, the concept of vegetarianism is utterly incomprehensible to the Mongolians. The rest of us, being of less discerning dispositions ravenously hunkered down in a fleshy orgy of gristle, fat and bone. In the tent silence falls almost immediately apart from horrible guttural ommm nomm noises, trance like in their deep intensity, punctuated by the occasional belch. Licking our fingers like savages, greasy bones and sinews littered the ger by the time we were done. The most amusing incident of the evening was when Eoin poured our his entire stash of wine for the evening into a large bowl. “Good?, good?” asked Mr Bald thrusting a gnarled digit at the bowl of wine. The look on Eoins face was priceless as he reluctantly handed over the bowl to Bald for a taste, knowing full well what was about to happen. Of course Bald downed the entire stash of wine in one and ambled away with a sly smile on his face.

Mr Bald, or as he is known to friends Mr Bald with Brian.

Either the heat in the tent or perhaps it was the furnishings themselves which triggered it, but suddenly the wheezing was back again for an unwelcolm encore, this time it wanted a head. I staggered out of the ger, collapsing on the earth to the side of the tent sucking at the cool evening air outside. In the distance on the ridge on top of the hill two bulls silhouetted now passed by bellowing into the setting sun. Mr Balds bull bellowed in reply, stamping his hoofs and pawing at the earth in anger at the intruders. He bagan to slowly advance in their direction bellowing and snorting. I feel lightheaded now, I can still breath but at this point have no idea how much worse the situation could potentially get. One thing I knew for sure was that there was no way I wsa sleeping inside the ger. If I had to sit outside in the freezing night then so be it.

Night was falling fast and I needed a solution before it was too dark to do anything. Efrat and Bogey searched for a fold up tent but unfortunately we hadnt brought any with us this time. Stephen being ashmatic normally carried an inhaler but much to my dismay had left it back at hostel. Bogey tried to communicate my difficulty to Mr Bald, he seemed to think that i wouldnt sleep in the tent because of the smell, I was anxious for him to understand that this wasnt the case although I doubt the concept of being allegic to horse is one ever encountered by a mongolian nomad. In any case Bald came up with a solution, he would construct a tent by draping some tent material over the ox cart and I could sleep under it.

So that was how I came to find myself under and ox cart in mogolia slowly axphixating. I had hoped that once the allergen had been removed my breathing would improve. However whether or not my oxcart home had been contaminated by horse hair remained to be seen. As darkness fell everybody else retired to the gers leaving me alone outside, I hung my little LED lamp from one of the beams under the cart, unrolled a sleeping bag and pulling the tent lining under a log thereby sealing the tent from the rapidly dropping temperatures outside and waited. I had decided to remain concious to moniter the situation, not that it mattered of course, there was no way I was getting any sleep.

The mogolian night is rarely quiet. As I lie concentrating, controlling my breathing to prevent a potentially disastrous hyperventilation I hear many things outside. Clumping chewing noises of herd of herbivorous creatures grazing not far from my cart, occasional galloping of wild horse as they pass by to new pastures, barking from the dogs of nearby gers and once a chilling scream of a horse reveberating off the hills, very far away now. Suddenly a deep bass growling, I freeze, silent. Could it be a bear outside, I had a packet of dried meat in my bag, perhaps the smell attracted one. Realizing it was just Mr Bald snoring nearby the panic ebbs away.

As the night wore on, slowly the wheezing lessened and I realised that I was safe. I left the tent and sat outside in the darkness. I sat there looking at the moon and the plough wheeling silently overhead, I began conscious of an overwhelming feeling of transience against their immutability, of something I couldnt quite articulate, it was cold but I didnt care, I knew soon the dawn would come and Id be warm again.

I crawled back under the tent but couldnt seal it up again as perfectly from the inside allowing cold air to penetrate freezing my feet. At one stage some nosey horses dug up the back of my tent and started peering in at me, until I chased them away. Before the dawn I heard some particualarily strange sounds, a heavy artillary bombardment very far away in the distance, I had initially mistaken it for thunder but the sustained barrage, lasting about a minute suggested otherwise. I asked the others about it the next day but nobody else had heard it, maybe it was the first sign of an insipent madness afterall. Eventually I slept for maybe an hour, a happier dawn Ive never seen, the sun casting massive shadows over the rolling hilly landscape. At day break I left the cart and wandered down to the river and waited for the rest to rise.

(more pictures to follow including picture of my palatial accomodation when I get better upload speeds)

My most salubrous accomodation

Three hours, two maybe at a gallop, not that it mattered of course, I could never take a horse now even were it not for the darkness of the night. And then if by some miracle should I make it, what now? Another three hours at least on a cratered dirt track to Ulan Baatar where they would surely have something resembling a hospital? It quickly became apparent to me that out here, if my condition should further deteriorate, Id never make it, of that I was certain.

Possibilities, permutations ran quickly through my mind, lunacies dismissed as such in the sober light of day now loomed large with seductive whispered promises to a desperate mind seeking salvation. A growing panic lending credence to madness and a mind in a wanton search for an answer always finds one eventually in some strange occulted recess. Was it getting worse? I would have to act and act soon. Would I be better off taking my chances alone blind in the hills but for the light of the moon where the air would be clearer? Surely it was an act of terrible desperation, to venture out from beneath the ox cart into the freezing dark. The dogs were frightened, they whimpered now and cowered, something out there had terrified them earlier. Even before that as I lay there in the dirt I could hear a faint howling low and mournful out there beyond the hills, in the mountains, bearly precievable above the wheezing of my laboured breath.

How had it comes to this? What road had led me here to this place? A dark gallows humour, I laugh, you plot, you measure, you control yet somehow you find yourself here, here as I am now trapped, in an absurd improbability, a mockery of every carefully crafted plan. Here I am now, lying gasping for breath like a landed fish, here I am now beneath a shit covered ox cart in the freezing Mongolian night, praying for the dawn.

In my mind I see a soldier lying dying on some distant shore, far from home, I know his mind as his life ebbs away, I know where it goes, I know the refuges it seeks. His mind turns towards home, to the people and places he knows, fleeing this unreality, seeking a familiar fantasy to cling to for comfort.

But a few weeks ago I was sitting on a bus, or having a drink with friends, or engaged in some boring quotidian of daily life, but now I was here as if Id awaken from my life into an impossible nightmare. In my mind I tried to join together the events which had brought me to this point.

Mighty Baikal

Spent the next two days at Lake Baikal. The homestay and the entire area has an eerie feel, the village has many wooden houses but we wander the lanes and almost never encounter another human being, its almost as if the entire population of the town has vanished. I cant help but feel as if we are on the set of the Truman show or as if the entire village is in fact the deserted film set from the hills have eyes. A number of us speculate that there is simply nothing to do around these parts and the people spend all night drinking and sleeping during the day. Occasionally I catch a twitch of a window shutter or a shadowly face vanishing around the end of a wooden fence. I am gripped by an overwhelming fear of cannibalization..

Beware the cult of the head

The owner of the homestay appears utterly obsessed with the chillipaka with is apparently russian for turtle, i imagined it to be some prehistoric beast to which the local regularly sacrifice any so foolish enough as to venture out here. In fact its a giant rock out in the lake which if you are sufficiently myopic bears a slight passing resemblance to a large turtle (with is head still inside its shell). We trek for about 3 hours there and back, there are now a number of pictures of myself and Stephen looking decidedly unimpressed next to turtle rock.

The homestay has a sort of sauna attached to it, later in the evening a bunch of drunken russians show up and strut around bollock naked shouting nationalist slogans at us.

The next day we take a trip upriver in the owners speed boat, its fairly unremarkable expect for one point where we rounded a river bend and found some guy with a Borat mustache standing on the bank in the middle of nowhere with what looked up luggage at his feet almost as if he were waiting for a bus.

WTF?

Afterwards its back to Ulan Ude, on the way back we stopped at the high point again, where Jo was almost abducted by an enormous Russian hobo, the guy was huge, towering several inches over me and stinking of alcohol, the hostel is quite nice despite appearing to be located in the middle of a wooden shanty town where people seem to be living with their animals. The bar had a ping pong table where I dealt such an almighty punishing lesson in humility to both Eoin and Stephen that I wouldnt be surprised if the future sight of a ping pong ball doesnt leave them sobbing gently whilst curled in a fetal position sucking their respective thumbs. (Note there may be several competing, less reliable versions of this series of events). We head into the town later, Ulan Udes big claim to fame is that it has the world largest Lenin head, so I guess you cant go to ulan ude without seeing the big angry Lenin head. We make a mockery of it by shoving our heads inside our coats and taking photographs with it in our place. Yes there is also an Irish bar in Ulan Ude. Later that night I slept on a cloth covered wooden board masquerading as a bed, slept surprisingly well.

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

7 Sept

Up at 6 am to catch bus to Ulan Bataar. We travel over a runied landscape towards the border, its clearly getting progressively poorer as we approach mongolia. Journey is expected to be 12 hours with 2 hours budgeted to the protracted process of crossing the border itself. Population density drops off severely with settlements becoming sparse. The landscape is rolling and hilly, a light shade of green. Bowel movements, frequency or lack thereof have now become a common topic of conversation amongst some members of the group, clearly we are all getting to know each other quite well at this stage. Thankfully my old iron stomach is holding up well and I have thusfar eluded any noteworthy medical complaints.

We wait in the bus until the Russian authorities are good and ready to let us out of their country, which is surprising given how welcome they made us feel you’[d imagine they'd hurry it up a bit. On the other side the mongolian official greets us with a smile, I love this place already. across the border at first there is little difference, however quickly tents dot the landscape, there seems to be only one road. Ulan Bataar will never be described as pretty, entering the city looks like a scene straight out of Mad Max, twisted metal debris everywhere, people crowding out of tent like huts, tall utilitarian concrete flat blocks.

Given that most of UBs citizens are at most one generation from riding horses I probably shouldnt be surprised that the traffic in the city is utterly chaotic, there appears to be essentially no traffic lights or rules whatsoever, the traffic police are relegated to the role of some sort of comic buffoon and are treated with such derision as befitting this station. Waving away in the center of the road they are almost universally ignored, unbelievable people even blow their horns at them, we couldnt be further from Russia now where you'd be shot dead for a lesser insult.

We are met in the bus station by the guy who runs the hostel, its affiliated with a charity for street children and he is predictably some freaky dutch guy with a big mad bald head on him and surrounded by a yoga-jedi master aura. He arranges taxis to take us to the hostel expect somehow myself John and Renee end up in the car of some random guy who pulls up. The driver ploughs a third lane for himself down the middle of the road and after 10 minutes of driving turns to me and asks where the hell we are supposed to be going. Nobody knows, this lunacy continues for another 10 min until we eventually contact somebody and end up miraculously where we are supposed to be, which looks remarkably like a condemned tenament building from 1930s dublin. The hostel is full of utter freaks, the sort of hippyish losers that pretend to be all peaced out and gentle but ironically in reality are the worst kind of facist assholes you could ever meet, the type who are only concerned with charity to wear it as a badge to sneer down at other people. Apart from them there is one particularly disgusting indian guy, I woke up early one morning and found him doing some sort of yoga ritual which appeared to involve micking a cat coughing up a hairball. Later that night Ashling came back from the toilet looking shaken, she wouldnt say exactly what she had witnessed whilst trying to wash her teeth other than that he had come in an started “using” the sink next to her. All I can say is that he was in there for about half an hour each morning and night, hocking and spluttering, a noise which could be heard throughout the entire hostel as he habitually cleared out the entire of his sinus cavities into a communal sink. The hostel is staffed by street children from the charity which prompts myself and ashling to continually attempted to put a sinister spin on things by making frequent Cathal O Searchaigh references. Freaky dutch seems to have taken a particular dislike towards eoin for no obvious reason. His repeated rebuffs of Eoins attempts at establishing a rapore are particularily amusing to me. Eoin asked him if he was into the yoga and all that (reasonable given his sterotyped appearance and the fact that it was heavily promoted in the hostel), no, not so much he coldly replyed, more into vulnerable young asian girls then or so I imagined. My favourite Freaky Dutch moment was when we unexpectedly met him for a second time in a restaurant which prompted John, politically incorrectly as ever to make some quip about everybody looking the same in this town forcing Freaky Dutch to make some sort of gurgling croaking noise as a polite acknowledging laughter, despite, as evident from the horrified frozen expression on his face, being offended and really not wanting to. That guy really cracked me up.

Moon rise over Baikal

Rumors of snow in the north. Irkutsk has been buried or so our Buryat driver collecting us at the station informs, and thats no loss in my opinion. We are to be driven to a Lake Baikal homestay by two Buryat drivers whos personalities couldnt contrast any more. One is dour and noncommunicative, the other playful and talkative, despite having no english that is.

Ok, let me off right here

For the first time I feel Ive left the west behind and am now entering the unknown expanse of Asia, here in Ulan Ude is my first taste. Both the people and the building take on a more asiatic appearance, colourful buddist temples dot the landscape like beacons in the pre dawn blue haze. Excitment is building as we stop off for the best damn fried eggs and pancakes of all time before daybreak.

The driver turns on the radio, oddly its Chris De Burgh singing dreaming of you, even here in the Siberian wastes is there no solace? The nextsong is by the cars, the girls song along as Buryat temples fade in and out of the twilight.

As dawn breaks we are travelling uphill through dense coniferous forest on some of the worst roads imaginable, I begin to feel seasick as the minibus rockets over enormous craters, overtaking giant military looking trucks carrying huge logs on blind bends. The driver occasionally rolls down the window to sprinkle seeds in offering to some unknown god. Efrat explains to me this is part of the shamanistic blend of buddism followed by the buryat.

Having failed to kill us with his driving, frustration reaches boiling point.

Suddenly and dramatically we cross the snowline. We stop at the highest point, for the drivers to give thanks to their gods and for the rest of us to thank heaven that the hell journey is almost over. We continue, I close my eyes to blot out the madness unfolding on the road in front of me. At one stage I open my eyes to see some mad hoorer whipping the bejaysus out of a horse, riding like the devil straight for us. I decide to close my eyes once again.

Playing Chicken; the competition

The countryside is incredibly remote with people living in wooden hovels on peaty land. Its real deliverance country, animals freely roam “streets” between the houses. We eventually arrive at the homestay, its run by an elderly russian couple, between them they have a full set of gold teeth and maybe three hands worth of fingers.

I think this says something like central bank

The Bridge to bad irkutsk

Greetings from the arsehole of the world, Irkutsk; Russian for “the middle of fucking nowhere” also translated as “place where you really dont want to be”, formorly the murder capital of Russia, a crown which it has since ceeded to Moscow, but still putting in a strong performance in second, although looking at the place Im sure it must have been a photo finish. Not to be outdone however Irkutsk is currently the proud title holder of the AIDS capital of Russia.

I awake in a cold sweat with the smell of chicken concentrate in my nose. I need to get this taste out of my mouth. The train stops and I bolt out the door and dart from group to group of waiting people screaming in Russian as though Id mistranslated crack cocaine as icecream.

The abuse from the provenitza reached new heights this morning as we approached our final destination. As we returned our sheets she tried to claim brian had stolen a teatowel (which he had never received) and began demanding cash, we refused, she eventually backed down and heard no more of the issue. Seems like the guys in the other carriage had a similar experience suggesting its a common scam. Goodbye you horrible bitch I say to the provintiza as I disembark the train.

Karl Marx street or maybe lenin street

Arrive in irkutsk, seriously dodgy looking place, place feels like a wild west frontier city, its sunny, hot the streets are slightly gritty and dusty, and steep, something ive seen in other city afflicted by extreme cold weather. The station exit is populated by a profusion cauliflower eared, gap toothed, broken nosed weird looking freaks. Reassuing to see that taxi drivers are the same the world over. They decend on us like vultures of some rotting carcass. We were warned that Irkutsk is dangerous, surveying the scene it was clearly a warning that was about as nessecary as saying that the weather in Siberia is sometimes cold. That said I didnt bring any warm clothes and had to borrow a fleece from John so maybe I do need these things pointed out to me.

Im feeling quite misearalbe at this stage, still on moscow time with a sever lack of sleep, flithy having not showered in days, paranoia of disease and germs running at an all time high, pain in stomach getting me down and a mounting terror that Im coming down with a strep throat infection. I begin self medicating with antibiotics. On the way to the hostel we learn how to cross roads in irkutsk, it involves throwing your soft prone tender body out into the way of speeding traffic and placing your faith in the goodness of humanity, a faith in short supply in a place like Irkutsk. Our hostel is in the shit part of Irkutsk, on the way in we pass three guys standing on the corner sharing several beers and about one eyebrow between them (needless to say its 9.30 on a Tuesday morning).

Later on I wander the city alone, strict instructions to be in before nightfall. Its not too bad one you cross the bridge out of the bad part of Irkutsk actually. I go to bed early but dont sleep till 4 or 5 despite my exhaustion.

3 sept
Lie in bed till 11. Head into town, Ashling and Eoin take pity on me in my miserable state. Ashling being an experienced traveller shows me some useful medications in a pharmacy, I buy some Barocca and Motillium and am feeling back on top by the afternoon, the change in weather is truely incredible, 28 degrees yesterday, today its 3 with a sharp piercing wind and the wet grey feel of approaching snows.
Before before coming to places like Irkutsk, Id look at the map and wonder how anybody could live in such an isolated place, now that Im here I realise how naive that was, people live here just fine, in a large city with lots of stuff going on completely unconcerned with my ignorance of their existence, I dont know why this came as a surprise to me. Wander around the city for a while. Go to use internet in a hotel. The girl behind the counter lets me stand there like a fool for few mintutes until I eventually lose patience. She asks meto wait a moment while she finishes filing her finger nails. Afterwards she get up, grabs her coat and leaves me to be dealt with by her equally surly successor. My hands are freezing at this stage, I can barely type.

Back to the hostel for 8 then on to the train station to catch the overnight, 3rd class again to Ulan Ude. The trainstation is total dodge city,v  easily one of the worst place Ive come across so far. In fact the dodgyness of anywhere in Irkutsk can be measured by its distance from the trainstation, here in the epicentre the density of dodgyness diverges towards infinity.

Id like to think if I was a pickpocket Id have the intelligence not to look so blatantly obvious. The station is full of wretched half-men who look like they slit your throat just to steal your piss. So many people just hanging around with no apparent purpose, admittedly they could be waiting for a train I suppose, with no baggage that is.

Suspicious looking characters flit in and out of the shadows, ducking and diving behind pillars in the florescent lit twilight, salivating over our bulging open pockets and momentarily unattended baggage. We form a tight knit cluster back to back as desperate gaunt looking wolfmen circle eyeing our precious unwashed laundry.

Outside the station we notice a man on crutches on his knees in the middle of the road. silhouetted in the head lights in the dying light with his arms raised towards the heaven he takes on an almost christ like appearance. Sheepishly everbody looks at each other wondering if we should go to his assistance. I point out that I recognise him as a one legged beggar Id seen earlier that day. This seems to bring some relief for some reason and we continue inside with clear conscience.

Inside the station John goes to buy something in the shop and is approached by what appears to be some sort of teenage crackwhore and her pimp, he jokes around with them as the rest of us exchange frightened concerned glances.

On the train I become confused by the recommended lay out of the bed linen on my bunk. Eventually Jo makes my bed for me, this results in numerous jokes at my expense. I sleep for an hour or two and am repeatedly awakened by flies crawling on my face.

I ate some of this stuff and didnt die

Onward, night blends into day blends into night, the train pushes ever forward, relentless. Some people sensibly begin attempting to adjust their body clocks to the new times, recklessly I dont bother and just sleep at irregular hours, whenever I feel tired, a policy which will probably prove disastrous. Much of the time I am awake pacing the corridors and watching the slowly changing landscape while the others sleep, perhaps years of chronic insomnia have left me requiring less. I have no watch and no concept of when night will fall or day will break.

Watching from the window, the place seems so remote that I often wonder if anybody from Ireland has ever laid eyes on this place before. Myself and Brian go on an exploratory mission down towards third class. desperado beastmen smoking between the carriages eye us up as we pass, one shouts something aggressively in Russian, probably best we dont understand. Down in third class, things are horrible, people have been cooped up there for several days at this stage, quite a few flies, bad smell. People clinging to every available space, this is hardcore, no tourist trip, people in the business of living. Feeling like a voyeur I turn back. On the way down I notice something in one of the cabins which leaves me shaken, at first I can comprehend what im looking at, it barely looks human. An emaciated girl lying stretched out on a bed, taught skin over sharp angles like a plastic toy, elbows, hip bones. Back at the cabin I have to lie down for a while.

People also changing with the landscape, more asian looking. We are within 200 km of the Kazastani border, and indeed Outside it looks like something straight out of Borat, all corrugated iron roofs, mangy dogs roaming in packs between careering Ladas. Stopping at a station near Omsk, a weird disembodied chattering laughter noise emanates from the loud speakers, resonating off the surrounding buildings adding to sureality of the place. The weather is damp, 10 degrees, air feels saturated. Oil fields, industrial, ramshackle hovels.

Myself and John venture off the train, make it back just in time, the provenitza starts roaring something in russian at us.

As a group we spend most of our time huddled in the cabins for fear of the provenitza, the journey is tolerable because we can get together and laugh about the ridiculous hostility of the staff, alone it would be a different story. We swap stories, eoin tells one about how the provenitza shoved him out into the rain at a station when he was smoking in thedoorway, then lights up herself in his place. Its almost like being stuck in some story of Kafka story, the provenitza follows her orders to the letter, even when they clearly contravene their intended purpose, namely to serve the customer. Her only apparent concern is to impress her supervisor, who presumably in turn only concerned about her direct superior too. The level of abuse and hostility in the dining carriage is incredible, eventually it reached farcical levels when in they suddenely started asking for an extra 10 roubles for the beer we had drunk, an enormous trollish looking woman shouting at us in russian for payment. We pay.

1 Sept Day 10
Fitful and difficult sleep, the terrain has become more mountainous, blood rushes as the train negotiates bends in the night. Weather becoming colder. Im still on Moscow time so I get up in the middle of the day. Longest ive gone in about twenty years without a shower.

I pick up a pot noodle thing at a station. Its got what looks like some sort of Russian Gary Rhodes smiling on the cover and giving a thumbs up in endorsement. Pot noodles, surely you cant go too far wrong, right? I fill it up at the samovar then bring it down to the Scots cabin to eat and chat. Opening the flavouring sachet a semitransparent gelantenous grey substance oozes out and drips down onto my noodles. Now I may be prone to exageration at times, but I think in this instance I can saftely say that this substance was most definitely the most disgusting smelling thing I have ever had he misfortune to encounter. My stomach is turning now even a month later in recollection as I look at that evil bastards grinning face.It smelled like the condensed smell of a thousand chickens concentrated into a small package. A truly unnatural with no place in gods creation. I threw it in the bin, then the bin into a bigger bin. I couldnt eat anything else for several hours.

This man will forever haunt my dreams

30th Aug Day 8

1770 km from Moscow, approaching Siberia. The monotonous click clack of the wheels on the tracks is boring a hole in my head, blood rushes from head to toe as the train rounds bends. To make matters worse the room is spinning but thats got nothing to do with the motion of the train. We were strongly warned beforehand not to get into drinking vodka with Russians, because you will lose, and lose badly. That said it was a Scot and an Irishman who were my undoing, probably the two nations next in line for the coveted throne.

Eoin shows up at the door early in the morning as if he’d been drinking water all night. Personally I think he probably staggered up to the door clutching his stomach, put on a brave act, then hurried back to bed when nobody was looking. He was struck by a mysterious “motion sickness” later that day.

Looking out the window, the landscape is flat, forested with wide open spaces. Civilisation tends to cling to the track, beyond it the plains stretch off for thousands of miles of emptiness to the arctic. Looking out the window mymind begins to wander, the shear isolation is difficult to comprehend, its alienness hard to quantify. There is a certain strange creeping horror in wide open spaces, the terror of the outcast, Isolation, loneliness, solitude synonymous with ostracization, exclusion and death to the prehistoric brain of social species. I find it fascinating looking on from the protective bubble of the train carriage. Most of the others read for hours on end, my mind is too restless to fixate on anything.

Night comes quickly and unexpected as we cross times zones.

Today is the day we will board a train which will carry us away from european russia, out through the vast wilderness of siberia towards the heart of the russia far east, Irkutsk. What lies waiting in Irkutsk I have no idea.
Crossing five times zones and traversing more than 5000 km, it is this enormous void on the map and in my mind which separates the familiar of the west with the alien lands of the orient. This is the reason I decided to take this troublesome journey rather than take the easy option and fly to the east, I wanted to see how all the pieces fit together.

The Kermlin

Before we go, we hear tell that there is a dead body in red square so we decide to get up early to catch the ghoulish spectacle. What has most surprised me about russia so far is the reverence in which the communists are still held. The viewing of Lenins embalmed corpse, or at least a wax dummy purporting to be him is not so much a tourist event as a homage. I walk in alone into the mausoleam, striped of everything even my wallet and passport, its dark and difficult to see where you are going. A guard stand at each corner silently ushering you in the correct direction, no stopping or gawking is allowed. You are kept well back from the body so its hard to say if its real or not.

Spirits are high as we make for the train station on the metro. Its illegal to take photos of russia metro station, i think it may have something to do with them doubling as nuclear bunkers, which is a shame because they really are works of art. So I take photos anyway.

Arriving at the train station, Efrat informs us of a few important points. The guardian of each carriage is called the provenitza, she can male your life hell if she so wishes, the train makes scheduled stops allowing passengers to disembark and catch food poisoning from the babushkas waiting on the train platform, this is encouraged for some reason, the toilets are closed half an hour before and half an hour after a stop, also as we would later discover at random and for no apparent reason. And perhaps most importantly if you dont get back on the train before it leaves, you will be devoured by wolves.

Our Cabin

We get on the train, I have a strange niggling suspicion that something is slightly amiss, but more about that later. The cabins hold four beds. I share with Renee, John and Avril. We along with the scots have been bumped up into luxury class much to the annoyance of everybody else, especially since in the cause of social harmony, efrat has rearranged the cabins from the names on the tickets.

What ive noticed is that there appears to be no other tourists on the train, not even other english speakers. It is the trans siberian route but this train is bound for chita, just beyond irkutsk. I begin to suspect that the travel agency has booked us on a local non tourist train probably because it was cheaper. There are pros and cons to this as i would discover. I mention this to the others. But we dont enquire further.

The train departs and we are soon out of moscow and into some seriously run down looking places, A deathly fear begins to gnaw at my mind, of getting off the train at a wilderness station and turning to see it vanishing into the distance.

Our neighbours are a russian family with two kids. the little girl never smiles and kicks and beats us as we pass. The guide book says the dining carrier is social center of the train, where you’ll be smoking, singing, carousing and heartly toasting mother russia till the wee hours. With this in mind i head down alone on a reconnaissance mission for the group. 3 minites later i return, ashen faced. The experence was something akin to an old western where some unknown gunslinger rides into town and walks into the nearest saloon. Opening the door silence decends, three cranky provinitzas start shouting at me in russian, I dont know what they are saying but it sure as hell doesnt sound anything like hey come on in your welcome, so I say the only russian word I know piva (beer) grab one and get the hell out of Dodge.

The first main stop is at Danilov, it looks like hell in train form. A big industrial train graveyard in the middle of nowwhere, its not so much the wolves here than the locals who are most likely to eat you. I ask the provenitza how long the train is stopping here, she tells me to fuck off.

Out on the platform ragged looking babuiska selling digugusting looking pastries containing some unidentifiable meat. As darkness decends we all gather in my cabin and get a two story bunkbed party going. Myself Eoin and Steven start with my good vodka, when that runs out Steven, being a tightfisted Scot cracks open his $1 paintstripper Vodka, inspired by teh reckless nihilism that only a long train journey into the unknown can summon, we knock it back with abandon, knowing full well tommorrow we will reap an bitter harvest. Eventually everbody else goes to their respective beds leaving the more unhinged elements of our posse, namely myself, eoin and Steven to continue the festivities between the carriages. We are shortly joined by a topless man with a swaztika tatoo with a skull in the center. Eventually myself and steven give up and return to our cabins, and finally eoin is escorted to his bed by a provinitza and a policeman, he could probably have considered himself lucky he wasnt thrown from the moving train.

Forgive me Sylvester, I knew I should have never doubted you! We arrive early in the morning in Moscow and its cold, its gritty and its grey. Just like out of a Cold War era spy movie. Dump bags in hostel and decide to push through the pain barrier and go explore the city since I have only one night, despite feeling as if lead weights have been attached to my legs. I wander through red square. To my sleep deprived mind the kremlin and st basils warp merging with the vast ominous concrete tower block cityscape to form some sort of nightmarish horror dreamscape. Moscow looks somthing akin to something out of 1984, if it had been written by Walt Disney. Or perhaps a George Orwell themed park. Adding to the horror Lenin and Stalin lookalikes stalk the square sneaking up on the unsuspecting. The past is far from dead and buried here, actually quite literally; Lenins mummified corpse lies waiting in the mausoleum in a deathless dreamless sleep until when once again the stars are right and the Old Ones return from Beyond, presumably.

Anyway, instead of going to bed early I go to the pub and have a conversation with some drunk Russians, both in our own respective and mutually unintelligible languages, this didnt appear to be much of a drawback. Over the course of an hour we did how ever manage to establish that both Ireland and Russia were “good”.

Ulyseeeeeeeeeeeessssssss I condemn you to wander the universe for all eternity.......

27 Aug Day 5 Interestingly, in being a student, or at the very least successfully passing myself off as one, I am afforded a status equal to that of the members of the glorious order, heroes of the siege of Leningrad, heroes of the Soviet Union and the defenders of castle greyskull, in that I have free admission to the world famous Hermitage, the palace museum of St Petersburg. I stay six hours here, two of which are spent slumped on a couch down near the cloakroom, lack of sleep is starting to creep up on me.

Its ok, its art

Earlier that morning we had gotten up, left the hostel and deposited our rucksacks in the left luggage of the train station with the intention of reassembling at 10pm for the Moscow bound train, so I was now homeless and in dire need of sleep. The overnight train leaves at 11.35 and arrives in Moscow 7.30 in the morning, we would be traveling third class, what this would mean remained a mystery to me at this point, mercifully so in retrospect.

...............art

So our group broke up early in the morning and we went our separate ways. I walk up Nevsky Prospect to the Hermitage, admiring the view as I went. Whatever about the palace, the police woman guarding the entrance was truly a work of art. Six foot tall, blond, funny grey hat, beating stick swing from her hip, gun on the otherside yet still tottering about in her high heels, only in Russia.

To my surprise most of the tourists even here appear to me Russians, still very few English speakers. The art in the museum managed to survive presumably being eaten during the siege as it was evacuated by train ahead of the Nazi advance, instead of the people.

Exhausted we reassemble at the station, everybody is soaked from the rain. I discover the meaning of third class, a huge open carriage with people hanging out of every available space, of course Im too long for the bed so people continually brushing off my feet throughout the night ensure I get maybe a half an hour sleep at best. I now have a very large sleep debt building.

The password to the next post is my first name

Nevsky Prospect

Sylvester Stallone has a lot to answer for. Given that my preconceptions of Russia have been primarily formed by such cinematic triumphs as Rocky V and Rambos 2 to 3 I suppose I shouldnt have been so surprised that it bears little resemblance to a cold war era spy movie. I had been expecting a haunted city bathed in rain and perpetual gloom, a bit less like St Petersburg and more like say Dublin. In fact the city is bright, clean and amazing beautiful. The streets are wide enough for several tanks to travel abreast. Every second building looks like a work of art however the police are omnipresent. This presence generally takes the form of an officious looking guy with an hilarious oversized peaky cap making him look like a boy wearing his daddys hat and effectively destroying whatever authrity he may have had, however the large jackbooted thug in blue camouflage gear with a huge beating stick swinging from his side backing him up generally suppresses any urge to laugh. I keep my eyes on the ground when passing to avoid looking like a tourist who they reported summarily like to shake down.

The city has a violent reputation and is notoriously racist, venturing out alone at night or travel out to the suburbs at anytime is strongly advised against. That said, bar the initial shock of arrival I cant say I’ve felt in anyway threatened so far, nor have I noticed the supposed unfriendliness for which the Russian are famed. However there is very little English anywhere and as such a general sense of alienation quickly begins to take hold.

The streetsigns are in cryllic, thus rendering your guidebooks maps essentially useless, fortunately at this stage I’ve got the hang of the Russian alphabet, which is a great help. A lot of people have very little english or appear very unwilling to make an effort.

Sadly I must confess that my first meal in Russia was a subway sandwich, exhausted I was in little mood to deal with the hassle and so far was having great difficulty identifying different food items in shops. Found the hostel, which was fine and went to bed early.

Traffic Jams of Lada and Mercs, bit a common sight in Russia

26^th Aug Day 4

Today I am supposed to meet with the small tour group with whom I will be traveling for the next 20 days; so I seriously hope they are not assholes. I had originally intended on doing the Trans Sib entirely alone (more about that later) but partially due to frustration in the difficultly in organizing it and partially if Im honest must admit slightly chickened out of the idea of hurtling myself into the deep end (more on that too elsewhere). So I get my heavy bag and walk 20 min along the route I’d earlier memorised, turns out its that rice hostel after all!

Outside I first meet Jo, english girl from London, initial impressions are positive, seems nice, friendly should be easy to get along with for the next few weeks happy so far. We spend some time trying to figure out how to get into the hostel. Hostel looks like an absolute dump from the outside like some derelict tenement building, completely believing the palatial interior, now writing in retrospect I can see that judging books by covers was to become a running theme during the course of this expedition. I leave my bag and wander up Nevsky Prospect to Tsar Peter the Great museum of assorted weird things he had collected, turns out to be little more than a collection of deformed fetuses in jars. Disappointed I head back to the hostel for the initial group meeting.

Our group consists of efrat the leader, an israeli, john and avril couple 50′s-60′s from new zealand been traveling around europe for the last four months, eoin and ashling couple 30 from dublin, turns out they know somebody i know so i cant slag them off here, stephen + shinita couple scotland, newly married traveling with her father brian from Mauritius, jo, renee from sydney, and michelle from london. Everybody seems nice and friendly no obvious assholes so far. Probably feeling the creepy sense of alienation Russia instills in outsiders everyone is anxious to make a positive first impression, perhaps a natural instinct faced with a new uncertain alien environment and countering familiarity. Seems like most are much more traveled than me, especially aishling,jo and erfrat who seem to real veterans swapping old war stories about travel disasters befallen them. Dinner then a few beers along the canal (knacker drinking never seemed so classy) incidentally people walking around with open beer bottles is a very common sight in russia. Then back to mollys irish pub, sad i know, next door to hostel, not much of an irish influence apart from the prices.

Some big mad palace place

Anyway, I have about 10 pages of notes in my journal to catch up on writing,  will do this as soon as I can, however I’ll be living amongst Mongolian nomads in a few days and Im not sure how good their WiFi connections will be.

This is proving farmore difficult than I had originally anicipated, findingtime to write anything so far has been almost impossible, even trivial little tasks seem to take hours. So apologies spelling grammer will have to fall by the wayside. I think anything else I write will have to take the form of brief reports.
So I arrived in Gatwick with my large rucksack on my back. The realisation that I was very much alone now began to take hold as soon as I went to buy a train ticket, somebody to hold on to my luggage would have been useful.

About an hour later, fairly flustered at this stage I arrived at the hostel just off Piccadilly circus, annoyingly it was one of those hostels big on partying, not so big on hygiene. Having free myself of the giant rucksack and regained my composure I met my friend Damien for dinner in Chinatown. Afterwards it was straight back to the hostel to effectively study for the journey to St Petersburg the day after next.

My preparation were intrupted by a strange Swedish guy Id met earlier in the lift. For some reason he decided to sit next to me for a chat despite the facf that I was clearly busy. The then proceeded to detail his day including hitching up his teeshirt repeatedly to show me his sunburn. This greatly disturbed me.

Eventually I returned to my four bed dorm and drifted off to sleep. Around 12.30 the door slamms open and in waltz my roommates, namely three teenage french girls, noses cocked to the heavens. Whispering to themselves I hear them refering to the Irlandais, indicating that they had clearly rifled through my coat early on.

Day 2, 24th Aug

Awoken by a dawnchorus of jackhammers from the building site which our room views. The french girls get up and get dressed. Not knowing howexactly Im supposed to react to this, I pretend to be asleep and wait for them to finish beautifying themselves. An hour and a half later they’ve gone and I get dressed. Spend the rest of the morning searching around the city for various items Ive forgotten to pack.

Doctor appointment around 1 for malarial tablets and a vaccine for Japanese encephalitis. The service at the Fleet street travel clinic was really excellent, never get anything approaching that in Dublin. Spent about an hour with the doctor, chatting away about a range of topics from brain wasting mosquito bourne diseases to Irish racehorses, once she noticed where I was from. Wandered down to Trafalger Square for a solitary picnic. Then back to the hostel to cram for my early morning journey to St Petersburg. There were a lot of preparations to make, memorise a map of the city, find the hostel location, flight times, work out how I was going to get to Heathrow, source some dollars and roubles. In my mind I envisage St Petersburg as a dark and violent city where anybody so foolish as to produce a map on a street corner will instantlybe mugged from several angles. So youcan understand my annoyance when the freaky Sweadish guy suddenely appears over my shoulder once again. Apparently he had been to a recuitment agent. He spent the next hour showing me a database program he’d made in excel, which had lead to him being firedfrom his previous job, presumeably becuase it was underappreciated.
At one point he asked meif he was boring me, I remained silent. He then asked again to which I grudgingly replyed, no of course not. Eventually I had to tell him I was too busy, he then suggested we link up on facebook. I explained that this was unfortunely impossible as I had forgotten my facebook password and security questions, all of them. He then volunteered his email adddress, I gave him some scrap of paper to write it on, an awkard pregnant pause followed, in which I was supposed to give him mine. Eventually he went away.

I met Damien later for dinner, we went to a nice Lebanese place and remanisced about the good old days. Afterwards I went for a walk to see London at night and had several interesting encounters. Walking through SoHo I noticed an incredible statistical anomaly, some pubs entirely frequented by men. On street cornors rent boys stood with posing. A woman approached me asking if Id like the company of a young girl for half an hour. I respectfully declined. Further down the road I was approaced again by another. As she followed me she detailed exactly what Id get for a mere 35 pounds or 50 for an hour. Again I declined, no problem she chirped strangely sounding a professional as any legitimate sales person.

Day 3, 25th Aug
Up bright and early at 5:45, much to the annoyance of my new french roomamtes. Bakerloo line to Paddington, then Heathrow express to terminal 5.

One or two people mostly older Chinese woman weearing facemasks with their ebarassed looking too cool daughter walking several steps behind.

By 9:30 Im in the air and heading eastwards into the rising sun. After three hours we are in Russian air space.My first impressions are of an ordered flat landscape as far as the eye can see. Fields seperated by long straight roads stretching off to infinity. Large angular forests, order, tranquilty.

Arriving at the airport and officious looking youngman in a white lab coat greets us with an infered themometer gun. At the baggage carrosel I worry that my baggage has vanished until I discover it unceremoniusly tossed on the ground on the other side. In the bathroom I notice that the ceiling is so highly reflective that you should you so wish to do so, you can amusing yourself by smiling up at you fellow users and watchthem taking a dump in the other cublicles.

I spend a while longer at the airport making sure everthing is in order before venturing outside, nervous that if I show any sign of unfamilarity I will be immediately arrested by some corrupt policeman. My cover is blown almost instantly, making my way down to the 13 bus stop, climbing on the bus the driver starts shouting somethinjgn at me in russian, I mouth the name of the metro station. The driver waves me off the bus, as I get off I whack my head, everybody starts laughing as I stumble dazed back onto the path. Some guy then ushers me onto a minibus. A nice Belorussian girl sitting beside me offers some assistance, I accidently get off without paying, and an american guy living there gets off with me and brings me to the subway. We exit at the same stop and he offers me some sage advice, namely to brace myself for when I surface from the subway at Nevskly Prospect, because some of the most beutiful girls on earth will be simply walking up and down that street. Eventually I find the hostel.

Tomorrow I meet the small tour group I signed up to for the trans siberian.

Maneuvering through a throng of tracksuits ogling the hunting knives, I picked up a few useful items like a head torch. “Heeyar, dis one got Padjo written all over it”, loudly proclaimed one of the skinheaded teenagers, pointing out a particular 8 inched beauty to his compatriots. I hear they may consider expanding their line into pipes, fertiliser and fuses.

On my way back I was knocked half an hour off course as I searched the shops of Junkieville behind Pearse St for the ever eluisive Wibbly Wobbely Wonder.

6 days to go, nearly there now …….

This song from twelve years ago was playing in the ilac center, I remembered it had a particularly strange video.

* disclaimer, no claims as to the veracity of this statistic. Could be far higher  for all I know.

Attended another going away party / double birthday party last night. Apart from that nothing much else to say. Was wandering the back streets of the inner northside earlier today and happened upon a break-dancing competition in Smithfield. Ahh, the road not taken, sigh, dreams of what might have been……

Now on a temporary career hiatus but still performing to near capacity crowds in various university gymnasia. Its over to the self-dubbed saviour of rock and roll, Mr. WK

Still as funny as it was back in 2002, by god one of these days that boy will make it big, embedding is disabled but its worth following the link to youtube just to see the famous WK horse wanking dance. Also the tame orc from Mordor on bass. Love that keyboard solo…..

Known as Puck Fair, the organisers claim it dates back to when some giant goat ran over the mountains to tell the people of Killorglin that Cromwells armies were coming to basically wreck the place. In gratitude the townsfolk instated the goat as their king, threw their young women upon him and danced around in orgiastic ecstasy. Of course there are a number of aspects of this story which sound somewhat implausible, I mean why would the goat say such a thing? After all Cromwell never went anywhere near Killorglin. The deeper truth is that the festival is far far older than that, harking back to a dark Pre-Christian era long before the dawn of history. The fertility ritual of Lughnasadh is still very much alive down here, where its passing is marked by various activities including pony trap racing, bare knuckle boxing, mattress burning and the ancient art of the selling of goods and wares from the back of sacred Hi-Ace vans. This bacchanalian festival eventually culminates in the “marriage” (seriously) of The Queen; a young local girl to the King; who is a giant hairy fucking goat!

Dont believe me? See below….

There is nothing unusual about this picture.

Occasionally this all gets a bit out of hand ……….. allegedly been know to occur on occasion:

In preparation for when I assume my rightful place as God-King of some mountain tribe in Papau New Guinea, I’ve been rereading Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Its about how the harvest cycle of life death and rebirth is ingrained universally in almost every world myth, the killing of the god king; the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, and his replacement by a new younger successor to ensure next years harvest. First published in 1890, the book was considered scandalous for its far reaching implications, future editions were heavily censored.

Here is one such list by El Stuntman of The Property Pin fame. Incidentally this website is a must read.

El Stuntman: “
OK, so I think that most people on here are very au fait with what has transpired in this country over the last decade or so and could provide a reasoned explanation of these events to anyone who asked. I think that, contrary to the lines frantically spun by the Govt and its apologists, most Pinsters would firmly identify local factors (i.e. our massive feckin’ property bubble) as being the primary cause of the hole in which we now find ourselves. We also have our own theories as to who the villains of the piece are and these villains pop up in almost every thread and are duly excorciated for their foolishness\incompetence\corruption\whatever you’re having yourself.

What I haven’t seen so far is a thread that attempts to identify all the major ‘villains’ of the Great Irish Property Bubble, the role that they played in creating this monster that now threatens to consume us and the relative importance of each villain (a ‘hero’ thread mightn’t be a bad idea either!). This is my attempt at creating such a single list – would love to see something like this in the history books some day – please feel free to add your own ideas and thoughts. I think it’s important that we have a list like this to cut through all the bullshit, lies and spin that populate the national airwaves; real, imagined or bar-room.

So here’s my attempt at the ‘Blame Game’ (snappy title for a future documentary?), in descending order of villainy:

1. Bertie Ahern: this fucker sat in the hot seat for the entire period of the Great Irish Housing Ponzi Scheme. Despite the fact that he liked to claim that nothing bad ever had anything to do with him or his Government (his speciality at Dail Q&A was affecting an air of bewilderment and agreeing that it was awful that such things would happen, not that he was responible or, perish the thought, should actually do anything), I’m placing him as my Number 1 villain. History will judge him better than I can but my judgement is that he was an actual functioning illiterate who should never been allowed near any position of responsibility and a deeply corrupt individual (his evidence to Mahon was farcical, self-contradictory and at times surreal). He sold this country down the river through a combination of stupidity and corrupt motives and left us exposed to the consequences of the property monster that he helped create and nurture to the benefit of his backers, the developers. His tactic of never wanting to make an enemy or fail to appease a vested interest meant that the national finances (which he inherited in good shape) now resemble that of an African banana republic. The tragedy is that with even a modicum of sense and vision, we could have built a proper modern society in Ireland on the back of the first Celtic Tiger Period. Instead, his legacy is the metaphorical heap of smoking rubble that this country has now become. I hope that I see this man being led away in chains at some point in the future. I’m not holding my breath. The boom is getting boomier indeed, how fucking apposite.

2. Fianna Fail: has ever a party that sells itself on its patriotism so clearly embodied the truism of patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels? From the disastrous Finance Ministers McCreevy and Cowen, to the total incompetents Cullen, Coughlan, Dempsey and Hanafin, to the openly corrupt like Lawlor, Burke and The Stroke, to the selfishly self-centred like Martin, to the spineless backbenchers and down to the nod-and-wink county councillors, the sole objective of this group of traitors over the last decade was to enrich themselves, their backers and their cronies though the property pyramid scheme. Frank Fahy is the man who for me encapsulates everything that is rotten about this party. My hope for them is that they get what they deserve at future elections – oblivion followed by a ruthless investigation by a newly empowered CAB.

3. The Irish People: I debated internally about how high on my list to place this villain but let’s face it, 95% of the nation were willing participants in the frenzy of the last decade. Common sense was thrown out the window, greed and vulgarity stalked the land, we scorned the values of our past and graspingly reached for fools gold with both hands. Idiotic and facile reasoning ruled the national debate and those who dared to question the status quo were scorned as ingrates and sneered at for paying the dead money of rent. Woe betide the man who volunteered the fact that he didn’t own ‘investment’ property at any suburban dinner party. Real work and innovation was disdained in the mad scramble to grab a slice of the property pie. Even now, with the game well and truly up, the population still refuses to accept reality and whimpers at every new misfortune without questioning ‘why?’ A bleak future ahead.

4. The Banks: lol, where do I start? Imagine being a former employee of Anglo and going for an interview at, for arguments sake, Deutsche:

interviewer: thank you, very impressive so far. Now let’s just run through your experience to date. Your last position was risk manager at…sorry, I can’t read that, it’s smudged quite badly?

interviewee:

interviewer: sorry, I didn’t catch that?

interviewee: Anglo Irish Bank

interviewer: get out

5. The media; was there ever a more vacuous group of willing cheerleaders for insanity? With a few honourable exceptions the media in this country proved themselves to be the lapdogs of the unholy trinity of the banks, the government and the VIs. RTE is a disgrace – where was our national broadcaster when cold-eyed analysis was needed? The newspapers, puffed up with the revenue from their ridiculous property porn supplements, were no better. The Brendan ‘smart and ballsy’ O’Connors of this world were vomit inducing in their servility and the derision heaped upon the analysis of refuseniks such as MacWilliams, Kelly and Ahern casts a long shadow. Cowards and intellectual pigmies the lot of them.

6. The financial authorities; IFRSA and the Central Bank. They sound like august, almost menacing institutions with a strong suggestion of probity and eagle-eyed vigilance. The complete opposite turned out to be the case. Their job was to protect us, they didn’t even bother to try, preferring instead to take the healthy paycheck and rubber-stamp the scam with every public pronouncement. Each and every member of staff should be fired summarily without benefits.

7. The Opposition: Fine Gael and Labour had the chance to distance themselves from FF on this; to point out the stupidity of the course we were embarked upon and to suggest a sustainable alternative. They failed miserably at this instead preferring to hoist their skirts in the same manner as FF and try to entice the punters by convincing them that the illusion was real. Fuck them. Only isolated voices like Joe Higgins (right for the wrong reasons) have the right to hold their heads up high on the opposition benches.

8. Professional ‘economists’: I keep asking a friend who works in BoI to punch Dan McLaughlin in the face. He thinks I’m joking. How on earth were these prostitutes allowed to get away with their blatant lies for so long? Have they any conscience about selling so many into debt slavery for generations? There’s a special circle in hell for these fuckers.

9. The auditing profession: (thanks to roc) I have had many fun afternoons misleading the members of the auditing profession; it’s not hard – I’m actually convinced that the first thing that happens to each year’s intake in PWC, KPMG et al is a full-frontal lobotomy and the removal of any independent thought. These boyos were supposed to thoroughly investigate the books of all the financial institutions and provide reassurance to the shareholders that all was well. I don’t think any further comment is needed on these fuckwits who happily looked the other way while they stuck their snouts in the trough of ‘professional service fees’. Hope your professional indemnity insurance is up to scratch lads! A special mention of dishonour to PWC for their report to Minister Lenihan that reassured him and also E&Y for their exemplary job in auditing the books of Anglo.

10. The developers: (thanks to unsure) Jesus, where do I start? These guys corrupted our democracy, buying politicians like kids buy sweets. These amoral vermin amassed great riches at the expense of a generation of Irish people. The Bailey brothers bought Ray Burke. Owen O’Callaghan was so busy making political ‘donations’ (mods, note careful phraseology) that he had to have his own personal bagman to make all the drops. Who knows what deals were made at the Galway races? Jackson Way. Sean Dunne was in Washington for Bertie’s speech; that says it all really.
The really funny thing about most developers is that they believed their own bullshit and are now hoist on their own petard; witness Dunne and Grehan buying up land in Ballsbridge at ludicrous valuations. Dunner says he could ‘technically’ be considered insolvent; too fucking right you are sunshine. Don’t even get me started on the sheer vulgarity of these scumbag’s lifestyles and the really sickening thing is that we as a people worshipped these ignorant chancers; hubris, hubris, hubris.

11. The EAs and auctioneers: (thanks to unsure again). Professional liars and schemers in the main (tip of the hat to the honourable exceptions such as our own Mr A). Gazumping, phantom bidding, whipping up fear and uncertainty; these were their tools of the trade. A self-regulating profession? They make me puke. Ken MacDonald epitomises this species.

right, feel free to add your own or amend mine, I feel a lot better now!”

An impressive rant!

So NAMA looks to have sprung a rather large leak. Maybe we can stop them mugging our unborn children after all.

Maybe

So a friend of mine sent me an email asking where exactly in the world I was now. My reply was: Well I got up early this morning and traveled to the capital city, which despite being only about 10 miles away took in excess of 60 minutes. The city is dirty and every second corner smells of piss. The roads and general infrastructure would suggest I’m somewhere in the third world. Have you guessed where I am yet? Yes, Im still in Dublin, I’ll be here for another 14 or 15 days or so. Other than that everything is fine.

So still in Dublin.

I think this song is strangely applicable today as ever………

Well here are some more photos from “the Whestch”
More sheep etc

Officially my journey has begun at last, well sort of. I traveled to the the county of Kerry; on the wild ragged westernmost fringes of Europe, to visit relatives before I left on my much-feted voyage of exploration. My aunt; being a primary school teacher and therefore viewing every experience through the lens of educational embetterment*, immediately seized the opportunity to suggest I set up a map detailing my progress. She felt it would be a fantastic educational tool for the children. Educational indeed I mused, and not just for the children I dare I say. I briefly meditated upon revealing the existence of this blog; briefly as in for half a nanosecond.

I have what would probably be characterized as a very dark view of human nature. To my mind our collective farcical pursuit of happiness seems nothing more dignified than herd of donkeys chasing an evolutionary carrot and stick. I’m not sure how you can expect to travel the world and experience life in all its glory and horror, warts and all and expect a PG-13 rating. I think a second more insulated blog might be in order, the kids will learn soon enough.

*cromulent

Whilst in Kerry, instead of actually helping out, I had the opportunity to observe first hand some interesting daily farm activities. Well, one thing I’ve learned about farm animals is that they are generally disinclined to do as they are told and in general its hard work to move them to where you want them; that and they also sort of smell like shit.

I was also privileged to observe a real live mart taking place. Its apparently where some guy mumbles incomprehensibly into a microphone whilst farmers with Tourettes Syndrome stand around winking, nodding whilst gazing longingly at bored looking animals in stalls. Eventually after this bizarre pagan matrimonial some animals trade hands and everybody goes home happy.

That was the idea at least, until some of the yokels noticed I was taking photos of them and became visibly agitated. Until this point I had managed to discretely photograph the proceedings that was until I unfortunately moved into a darker part of the barn, thus setting off the flash on my camera phone and then the game was up. Fearing that I’d soon find myself burning inside a giant wicker man, I quickly made my escape.

After a few days I caught the train back to Dublin. Traveling by train across Ireland, with all the interesting scenery confined to the coast, is generally a turgid affair. To keep passengers amused CIE forces them to partake in a hilarious little game, its called find your reserved seat. The aim of the game is to find your seat which is hidden somewhere on board. To spice things up none of the carriages are labeled and your ticket doesnt even display the seat number, its even more fun if you happen to be elderly or disabled. So I traced up and down the train, repeatedly brushing groinage on the narrow aisles with the same faces, also trapped in the same hellish pandemonium. We traipsed up and down again and again, until eventually I found myself in the first class carriage.

The carriage was deserted apart from a fat oafish simpleton seated close to the entrance, his bulk wedged under the table in front of him. On entering he appeared to be intently studying the salty foil of a burst open but now empty packet of Tayto crisps. His intense stare coupled with his round baldy head gave him an unsettling look of childlike idiocy. Noticing my entrance, he looked up “This is first class” he flatly stated. So what thought I, pressing onwards on my journey. Noticing that he had been ignored he bluntly added “there are plenty of seats free down there” he said gesticulating with an imperious twitch of his elbow and wrist. Rounding on the insolent man-child, I was about to loudly inquire as to who the f**k had died and made him king?

That was until I noticed, hitherto concealed beneath a fatty crevice, a CIE logo on his long-suffering sweat stained shirt. With swiftly rising gall, I angrily explained that my reserved seat was not reserved and some teenage girls obnoxiously playing pop ringtones from their phone appeared to be occupying the place I guessed was supposed to be mine. Clearly rankled the man-oaf stirred and braced his arms either side of his seat, his face turned the colour of beetroot, a noise akin to some great beast of burden straining under a mighty load emitted from his mouth and I half thought it were as though he were about to soil himself. Realizing what was happening I stood silently until the man-child has freed himself and heaved his bulk out into the aisle. “Fine, i’ll go fix it” he said, as I turned and walked away feeling satisfied with my petty Pyrrhic victory I shouted back “Its fine, There are plenty of free seats and I’d just take on of those”

I found a seat next to an old man on the wrong side of eighty or so I guessed. He said something to me about being lucky to find a seat as I sat down. I think it might have been the way that very old people have long since lived passed such silly things as social inhibition that caused me to initially peg him as a narky old man, pegged in error I must confess. After a while I finished reading my book; Paul Theroux’s “Riding the Iron Rooster” and we had an animated discussion about various recent news stories. I especially liked the story about Bill Clinton “rescuing” two female journalist from North Korea. Thirteen years hard labor never sounded so appealing.

It transpired that the old man was a retired chartered accountant, having qualified in 1952. At that time there were no women in the society of chartered accountants, apart from one nun, who presumably didn’t count as a woman. Now about half of those newly qualified were women, he told me with genuine amazement. I asked him about the purpose of his trip to Dublin, to change some old irish pounds into euros at the central bank he told me. Really? said I, so how much do you have to change? I asked. Well i found an old ten pound note in my house, says he. My train ticket had cost me twenty euro, suppressing the urge to burst out laughing, I nodded, solemn faced.

We talked some more about the economic crisis and about a well known but reclusive developer who had been granted a stay of execution by the supreme court having failed in a bid in the high court to have an examiner appointed to his property pyramid empire. I expressed my sorrow that the court hadn’t let him swing and thrown him to the wolves now gathering at the door. “This fellow had managed to avoid being photographed and all the photos they had of him were years old” said the old man, “indeed”, I replied, “sort of makes him sound like a criminal”, said I, we both had a good laugh over that. Canny savvy businessmen or the same sad deluded fools Id faced night after night hunched around the poker table, gambling away their children’s allowance, I wondered.

We parted company at the station and sorrowful I watched him slowly hobble away with a quite forlorn dignity. Later as I walked alone into Dublin from Heuston Station, and past the Guinness factory, increasingly in my mind I began to see parallels between the old man’s pointless journey and perhaps my foolish own.

Within the space of twelve months I wanted to travel from the Arctic circle, over the Tropic of Cancer, across the Equator and then onwards to the Tropic of Capricorn. So far, since March I have reached the Arctic circle. Here are a few poorly taken pictures with my camera phone; I have a better camera now.

I took an overnight train from Stockholm to Kiruna which is where these photos were taken. I also visited the Ice Hotel which was nearby and took a nighttime dog sledge ride to see the Northern Lights, who didn’t bother showing up.

Here is where the photos are, I haven’t figured out how to link to Flickr yet.

Photos from the Arctic

Anyway Pete is a funny guy, he was telling me this story about how he had started on a new fitness program with his personal trainer, Jesus. No, not that one, the guy’s name is actually Jesus, or so Pete claims but I remain skeptical. Apparently Jesus talks to Pete while he is on the crosstrainer. Pete told one such story of how he was once on the crosstrainer and Jesus started talking to him. Pete started laughing as he was telling it, it was about how Jesus started telling him some story which was totally pointless and ended up going nowhere as Pete put it. It was about how Jesus was one time trying to lift some really heavy weight, and then …….. he did. And that was the end of the story. Pete started laughing at the story but luckily was too out of breath for Jesus to notice.

I found this story very funny and started laughing, partially because Pete found it funny and partially at myself for not immediately finding the story as ludicious as I ought to have. I realised from hanging around with sports and gym fanatics for so long that I’d become desensitised to stories about lifting really heavy weights, and then suceeding, to the point that they sounded completely reasonable to me.

Pete was telling me he caught Dengue Fever in California, apparently they are a band now too and not just a horrible mosquito borne disease. They came up in conversation because the lead singer is from Cambodia. There is also a guy with a huge beard.

Anyway I was walking to get the bus home; deep in thought of far away lands. Boarding the Dublin bus, thinking about how I’d probably sail up the Mekong River out of Vietnam whilst throwing some coins into the slot, “Cambodia” I said to the driver. Wha’?, er sorry I mean 2.20 please. I hate when that happens.

You pay! You pay now! barked the sour faced lady behind the counter, and pay I did. Collecting my passport and looking around to no avail for the friendly pretty girl who had served me last time, I made for the door holding aloft my shiny newly envisaed purple passport blazing in morning light and to victory! And its only eleven thirty.

My mood right now could probably best be described by the following song.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=107446178937082904382.00046fca51ab06e824e94&ll=51.508742,80.507813&spn=75.664533,157.675781&z=3

Any suggestions internet?

In preparation for this artful act of monetary astuciousness, so good I even made up that word, I ventured into an inner city bank late of a Thursday morning. Now dear reader, perhaps at this juncture it should be pointed out that the previous night, having taken a fortuitous turn of events, had conspired to keep me from returning to my bed and home. Needless to say it was a night of much merriment, involving copious quantities of beverages of an alcohol nature.

It was in this state, unshaven, bedraggled, and stinking of stale beer, that I staggered in the direction of the bank teller, tripping, almost collapsing upon his partition and falling reeling onto the startled lady in the other section. Righting myself, I began to inform him that I would be making a withdrawal, however my vocal cords, launching a impromptu wildcat strike probably, and possibly understandably, in response to my singing along to Journey the night before, failed me in my moment of need. Something closely approximated by mmmhumpf mmuuumph account issued from my mouth, swiftly followed by several globules of saliva and some partially chewed crumbs of bread.

After some perfunctory background checks including photo id, general knowledge of the content of my accounts, just stopping short of fingerprinting and retinal scans, not to mention several anxious phone calls in which the teller whispered quitely with his hand cupped over the mouth piece whilst glancing furtively in my direction, all of which were routine, the bank teller assured me, I managed to successfully sequester my funds effectively beyond my reach.

Anyway, ever closer draws the day……..

Here is a song by The Knife, no its not the original of a song you may know, it IS the song, there may be some watered middle of the road, easy listening, tea with granny version out there too. Only joking they are both good :p

No sound? Sorry, on your own.

Roll on 25 of Aug, where for one night only CubaHostel shall be my palace. What hijinks await?

Maybe there are many people who consider what I am about to do probably quite selfish. But this wanderlust is something I have always had for as long as I can remember, this is something I have to do. One foot in the sea and one foot on the shore. To one thing constant, never.

I’m not sure what format this will take, and in fact must admit to being somewhat uneasy about the whole thing given that I’ve always imagined the travel writer as a bespectacled, trenchcoat clad pervert standing on his tippy toes, straining to peer in bathroom windows; but enough about Paul Theroux.

Never content with those text book pictures depicting a so-called “round” earth, starting on the 25th of Aug 2009 I will be travelling on my own from Dublin across Siberia, through China and South East Asia to Australia and on the North America and eventually returning home in eight months, thereby putting this outlandish hypothesis to the test.

I know not what lies ahead, if nothing else then I shall have many a tale to tell the grandchildren; failing that,  at least a cautionery tale, for somebody else’s.

I promise to publish one piece of salacious gossip, randomly, about somebody I know, on a weekly basis. Check back to see if its your week. Now, do I have your attention?