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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Male Pattern Boldness

My local barber is on holidays.

I know. I was devastated and my hair was starting to take on that Western Cape Buffalo look, parting down the middle of its own accord, curling up at the back, a proto mullet.

Just a little off the sides thanks

But it was desperate times, a job interview was around the corner. There was nothing else to do. I went back to my old haunts in Sydney's Inner West and back to the same barber I went to for 8 years while doing the share accommodation thing. Because it was cheap. And they used a switchblade.

It's a guy thing almost by definition. Hairstyles come and go, but guys like old school when it comes to getting their hair cut. There are some other musts too. The barber must speak with a European accent. Hair must pile up around his (never her) feet. It must not take more than 5 minutes. And there must be old girly magazines (formerly Picture, now FHM, Street Machine or, my all time fave, Guns 'n' Ammo) to flick through while you wait.

Travelling the world during my backpacking days proved to be a real challenge - there aren't too many Greek barbers in Phnom Penh. In Hue, a small town in Vietnam, I couldn't resist the '$1 Haircut' sign - if the cheaper a haircut back home the better then this must be the best ever. I walked into the shack by the side of the busy road. There was no waiting and no girly magazines, but there was a switch blade so I felt reasonably comfortable. The haircut itself was fine, trimmed all round, short enough and presentable, but there was more to come.

At that time in my life, at 25, I'd given little thought to rogue hair. Women seem to spend a lifetime plucking eyebrows, waxing bits that never see daylight and destroying razors. Men wake up one morning and see a hair growing out of a nostril and suddenly realise that they've turned into their Father. My moment was in Hue. I was waiting for the switchblade. I enjoy the feeling of cold metal on skin. There's a lot of trust involved. One slip and you could be dancing in a jugular fountain. The switchblade was poised and began its descent. It probably briefly reflected the glare from a motor scooter headlight, or the setting red sky. Its arc followed the time honoured path to the side of my face where my unruly sideburns demanded attention. But then it stopped, turned 90 degrees towards my ears, and scraped off - EAR HAIR. "I have hairy ears". Devastated. Absolutely devastated. He scraped both ears. Top. Sides. Front. And then grabbed scissors. And trimmed my nostril hairs.

Adolescence over I paid my $1 and mumbled some thanks. But for what? For discovering that for the rest of my life I'd be engaged in a never ending battle to not look like Cousin Itt?

By the time I got to Turkey six months later I'd more or less come to terms with my hirsute status. I'd even grown a goatee because a straw poll of western girls on the ferry from Penang in Malaysia to Medan in Indonesia liked them. But in reality I was trying to learn to embrace my hair. The shoulder fuzz was also descending south, it was a losing battle, like when Andre Agassi shaved his head after years of a ridiculous mullet but sort of in reverse.

Freaky huh?

The Turkish barber not only spoke with an accent but he spoke Turkish. Extraordinary I know but in my eyes you couldn't be more credible than that. And the haircut was extraordinary. I have no idea why some barbers can cut hair and some can't. Certainly no woman has ever been able to cut my hair, clips all over the place and millimetres chopped off at a time. One had the gall to claim I had a 'crown' of hair which was why she did a shit job. But the Turkish guy was the best. But something was missing, the switchblade. While my eyes scanned for it he reached for a cotton bud. And a bottle of flammable liquid. And a cigarette lighter. He dipped the cotton bud in the liquid and lit it and proceeded to burn the hairs off my ears and my temples and the back of my neck. It smelt like burnt hair funnily enough, like when your dodgy gas stove finally roars into life and you burn the hairs on your knuckles. And it was then that I realised that ear hair could be fun. Or at the very least it could be the topic of an interesting tale.

I was expecting no surprises in Newtown. No one expects surprises in a barber shop. Certainly you don't hope for them as the most likely surprise in a barber shop would involve spurts of blood. Other customers were coming in asking for all sorts of combinations such as short sides but no top as tops are 'out' at the moment (what is this - 1980?). I asked for a haircut and the barber just started cutting. How did he know that I don't know?

Like many barber shops, this one had a mirror in front and a mirror in back so you can check your front, back and top (if they happen to be 'in') at the same time. My current barber only has the mirror in front, so it had been a number of years since I'd seen my top. And you know what - my top was on its way out.

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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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20 Favourite Songs

Who am I kidding? If tone deafness was an art then I'd be Picasso - a bit messy and a bit all over the place but I know what I like and in 50 years people may begin to appreciate my brilliance.

This blog article (is there a jargon word for that? - a blarticle perhaps) has been inspired by a regular contributor (there are two of them believe it or not) looking for a forum to list his 20 favourite songs. Being the blog slut that I am I'll host anything anytime and if I get a virus well then what a way to go. The fame-o-meter has nearly hit 100 and by my calculations that's gotta be worth at least 10 seconds of my 15 minutes (I'm still owed over 13 minutes).

So of course, despite only knowing about 11 songs, and three of them off the same Midnight Oil album, I have no choice but to start the listings with my own 20 favourite songs (or at least 20 that spring to mind because I was doing something memorable at the time). In no particular order, and I make no apology for getting the names wrong, here they are:

Power and the Passion - Midnight Oil
London Calling - The Clash
Highway to Hell - AC/DC
End Of The World As We Know It - REM (and a song I'd like played at my cremation)
Here We Go Again - OK Go (the other song I'd like played at my cremation)
Breakaway - Big Pig (my first gig, my first album).
Have You Ever Seen Sydney From a 767 (727? 737?747?) At Night? - Paul Kelly (I listened to this once while flying into Sydney at night - you don't forget moments like that)
LA Woman - The Doors
Seven Nation Army - The White Stripes
Beds are Burning - Midnight Oil
And your pick of any number of songs from: TISM, Nick Cave, Rocket Science, The Strokes, Machine Gun Fellatio etc etc

Told you I couldn't name 20 songs.

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Movie Rankings 2006

1) Water *****
2) Children of Men ****1/2
3) Brokeback Mountain ****1/2
4) Borat ****
5) Kenny ****
6) Casino Royale ****
7) Syriana ****
8) Little Miss Sunshine ****
9) V for Vendetta ****
10) The Prestige ***1/2
11) The Aristocrats ***1/2
12) Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story ***1/2
13) The Departed ***1/2
14) Inside Man ***1/2
15) Jindabyne ***1/2
16) Capote ***1/2
17) Thank You For Smoking ***1/2
18) X Men: The Last Stand ***1/2
19) Pirates of the Caribbean ***1/2
20) Babel ***1/2
21) Wah-Wah ***1/2
22) Ten Canoes ***1/2
23) A Scanner Darkly ***1/2
24) Tsotsi ***
25) Colour Me Kubrick ***
26) Catch a Fire ***
27) Munich ***
28) Suburban Mayhem ***
29) The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada ***
30) The Libertine ***
31) The Queen ***
32) A History of Violence **1/2
33) A Prairie Home Companion **1/2
34) Match Point **1/2
35) The Devil Wears Prada **1/2
36) The Book of Revelation **

Movie Rankings 2005
Movie Rankings 2004
Movie Rankings 2003
Movie Rankings 2002
Movie Rankings 2001
Movie Rankings 2000

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I Demand a Refund

The English Cricket Team, and I use that phrase in the loosest possible manner, owe me. Big time. To capitulate a cricket test inside three days does the game a disservice and makes me feel cheated. Cheated of up to two days entertainment. Cheated of those knuckle munching, heart-pumping moments which test cricket can provide more than any other sport. Cheated of the opportunity to provide a audio visual backdrop to the guests at my Ashes Barbeque (the ashes being the cricket and the excuse for the barbeque - not the result of overcooking).

I am not alone I am sure. Across every continent closely following the Ashes (and that includes Antarctica - where the scientists at Mawson base station no doubt gather closely around the radio for warmth if not for any other reason - but not North America - and this is another reason for the greatness of the game) the boredom follwing the early finish has resulted in:

a) the execution of Saddam Hussein
b) a ferry sinking in Indonesia resulting in 500 deaths
c) the Australian national holiday road toll rising to 38

For the sake of humanity I urge the English cricket team to consider the consequences of their actions (or lack therof). Either that or cash. I'm happy both ways.

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Hygiene or High Farce?

My toothbrush doesn’t vibrate, whiten or massage with a triple action. It has one action known as brushing teeth. That’s why it’s called a toothbrush. It does not emit a sonic pulse. It has no buttons, does not take a battery, have multi coloured, raised tipped bristles, a tongue cleaner or flexible cups. Its active angle is whatever my hand chooses it to be and the handle is not sleek, ergonomic or flexible and has no rubber grip for greater comfort and control. I’ve been using a toothbrush for years and have rarely lost control and when I did it’s not like I put an eye out.

The toothpaste that goes on my toothbrush contains 0.76% sodium monofluorophosphate as its active ingredient, or fluoride in other words, to stop my teeth from rotting. It prevents plaque and bad breath, has a horrible bitey fake mint taste and is coloured white, not blue or red and definitely not stripey. It doesn’t do anything for tartar beyond what toothbrushes and toothpaste have been doing for generations – clean teeth. It doesn’t whiten or include mouthwash, breath strips or baking soda. Yet my teeth aren’t falling out and my friends and wife still talk to me face-to-face.

My shaver has no lubricating strips. It too has no buttons and does not pulse. It has only two blades. It doesn’t shave incredibly close, it just shaves my face smooth. It doesn’t have microfins to prime the bristles, anti-friction or power glide blades, a central pivot, or xtreme balance. Its handle doesn’t have textured rubber grips and metal grooves for improved handling and control. My handling is fine, I rarely lose control, and when I do I don’t lose an eyebrow or slash my jugular.

My ‘grooming pack’ is not a sport pack or a wet pack and is not ‘essential’. It consists of a bag containing the aforementioned toothbrush, toothpaste and shaver, a brush for my hair, and deodorant.

The deodorant is not named after a continent, an animal, or a feeling. It is not extreme or sport or sensitive or ice cool or essential or a force of nature or a body spray. It just smells better than I do and stops me ponging in public.

I do not use treatment crème, a body wash, a mud pack, a grapeseed moisturiser, a microfine scrub, a snake peel, a cleanser, a shower gel or an exfoliater. I use soap. And how does a masque differ from a mask?

And I do not need a muscle soak or foot recovery gel. After exercise I need a beer.

The night after many beers I do not need a perfect smoothing and mattifying gel or reviver eye cream – I need a strong coffee and bacon and eggs.

I protect my skin by wearing a shirt and wearing any 15+ sunscreen. I don’t put on skin protector. I do not need a self tanner – I find the sun highly effective for tanning and for wrinkling – no amount of wrinkle serum could make a difference.

There is no moral to this story. You are free to do whatever you want. I am free to think you’re mad.

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The Biggest Rock Band vs The Biggest Stadium

If U2 are the biggest band on the planet, does it immediately follow that the best way to see them perform is in the planet's biggest stadia? Or is the plural of stadium, stadiums?

These were just two of the big topics being discussed all around Sydney recently as U2 performed in front of over 150,000 fans at approximately $120 each. The other big topic is what happens to the $18 million?

I am a complete stranger to stadium rock. The exception is a couple of Big Day Outs 10 years and a continent apart from each other. In 1995 I was fortunate to get a glimpse of Silverchair as the organisers, showing great foresight but poor planning, booked Silverchiar on the smallest stage at Subiaco Oval in Perth. Fans hung off trees, goal posts (no mean feat in Aussie Rules only Perth) and rooftops to watch them, while members of Green Day tried to convince a fan to jump off the speakers. In 2004 at Sydney's Showgrounds, PJ Harvey was dwarfed by the stage while the Foo Fighters, Jayne's Addiction and the Stone Temple Pilots revelled in it and The Vines wasted it and their music.

In those young and carefree days I'd willingly stand up for hours on end in order to get a few metres closer to the mosh pit. Being the nerd I was I even accidentally ended up in it once but a ripped shirt and swollen eye (both accidental) convinced me that, like advanced levels of hand-eye coordination, it just wasn't me.

So it was with some foreboding that I ventured to the Acer Arena (formerly Sydney Superdome) and the Telstra Stadium (formerly the Olympic Stadium) to watch Pearl Jam and U2 respectively. I could probably write an entire article about the days when the names of mass viewing venues described what they were for (like Sydney Cricket Ground, The Entertainment Centre or The Melbourne Vomitorium), but that just puts me even further into the grumpy not quite old man category so I won't go there.

Now don't get me wrong when you read the next few paragraphs. U2 are excellent musicians. They have revolutionised how music is written, watched and listened to. They have demonstrated outstanding longevity, social responsibility and foresight. But I prefer Pearl Jam. Sure they're rougher, less consistent, drink and smoke on stage and are musically limited. Sure they rode in on Nirvana's coattails and are riding the retro boom to even more fortune. But I just like the music more (and the fact they drink and smoke on stage). And I wasn't all that impressed by the stadium rock experience at the stadium, an entire evening of watching the screens from hundreds of metres away, an impressive (don't get me wrong) audio visual experience that I could have watched at home through my stereo and on my large-screen TV for $135 (minus the cost of the DVD) less.

And while the Acer Arena proved to be a better venue to watch a rock band than the Stadium, in future I might stick to nothing bigger than the Hordern Pavilion where security guards don't stop me from pushing to the front or taking my own bottle of water or chewing gum into the venue (as happened at the Arena).

And while I'm ranting and showing my age, when did kids at rock concerts start going all Hillsong during the slow songs (two hands raised to the heavens, head slightly back and eyes closed)? And you can tell smoking is out of favour when, as well as the Hillsonging, no-one puts their cigarette lighter in the air to sway to the music but their mobile phone (though I will give U2 some credit here by taking advantage of this by encouraging some impressive audience participation even if it was just a plug to contribute by SMS to Bono's Make Poverty History Campaign).

Anyway, I must stop now. My rheumatoid arthritis is playing up and the wrists and back hurt from all the typing, I can't see the screen through the bifocals and I need to put my teeth in a glass of water.

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I Have A Dream That's Out Of This World

Martin Luther King Jr had a dream, though if you read his speech you'll see he actually had about six. I have a dream too. No, really.

Last year, Richard Branson announced the first ever plans to launch space passenger flights. For only about $200,000, passengers get a week of training, 1 1/2 hours up, 3 minutes of weightlessness (or throwing-up time as it may be for many people) and 1 1/2 hours down. And I'm there.

Well OK, maybe I'm not there straight away. For a start I need the money, and right now there is the small matter of the mortgage. But in 13 years, or on my 50th birthday, the mortgage should be paid off, the will updated, the life insurance renewed and the superannuation contributions maxed. And 200 grand won't be worth nearly as much then - hopefully.

I've always wanted to be an astronaut. But being:
a) a lazy bastard;
b) not American;
c) physically adverse to hard training;
d) not in possession of a physics or aeronautics degree; and
e) not wanted to join the air force (the small matter of killing people for a living)
it wasn't going to happen. Until Mr Branson came to my rescue.

I had dreamed of hitting golf balls on the moon (alas I hate golf, kicking a rugby ball would be more to my liking but with no atmosphere the ball would expode or implode or something that someone with a physics degree would know. In any case I'm a shit kicker). So now Virgin spaceflights offer me the opportunity to finally kill myself in a suitably reckless manner. Unfortunately, my suspicion is that I'll be beaten to the punch, so to speak. One mid-air explosion, failed engine or screams in space that no one will hear, and the whole operation could go belly up.

Which is a shame. Risk is a central component of my character. It's why I eat at Asian street stalls and drink the water, support the Waratahs, and got married. People like myself who live on life's edge need an outlet for our personalities. If not, we'd be like that rugby ball on the moon and just explode. Or is it implode? Whatever.

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Advanced Bachelor Food Part 1 - Chilli

I am told that I have a signature dish. This is quite an achievement for someone who once didn't know which end of a knife to hold (OK, so I was only one-and-a-half but I learnt quickly - and the hard way). I was brought up with no cooking experience whatsoever. My culinary experience as a child was mostly meat and three veg cooked by my mother. In the best of Aussie tradition the veg were often overcooked or included dry and lumpy mashed potatoe (it was years after leaving home before I could bring myself to eat it again). My father cooked the barbies, still does.

So there's a lot to be said for spending at least a decade of your life in shared accommodation. What began as toasted sandwiches and pasta sauce in jars has developed into gourmet pizzas and spaghetti bolognese made from scrach (more-or-less). My greatest discovery was that bolognese sauce is the base for all manner of Italian and Mexican dishes, and if you stretch the analogy far enough, all sorts of curries too (and probably stews but I haven't got that far - yet).

But there is still the spirit of the bachelor (or the backpacker for that matter) in my cooking - use a minimum of utensils, avoid recipes and go with your gut instinct. What 's changed since those carefree days? Time and quality. The longer a sauce bubbles, the better it is. And buy the most expensive ingredients you can find.

So here we go - my contribution to the culinary world - my recipe (or lack thereof) for Chilli...

Ingredients:
2 cold beers
A bottle of wine
1 tin of chopped tomatoes (the expensive italian type)
1 tin of kidney beans
2 average sized red capsicums cut into smallish pieces
1 onion chopped into even smaller pieces
some garlic cloves (your call - how much do you like garlic?) crushed
1/2 a kilo of the best quality mince you can find
3 small hot chillis cut into tiny pieces OR a few scoops of hot chilli sauce (sambal is ideal) OR chilli flakes
small carton of sour cream
salt
pepper
Tabasco sauce
white rice
enchilada tortillas

And if you want to take a short cut...
1 jar of hot taco sauce

What to do with this stuff:
Open the first cold beer. Have a couple of gulps. Whack the onion in the biggest saucepan you have with some oil. Stir until it goes soft and a bit brownish. Add the capsicum and the chillis and keep stirring for a couple of minutes then add the garlic and stir some more. Rinse the tin of red kidney beans in cold water and throw them in. Keep stirring.

Have a couple more gulps of beer.

I hope you have strong wrists because now you're going to add the mince. Stir and fold and stir until the mince browns and the whole lot starts smelling yummy. Add the tin of tomatoes and all your spices (how much is up to you) - your chilli pastes, powders, sauces or flakes - and a splash or two of water (enough to wash out the tins is probably plenty). Don't forget the tabasco - add plenty. Salt and pepper to taste.

Drink some more beer. This is hot work and you don't want to dehydrate.

Keep stirring (what do you mean you stopped - don't) until it's all mixed up and it starts to bubble. Turn down the heat and let it bubble away for at least 1/2 an hour but preferably 45 minutes to an hour tops. Finish your beer and crack open the second one. Drink it while you wait but stir the chilli every 10 minutes or so. If you have an electric stove make it every 5 minutes - don't let it burn whatever you do - add more water if you have to but avoid this if you can.

Now the hard part - in an ideal world you would have done all of the above the day before or at least a few hours before you wanted to eat it - the longer it sits in the saucepan the better. But realistically you came home from work and it's already 8:00 and you're starving - so it's time to serve up.

Put the rice on 20 mins before you're ready to eat.

Serving suggestion:

Eat the chilli with a lover - use your imagination for what to do while the chilli cooks (but don't forget to stir - the chilli that is).

Open the bottle of wine and pour two or more glasses.

Warm the tortillas (microwave is fine) and serve on a plate. Warm, reheat or just put the saucepan in the middle of the table with a ladel, ditto the rice. Put the sour cream out too. Eat it however you like - I prefer to whack the lot in a tortilla - it's messy but so what - you cooked it - your lover/partner/dinner guests can clean up. Take large sips of wine between bites.

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