Chinese Villagers Show Remarkable Honesty...

From the local newspaper, it's clear that the road towards democracy in China may be a long and rocky one:

CHINESE VILLAGERS WANT BRIBERY BACK

Villagers in south-eastern China are up in arms after missing out on lucrative bribes during a recent village elections when candidates foreswore the practice at a temple, according to the Xiao Kang Communist Party magazine, reported Reuters. Villagers in Dingmei in Fujian province said they preferred getting the 1,000 yuan ($200) bribe from candidates rather than have a clean election, it said.

Star Guitar

I realised (too late) that I should have used The Chemical Brothers 'Starguitar' as the music for my train video if only to stay in keeping with their video. Re-watching the video I thought it was worth posting as it's pretty cool. The video describes a journey as seen from a train window, only the disposition of each passing element in the landscape is positioned exactly in sync with the music.

Every sound from the track is illustrated by an element of the landscape that appears each time that sound is heard. As the song becomes more elaborate, the landscape created becomes more and more complex. I think it bears a couple of watches.

All aboard

One of the things that I had wanted to do since starting to read about Singapore was to take the Orient Express from Singapore to Bangkok. I'd kind of filed it at the back of my mind so it was pretty surprising when some people we had met here invited us to go with them on the trip just after Chinese New Year. Given that the E&O company offers a 25% discount it seemed rude not to, so one day after arriving back from Bali we were packing our bags again.

As you can see our timing couldn't have been better. We had armed guards on the train at all times, just in case.

As the others waited to board, I took a walk up the platform to see the train. I'd obviously been expecting the train to look like the Hogwarts Express, but sadly it was a lot more practical than that, though given the size of the train I had to admit that it made sense. Each carriage has been beautifully built to the most opulent standards using the finest materials (I sound a bit like the brochure here). On our journey there were 11 sleeping cars, plus the bar car, the 2 dining cars, the lounge car, the observation car, the library car and the merchandising opportunity aka the boutique. It takes about 10 minutes to walk from one end of the train to the other. One of my favourite in train devices was a little hook for keeping the toilet seat raised. I guess the only thing that this proves is that train designers were men, but to me it speaks volumes.

Personally speaking I love train journeys (as long as I get a seat, the Tube doesn't count) and there was something extremely satisfying about doing a journey that you can make in a couple of hours by plane and stretching it out to be 48 hours long. It felt more like exploration harkened back to the days of Singapore just becoming established and a bit more like I thought that being in Asia might be like. It also makes the journey become the trip and less like a mode of just getting there. It seems so easy to jump onto a plane and be almost anywhere in the world in at most a couple of days. Although this doesn't explain how packages from America are taking a month to get here airmail.

Life on board is pretty easy and in some ways I felt a bit uneasy because the service was so good and omnipresent. Each sleeper car had a steward who looked after your every needs, brought you breakfast in bed, transformed your carriage from day to night (beds fold down out of the walls etc). Everywhere were staff who brought you drinks and snacks and each dining car had many waiting staff. Basically, what it all boiled down to is that this is the way that the colonists used to travel and it felt a bit wrong that Britain would march into any country that their mineral wealth took our fancy and then create a 5 star hotel atmosphere for themselves to boot. The other factor is that, as any fan of John Hughes movies knows, you come from the wrong side of the tracks and we're not talking about mountain tracks here. Perhaps naively I had a vision of the train passing through lush verdant jungle with monkeys swinging from tree to tree alongside the train and the odd parrot here and there. The reality is you also get to travel through some of the poorest areas of Malaysia and Thailand (Bangkok especially) and it feels a bit wrong to be sitting there with a gin and tonic while people are living in shacks by the train lines. Although it should be noted that our steward was called Weenus, which did make me laugh.

I mentioned the library car, and one of the things that I found there was this picture from an old newspaper. OK, ok, you caught me out. I persuaded everyone to dress up to the nines for dinner and managed to get quite a nice vintage look going. It's not exactly the Bethnal Green Working Mans club but it was nice to be dressing up again. The staff all thought that we looked fantastic and some of the other guests were impressed as well. The train had requested a jacket and tie and evening dress for ladies, so it was great to see this German couple who wore the same casual clothes for the entire weekend. We nicknamed them the 'Commando couple' and you can see Mr Commando looking a lot like Mussolini here at Butterworth, our first excursion stop.

Unfortunately, and probably through lessons learnt, the train company isn't so keen on allowing the passengers a free rein to explore. I suspect more than a few of them have missed trains that way, so the format of our trip from Butterworth to Penang Island was leave train, get on coach, get off coach, walk 20 metres down a street with no side turns, get into a rickshaw and get pedalled past the sites and then get dropped back at the coach again for the return journey. I would have preferred to have been given a map and gone to one or two of the sites on my own but I guess people are stupid and can't be trusted. The line up of rickshaws was funny (in a very sad tourist way) with some of our train brethren couples being, how to put this, too large to sit in one side by side and having to have the ignominy of one to themselves... Rickshaw riders are also known as the king of the roads, mostly due to their lack of respect for the traffic laws including as we found out, red lights. This doesn't mean that the other cars stop, it just means that you get to have cars heading straight at you. Thankfully it's all part of a system and no-one seems to get hurt.

Butterworth pretty much marks the end of Malaysia and to be honest I was looking forward to Thailand more. Malaysia is somewhat over exploited from a natural resources perspective and although we did get to pass through some of that dense jungle as the pictures show, for the most part the rainforest has been torn down and replaced with palm oil plantations. Biofuel car users take note. Where do you think bio diesel comes from..? Yes, your eco cars are helping the demise of the rainforest. Thailand on the other hand has replaced their forests with rice plains, which are much more picturesque, so that's ok then.

It's probably worth mentioning how nice the food was that we had on the train and considering it comes out of the same sized kitchen as a train in the UK, makes me wonder exactly how the food there can continue to be so sub-standard. From time to time we got a peek into the myriad of cupboards and what have you that contained a jigsaw of tools, food storage and wine cellars that keep the train moving in the manner to which it is accustomed.

The second excursion was to the 'Bridge over the River Kwai', providing the other tourists with an unexpected photo opportunity to get some pictures of the Orient Express crossing the bridge. Sadly due to a few delays en route although we were given the benefit of a free run of the museum and the war cemetery we didn't have a great deal of time to look around both, although both were very interesting. Ayako, a Japanese member of our party said she found the history side of the story very interesting and something that she hadn't really been aware of.

The really big difference that we observed between Thailand and Malaysia is that the people you pass all wave and smile at the train (particularly if you are on the open sided observation car) even in the Bangkok suburban slums. If you look at any of the pictures from the end of the trip you'll see the genuine smiles of welcome that we were flashed as we rolled past.

I uploaded a lot of photos here for this trip, as it was a bit special to me. However if you want to see an edited highlights video then click here.

You can also see the 'official' E&O video here, it gives you a good idea of what the trip is like. Obviously they spent a bit more on thier video budget than me...

A question

Is the Harley-Davidson Pantechnion the gayest motorcycle in the World? I think it might be.

Brought to you by the colour green

Taking the advice of everyone in Singapore, we decided to get out of a Chinese populated area over Chinese New Year. This isn't as crazy as it sounds, because unlike our version where drinking as many alcopops as possible is the order of the day and having yourself vigorously shaken upside down by club owners and taxi drivers, the Chinese actually spend the time with their families, often travelling significant distances to do so. The upshot of this is that it's impossible to get fed or find a taxi anywhere in Singapore, so we headed to Bali for the CNY break.

The trip did not get off to a flying start basically due to a last minute repack at check in by Beatrice in order to redistribute her baggage allowance to avoid paying the usurious excess baggage fees the low cost airlines inflict here. Two of her chosen methods of lightening her bag of heavy metallic objects was to pack her dive knife (attached to her dive regulator) and some sharp scissors in her hand luggage which were promptly picked up at the gate security. Being Asia, the ground staff very reasonably and helpfully offered to transport the items but as checked in luggage. Being Asia, they also forgot to put the bag onto the plane for us. Leaving us with a long, annoying wait at Denpasar airport for the next flight out of Singapore to bring us these items (plus Beatrice's toiletries, contact lenses etc that were also in the bag) as being a budget airline they had no intention of couriering us the bag when it arrived. You get what you pay for it seems. Respect to the driver from Tauch Terminal (where we stayed) who stoically waited for us to get the bag, and then let us fall asleep on the journey there, didn't crash from being so tired himself and the member of staff who waited up for us with a welcome drink and was still cheerful at 2am when we were so grumpy. You can see how nice the resort is at the webpage and there are a few pics at the holiday album here. Everyone was so nice and helpful the entire week and I can't say enough nice things about the manager Robert, who on hearing the Beatrice got sea sick, offered as an alternative to a boat ride to drive her overland to the dive site, and then drive some tablets out to her later so she could come back on the boat. This is in stark contrast to most UK operations who would sell your kit if you died on their boat, claiming salvage rights to the metal.

The resort is in a tiny village called Tulamben and is literally 3m from the sea. It is famous mostly for the wreck of the USS Liberty, coined as the worlds easiest wreck dive. Although the site is obviously a wreck, the proliferation of life on the ship really renders the dive more of a reef in many ways and for the most part the dives there concentrate on the marine creatures that live on the wreck. And what an amazing array of life there is in Tulamben Bay. In deference to the non divers, I've split the photos up again - so the diving album is here.

Orange frog fish	Deepwater lionfish
Juvenile Octopus on the run	Spot the seahorse (answer here)

So many creatures that I've always wanted to see were present, and many rarer forms of the ones I'm familiar with were also nonchalantly swimming around, unaware of how excited I was. I make no apologies for posting so many pictures of the pair of harlequin shrimp munching on a starfish arm, and to see baby octopus and cuttle fish (my favourite undersea animals anyway) was stupendous. The other sites in the bay, although wreck-less are equally amazing, with lava flow drop offs extending into the ocean and in other areas, piles of rocks with life nestling in nearly every cranny. One feature of the area is that it is volcanic (you can see the mighty and very holy volcano Agung in some of the pictures, especially dramatic when the clouds rolled back) and this leads to black sand which in turn leads to the sport of macro diving. This is an odd past time which can be best described as scouring what appears to be an initially black and featureless bottom for interesting and rare forms of life. What this leads to is you floating around with your head pointing down towards the sand for an hour or so, examining rocks and what have you to see if it is really some form of highly camouflaged animal. The prime spot in this area is called Seraya Secrets and we were lucky enough to do 3 dives there, including one night dive, which rates as one of the best dives I have ever done in terms of life to see. Added to this the resort supplies free Nitrox (a gas that allows you in simple terms to dive for longer than air at shallow depths), a water temperature of 30 degrees and we were clocking up dives of 90 minutes plus quite happily.

Another feature that will make hardened UK divers shiver with anger in their drysuits is that you don't even have to carry your tanks yourself if you don't want to. The famous tank women of Tulamben are more than capable of picking up 2 sets of kit, swinging them into position on their heads and navigating the boulders and cobbles of the beach without so much as looking down, and twice as fast as you can carry your fins and mask to the same spot. I had a different run in with the locals whilst Beatrice was resting during the afternoon. I'd decided to go and check out the village, which didn't turn out to take very long as it's really only a road with some houses and restaurants to cater to the dive trade along it. However I was drawn to the unmistakable sounds of a heavy bassline that appeared to be emanating from down the road. Sadly that bassline appeared to be associated with the Euro outfit 'Scooter' but I felt duty bound to investigate. What I found was a group of guys sitting in the garden underneath the mother of all sky dishes, with two whopping big speakers having themselves a bit of a mid afternoon party. What the video doesn't show (as I pan round) is the guy who gets up and walks over to me is presenting me with the worlds scariest looking drink and offering it to me and inviting me into the party. I'd like to say that I accepted, but the glass looked like it had been used for mixing paint and motor oil in and the drink looked like it would remove the paint from the glass if spilt.

Click to view video


I also went down to the beach near the temple where some local kids were swimming and throwing stones into the sea. I decided to do some stone skipping, which was approximately the equivalent of walking into a Japanese high school with a PS3 two weeks ahead of launch date and resulted in me being inundated with swarms of children who all demanded to be taught how to do the same thing. If anyone goes back to Bali and they are having the island stone skipping championships in a couple of years then you know where it started from.

We also took some time to head into Ubud, the artisans village in the centre of Bali. I'd actually been there with James a few years ago and I was quite shocked at how much the place has commercialised in the last few years, with extensive building and expansion of the arts and crafts galleries and many more upmarket restaurants and bars than my last visit. That said, it's dead easy to walk for 15 minutes or so and get out of the centre and this part of the trip, like Sesame Street, is brought to you by the colour green. Everything is so lush and verdant, from the lizards that we saw to the rice paddy fields we walked past. The monkey forest (a must do for any visitor) is incredible and the monkeys inhabit the temple of the dead, just like in Disney's version of the Jungle Book. Particularly fearsome statues of demons eating babies are found there, possibly to keep kids well behaved in Sunday school. On the way to the forest we bumped into two friends from Singapore, Nico and Ayako, which was pretty surprising.

We took in some traditional Balinese dancing for the evenings entertainment, which I have to say was pretty dull and not that inspiring. Performances are sometimes many hours long and to be honest even the tourist lite version of 90 minutes that we got left me shifting in my seat and fidgeting restlessly. It can be best described as someone beautifully dressed on stage, suffering from St Vitus Dance, whilst an orchestra drops bags of rusty plumbing instruments onto a harp from about 3 metres height (also known as the Gamelan orchestra). The audience was predominately Japanese tourists who all videoed the entire performance so they could inflict the same amount of pain on their families back home, or perhaps it was making a showing on the latest Japanese gameshow - 'How long can you listen to Gamelan for without yawning?'

We had booked into a self titled 'health resort', where we stayed in a cute little two storey villa which was open to the night sky on the top floor. Despite Beatrice worrying incessantly about mosquito invasion, the provided tent over the bed was very effective and the lack of sleeping under air conditioning meant I slept perhaps the soundest sleep I've had in months. This was a good job as we had a long, long journey back to Singapore, via Jakarta as we couldn't get direct flights. But there were at least plenty of taxis when we arrived.