Tales from the Mild Man of Borneo Part 2

Tales from the Mild Man of Borneo Part 1

A hint for non-budget travellers looking for an upgrade when travelling in Asia – ensure you and your partner have different surnames. It helps too if your partner is pregnant. This ensures you are booked into twin rooms and when you ask for a double you are guaranteed an upgrade to a deluxe room. Worked for us twice, though the same trick didn’t work with Malaysian Airlines – Business Class was beyond us.

The Deluxe Suite at our hotel in Kinabalu, a stop-over after Mulu, gave us outstanding views across to the stilt villages of nearby islands and that rarest of rare events, a sunset during Monsoon season. It also ensured more space to wash and hang up smalls. This is one backpacker tradition that will never leave me, indeed the more luxurious the room the more I want to spread damp underwear on every surface.

Next stop was Sandakan on the east coast of Sabah, home of the largest Orangutan sanctuary and stepping off point for Turtle Island and river boat treks up the 560 km long Kinabatangan River. At the sanctuary, once again we were warned that there was no guarantee of seeing anything and sure enough there were more Orangutans than you could point a long thin zoom lens at. While they didn’t quite outnumber the tourists there were enough young Orangutans, one large scary adolescent, one slightly frightened park staff member with a box full of bananas, and monkeys to keep us all satisfied and taking lots of photos. And it’s true – they are very human like, if humans could carry bananas in their feet, walk on ropes, and shit in midair and not wipe.

An interesting fact I learnt at an information bay along the pregnancy highway was that seasickness and morning sickness are related. A woman who suffers from severe motion sickness is very likely to suffer severe morning sickness. My wife throws up when aeroplanes turn corners on runways. She throws up in cars when reading street signs, and in boats when they bob up AND down AND up AND down. She has to dash out of movies that use hand held cameras (admittedly that’s often because Lars Von Trier is crap – he makes me sick). Her morning sickness lasted all day, and the worst trimester (three months) for morning sickness lasted five months. She lived on a diet on peanut butter and crackers and took these and powdered milk to Borneo as emergency supplies (a foolish move as it turned out, but we’ll get to that later).

Also, only days before leaving Australia one of Sandakan’s small high speed ferries travelling to Turtle Island capsized in rough seas, killing one Malay and leaving a few Aussies and Kiwis with some stories to sell that might just have about covered the cost of their lost luggage. While we weren’t going to Turtle Island (not exotic enough for us wildlife snobs) it was with some trepidation that we approached the Kinabatangan River trek, the first of four speed boat trips of the holiday. However, not only did my wife get through them all in relative comfort, but the speed boats all possessed shiny new lifejackets and everyone wore them. Anyone who has been to Asia will tell you that this is unheard of.


There's a wild orangutan in this photo - really


Accompanied by more honeymooning couples than Noosa, we sped along the river towards the Borneo Eco Lodge, a resort in the jungle about 2 hours away (Eco referring to the lack of air-conditioning and hot water). Again we were warned not to expect anything, and certainly not to expect Proboscis Monkeys (tick), Borneo Pygmy Elephants (tick), Hornbills (tick) or wild Orangutans (tick). The elephants were crossing the river as we arrived and we spent hours watching them munch on river grass and make classic elephant noises. They may be small (adults are about man size) but they make quite a racket. The Orangutans dozed and ate – which was sort of what I was doing in Malaysia too.


Borneo Pygmy Elephants doing Elephant things


For the next two days every time we stepped onto the river we were confronted by the exotic, the endangered and the delicious, which doesn’t actually explain why they are endangered. Malaysia being a Muslim country such animals aren’t eaten; endangerment usually has more to do with encroaching and illegal palm oil tree plantations. An interesting side effect of the push to ‘sustainable’ and bio fuels (especially in Europe) is a massive jump in the price of palm oil and a massive proliferation of plantations in Asia and the Pacific at the expense of native vegetation and wildlife.

Our time at the Borneo Eco Lodge included a night tour along a boardwalk out the back of the lodge. Winston, in his sixties, a former soldier brought up in the tradition of British East India and all that but ‘gone native’, was our guide. Malaysia’s answer to the Bush Tucker Man, but with coke bottle rim glasses, he described in great detail how every plant could either kill you or your enemy or sustain you. The following night over a half dozen Tiger beers he casually mentioned the three people who wanted him dead, including a palm oil plantation owner and a former soldier back in Sarawak (also in his sixties), which was part of the reason he couldn’t go back there. He refused to say how many men he had killed.

Back in Sandakan we drank Pimms and played croquet at the English Tea Garden and then to come way back down to Earth visited the War Memorial commemorating the 2338 soldiers (1781 of them Australian) who died on the Sandakan death marches and the six Australians who survived.

Diving Sipidan Island was to be a highlight of Borneo for me, with a whole extra pile of animals that I shouldn’t expect to see. But just getting out of Sandakan was an adventure of sorts, albeit a boring one. Air Asia Express once again excelled themselves in confounding and annoying travellers. Our 10 am flight was cancelled and the replacement 5 pm flight was late, finally arriving at 9pm. The 11 hours spent in Sandakan airport’s restaurant with vouchers for a complete range of chicken rice or nasi goreng (chicken rice without the chicken), was not quite wasted as I read about 30 years of Nelson Mandela’s life in Long Walk to Freedom, but the long wait for the flight was one less day of diving so I wasn’t happy.


Luxury stilt bungalows for the honeymooners, gas platform for the backpackers


We got there in the end. The Mabul dive resort was one of five dive resorts on the island of Mabul, though strictly speaking three aren’t on the island at all. One is a converted gas platform for diving backpackers, and there are two 5-star resorts made up of luxury stilt bungalows. The locals mostly live on stilt dwellings too, but that’s because they’re too poor to afford any land and live a more or less subsistence lifestyle based around what they can pull out of the ocean. I doubt the resort dwellers appreciate the irony. Not that we were slumming it of course. Yet another upgrade saw us in a luxury, land-based bungalow with all the amazing seafood I could eat and plenty of other food too for pregnant women who don’t go near the stuff.

The diving was outstanding, at least would have been if it wasn’t monsoon season, which meant the wind picking up in the afternoon affecting visibility. But I still saw lots of rare and extraordinary sea life such as sleeping giant green sea turtles wedged into the reef, scorpion fish, leaf fish, baby lobsters, a blue spotted eagle ray, mornay eels and sea dragons. My dive guides were forever excited about nudibranchs. These highly colourful sea snails without a shell are world renowned at Mabul, but as far as I’m concerned they’re just colourful slugs. If it can’t bite me then I’m not interested, and fortunately at Sipidan on the second day of diving I saw plenty of sharks but just missed a school of barracuda.


Amazing $2 meals (if you like seafood)


As if we hadn’t stayed in enough resorts or had enough lounging we spent the last few days in a 5-star resort in KK. This was truly one of the most awful, and comfortable, experiences of my life. I could have been anywhere in the world. Overfed Aussie honeymooners, elderly overfed Europeans, waddling kids and busloads of Asian tourists battled for space at buffet breakfasts that could feed African nations for a week, reserved their favourite spots around the pools, and partook of activities designed to remove any thoughts of actually venturing outside the resort. While amazing $2 meals were served down the road, meals in the resort (admittedly good but you could be anywhere) were $50. Beers at happy hour were $7 for a small. And there wasn’t even a bar in the pool which is the least I’d expect of a resort. Still, the wife needed to put her feet up before the flight home – for another $10 she could have got them massaged by the pool.

The flight home was uneventful, going through customs wasn’t. I partly blame Border Patrol for making every customs official want to be a superstar, my wife blames memory loss due to lack of sleep and pregnancy. My wooden mask and sculpture passed the test, her milk powder and peanut-butter (crunchy of course) wasn’t declared. She was lucky. She could have faced a $60,000 fine and a cavity search (fortunately her major cavity was filled by my future son) but got away with a warning and a blacklisting. I expect she’ll end up on the cutting-room floor too.

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Tales from the Mild Man of Borneo Part 1

I have seen the future and it is expensive. But comfortable.

I have had the nicknames ‘Guru’ and ‘Billy Backpacker’ given to me at some workplaces, so ingrained was my public image with the life of the unkempt traveller, my backpack and Dunlop Volleys my closest companions.

But no more. ‘Package Tourist Man’ and ‘Suitcase with Wheels Person’ are now more appropriate monikers (if I were a Superhero).

Five-star resorts, buffet breakfasts, internal flights and being met at airports with your name on a card may have been how I travelled around Borneo, but while you might be able to take the backpacker out of the hostel you can’t take the cheapskate to the air conditioned restaurant and expect him to leave a tip. Well, not every night.

There are extenuating circumstances. My wife is pregnant and admitting this takes this blog to a whole new personal level that was not its intention. So central is this fact to how I (we) travelled, what we ate, where we stayed and who I slept with that it could not be ignored in the telling of these traveller’s tales.

The Crunchy-Peanut blog has lost its wild-eyed innocence, and unless I’m very careful it could shortly descend into tales of parenting classes, nappy changing at 3am and yellow vomit running down my shoulder. Har-bloody-har. Such things happen but I avoid reading them and will not write about them (although I did take advantage of duty free to buy cheap Wallaby baby clothing – that’s not to say my wife is giving birth to a furry marsupial though).

Meanwhile in Borneo (and you thought I’d never get there)…

…We saw Orangutans. Well that’s all that really matters isn’t it? Your images of Borneo, apart from the occasional head hunting, is of Orangutans (and just by way of an aside here – I have no idea whether Orangutan should be capitalised or not. I mean you don’t capitalise ant or mosquito or fish, but Orangutans are somehow proper when it comes to them as a noun - very proper and very deserving – regal even. Maybe it’s the 96% of our DNA thing. But then again we share 90% of our DNA with slugs – or is it fruit flies? So anyway, for the sake of this blarticle, O-rangutan it is).

Our first day in KK, as the locals call it was a real eye-opener for my wife. I’d been to Malaysia 12 years earlier as a smelly backpacker (I’d lost my deodorant in Lombok), but even by that stage I’d been hardened by two months in Indonesia and a week in Singapore (which wasn’t hard at all). So I knew that Malaysia was a pretty liberal (as long as you weren’t in an opposition political party and kept your mouth shut about the ruling party), pretty developed (if you could call clogging traffic and rampant destruction of forests developed), friendly country where everyone spoke English (mostly poorly) and the local car, the Proton, was a pile of crap. But my wife realised this for herself pretty quickly when she saw young couples holding hands, women working in occasional non-menial jobs, and beer being served.

It should be said though that when it comes to Malaysia, Sabah is as Catholic as you can get in an Islamic country. Apologies for the history and geography lesson, but Sabah is much closer to the Phillipines than it is to Peninsular Malaysia and the only reason Malaysia exists at all is because it is the old British colony in South-East Asia. And it was the Brits that encouraged Chinese traders to settle the area. So Sabah has a high Catholic (ie Phillipino) and high Chinese population. So ironies of ironies the Chinese food is fantastic and the Malaysian food dubious. But you can get a beer pretty much anywhere (except the Muslim halal restaurants but even then they’d serve ‘American Tea’ in a tea pot).

Within a few hours we’d discovered the cheapest place to get a beer (in the backpacker’s area – two longnecks of Tiger for $7), the best and cheapest place to get chicken noodle soup (one of the ubiquitous Chinese Cafes - $2), and where all the markets were (meat, fish, vegies, fruit, souvenirs, and food late at night – especially whole cooked fish eaten with you hands at the Phillipino night market for $2). Unfortunately we also discovered that every band is the same (Malaysian pop and English love ballads played Phillipino karaoke style with a dude of a keyboardist), Malaysian breakfasts are inedible, and Chinese can’t swim. At a snorkelling tourist island just off the coast, Malay Chinese would don life jackets before venturing into waist high water where a very bored lifeguard would keep watch. But other than that KK was just a hub for us to get to other places.

The first place we went to were the Mulu caves just over the provincial border in Sarawak. The flight to Mulu was our first experience of Air Asia Express, the little of the Malaysian domestic dodgy brothers airlines. Actually that’s not fair. When the planes did arrive they were as comfortable as 50-seater ex-Malaysian Airlines propeller planes get, but that’s arrive with a big IF. They were usually late or never and even then were mostly empty. Indeed the flight to Mulu had 8 people on it including the pilots, the air hostess and the incredibly camp steward. For some reason all flight stewards the World over are camp and gay but in Malaysia it’s extreme – and this in an Islamic country where many states would castrate you if word got out. I guess at about $30 one-way though you can’t complain. Much.

Evidently the local or national Government is subsidising the flight in an effort to promote the caves as a tourist destination. Certainly the Mulu resort would appreciate this as it is one of only two places to stay – the other being the backpackers at the National Park. The resort by a peaceful river was nice enough and certainly the pool was appreciated. It also had its quaint customs like a flag raising ceremony each morning where they’d play the National Anthem, which, according to the brochure, was ‘given a livelier tempo to make it more contemporary, as well as to signal the dynamic progress that the nation has seen as it moves towards Vision 2020’. I think John Howard could be inspired by such an idea and slow down Advance Australia Fair as we move toward his Vision 1950.


The walk along a 3km boardwalk to the caves was an adventure in itself as obscure and highly colourful tropical millipedes, caterpillars, butterflies, dragonflies and more fought for space on the handrail and kept the Czech version of vegetable lasagne (a joke there for the Seinfeld fans) busy taking hundreds of photos for bored relatives back home.

The Mulu caves are the largest in the world, or have the biggest diameter, or largest opening, or the largest volume, or the biggest open at both ends. It all depends on who you talk to and when you talk to them. Our guide gave us all of these descriptions. But they are jaw droppingly massive. Guide books talks about how you could fit 100 jumbos in them as if the jumbo jet were some standard unit of volume in the same way as a swimming pool or Sydney Harbour has any relevance to Lake Titicaca or the Caspian Sea. Words don’t do the caves justice, which is just as well as this blarticle is long enough already.

After a few hours exploring the caves and seeing the world's greatest pile of bat poo covered by the world's greatest collection of cockroaches (enough to make it seem as if the pile was moving and glistening in the torch light) we emerged blinking into the sunlight and adjourned to a small viewing area. Like much of the trip our guide warned us not to expect anything, but to hope for the extraordinary - in this case millions of bats flying out of the case mouth in a snaking trail like massive wisps of smoke. The hoped for arrived. They poured out in a continuous stream for 45 minutes and we only left due to an impending tropical storm which drenched us in seconds and poured for hours. The river rose two metres overnight but that's nothing unusual in this part of the world, so we caught longboats to more caves, more bat poo, more cockroaches and more massive caves.

Each night at the Mulu resort we’d be subject to native dancers and dances and a blow pipe demonstration at which tourists were invited to kill balloons. Let’s just say that when the balloon men from planet Helium arrive I’ll be well experienced to man the front line.

Tales from the Mild Man of Borneo Part 2

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Traveling in India OR How to Prevent the Runs

It didn’t take long to remember how to travel in Asia. Walk with your eyes down (avoiding the eyes of beggars, touts and rickshaw-wallahs, and to avoid stepping in or on something or someone) and with your mouth closed (your nose is a filter – you should have seen all the black stuff I’d blow out of it at the end of each day). Haggle at length, keep your sense of humour, don’t lose your temper, don’t drink the water, take advantage of every clean toilet. But most importantly, DO NOT FART. And finally, it’s OK, indeed mandatory, to discuss your bowel movements with complete strangers. It’s also OK to write about them at length, as you will discover.

My journey began in New Delhi. New Delhi is the capital of India, and, believe it or not, has a layout based on that of Canberra. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Anyway, my point is that the similarities are striking. Yeah right. One’s a stinking quagmire that is testament to the depths that humanity can plunge and the other one is in India.

In New Delhi, as opposed to Old Delhi, which is more crowded, noisy, smelly, polluted and interesting (and has more open-air urinals), I stayed at the Park Hotel (lobby like that of a 5-star brothel) and quickly fell into my routine of following my partner, her head buried in the Lonely Planet, from site to site while thinking about food. Fortunately, our different philosophies of travel complemented each other quite well. My partner would study the history of a city before seeing it. I’d study the menus and try to convince her that it was OK to eat things covered in wasps. The touts and most other Indians would practice their English and test our spending power by asking where we're from. They have no sense of humour though. They don't know where Latvia is and never believed I was Steve Waugh, though they did want to take our photo. I still don’t understand why us? We tried asking one gentleman why he wanted a photo of us with his daughter. “Because it’s her birthday”, he replied. Well, you can’t argue against logic like that.

Delhi, like all of India was covered in sites with this description:

“Built in the 12th/13th/14th/15th/16th/17th/18th century, this impressive/outstanding/excellent/crumbling/former Mughal/Arab/British Fort/Palace/Mosque/Temple was reconstructed 7/8/9 times. Invaded by the Mughal/Arab/British/Tourist invaders in 1450/1569/1670/weekly, the impregnable/pregnable Fort/Palace/Mosque/Temple was finally abandoned/turned into a hotel.”

This description was at its best when told, via an expensive audio system, by the current Maharajah (or perhaps it’s Kamahl), his booming Indo-Oxford accent struggling to comprehend how it had all come to this, and wishing he’d only been born a couple of centuries earlier.

It was in Delhi I began my love-hate relationship with Indian food. I was grateful for the air-conditioned South Indian Pure Vegetarian Family Restaurants which closely resemble Australian North Indian diners but without the Butter Chicken (which doesn’t really exist in India). I also stumbled upon the joy of Dosas (mega-crepes filled with anything) and the all-you-can-eat for 70c Thalis (veg curry, dahl and other slop served on a segmented metal plate with rice and the ubiquitous chapatti – a flat brown tasteless bread common all over India because, being made essentially of sawdust and sand - perhaps, they cost nothing to make). Only one Samosa made me sick, though they were all awesomely delicious. A Tibetan restaurant in Jaisalmeer in Rajasthan was out of Fing even though they didn't know what it was ("We have no Fing").

My favourite dishes though were the local specialties – Laal Maans (extremely spicy mutton – mutton is usually, but not always, goat), bean curry and cashew curry in Rajasthan, seafood and Chicken 65 (I don't know either and neither do any waiters, but it was very spicy) in Goa, fish kebabs and crème caramel like deserts in Kolkata, sugary syrupy things of all shapes everywhere. I also drank loads of Pepsi, Coke, 7th up soda water, Thums up (sic) cola, and Frooti and Maaza mango drinks. And of course about 15 different varieties of bottled water of which Aquafina, owned by Pepsi, was the most common and the worst tasting (of chemicals and plastic) of the lot.

After Delhi we spent two weeks in Rajasthan, admiring (and in my case envying) the palatial decadence of the Mughal (Muslim) Emperors and various Maharajahs. Back when every city here was the capital of a nation and the threats weren't from hordes of tourists and capitalism but each other, the Emperors and Maharajahs spent most of their time attempting to kill each other and now extinct wildlife while exploring their vanity and their concubines. I don't know how they managed it. I've only got one concubine and that's a full time job (not to mention my partner – boom tish). It’s very difficult to tell a Maharajah from a Mughal Emperor. Each sprouts an identical luxuriant moustache (the local Rajput men still do - I tried to grow one but fell short by 10cm and many years) and have the same imperial nose which was repeated in artwork for centuries.

We travelled on all possible forms of air-conditioned and non air-conditioned Indian transport except elephants. This is where we differed from Maharajahs who mostly travelled on non air-conditioned elephants. We spent a few days in the Targ desert on a camel safari. Camels are as uncomfortable as they look and smell like off cabbage. They also don’t have air-conditioning. The trek was conducted under the roaring jets of the Indian air force and in full view of the thousands of windmills that power the electric fence and lights that run along the India-Pakistan border. It was while being sandblasted, melted, sunburnt and jolted into another dimension that I came to view camel riding as a pointless and painful way of going from one place to another. Give me a 4WD any day. An air-conditioned one.

The last few days in Rajasthan was spent tag teaming the toilet - up to that stage my biggest problem was actually constipation, but I more than made up for it. This made going to the Shiv Niwas Palace in Udaipur for my birthday meal a little problematic. The Shiv Niwas Palace is where Roger Moore cavorted with Octupussy, henchmen and bikini models but these days (and in reality probably in those days too) it is full of overweight middle aged Germans. All three of Udaipur’s luxurious palaces were built to take advantage of the glorious lake vistas. Today, there’s barely a lake and the palaces are 5-star hotels with restaurants to match. No matter - even if our chosen palace was the second most expensive place in town it still worked out at King St, Newtown prices. It was just a shame that I lost it all down the toilet an hour later (and for much of the next day).

By the time we reached Mumbai after three weeks and seven rolls of toilet paper (actually easier than it sounds – standard Indian bog rolls are all of about 30 sheets – the cardboard tube is almost thicker than the paper) we were more than familiar with all Indian forms of transport, the ubiquitous Tata buses and trucks, cycle and auto rickshaws and Ambassador Taxis.

Of all the buses the most frightening was also the most comfortable – the sleeper bus. Sleeper buses are great if you’re not claustrophobic or sick (which best described my partner by that stage). You travel in your own sealed and padded coffin while speeding along the highways and arrive refreshed, relaxed and hopefully not dead. If you’re really lucky you’ll have slept for a few minutes. The bus dropped us 40km short of our intended destination in Mumbai and the legendary bone-jarring three-wheeled autorickshaws descended like swarming wasps. Surprisingly, rickshaws, auto and cycle, are not allowed in central Mumbai. Ambassador taxis though, designed, and in the majority of cases probably dating from, the 1950s, are present in their thousands, though being bigger and largely black they swarm more like cockroaches in need of a good wheel balancing. Equally surprising, cows are also banned, and as a result of these proto and token attempts at town planning, the traffic successfully oozes along and you can even see the gutters most of the time.

Outside the city and everywhere else in India, the cows rule the streets much as a Maharajah would rule a nation, but without the concubines (but then again). Everyone knows that cows are sacred in India, including the cows. The natural habitat of the cow is highways and traffic islands, this way they can create the most chaos. They subsist on a diet of paper and cardboard. They tend to crap in your general direction and change their direction without warning, usually to the detriment to your car, bus or shoes. They’re treated by the locals more like dogs than the dogs are, which are generally shabby and mangy and pregnant. But again, except in Mumbai, where rich, fat Indians will happily power-walk along the waterfront in shorts and a t-shirt with two perfectly groomed corgis on a leash.

Mumbai is all about food and cricket and money, and we had plenty of all of them. Plenty of Chinese and Western Food (I finally cracked, had chow mein, fried rice and pizza and didn’t my stomach just love it) served by a plethora of hovering waiters. The menus of your standard Mumbai restaurant ran to over 12 pages and included hundreds of variations of everything meat and veg that had ever been invented in India and China. And for the first time I encountered a drinking culture, or at least lots of men in dark and smoky rooms drinking a nip of scotch with a litre of water or a Kingfisher beer by the longneck.

The ubiquitous Kingfisher beer, drunk all over the country, comes in a clear 650ml bottle. Strangely, it’s made to a different recipe in each state – in Uttar Pradesh it’s a caramelly brown with a yeasty bite, in Goa it’s a lemony yellow with a light refreshing taste. Whether this reflects the quality of the local water or the air is something best not contemplated. Each state controls its own alcohol tax, and hence beer is priced according to numerous factors, but mostly religion. The stronger the religion (especially in the Hindu Belt state of Utter Pradesh) the more expensive the beer and the more likely you to have to drink it out of a tea pot (Agra) or keep the bottle under the table (Varanassi). The less religious (especially in Christian Goa) the more likely that a longneck will cost $1 and you will spend all day drinking them on the beach.

We boarded the train from Mumbai to Goa and spent a night in a 3-tier (bunk) air conditioned carriage. Luxury compared to the sleeper bus. The next morning we leapt from the speeding train (almost literally - we had about 30 secs to get off) and caught a cab to Arambol beach. It only broke down once.

Once settled in at Arambol we hit the beach and the Kingfishers and then the Kingfisher hit us. My partner had her doubts about the beer from the start (Her: “Is it supposed to be green?” Me: “It’ll be fine, it has wasps on it”) but it was the only thing we both ate and we both got really ill that night. Without being too gruesome - oh stuff it why not - I endured a 12 hour colonic irrigation and my partner a 36 hour spew and poo. During the intermediate 24 hours I was forced to laze on the beach by myself and swim in the surf, drink, and eat delicious and only slightly contaminated seafood (I was tempted by the Tendor Lion Strogan Off but thought I shouldn't). When we left, my partner foolishly decided she was better despite not eating for three weeks and could handle the 3km walk to the bus stop. Unsurprisingly, she fainted just as the bus turned up.

We spent the night in Panjim, capital of Goa and in the afternoon checked out the massive churches and Cathedrals of Old Goa, built by the Portuguese during their 400 year rule of the colony of Goa (until 1961 - more staying power than the British evidently). This included the Cathedral of St Francis Xavier whose supposedly undecomposed body is displayed every 10 years and which we missed by two weeks. This is apparently a miracle. The real miracle is that anyone believes it. I saw the photos and he looks pretty decomposed to me.

5 am the next morning we woke for a 7 am flight that arrived at 10:30. 11 hours, one late flight, one cancelled flight and one flat tyre on the hired car later (5 hours to go 150 km) we finally made it to Agra. Being short of sleep and still essentially ill, we went to bed early to be woken every 2 minutes by deafening explosions as another Diwali firecracker went off. Diwali is the Indian “festival of light” though in modern day India this has been translated to “festival of extreme and sudden noise”. This comes as no surprise. India is a land of extreme noise. There is no Hindi word for “whisper” (or “sorry”, “please” or “excuse me” for that matter). Indians talk incessantly and at volume, especially on their mobile phones (standard conversation goes “HELLO…HELLO…HELLO” etc). They sit on their car horns (it’s officially sanctioned – even the trucks have ‘horn please’ painted on the back of them), blow whistles constantly at the cricket, scream political slogans from jeeps with giant loudspeakers and play Bollywood songs and advertisements at ear-bleeding volume at kid’s fairs, markets and festivals. Sydney is a sleepy village compared to your average Indian city.

There is only one thing to do in Agra and that’s go to the Taj Mahal. The contradiction between Agra and the Taj couldn’t be starker. The Taj is stunning, so much so that it completely overwhelms the thousands of tourists milling around it – don’t believe the staged Princess Di images. Agra is a crowded polluted dump overrun with incessant touts that forever hound the few tourists that can be bothered staying in Agra rather than do the standard day trip from Delhi.

After Agra, checked out some smaller towns (in India this means a population under half-a-million) – Fatapuh Sikri is a poorly signposted (ie it isn’t signposted) massive fort and palace complex (with the standard history of emperors and invaders) surrounded by a mass of the above mentioned kids fairs. Orchha was, believe it or not, small, relaxed, isolated and pleasant. Orchha’s palaces and fort face each other across the river. Mostly devoid of tourists and undiscovered by the Indian Archaeological Society, the sites are future ruins just intact enough to let you scramble all over them, including on the roof. The surrounding jungle is full of temples. It’s all very Angkor Watt (Cambodia), though not quite as grand or on the same scale (and there are no landmines).

Khajuraho is home to the famous Karma-Sutra sculptures. If you’re not familiar with the sculptures don’t worry. Just think the kind of hard-core porn that could put you in prison or without a job in the Department of Education. The manicured lawns and peaceful surroundings (it’s too expensive for the locals) ensure a surreal experience and a slightly uncomfortable one for males. At least, that’s the idea, but I was sick again and nothing, except a flushing toilet and 2-ply toilet paper, could have turned me on at that stage.

The train to Varanassi was preceded by a three-hour taxi ride along the worst road in India and perhaps only second to the Highlands Highway in PNG as the worst in the world. The alternative was the 6 hour bus which came sometimes at 6am and other times not at all. The connecting train arrived three hours late, the last 145 km taking six hours. Being night time, Varanassi station had already taken on its alter ego of homeless shelter, and there are lots of homeless in Varanassi. There are also lots of cows, buffalo, dogs, pilgrims, burning corpses, monkeys, boat-wallahs and rickshaws all competing for the same dusty smelly piece of Ganges foreshore. The Ganges is lined with cement steps (Gats) that act as cremation site, laundry, bath, wharf and men’s urinal, often within (literal) spitting distance of each other. The continual cremations lend a permanent haze to the atmosphere while providing the only entertainment in town to the locals, though even as a tourist you get used to seeing burning legs poking out of a pyre or the remnants of a corpse being picked up on a stick.

Kolkata by comparison is party central. Being ruled by communists since independence and being disdainful of the federal government, almost weekly strikes (called bundhs) and go-slows organised by either the government or the unions ensure that not a lot gets done. Office hours are 10-4:30 with an hour for lunch. They’re also such appalling hagglers they’ll often sell things at marked prices – it’s easier that way. During the wet season the place floods and even less gets done. It’s no wonder the local pastime is eating, and they do that very well and very often (but don’t order a margarita – not unless you like warped martinis).

So all that was left was to brave the traffic out to the airport – a one hour journey in a rickety old taxi through the belching truck and bus fumes along non-signposted roads while hanging on for grim death for the first available toilet. A fitting end to an awesome trip.

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Cricket in India - Or How to Limit the Runs

I expected thousands of Indians crowded around radios and TV sets. I expected every cabbie, doorman, wallah and beggar to regale me with tales of the Australian tour of 1969 or to be able to recite Allan Border's batting average to seven decimal points. I expected every street corner to be full of wanna-be Sachins belting tennis balls for imaginary 6s. My expectations have not been met, well, not entirely. Yes, my very first cabbie knew the entire Australian side from the tied test in Madras in 1986. Yes, my nationality triggered a hundred identical conversations (“Australia – very good team” followed by a list of all the players to have played for Australia since 1969). Yes, I received grateful unabashed thanks (though perhaps greed is closer to the mark) when giving tennis balls to street urchins. But it was so difficult to find out the score from Nagpur when I was riding a camel in the deserts of Rajasthan. And not one samosa salesman had the radio on, nor did any other street vendor in Delhi know who Nathan Hauritz or Cameron White was. Sure, they have a meagre living to scratch out from the grime of their barely sustainable existence, but you still think they’d be known about in India of all places.

No, to find the true essence of cricket in India one must watch TV. The cricket is on live, all cricket, everywhere, not just the current test series. Each of the sport channels (Star, National and ESPN) show live international cricket from anywhere in the world (and wasn’t NZ vs Bangladesh a snorter of a series), sports highlight shows, obscure replays (England vs Pakistan 1992 - now there was a series) and official and unofficial cricket related programs (including a weekly ICC cricket show which is always three weeks out of date). And while all the players (and Harsha Bogle) are massive, appearing in innumerable commercials and other sponsorship tie ins (though I can't work out why Harsha Bogle is always with a buxom Bollywood starlet), the undoubted megastar of the game is Roshni Chopra.

Roshni Chopra, Bollywood star and model, is the star of 'Fair and Lovely Fourth Umpire', which by no coincidence is also a skin whitening cream.Roshni Chopra supplies the glamour and the inane commentary while Kris Srikkanth and a couple of other one-test wonders debate aspects of each session's play. She's caused a lot of tension amongst the local populace (letters to the editor, editorials, burning of effigies – that sort of thing), who, while in awe of her radiance are as perplexed by her lack of knowledge of the game. The show randomly switches from English to Hindi and occasionally a pidgin variety of both, but it's Roshni that the public watch it for.

So armed with this background knowledge of all things Indian cricket I proceeded to Mumbai to watch the 4th test. Australia had already won the series, but the locals were keen to point out that they were robbed in Chennai and so for all intentions the series was ‘live’. Only an Indian could think this way. When they did win the match in only three days some of the spectators started proclaiming the Indian cricket team as ‘World Champions’ despite the fact that Australia are the One-Day World Champions, there is no Test World Championship and Australia had won the series. I tried pointing this out to them and was lucky to escape in one piece. The first day's rain and near-washout came as a welcome relief from the heat of Rajasthan.

Rajasthan has historically been different (indeed many different nations) to the rest of India and it is just as true with their cricket. Barely a match was seen in the streets nor a hotel TV tuned to the cricket. But my Gypsies cricket cap was enough to trigger a conversation with the vice-captain of the Jaisalmeer cricket team – the equivalent I imagine of first grade – so I politely refused his invitation to go to training that afternoon. Anyway – I didn’t have any gear and was severely weakened by whatever virus was going round at the time. I also didn’t feel up to taking the revenge of a nation just humiliated in Nagpur.

So I turned up on Day 2 of the Mumbai Test to battle the masses clamouring to see Sachin Tendulkar who was not out overnight. Tendulkar is massive all over India, selling everything from Pepsi to scooters and mobile phones, but being from Mumbai is even more massive there. I scrambled to the empty ticket window (empty because it sold the “expensive” tickets) to buy a discounted match pass in the luxury 'Guest' Stand for a bargain 550 rupees, or $17, for the remaining 4 days and was seated in time to watch Sachin add 3 to his overnight score before succumbing to Gillespie. For the only time in three days, the crowd went quiet. 6 hours later they were all gone and so were the Aussies. 18 wickets in one day. The crowd, especially those in the cheap seats which weren't seats at all but cement terraces baking in the sun, were going off, even when wickets weren't falling (and they were doing that about every 15 minutes).

The peculiar design of the Wankheyde Stadium amplified their noise. 5 large tin sheds in a circle propped up by varying degrees of concrete cancer, this has got to be the ugliest sporting stadium on the planet. The real tragedy is that the larger, more functional and certainly more atmospheric Bombay Cricket Club is just down the road. Test cricket was played here till the 1987 World Cup when the BCCI realised they could get more cash in brown paper bags if they threw together some large chicken sheds and called it a stadium rather than pay the snobs at the Cricket Club to use their superb facilities. Everything in India is political except the politics. That’s religious.

The Aussie players were eulogised or insulted to varying degrees each time they approached the boundary (and the Paki umpire was just threatened). Some of the chants were rudimentary and intense - "McGrath's a Homo", "Aussies Suck" and others in Hindi that were only translated to me with a standard incomprehensible Indian head wobble. I only found out later on than Indians never say “no” and when threatened with having to answer a question will just wobble their head, much as an Ostrich will bury its head in sand (another myth!). The chanting was interspersed with an Indian Wave, like a Mexican wave but without the technique - 5,4,3,2,1 and then the whole stand puts their hands up. They actually did get a Mexican wave going on Day 3 - it sped around the ground at less than six seconds per revolution, dizzying for me and for Dizzy Gillespie who at that stage was trying to win the match for the Aussies.

The truly frightening thing though is that you can’t get a beer (or a pie for that matter) and the whole stadium is alcohol free (except for the dressing rooms perhaps). Total insanity from the Indians and they’re all cold sober, though they’re caffeined off the dial. Pepsi comes by the bucket for only 60c.

On Day 3 of the test I went to do some sightseeing confident that I could watch a full day for my birthday on Day 4. Went to Elephanta Island - off the coast of Mumbai - to see some famous sculptures, but who cares, this is about cricket. Fortunately Sachin Tendulkar's Restaurant and merchandising extravaganza (unimaginatively named ‘Tendulkar’s’) was near the ferry quay, and I headed off there for lunch, though with prices higher than those of the great palace hotels of Rajasthan I just had a beer and chips. The cricket was showing on the big screen at Tendulkar’s, and as Michael Clarke ripped through the Indians the place emptied into taxis as everyone realised the match was heading for an early finish.

So I caught the last session; 3 hours, 12 wickets. It was just like watching my own team play. Part time trundlers deceiving wanna-be batsmen with nude deliveries and shocking umpiring decisions. Perhaps the umpires had given away their eyes. In Kolkata’s Eden Gardens a few weeks later and a few days after India had been thumped by Pakistan in a one-off Jubilee one-dayer, I couldn’t help but notice the fence banner advertising for peace between the nuclear neighbours and one that read ‘Donate your eyes’. Very Monty Pythonesque, my first thought was “But I’m still using them”.

The Aussies won the series, the Indians the match. 1000 Indian officials ran onto the ground for the presentation ceremony and for the first time in three days there was a ground announcement – that it was over. Up to that stage there was no ground announcer and only a scoreboard that was plus or minus two overs and three batsmen.

Oh, and for my birthday I went to Mahatma Gandhi's house. He's a great man, but not as great as Sachin Tendulkar.

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Trying to Escape from Rabaul

In January 1942, hundreds of Australian troops stationed at the remote Papua New Guinean (PNG) town of Rabaul, on the island of New Britain, were ordered to flee an imminent Japanese invasion. With less than two days’ notice, the Australians, often with few or no provisions, escaped along any route using whatever method they could find.

Some succeeded in getting to waiting ships, several fled along the coast only to be massacred, some were captured and imprisoned, and some spent weeks crossing the thick jungle of the Baining Mountains to the relative safety of the other side of the island. As with the Kokoda Trail, native people often provided assistance that was to prove the difference between life and death.

In September 1994 the city of Rabaul was almost destroyed by the eruption of the volcanoes Tuvunur and Vulcan. Ash metres deep smothered the town, displacing thousands, closing the airport permanently and devastating the lucrative local tourism industry.

The ash continues to fall to this day from regular exhalations from Tuvunur, stinging the eyes, ruining clothes, covering paths, lawns, roofs and roads. On bad days, stinking sulfurous gases make breathing difficult and cause acid rain, eating away at metal surfaces. The former bustling heart of the city is eerily quiet and dusty. It is if another war has been fought.

The airborne ash though creates spectacular sunsets, a brand new airport is in operation and tourism is making a comeback. Numerous wrecks and fantastic reefs are once again being dived upon and trekkers are beginning to climb the volcanoes and explore the mountains.

Two such wannabe adventurers, my partner and I, arrived in Rabaul recently to attempt the ‘Escape from Rabaul’ Trek. This trek (‘wokabout’ in Pidgin English), which takes three or four days depending upon ability, traverses one of the many routes over the Baining Mountains along which fleeing Australian troops endeavoured to escape the Japanese invasion. Following overgrown colonial roads, bush tracks, creeks and rivers, the trek aims to give some insight into the conditions and hardships faced by those soldiers.

Unlike the more famous Kokoda trail, there are no monuments to fallen heroes, no grainy black-and-white imagery, no well-worn trails, relatively comfortable huts or airstrips. You follow local guides with machetes who hack their way through the jungle following overgrown and rarely used tracks. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

Starting at dawn in Rabaul, we set out by boat along the north coast of New Britain aided by three porters, a cook and a young local tour operator. We were effectively intending to escape to Rabaul as logistically it is much easier to do the trek in reverse.

The volcanoes provided a spectacular backdrop as the boat powered along between glorious and barely explored tiny tropical islands. At times a dolphin entourage accompanied us. Schools (or is it flocks?) of flying fish scattered in every direction. The porters spat betel nut fluids (buai) into the ocean in perfectly timed blood red arcs and the sun belted down.

For four hours the boat alternately roared at full speed or tiptoed through barely chartered coral reefs. The mountains were always on our left, towering over the coconut and cocoa plantations.

We arrived at the timber town of Open Bay at about noon where we were to be met by Francis, a timber mill manager and our driver to the ‘official’ start of the trek. We hopped in the back of the battered Hilux for the 30km journey along the dusty timber company’s roads.

These are the only roads on this part of the island. They are built and maintained by the logging company and hence are in better shape than their counterparts in Rabaul which are supposedly maintained by the government. While the timber logging operation provides much needed employment and investment, as well as providing access to some of the more inhospitable parts of New Britain and the Baining Mountains, it is inescapable that parts of the virgin rainforest and their associated habitats are earmarked for destruction.

From time to time Francis would stop and he and the porters would go into the very small villages we would pass. The villages were little more than a few traditional huts built from local materials. Each hut had a vegetable garden growing mostly sweet potato (kau kau), bananas and taro, from which each family ekes out a largely subsistence living.

We eventually discovered that Francis was looking for our guides. Local Baining tribespeople act as guides for the ‘Escape to Rabaul’ trek. They know intimately the current state and position of the bush tracks that lead from village to village through the jungle. The guides are changed daily at each village and camps are often made nearby on creeks or rivers.

When we finally reached a point beyond which even a four-wheel drive could not pass we still had no guides. While in hindsight this would seem an obvious problem, at the time it just seemed a normal organisational glitch in classic PNG style.

Two of the porters, Eddie and Enoch, and the local tour operator, Steve, debated what to do. The decision was made to carry on regardless as Eddie and Enoch claimed to know the trail having done it a number of times.

The old colonial 'road'

For an hour Enoch slashed and pushed his way through eight-foot tall weeds and creepers like trip wire (including the aptly named Waitawhile) that smothered the old colonial road. Finally in frustration, our shirts already drenched in sweat and our arms covered in scratches, the decision was made to head off road in order to find the bush track that would lead to the first village and camp.

The tangled weeds gave way to a thick clogging undergrowth, though the mosquitos remained a constant. The rainforest canopy provided shade but little respite from the heat and humidity. We slowly made our way downhill, stopping frequently to allow Enoch to race ahead and determine the best route. But it became rapidly apparent that we had no idea where we were going.

Not only were we not escaping from Rabaul, we couldn’t even find it.

Up and down steep hills, along ridges and across muddy creeks we went, Enoch constantly swinging his machete and carving a rough track. Birds, bugs, butterflies, giant snails and stick insects provided alternately colourful, annoying and interesting diversions. We tripped over the buttresses of giant trees, fell through decayed logs, got tangled in creepers and slid down slopes of wet clay and dirt.

Through all this struggle I tried to keep events in perspective. The conditions, though harsh, were nothing compared to those faced by the Australian soldiers 60 years ago. Travelling in the middle of the wet season, many carrying shocking bayonet and gunshot injuries, they crossed the mountains with little support, provisions or guidance.

Eventually we found a creek where we could replenish our dwindling water supplies. The creek was one of many that supposedly fed the Torio River on which the first camp was located, so we attempted to follow it, thinking this would speed our progress.

Boots proved totally inappropriate for walking along the muddy and boulder strewn creek and travelling barefooted there was no way my partner and I could keep up with the rest of the group who wore thongs or nothing at all on their feet. I turned to my Dunlop Volleys which proved up to the task. I contemplated wearing them for the remainder of the trek, but not needing the cash from an endorsement deal once I got home, I switched back to boots as soon as we left the creek.

We ascended and then followed another ridge in an effort to avoid a trio of waterfalls along the creek. As the sun set, and with no alternatives, the decision was made to camp by the creek at a slight clearing. It was a beautiful spot without a doubt, but Steve’s words, “we’re not lost, we just don’t know where we are”, were little additional comfort.

Esther, the cook, prepared dinner and the boys cleared some of the bush for the camp. They set up a tent for my partner and I and prepared a natural mattress of leaves covered by a tarp for everyone else. We discussed our options for the next day, but the reality was that with time being limited and with no guides we had only one, to turn back.

The only consolation was that perhaps we would be in radio range the following night and could listen to the State of Origin. The conspiracy theorist in me postulated that this was the intention of the porters all along.

PNG’s Rugby League obsession, especially at State of Origin time, is real. Conversations with the locals often begin with “Blues or Maroons?” and families have been torn apart by domestic warfare on the basis of divided team loyalties.

That night, after clearing the bullants out from the tent using a combination of handy crushing implements (torches, water bottles etc) and chemical warfare (aerogard), and despite the heat and the mosquitos, we collapsed to an exhausted sleep.

It only took a few hours the next morning to retrace our steps back to the ‘start’ of the trek. The realisation that we had barely walked more than a few kilometres the day before, that we had stopped a long way from the intended camp, and had not even begun to cross the mountains was disheartening.

Despite getting a message back to Rabaul via a two-way radio, there was no guarantee that a message would be passed on to Francis to pick us up. So fuelled on a lunch of Tang orange drink, beef jerky and the ubiquitous beef crackers, we began the 30km walk back to Open Bay.

Almost on cue it began to rain like it only can rain in the tropics. Great slabs of water fell from the sky turning the road instantly to clogging mud. We sheltered under a hastily erected tarp and took the opportunity to refill our water bottles.

The rain cleared as quickly as it had arrived. As we continued down the road we didn’t pass any vehicles, just lots of villagers on foot, nearly all women and children. They were very shy and we could barely elicit more than a smile and a greeting of “apinoon” (good afternoon) from them.

With dusk approaching we decided to camp by a river, still 20km or more from Open Bay. Finally, an opportunity for a swim, a wash and a chance to cool down.

Enoch had bought a few kilos of cooking bananas along the way and these were thrown in the fire as soon as it was built. The bananas were by far the highlight of a dinner of tinned corned beef and rice, which along with instant noodles and tinned tuna are the typical dietary supplements in PNG.

Thousands of fireflies began to flash in unison in surrounding trees as if they were Christmas lights. It was like the trees were talking to each other. Meanwhile, a noise in the distance became a rumble, and soon, three bulldozers and a truck crossed the river right near our camp. With fears that the recent and forecast rain might lead to flash flooding, and still not being able to get any radio reception for the State of Origin, Steve and Enoch went to flag down the next vehicle.

Steve was mistaken for a ghost but fortunately managed to flag down a ute. Its drivers agreed to take us back to Open Bay after collecting the operators of the bulldozers.

After we had piled into the back of the ute, we found out that one of the bulldozer drivers was one of our intended guides (the pay was better). Not only would we have never found him, but he also informed us that due to the deplorable nature of the road we had tried walking along and then around, a new bush track had been carved out and was now being used.

So it turned out that not only would we have never found our guides but we would never have found the track either as the one we were looking for hadn’t been used for over six months.

We spent the night in Open Bay in the cockroach ridden ‘guesthouse’, temporary rooms with two rickety beds and a cupboard. It didn’t rain and we still couldn’t get any radio reception.

It became apparent almost as soon as I woke up, by the smile on Eddie’s face and the blue flags waving from all the vehicles in town, that New South Wales had won. It wasn’t much to mull over during the wait for the boat to pick us up, but it was something.

There were still two days to go of the ‘trek’. My partner and I had paid for porters, guides, food and transport. Steve suggested we spend a night camping on the Talily Islands just an hour from Rabaul and where he was trying to start a small tourist operation and we agreed.

The Talily Islands -paradise of a sort

Once again assisted by dolphins, the boat arrived on a tiny, beautiful uninhabited island. The camping spot was idyllic, the snorkelling was great, we went fishing. There were no mosquitos or sandflies and we had only small crabs to chase out of the tent. The next day we barbecued freshly caught Spanish Mackerel and swam in a cool stream at a cocoa plantation on New Britain owned by Steve’s grandparents.

It was hardly what we expected from a four-day mountain trek.

Once off the beaten (Kokoda) trail you can pretty much expect the unexpected if you go trekking in PNG. Ours was apparently the first time that the guides could not be found for this trek. As this part of the world is further opened up to tourism it can be expected that more formal organisation and planning will follow. Indeed that seemed to be what the organisers of the trek, Bruce and Susie Alexander from the ash-covered Hamamas Hotel in Rabaul, have in mind.

The ‘Escape from Rabaul’ trek is not for the casual walker or those expecting much comfort. The walking, whether on or off the intended trails is tough going but the rewards are knowing that you’ve experienced what few tourists have done.

You’ll also gain a different, perhaps more authentic insight to the PNG jungle and its people. The knowledge that Australian soldiers struggled, and sometimes failed, to cross the same jungle in conditions much worse is both inspiring and humbling.

© Lindsay Cohen - July 2003

Different Trek - same country

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Diving into Vanuatu

This article, by me, originally published at Travelmag.

The duty-free Rum, Vodka, Bourbon, and Baileys nestled neatly up against the flippers, snorkels and other diving equipment. With images in our minds of dark skinned natives serving paper umbrella laden drinks to us under swaying palm trees, we boarded our Air Vanuatu flight.
While it panned out that there are no palm trees on Boeing 737s and there is a chronic undersupply of paper umbrellas in Vanuatu, there is a fortunate oversupply of airline beverages and the duty-free alcohol remained stowed safely away.

Communication with the locals was to prove no problem. The airline magazine conveniently provided a translation of the most widely used Bislama phrases (a Pidgin English dialect). 'Basket blong titi' (bra) became the first running gag of the trip.

The airport at Vanuatu's capital Port Vila (built by the Japanese) is surrounded by cattle properties (owned by the Japanese) and consists of one runway and two small terminals. Your welcome to Vanuatu consists of an immigration queue that moves at what can only be described as a 'relaxed' pace. As if to get you in the swing of things, you are forced to slow down, contemplate life and enjoy the occasional thud of stamp hitting passport. We were there merely to transfer to the domestic terminal, a 'once was concrete' structure that perhaps doubles as a cattle shed on weekends.

The island-hopping VanAir aeroplane was a good old noisy twin prop flown by Captain Bill. No magazine this time, just the local paper that featured an advertisement for a Pt Vila nursery proclaiming 'Plants at Stupid Prices' and an article on a Tribal Chief who had just died who was famous for killing 1000 pigs in one day and building his own grave 10 years earlier.

The airport at our destination, the island of Santo, was little more than a shed that no doubt gets rebuilt after each cyclone. Luke (obviously the ni-Vanuatu (people of Vanuatu) aren't into multisyllabic names) collected us at the airport that night. Our resort (tourists stay at resorts - there is no such thing as a backpacker) was easy to find, just follow the only road through the island's capital of Luganville. By night Luganville seemed to be a typically decrepit and 'relaxed' village of Chinese owned shops and petrol stations. By day it was the same only with more light.
That night we enjoyed out first local beer - Tusker Bitter, an easy drinking Australian style pilsner. The curved pig tusk is the greatest traditional symbol of wealth in Vanuatu, although it's hard to get more than one in your wallet.

I was also to try my first Coconut Crab. More lobster than crab and eaten with more nut cracker than fingers, they get their name from the fact they are baited with coconuts and the interesting aromatic affect this diet has on their taste.

By the end of our first evening we had organised our diving programme with the omnipotently named Allan Power. Allan is a legend or a wanker around those parts depending on who you talk to. What cannot be denied however is his longevity and his diving style. Allan does not wear a wetsuit, he wears Speedos.

Allan first came to Santo as part of a crew to recover the propellers of the wrecked troop carrier the President SS Coolidge, a converted cruise ship, in the 1950s. 15,000 dives later Allan still waxes lyrical by reputation (according to his book) if not in person. Indeed on our first dive on the wreck his only words to us were, "What's his problem?" in regard's to my friend's struggle with his rebellious fins.

The dive, our first in years, was to be to the Coolidge's 5mm cannon at the cruisy depth of 35m with all the bloodied noses, nitrogen narcosis and bends risking antics that implies. Needless to say we all struggled, not with the depth but because none of us wanted to be the first in line to follow Allan's Speedos. As we descended the ship's bow loomed ominously out of the murk towards us. We proceeded over the bow and along the promenade deck and fooled around with coral encrusted rifles, helmets and other gear that thoughtful American soldiers had left behind for our enjoyment. Checked out what remains of the guns then ascended to our decompression stops.

At the final stop at 3m we discovered that Allan Power has a strangely disconcerting relationship with a fish. Boris is a 200kg groper that has established an intimate relationship with Allan and his crew. Boris hangs around the decompression stop at 3m knowing he is the boss and that you mess with him you mess with Allan. Boris gets fed at the deco stop every morning while you bob around in the usual uncoordinated non fish-like fashion. Boris is so big he has his own eco-system of parasite feeders and other hangers-on that use his bulk for privacy, protection and shadow. He makes Allan look good.

Our second dive was to the medicine rooms, our first 'full penetration'. Inside the ship, amongst much fin in the face action, we played with syringes, bottles and jars of ointments and powders, crockery, cutlery and the usual detritus associated with ships that sink. On the ascent, my friend began his reputation for running out of air and could always be found 'sucking the pony' tank of the dive master.

The second day of diving began with a mind-numbing descent to the 20mm cannon and the crows nest at 45m. Admittedly a little absurd, 5 minutes to get there, 5 minutes to look around, 5 minutes to ascend and 30 minutes at decompression stops. The depth was frightening, but with all the nitrogen/laughing gas in our blood we were invincible. At one stage I looked up to see the whole immense ship on its side, a scene reminiscent of the opening scenes of any number of science fiction films. The more advanced dive computers beeped themselves silly during the ascent but still agreed the decompression stops were a little over cautious. Oh well, more chance to play with Boris, play fin-tennis, have torch shoot-outs and wrestle, anything to relieve the boredom.

That afternoon we got to fully penetrate 'The Lady'. The Lady is a stylish statuette of Rubenesque proportions in period costume at 37m. Allan originally found her in the first class lounge and the debate as to whether or not you can see her nipples has been raging ever since. The Lady has since been moved for safety reasons, quite possibly the nipple gazing was weakening her knees and she toppled over. Our dive to The Lady began through the door where a Great American Hero died while rescuing his colleagues. The next few minutes were a mad air wasting adrenaline rush as depth, danger and adventure combined, that and the fact my torch was not working.

The Lady certainly is an impressive piece of work with impressive breasts to match. My suspicion is that a politically correct soldier coloured in the nipples so as not to get his naval buddies too homesick on the arduous (amorous?) tours of duty. From there, with our pulses racing, our breathing panicky (and that just from our encounter with The Lady) and with dive computers reminding us of the craziness of the dive, we picked our way through the ship. We saw more soldier debris (gas masks, helmets etc), light fittings, daily detritus, staircases, tiled fountains and so on. Finally, with my friend desperate to suck the pony, we entered the lobby where the round skylights lit the murk with a view of infinite deep sea-blue. A mind-blowing experience, the highlight of the week.

After the usual decompression stops it was left to the bunch of American schoolkids who were also diving the wreck to wreck our mood with their incessant bragging and threats to sue (really). No matter where you go in the world you can't avoid spoilt rich American kids with too much expensive equipment and no volume control.

Most of the evenings on Santo were spent in a futile search for nightlife. Come 5:30, the sun sets with a thud, the buses and taxis vanish and the streets become eerily quiet. Even the ubiquitous missionaries are nowhere to be seen. Only the tourist resorts stay open, which is where we would inevitably end up, often in our own resort drinking duty free booze with coke or home made South American cocktails passed on to me in total secrecy (Caiparina - dissolve sugar in lots of lime, add lots of ice then add any white or sugar based spirit - stir vigorously).
One night we went to Deco Lodge, the budget resort of Santo Island. Fortunately we weren't staying there, it was where the Americans were staying, but the Coconut Crab was superb and the nightclub (Club Narcosis) was pumping when the pool comp was on. No locals there of course except behind the bar.

If you do find the locals at night it's inevitably only stupefied men at one of the town's 70 kava bars. We were taken to a local bar one night by a group of hard-core Victorians that would spend each evening replaying their dives on the resort's video before hitting the kava bars. We had two half-coconut shells of the dishwater coloured liquid each. Opinions of the taste varied from awful to disgusting, an earthy peppery watery substance that hits you in the nose before making your mouth and then your whole head go numb in a dentist's chair way.
Our only other night was at some pre-Independence Day celebrations. Women and children sat around on the grass listening to awful string instrument renditions of the constitution from groups in faux traditional grass skirts. The men just zoned out at the 30 or so kava stalls nearby. Either that or they'd been watching the Victorians' diving videos.

There were two other dives that week. One was into the cargo holds of the Coolidge where we explored jeeps and tanks on the bottom of the cargo holds plus the usual daily wreck stuff. At one stage we were joined by a huge school of fish in the giant cavity just as the sun broke through, an image Jacque Coustaeu would have been proud of. Our final dive was off Million Dollar Point where stupid America met greedy colonial Britain and France. It was here the yanks dumped a million dollars worth of new equipment they didn't want into the sea at the end of the war because the colonial powers refused to pay 8c in the dollar. It's still all in really good shape, some of the trucks look useable even at 25m. Add a couple of small wrecks and you have a nice little dive.

Captain Norm flew us back to Port Vila and from there we transferred to Hideaway Island which isn't as hidden as the name would suggest, indeed everyone on the island and every tourist knows about it. Perhaps Overrun with Expats on Weekends Island would be a better name.

Nonetheless Hideaway is a great little island you get to by tin boat. Accommodation styles vary from romantic bungalow with private bathroom to the Lodge with shared facilities and all the romance of half a squash court. But the bar/restaurant was really cool, right on the beach, great snorkelling at its doorstep and hermit crabs to amuse you for hours.

Hideaway is renowned for its coral and diving, so we set off for a dive that afternoon to Gotham City, so named due to the batfish that hover there waiting to be fed by the dive instructor, a practice I'm a little underawed by. Alas, the dive was ordinary, some nice coral, a few fish and not much else. The equipment proved to be a little dodgy too, regulators getting stuck on purge and depth meters not working. But the worst were the dive masters whose lack of professionalism and appreciation for the reef were astounding, diving upside down and letting their tanks bash the reef, cursory checks of other divers, handling everything (a big no-no in Australia) and the feeding thing.

Didn't have much time to see much of the main island but did check out Pt Vila a couple of times. The first time was a Sunday and we went straight to Independence Park hoping to find more pre-independence day celebrations. But being Sunday there was just a gospel singer and choir and it was more a case of playing 'Spot the Missionary' that any actual festivities. So instead we moved to the waterfront and watched French speaking locals playing highly animated Petanque.
The heaven's opened when we went back to Port Vila the next morning for Independence Day, but by this stage the park was mud and the locals just congregated in the food stalls and kava bars. With little else to do, we tried some local delicacies; lap-lap (yam, taro and banana mashed to the consistency of plasticine with about the same taste), Chinese inspired yum-cha like meat-rolls, kebab-style meat sticks (which were superb and cheap) and plates of stew and curry served on Australian rice. We gambled on another dive on our final day and fortunately came up trumps. Two days of rain resulted in 35m visibility and the dive was fantastic, giant plate corals hosting dozens of fish and in one case a shark (only a white tip reef shark unfortunately), fluorescent pink anemone, and the scariest fish I've ever seen, a crocodile fish. Also a Waho (a smaller better tasting version of a Barracuda) swam by.

The last afternoon included a walk to a local village. It was hardly traditional, no grass skirts or cannibalism, but lots of corrugated iron sheds, drying volleyball shirts, snotty nosed laughing children giving flowers to us foreigners and pit toilets as my friend discovered much to his embarrassment (must have been the lap-lap).

You have to like these people. Christianity may have robbed them of much of their culture but there is no begging, no aggression to tourists and little hassling of women. Pigs may be worth more than women, but on the major islands they're allowed into the kava bars now even if they're too sensible to bother. The bars are well regulated too, only open between 5pm and 8pm. Everyone seems well fed and healthy. Despite 80% unemployment, political instability, the occasional earthquake, high prices and land mostly owned by foreigners, I suspect boredom is the greatest social ill. It would be interesting to see some of the less touristy islands though, particularly Pentecost Island in April for the DIY bungee jumping. Maybe on the next trip.

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South American Tales Part 2 - Testing the best joke ever

Dateline Arequipa, southern Peru.

Intrepid foreign correspondent ventures into the Santa Catolina Monastery, really a convent where for hundreds of years rich local families would give up a daughter to the church, never to be seen again unless permitted by the bishop. Rumours of lesbian goings-on and four in a bath adventures are totally made up by tourists tormented by school boy joke about nuns in a bath (Where's the soap Yes it does doesn't it - Note to reader - punctuation is left out deliberately - it's all in the telling)

Only recently, and for tax reasons (the government decided they should pay some), was the monastery opened to the public. Here are my conclusions, based on in-depth research (thank yous to the Lonely Planet) and an intense hour wandering around the place...

Peruvian nuns are short and squat with good posture. This is based upon the observation of a wood-fired pizza oven in each of the numerous kitchens, the short yet spacious doorways and the short beds with no mattress;

The nuns' bath does indeed exist, and indeed it is large enough for at least six at a time (although given their squtness, maybe four at a time). There was no sign of the soap. Perhaps it does;

The nuns have either way too much time on their hands or a great eye for tourist opportunities, how else could one explain the perfectly manicured gardens and incredibly colourful floral arangements?;

Why isn't the miracle that the sainted nun from the monastery performed explained in better detail than 'cured a cancer'? A better miracle would have been to explain the best joke ever;

If there really is a god then why are numerous churches, cathedrals and even the monastery destroyed on a regular basis by earthquakes? I blame plate tectonics.

The Santa Catolina Monastery is worth the admission fee. Just.

The best joke ever is still the best joke ever.

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South American Tales Part 1 - The Galapagos Islands

I bring tales from the Galapagos islands. I intend to correct your misconceptions and exaggerate beyond your wildest dreams. I come complete with tales of drunkenness and debauchery, of animals at their wildest and most delicious, of plants at their most endemic.

Misconception Number 1: They aren't the Galapagos Islands at all but the Colon Islands in the province of Galapagos.

Easily understandable I suppose. Galapagos sounds exotic, Colon is where you go for a bowel cancer inspection. I blame that Charles Darwin fellow for no better reason than I can and because he was the one who made them famous by developing the theory of evolution by studying finches on the Galapagos Islands. Prior to Darwin, humanity believed that finches just appeared on the islands where they remained in relative peace, undisturbed by tourists or botanists until Charles Darwin delivered them fame and fortune.

Misconception Number 2: Charles Darwin wasn't exactly a long term resident studying a pristine wilderness or tropical paradise. He spent all of only 5 weeks in the islands and saw them at their worst, a time when Norwegian whalers had large factories on the islands and turtles were being slayed in their thousands. The finches largely avoided domestication because they taste awful.

Not a very imaginative chap either that Mr Darwin. There´s the mangrove finch, the highlands finch, the cactus finch, the slightly less red than that other one finch, the wasn't doing anything particularly intersting at the time finch and the woops accidentally trod on it hope no one notices finch to name but a few. Alas I only saw about 800 species of finch, and only went to 8 of the 20 sites selected especially for tourists due to their exciting range of souvenirs, photo opportunities and lack of volcanoes. This really sux as all I ever remember from all those Galapagos documentaries is iguanas dodging lava flows and Killer Whales walking up the beach to eat fur seals.

Misconception Number 3: Killer Whales do not actually walk up the beach to eat fur seals on the Galapagos Islands. That happens in Canada.

Still, the sites I saw were rather special. Still haven't worked out if all the animals are very stupid or very tame. A total lack of fear of humans may simply mean that isolation leads to in-breeding leads to stupidity, just look at Darwin (the city not the person but you never know) for example, a perfect study of the dangers of evolution if I ever saw one. Anyway, the novelty of sea lion pups nibbling at your toes or the adults checking out your snorkelling gear while in the water doesn't fade, neither does the memory of duelling albatros, Dolphins playing in the wake of your boat, turtles and reef sharks drifting in front of your mask, marine iguanas sneezing salt on your ankles or frigate birds inflating their bright red breasts in a feeble attempt to attract a mate (I wasn't interested). Even the names of some of the animals are great, Booby is of course the all time sniggering favourite. Boobies come in four varieties, red-footed, blue-footed, masked and the one you see on all the t-shirts.

Not all the animals are so friendly, the school of Hammerhead sharks I saw during my dive kept at a respectful distance and the sting rays and mornay eels lurked menacingly but ultimately on the terror scale paled in comparison with the Hammerheads. My favourite were the white spotted Eagle Rays, another example of imaginative naming. They sailed through the water with tiny flicks of their giant wings, gliding over the ocean floor like a stealth bomber. Also, just like a stealth bomber, they are undetectable on radar.

There were also lots of endemic plants. They had branches and leaves and weren´t afraid of humans either.

The animals didn't provide the only highlights, there was the small matter of the Small Yacht Yolita, a 12 berth chunk of wood and noise held together by the beer stains in the carpet and the chemicals in the toilets. The Yolita is hardly the pride of the fleet, it putters around behind the big luxury catamarans and tall ships, tormenting its passengers with a shower that is little more than a dribble and bunks so narrow that rolling over could result in a quick plunge to the damp and sticky salt encrusted carpet. Still, the crew did their best, and, when not drunk, were friendly and helpful even if they do cheat at cards and try sleazing onto all the women passengers. Even the food was generally good, fish twice a day in any of 3 exciting combinations with rice, beans or rice. Christmas Eve we drank the boat dry, quite an effort considering all the leaks, and danced the salsa into the wee small hours while a huge full moon provided a pathway to the stars (or some marine mammals).

Ah yes, these Ecuadorians know how to party, if only the tourists could learn from them. On New Years Eve (indeed millenium eve depending on how you count it), once the spattering of fireworks had been extinguished from the hair of the onlookers and the efigies of the politicians has been burnt to the ground, the locals danced for free in the main square till 8 am while the tourists fled to the expensive discos where non-stop repeats of ´Mambo Number 5´ followed by an eclectic Galapagos mix of bad dance music, hard rock, bad techno, retro funk groove, bluesy soul with a techno beat and other South American inventions burst the ear drums. Fortunately I was drunk enough to enjoy both forms of entertainment, partying much of the night with a bizarre mix of locals and tourists both long and short term, stranded sailors and adventurers.

Misconception Number 4: The Galapagos Islands are hardly deserted. Puerto Ayora, the main town, has a population of 10,000. Well someone has the feed the tourists.

I generally hovered around the edges of the long term tourists, finding them sort of cool in an uninteresting way. On January 1, hope sprung from the dead ATM (the only one) that perhaps the rest of the world had ceased to be, Y2K bugs consuming society and leaving only specks of paradise like ours at the end of time (only Easter Island, French Polynesia and maybe Hawaii celebrated the new millenium after we did). Unfortunately, on January 2 I was able to withdraw another 2 million sucres (a wad 10cm thick and worth about $3.17) from the damn machine. I can now also report that the Galapagos´first cyber cafe is about to open. Paradise no more?

Happily I can conclude, that in the best spirit of Eco-Tourism I left no impact on the Galapagos Islands, not on the land, the water, or the inhabitants (of both the human and animal varieties).

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