Happy Christmas folks...

So I had a different christmas, my first away from home at the ripe old age of 28. And as such it wasn't a christmas, I talked with the family while huddled in an alcove in the dark and rain on a beach on the other side of the world as they stood around waiting for my whimsical red wine wanderings to end so they could go open their pressies. From the start our little band of away-from-homers made a decent effort to make the occasion christmasy. We opened the day with a smoked salmon, cream cheese and brown bread breakfast, washed down with a cheap Baileys substitute. Seagulls hovered in the wind around us like we were returning trawlers. And us sprawled in the sun, our short sleeved shirts another effort to formalise it all. Then later, in a cave more used to student booze ups than buffet dinners, we served up a christmas fare of boiled ham, potatoes, sweetcorn and peas, pineapple, onions, stuffing and red, red wine. It was quite delicious but for me, try as we might, christmas did not come to the remote beach in New Zealand. For me, christmas is a ten day stretch, if not the whole month of december, where I get to see all those people who I haven't seen, maybe since the previous christmas. And I get to sit around with my big family and make the same jokes we've made for years and which, unlike us perhaps, never seem to grow old.

I am currently road tripping here, with surf boards on the roof and bikes racked to the back, wobbling our way along the coast in a top heavy van. So far the bikes remain unused, their chains rusting in the salty air as we chase the surf. I am new to this surfing game and I suck momentously. The water is head freeze cold, as fresh as the melting ice caps it comes from. I fittingly use a shambles of a wetsuit with some of one leg missing, a hole the size of my fist in the crotch and a sleeveless upper body like a girls one piece swimming costume. To counteract this I wear a hood which isolates me further from the others as I struggle in a very private battle with my board. Catching a wave is all well and good when I can barely sit on the thing. Each time I am swept off it brings the same instant angry frustration as stubbing your toe, and I shout and curse this great unwieldy ironing board I am trying to master. My shouts are impotent, lost in the rumble and ssssssh of the waves and it only makes me all the more exhausted. On occasion sheets of rain sweep across us, the wind whips the white tops up and I feel a little bit homesick, chilled to my core, an Irish winter's day in a New Zealand summer.

On the beach recovering, I watch a couple of small yellow-eyed penguins make their waddling way up the sand dunes. For some reason they remind me of an old married couple struggling back uphill from the shops, the woman leading the way and nattering away about this and that ( "Oooh I see the cormorants are back for christmas, and I have nothing for them..."), the husband patiently, silently walking in her wake, both their heads craning forwards as if crossing a finishing line.

In the evening I watch the sun set behind a small headland, great rays of light, like a snapshot of an explosion, light up the gathered clouds in a pink glow. The faces of the illuminated clouds seem to look into the suns cauldron with awe, its contents hidden tantalisingly from me, where I stand has gone dark and cold. I suspect a man less burdened by facts and figures could spend a fulfilling life trying to see into that cauldron, to see for himself what the clouds hold in such reverence.

I got a rugby ball stuck in the tree where we were camping, the same tree we hung our wetsuits from like upside down scarecrows who agitate in the wind, creepy in the dusk. I threw a variety of small hard objects up the tree to retrieve the ball and not all of them came back down. Occasionally a gust of wind would dislodge one and it would thump down unexpectedly like a rogue coin in those waterfall-coin games at the amusements. Not all of them came down though, and I like to think it is my legacy at that spot. If they do fall, and do hit someone, i can only hope that it is one of those people who feels obliged to leave a legacy of beer bottles and one-use barbecues. I have given Mother Nature the ammunition, it is up to her now.

We ate christmas dinner with a Czech couple. Their traditional christmas dinner involves carp. The carp is often left to swim for several days in the family bath tub to clear the mud out of its gills. Apparently many of the carp are saved by the tearful last minute intervention of the family children, who are unwilling to celebrate christmas by eating their new found friend. I am sure if we did the same with all the animals we eat over christmas there'd me more than a few disgruntled fathers on christmas day, grumbling quietly as they push their sprouts and soy-based ham (Sham) around their plates, while the kids happily charge around the garden slipping in fresh pig shit. Best christmas ever, they'd say.

Christmas down under Down Under

Just to clear up a slight misunderstanding. I am in New Zealand (not Oz), for a Christmas and New Years which will mostly consist of a surfing/mt biking road trip. I landed down on the South Island today and the first smell on leaving the airport was that of freshly cut grass. I thank you.

Aussie Ausbourne

I passed through Singapore. Two nights I spent there and I feel thats long enough to safely condemn the place as a soulless monument to money and malls and politeness, the streets are clean though, well done. I skimmed along the surface entirely unengaged, moving through like a ghost. I walked the streets at midnight with a full rucksack and almost wished someone would mug me. Fortunately I wasn't, and flew on none too soon to Sydney.

I've never had much interest in coming to Australia, unlike many of my fellow countrymen it seems, who proudly roam the streets in their county colours. Sydney, Co. Offaly. H'up the bhoys.

Sydney is a beautiful city but initially I had the same problem as with Singapore, wandering the streets alone watching couples and friends and other lonely people, and only later did I realise that I was wandering the upmarket districts, the Dawson streets and Powerscourt townhouses. I did however manage to find a giant chess game in a park. I watched a bum beat a Lebanese guy, the Lebanese guy was gold strewn and hair slicked, a mover and a shaker, and he did not like to be beaten by a man with dirty jeans. But the bum seemed uncaring of dented egos, instantly absorbed as he was by the next players to take to the board. One was an Asian man dressed like a tourist, an outsider perhaps in a shirt and shorts and socks with sandals, but calm like a clock. His opponent was a cycle courier on lunchbreak who never took off his helmet, as if every move he made was an All-In push. The courier took a slight lead and then just played attrition chess, taking one for one whenever he could. A good general, he won, but obviously not a bring-the-troops-home general. Around these players a bunch of us misfits watched, all males, nodding and hah-ing occasionally to let everyone else know what we knew. And wandering among us a man in his socks, homeless, or the victim of a rugby team prank, young and clean-shaven but edgy enough to make elderly spectators avoid eye contact and hasten away.

Australians are some of the friendliest folk I've met, particularly once you get out of Sydney. This is fortunate as most Aussie lads seem to be built like forges and if they chose to be unfriendly there is very little I could do about it short of pissing myself and threatening to get it all over them. And with most folks here a casual "How's it goin..." isn't a greeting, it's a conversation opener. I've said it a couple of times and when they reply I sometimes look a little put out, in a Ijustwantedabottleofwaternotyourlifestory kinda way. This in turn leads to the brick walls in front of me frowning and my bladder going into empty or exit mode. I have so far escaped unsoiled. So far.

The Aboriginal names for many places are still used (or are now back in use). I reckon when the first explorers arrived they encountered some very stoned young Aborigines. These lads, no doubt struggling valiantly with fits of the giggles, managed to pass off names like Wagga Wagga and Dingalingadong as genuine. They've only stuck with them as an eternal one finger salute to the white man, who has pissed all over them ever since. Where I was in the Blue Mountains the original pioneers found a lot of recent evidence of Aboriginal settlements but no Aborigines, apparently the diseases the pioneers carried had got there before them.

Still, at the tourist spots there is inevitably an Aborigine, body painted, playing a didgeridoo and looking as bushworn as they can. I saw a tiny Japanese woman stood beside one Aborigine for a photo up in the hills. He was a giant of a man, she barely came up to the top of his barrel of a belly. She ooohed nervously in that uniquely Japanese way and he just stood there with this fearsome thousand yard staring out from under his shaggy mass of hair, his mouth hidden in an equally shaggy beard. Two more starkly different human beings I have never seen, and I find it difficult to believe that they could ever treat each other as equal in the eyes of any god.

It is christmas here but it is not. The shop windows have christmas displays and there are christmas trees and decorations in every building. But listening to "A White Christmas" while struggling to apply suncream to that divil-to-reach place between my shoulder blades gives the whole thing a faintly ridiculous air. (I know Ireland is rarely white for christmas but we still seem to have that eternal luxury of hope. Bring on global warming.) I spent a couple of days on the beach and true to form I got sunburnt within an hour. When I took to the water I had to wear a t-shirt to cover my skin, my arms and face were painted white on lobster pink, my beard was grey, and I floundered desperately on my surf board, busy drowning myself. I couldn't have looked more Irish if I'd been eating potato-on-a-stick in a Celtic jersey.

Peektures

A brief burst of colour in Cambodjya then all Ozteralia, mostly the Blue Mts.


















Some mother's son.

Rock agus Roll

I have discovered that I am better than everyone. Princess lured me to Bangkok by promising to put me up in a 5 star hotel for a couple of nights. Nothing like a 5 star hotel to give one a little persective on life, an In-the-rooftop-pool-spitting-down-on-the-proles kind of perspective.

I, in turn, treated the little lady to a McDonalds meal. I even offered to supersize it (fortunately she turned that down, which is good, no one likes a fatty.)

The hotel is one befitting my new found sense of self importance, the kind of place where "Roast Peasant" on the menu is not a typo. The lobby takes about 15 minutes to cross, a cathedral of space with a deep pile carpet running down the centre that you cross like a humpback bridge.

At the reception I lay down the law from the outset. Between my mohawk and Princess' tattoos we look like a rock star couple and I reinforce this by singing a couple of bars of The Summer of '69. They ask me to stop, please sir, you are scaring the other residents and I say dat's what I'm talkin 'bout. I also let it be known that I am not above wandering the corridors in a wife beater and a pair of y-fronts if my demands are not met. The receptionist nods silently, the fear of God in her eyes.

The room is magnificent, everything is leather bound, with a tv as big as a small car. The toilets smell of christmas aftershave.

Being a not insensitive soul I am aware that perhaps my McDonalds does not quite represent a sufficient level of reciprocation for all this grandeur and so I offer to buy Princess dinner. We thusly picnic on the bed, on food bought from the local Carrefour behemoth. She eats gone off "Pre-packaged sushi" and I eat "Duck in sliced bread" washed down with a wine that tastes like it started life as a sock dye. She, being of common roots, is inordinately impressed.

I buy a dvd player in Carrefour, hey big spender. Then I take advantage of their No Quibbles return policy to return it for a full cash refund two days later. Again, that is what I am talking about.


Call logged 20.43
Yeah, this is room 303. One of my slippers appears to have fallen off. I suspect it is somewhere off the end of my bed. Please send someone up to retrieve it.

Call logged 21.07
Hey that last idiot you sent up left my reslippered foot in such a position as it impedes my view of the tv. Please send up someone to rectify this mistake and ensure the offending party is fired or shot.

Call logged 21.39
Your last garcon made eye contact with me. The next employee to do that will feel the blunt end of my bottle of Brut. Do you know who I am you foreign dog? You better start treating me with a bit of respect or I'll put the tv through the fucking window...

Call logged 22.43
I have hurt my back trying to put the tv through the fucking window. Please send up a chiropractor immediately, and two of your most strapping young men to finish the job.

Call logged 00.57
I want another tv, you bastards, and some of that Peasant Kebab with Mint sauce.

Breakfast is a buffet spread across acres of tables. People sit casually spearing melon pieces from their plates, reading newspapers from the world over. I adopt a Last Orders at a Free Bar approach and barely make it back to my table under my platter. On the plate a five course meal jostles for my attention, bacon and eggs, roast potatoes, spanish omelette, danishes etc. I glare around, daring anyone to catch my eye, but they are well trained, these blue-bloods, and maintain focus on their grapefruit juice and Le Monde. Before leaving I stuff my pockets with rare breads and cakes and fill a plastic bag with orange juice. I own you people, I scream, eyes twitching dangerously as I flee the room, a trail of soggy baked goods in my wake.





Rock agus roll. Princess is the one on the left.

Now look what you made me do...

Left to my own devices, and with no-one here to talk any sense into me, I have gone and got my hair shaved into a discreet mohawk. I think when I grow up I am going to be an undercover garda at a punk gig.

"Howya there lads, tis yourselves, havin a mighty time no doubt, anarchy and all that. Meself, I wouldn't mind a bit of the ould waccy baccy, have yis got any, eh? Any of the quare stuff, eh, lads? Or maybe some E's lads, jesus I'd fuckin murder an E, no? Well if yis hear anythin, gis a shout, I'll be just over there havin me a hang sangwich."




Its a bad one but it'll do for the moment. Again, sorry mum.

S-21

S-21 was a school in Cambodia's capital that the Khmer Rouge converted into a detention and interrogation centre during their rule. Entire families were brought here, photographed, tortured then killed. Of the 20,000 men, women and children who passed through, only 7 survived.

It is mostly as it was, bare beds in the interrogation rooms with bolts and chains, the tiny wood and brick cells, the barbed wire coils. Some of the classrooms now contain hundreds and hundreds of black and white photos of the dead.

The place left me with many twisting thoughts but little understanding. Ultimately it was the thoughts of others, overheard or graffiti'd or in the comments book, that helped me to start.

This is a quote from a letter a woman inmate wrote to her husband before she died.

"Its like living among the wolves, who do not know the language of man."

This is the language of man.

"Lucky guys you weren't born in this period."

"Give peace a chance."

"The justice and love of God will be with them."

"Pol Pop, fuckin asshole."

"Where was the world?"

"No oil, no USA."

"Its so unbelievable."

"Left always worse than the right. England forever."

"Sorry."

"The Jews do what they have to do."

"Replace hate with love."

"Puta sucia."

"May you rest in peace."

"We must never forget."

"Hopefully time will help you to forget."

"If this wasn't a concentration camp it would be a pretty nice school."

"Phil loves Lou."

Fuck you Phil.

The Typhoon Tourist

The train contours along slowly, the track etched into the hillside midway between the hilltops and the sea. Every few hundred metres we pass over the fresh scars of landslides, rich turned earth and boulders. We move very, very slowly, as if excessive speed might send us off the unsettled tracks. The sea below is a boiling mass, the rock dotted water yellow and foamy, as if stirred by rolling alligators.

The town of Hoi An was recovering from two typhoons as I plodded my way down towards it and weather reports had been predicting a third to hit within days. In the end this last one turned on its heel and stormed off to sea, a miraculous u-turn to my mind, perhaps in answer to some poor end-of-their-tether believer who begged for a sign, any sign.

In Hoi An itself the sun is hazy and the wind erratic, gusting and whispering in equal measure. Each time the wind dies the palm trees hang limp and exhausted, completely spent. Then it picks up and the leaves resume their desperate horizontal pointing, the tableclothes attempt flight and the many flags ripple and snap proudly. At this stage the serious flooding of a couple of weeks ago has mostly receded, only a small overflow remains by the river. By all accounts even at its worst life continued almost as normal. This in stark contrast to home, where an inch of snow has us at hysteria level Defcon 4 and has the Civil Defense( "To Protect and To Serve soup") escorting cyclists to work.

I book a 24 hour bus to get from Hoi An to Saigon. Unfortunately I have the shits. They insist there is a toilet on the bus but the bus arrives and there is no toilet. I medicate to constipate but I still have a belly like a bag of snakes. I will need a toilet. I try and explain that I will shit myself if I take the bus. The other passengers pretend not to listen to me humiliate myself. They now don't want me on the bus either but the travel agents don't understand. I consider getting a hairnet and some soup to demonstrate the current state of my stomach. Fortunately they quite suddenly refund my ticket without me having to resort to an involuntary dirty protest.

I am on a motorbike taxi out of Hoi An, my bag strapped precariously on the back. We weave our way at speed through the many cyclists in white, as they weave through the many potholes, with their straw hats like sharpened woks. I perch between my bag and the driver, feeling extremely vulnerable, my short shorts getting shorter against the leather seat. My legs, my marlboro whites, show up alarmingly against the rain slicked black road racing by. I should have worn jeans. Forty five minutes of I should have worn jeans.

Rambling in the Concrete Jungle

In the centre a lake, the green of mutants and radiation, the colour they make sweets to make the kid's eyes wide. Don't drink it kids, it'll surely kill you. The path around the edge of the lake appears to be some sort of open air insane asylum. Five people stand in a rough collective, each dancing to the beat of their own drum. One small old guy in a cheap suit beats himself in the back with little fists. The others do general arm swings, hip twists and the occasional arm raised sun salute. Running past, others do the same at speed, spasmodic jerking, busy in conversation with their equally unstable companions. A father and young son play badminton with energy and cheer. A pair of old women reluctantly sharing their patch do nowt to hide their disgust at such vigour, "...and at this early hour too." One guy balances himself plank-like on the back of the bench, the silly man thinks he's a see saw. A head down, arm waving, mutterer passes me by. Mutter mumble mutter, he says. Around this athletics track of loonys, the road, a one way swirl of motorbike mayhem. Crossing pedestrians disappear into it like one's shins in a stream.

The motorbikes are everywhere in Hanoi, and about half the drivers are wearing bandanas across their mouths, a citywide game of cops and robbers, "You're It!" x 1,000,000.

A few streets away is the metalwork street, welding and clanging, hammering and grinding, and my favourite, the camera flash of acetylyne torches, brighter than white in the dusk.

People are not so helpful here, I suspect most of my polite enquiries are answered with a local version of "Ask me bollix."

Don't mention the war.

Waiter: All things considered the American War was really about preventing post-colonial Vietnam becoming colonial Vietnam all over again.
Me: IN MY COUNTRY IT'S CALLED THE VI - ET - NAM WAR. YOU PEOPLE ARE CALLED GOOKS.
Waiter: Perhaps you should leave.
Me: CHARLIE DON'T SURF.


I go on a jungle trek to escape it all. (I wonder how anyone could fight a war in this undergrowth.) The walkway is a depressing concrete most of the way, leading past a cave to a thousand year old tree. I go deep into the cave and switch off my torch, and the darkness is total. Any good horror director knows that fear is mostly based on what you cannot see as then your imagination does his job for him. I guess I'm still a little afraid of the dark.

I leave the silence of the cave to raucous calls nearby. I am overjoyed to think it might be the local gibbons, of which there are only 60 left in the world, but alas it is only a bunch of local schoolchildren. They pass through like a brushfire, their laughter and singing leaving huge swathes of jungle empty of any living creature. I curse them and race ahead to the old tree. Its big and looks pretty old, I suppose. They catch me up and ask me to take a picture of their 30 strong group on the tree. They all make the V for victory sign at me as I take the photo, damn those pesky kids.

It is beautiful though, the hazy fingers of light breaking through the canopy, leaving sunlight puddles on the jungle floor.

Later I am the only one staying in the basic guesthouse in the centre of the forest. I help the waitress with her english. She points at products and I try and help her learn the words, particularly the pronunciation. I roll out the words like dough, stretching them, repeating them until I forget what they're supposed to sound like. She repeats after me earnestly but her words sound like those of a drunk. Together we try and mould the sounds back into something recognisable as english.

Me: Peanuts.
Her: Penis.
Me: PeaNuts.
Her: PeNis.
Me: Pea Nuts
Her: Pea Niss
Me: Better.

After a while she goes to bed and I am left alone with the resident litter of puppies, four of them wrestling in the v of my open legs. I am playing a symphony of puppies. I am the Pied Piper of Puppies. They are full of snap and fight, and a couple will occasionally break away from the general tumult in mini-whirlwinds of fluff before realising their own absence and leaping back into the fray. Its all fun and games until a particularly sharp canine goes through the denim of my crotch and nearly slices me goods open like an unwatched rucksack. Game Over. They look disgruntled and one takes comfort in trying to get it on with another. A bit early for that, I say and laugh, before I realise I am completely alone, in a jungle. Sure who needs friends, when you have puppies.


(I do. For friendship and maybe more, email me on mrloverlover@ilovescouting.com )

Mixed bag

I'm fog bound on a hilltop in a hotel with free internet access so I'm clearing some crap.

Firstly I'd like to say that I suspect my fifteen minutes of fame have come and gone. This is from the Kathmandu Times, one of the biggest papers in Nepal. Fellow Smyths, you'll please note that they remembered the all important y.

http://www.kantipuronline.com/kolnews.php?&nid=128574


***

Some of these pics were taken with a broken lens so be nice.











I'm sorry mother but the world needed to see Matthew for what he really is, a no good redneck, God love him.

Halong long time ago...

We are man. We will swim to the island. So we swim, the two of us, and leave the girls on the beach to worship.

A flurry of flying fish leap over my head as we swim. They only do that to avoid predators Paul says. Sharks, ha ha, we say and swim a little faster. A big black butterfly putters by and it gladdens me.

There is a fisherman at the island, floating in a basket. He waves cheerfully at us and I hope he is not fishing for sharks or jellyfish or sea monsters.

We are man. We will climb the island. So we shallow paddle our way into the rocks. The rock is limestone, pockmarked karst and is as forgiving as a razor blade carpet. It takes us 20 minutes to scramble up the 30 feet, every step painstakingly planned. We joke about making a film with the slowest chase scene in history. We wince our way across the ground, pissing and moaning like big hairy girls. We are big hairy girls. Seeing nowhere to do a big cliff jump (we are man etc) we admit defeat and descend as slowly as we climbed.

We hear explosions echo across the bay like distant thunder. The fishermen further out are using TNT to catch the fish, who am I to disagree. We swim back content, if a little footsore, and I daresay we emerge from the sea like a pair of youthful James Bonds.

There were lions and tigers and snakes, we say, but no one believes us.

The Involuntary Voyeur.

Come share my experiences.

My room is a last-bus-into-town budget special. Always check the fan. I lie on my board and stare at the ceiling as mine rotates slowly, slowly, moving nothing. Its control panel dangles from the wall by its wires, I am afraid to touch it. My window is a hole in the wall, with a mosquito net instead of glass, the view a brick wall a foot away. Not to worry, I can still clearly hear the sounds of a busy city street a few feet away.

My room is in fact half of a bigger room, split by a makeshift chipboard wall which almost reaches the ceiling. Light from my neighbour/roommate's room shows on the ceiling of mine. There is a cockroach on the wall but he is too small for me to feel comfortable squashing, like there were culling regulations.

The shower is a shared one but the door doesn't close properly. I feel sorry for girls who have to travel under these conditions. People can watch me shower all they want, anyone who gets their jollies watching me soap up my man-boobs deserves more sympathy than censure.

I struggle to sleep. The street is quieting down but joy of joys my neighbour has returned with a friend. They talk like strangers, he sounds German, she sounds local. I start to feel a little empty. Conversation becomes short, highly efficient grunts. He is audibly enjoying himself. She doesn't even sound bored. I feel like I am sharing their bed.

I take refuge in a bubble with my thoughts. I ponder. Is he fat? Is she pretty? Does it matter? Like when a pretty girl dies and people see the picture in the paper and proclaim, oh and she was so pretty, as if the loss of beauty were the biggest tragedy. My detachment is starting to scare me.

Mercifully they finish quickly. He talks about HIV, ("A little late for that, Hans!"), and his job. You take my last cash he says, and laughs. He thanks her, they kiss and someone leaves. Some shuffling next door and my neighbour settles.

Don't let the bed bugs bite, they say, but they are coming through the cigarette burns in my sheets.

How Laos, brown cow.

That is how it should be pronounced.

I am currently in Laos in Viang Vieng and it is breathtakingly beautiful. Limestone cliffs rise up vertically like grey teeth from a landscape of rivers and wheatfields. And within these soaring cliffs are cave complexes and caverns that are the stuff of Pan's Labryinth. The long and winding complexes can leave you heart-hammering and sweaty as you squeeze through holes a foot across, fending off bats and jumping spiders, while the echoing caverns with their sunbeam skylights simply leave you speechless. Bulging alien formations struggle towards each other from floor and ceiling. My kingdom for a lens.

The currency here is the kip. I think its about 6 billion kip to the euro. Wheelbarrow's worth for a loaf of bread kind of stuff. On the plus side it does make you feel a bit like a gangster. Buy yourself something nice, I say, as I try and tuck bricks of it into shirt pockets.

I am oft emailed about the state of my love life out here. Some of the crueller among you joke about it, please, be gentle, when stabbed with your verbal knives, do I not bleed? Unfortunately the reality is far, far worse than any of the jibes. For the past fortnight I have been sharing my bed with a dreadlocked tattoo artist from England who answers to the name Tony. Our uneasy marriage of economics is helped by our general lack of body hair but is shaky at best. Laugh? I nearly cry, every night.

Scribblings and Mumblings and Mekong Memories

My camera lens broke last week. Dog ear strikes again.

We land on the runway in Bangkok and a malteser rolls past my aisle seat and on down the plane. It remains in the centre of the aisle all the way out of my sight and my addled brain sees it as a tribute to the engineering minds that made the plane, bravo, we have arrived safely.

Bangkok is sweaty and smoky and modern. A rat meets me in the outside corridor of my hotel, small enough to be cute. In my room the shower ebbs and flows, breathing on me. Tiredness has blurred the edges. I lie awake feeling absurd, an unwanted guest in my own bed. I try and read Murakami but his style seems grey and subtle and the words pass by in the background. I am reminded that I like airports and shipyards and all night shopping centres, where people think day thoughts at night.

In Chiang Mai our guesthouse owner is from Belfast and it turns out he was on the flight we got bumped off. Sometimes I am not so much travelling as watching the world shrink.

I lie on the massage table in a room like a barbershop, with mirrors all down one side, useless for the blind masseuses that work there. There's a fan on the wall rattle and humming, back and forth, as if reading a fluttering newspaper on the table. A radio talks quietly. A fat blind man snores on a free table, taking his break. My masseuse is Mr Nut, and he is also blind. He starts by running his hand down my leg, barely touching me, checking my stature perhaps. I hope he will start listing off the wear and tear of my joints as his hand passes over them ("Torn miniscus, Skiing Accident, 1999") but he remains silent. He is not shy with his hands and manhandles me into positions using my crotch as a lever. However I am a grown up now and am unbothered. It is a two hour massage and he uses thumbs, elbows and knees to devastating effect. I would like to doze but cannot. I talk to him in my sleepy voice and he says that it is a lovely voice. His hands are warm like a bakers. He sings sometimes, or chats quietly to others in the shop as he gently beats me up.

...back to the bar owners mansion in the back of her pick up for a breakfast bbq, then back to her bar for a lunchtime dance on the tables, red wine in a Thai sauna telling ghost stories with Laos karaoke drifting across the Mekong, a goodbye drink which lasts 14 hours, all day Malibu and coke in a Halloween spent in our very own boat, afterhours bowling and boozing in a Laos bowling alley...

The Mekong is muddy, swirling and brown. We are 15 in a slowboat that can accomodate 60 on a two day trip from the border to Luang Prabang. Long thin speedboats occasionally pass us by with passengers hunched miserably in crash helmets. There are deaths weekly from speedboat collisions with hidden objects in the river. Our captain slingshots our long boat around rapids and rocks using the full two hundred metre width of the river to do so. We watch the tree covered banks slide by, the misty, cloud covered hilltops, the stilted huts of the occasional village. Somebody throw a spear already.

We visit a beautiful waterfall and I hear the memories of shouts.

We stumble upon a Laos village fete. We enter to geese copulating bad temperedly. A speaker stack taller than me is powered by a tractor engine on blocks. Chickens scrabble in the dirt between the tables. Kids wander around with crisp packets as big as them. People eat and drink and laugh. A keyboardist and singer play live and there's the atmosphere of a wedding, young and old dancing in the marquee. There is even a "drunken uncle" character, who dances with his arm around a cowering girl as her friends shriek. Same same but different, this marquee is a parachute suspended from a tree. We receive only friendly indifference, a welcome in itself, and the girls in our party are soon popular dance companions. I am the only male asked up to dance, go me, but a foreigner needs a licence to be with a Lao(i)s woman and apparently my papers are not in order.

Better late than never.

So we left a day late, flying out on Tuesday instead of Monday. Those of you familiar with our particular branch of the Smyths might not be all that surprised. Did they out faff ourselves, did they spend ten minutes too long thinking we were all of us waiting for everyone else, is that why they missed they flights? Oh ye of little faith. We in fact arrived early at check in, only to be told pleasantly that the flight was over-booked. We were safe, scrupulously punctual as we are, but the more tardy passengers were going to be in for quite the shock. And so, for the good of our fellow passengers and the image of our airline, we gave up our seats.

It is merely academic that they put us up in the Radisson SAS for the night and gave us six hundred euros each. And then bumped us up for the flight today. So that this entry finds me sitting in my slippers on my throne in Business Class, scribbling this note for those of you peasants who can afford the internet. I can see your house from here and my seat is bigger.

Unaccustomed as I am...

... to pubic speaking. Shit. I mean crap. Lets start over.

I'd like to thank so many.

Firstly, Himself upstairs, thank you for the beautiful weather, it hasn't rained on me once. (I'm gone on Monday, You can resume business as usual.) Thank you Jina and Geff for the wedding, I personally don't think it could have gone much better. (Thanks Jeff for helping us get Gina off the shelf, crocked and all as she is, though I hope you like your cute animals sans mint sauce.) Thanks ma and pa for everything. Thank you the family Gardner, I am glad Gina has found such a fantastic second family . Thank you castle owners for the unforgettable setting, thank you caterers for the melt in the mouth salmon, thank you Sally and your army of helpers for the stunning autumnal flowers. Thank you Claire for managing to make Gina look presentable, my little sister in fact looked beautiful. Thank you Laura Beth, Kathy and John for the music, for the sake of my mascara I tried not to listen. Thank you Gerry for the beautiful service. Thank you all those who populated the dance floor until the dj was obliged to stop, thank you dj for playing so long and for handing us the reins when you left, (were you on drugs?) Thank you Jeff for halting me early in my rendition of "Lady in Red", I'm not sure the crowd was ready for my unique interpretation of a true classic. Thanks Finnoula for the irish dancing, it was worth the wait. Thank you taxi driver for finding the red door. Thanks Jeff for the cooking wake up call, sleep is overrated.

If I have forgotten anyone forgive me, I am really only thanking anyone as an excuse to publish the first known picture of all six men of the Smyth family in suits.





If for some strange reason you wanted to see any of the other photos, they are here...

http://web.mac.com/erskingardner/Jeff_Gina_Wedding/Welcome.html

I think I'm turning Japanese...

...I really think so.


I have decided that in relative terms Japan is like the 5 star hotel of travel destinations. Its expensive but across the board the country works for you, as if the tourist board long ago had some "Pull Together" ("Purr Together") campaign. The people everywhere are as helpful as I have ever encountered. Stories abound among travellers of help given so far above and beyond that it borders on the creepy. One girl I met had been trying to hitch from a bus station where she had missed the last bus. A local couple driving by picked her up and drove an hour and a half out of their way to get her to her destination and then spent another hour driving around the town looking for her hostel. But as they spoke nearly no english, the entire 2 and a half hours driving were spent in near silence. As I am much too experienced a traveller to ever require such drastic intervention by strangers my own experiences were milder but no less gratifying. One particularly memorable incident was when a security guard gave me the wrong directions to a guesthouse and then chased 2 streets after me to correct them, followed closely by the woman who had corrected him.

Beyond the helpfulness of the locals is the sheer quality of pretty much everything. Everything in Japan seems to be about a week old. Roads look freshly tarred and painted. You could eat your sushi off the floor of a public bathroom. And the swiss really have nothing on these guys when it comes to time keeping. Trains arrive and depart at the correct time, every time. {Rumour warning} It is a fact that the Japanese Rail company sent out a letter to all its customers recently apologising for being 17 minutes late that year. I shit you not, though someone might have been shitting me, as it were.

***

I would accept (as would most people who've met me) that I wouldn't know trendy if it came up and powdered my nose. But I would still be confident that the Japanese are some of the coolest people on the planet. The girls are the best dressed I have ever seen, with vanity mirrors open as often as mobiles. And again I am not good with fashion but at the risk of offending a nation I would say the "Slut" look was in, skirts generally stopping closer to the waist than to the knee, and that was just the schoolgirls. What was weird was how well dressed the girls were in the most innocuous locations. Sightseeing on a weekday morning, girls would totter through gravel in high heels or try to maintain some decorum as they wobbled their way across cobblestones, clutching each other like drunks. It also took me a while to realise that the most common hairstyle for guys over here is one that involves highlights and a hairdresser, no bedroom blade 1 all over for these likely lads.

***

I visited Hiroshima and it was one of the highlights of the trip. At "their" Ground Zero they have kept one building as it was after the blast over 50 years ago, complete with twisted rubble. I found it very effective particularly with photos of what the area had looked like before and just after the blast, the complete desolation of the area. The museum tour was grimly fascinating. It is strangely structured so that you spend over an hour walking through technical displays of the background, the blast, the repercussions and the global nuclear legacy, the detached facts of the matter. Then, thinking the tour finished and quietly contemplating the notion of blame and innocence in such a mess, I found myself in the second part of the tour, the personal accounts amongst the remains of clothing and toys and lunchboxes. The audio account telling me that the skin and fingernails in front of me belonged to a ten year old boy who's exposed skin simply dropped off after the blast. Somehow still alive (for a mercifully brief time), he was so desperately thirsty that he tried to suck the pus from his raw fingers. His grief stricken mother kept his fingernails and skin to show his father, who was off fighting in the Pacific. Another photo shows the outline of a person sat on some granite steps. The steps around where the person was seated are darkened by the blast, imagine the energy that person must have absorbed in creating that "shadow". Beside this are the remains of the clothes of a 12 year old girl who was burned horrifically and then found by her father and carried home. For some reason, amongst all these stories of horror, the idea of this poor man having to carry his little daughter home to die, of having to watch her suffer so much and know her only relief would come in her death, this hit me hardest. I had to switch off the audio tour and leave, unable to look at any more without losing it. When the rawest emotions had passed, anger was all that remained. Walking back across the memorial plaza, the Japanese flag flying high, thinking about the pride of empires and those who suffer to maintain it.

24 Hour Party Person

08.00

I step off an Air India flight from Bangkok to Tokyo. Good to to get a taste of India in just to remind myself how bad things can be. I find myself more excited about this than any destination yet. I am expecting robots and disembodied female voices and sliding doors and an air- conditioned efficiency throughout. From the plane I head straight for the toilet, all a-flutter over the "Tomorrow's World" toilet experience I'm about to have. Nothing. No voice asking am I comfortable. No buttock massage. No heart rate monitor. Nothing remotely remote happens.

12.00

I am in an internet cafe/library. I think I am the only one using the internet. The library appears to cater to only manga and anime comic enthusiasts. There are thousands of comics, books and dvds. Men and women sit around reading in perfect silence. As I leave a bunch of schoolchildren head inside. "Herro!" they cry.

14.00

I go to an information booth where 3 ladies try and help me find a hostel. They ooh and aaah over me like they've found a lost pram. It turns out after much traipsing that all the hostels are full and I am directed to that quintessentially japanese businessman's refuge, the capsule hotel. You relinquish your belongings at the door, storing the clothes off your back with your bags and your boots. I shuffle into the lift in my slippers and institutional pyjamas, nearly colliding with a cleaner. She apologises profusely, bowing and looking at the floor. This is going to take getting used to. The capsule is surpisingly comfortable, not too claustrophobic, with tv and radio. I try and watch some japanese tv but its like watching dubbed fireworks so I switch it off before I get a headache.

17.00

There is a bathhouse on the top floor of my hotel, so I ascend in my pyjamas for an ould soaking. A few old men knock around the lounge, not looking at me, all of us dressed in our uniforms. They all seem deeply clinically medicated. Luckily there is no-one in at the actual baths. I am afraid of doing pretty much anything for fear of breaking some obscure japanese etiquette. (It doesn't even need to be obscure. At a gym once I used the spraybottle on the treadmill to cool myself down, only realising from the smell that I was coating myself in Windowlene.) Just as I settle in (naked, I decide, is what the locals would do) an old guy comes in. He's followed by two naked kids, who burst in and run out onto the open rooftop terrace. They shout and scream in delight, trying to get the attention of all the commuter traffic crawling along the expressway across the river. I am vaguely envious and then a little worried that if they all leave I'll end up out on the terrace, waving my willy at the world. Another old guy comes in, one with a shaven head. He has tattoos over 90% of his body, making him seem a little less naked than the rest of us. I find out later the full body tattoo is a trademark of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia.

20.00

Starved of other traveller`s company I head out for the evening on my own. ( I have no-one.) Fortunately Tokyo has many places to eat unobtrusively on your own so I struggle gamely with my chopsticks and noodle soup quite unnoticed. I go to the first bar I see, a dark, windowless dive. "Happy" hour apparently. There are several other guys there on their own. One guy dances The Cure-like to some hippity hop music, alone on the dance floor. Another sits sunken at his table, with his hands squeezed between his legs and a gloomy expression. Another comes over to chat, the pick of the bunch don`t you know. I tell him what I do. We're all mentally handicapped, he says. Isn`t life so boring, he says, with a sigh and then downs his fifth tequila. This isn't going so well. He is japanese-american but speaks neither language very well. He tells me he's been to this bar several times then 2 minutes later asks me where the toilet is. I make my excuses and leave.

21.00

Stop at British pub for a pint of cider. There is a nice mix of whities and local girls who like whities. There is rugby on and I watch Wales lose well. The barman is Irish, a fellow Dubliner.

Him: Whereabouts?

Me: Em, Deansgrange. You?

Him: Em, Dun Laoghaire.

Me: Right. Actually I`m from Foxrock.

Him: Oh, ok. I`m from Dalkey.

This is the second time this has happened on my trip.

24.00

I inquire with the barman about a good place to go clubbing and he kindly invites me to a party he's going to . It's sort of a costume party he says vaguely. His friend comes in Goth-ified, with mad scientist goggles on his head and a slightly crazed look. We find our party on the 7th floor of a high rise business block. There are leather whips for sale on the way in. Hmmmm. Lads walk around with only a pair of leather underpants to protect their dignity (ha!). Other guys walk around on a leash being led by women. The guys mostly seem to be white guys. The girls however, nearly all asian, steal the show. Their costumes are stunning, many dressed up in fantastical ways that I have no way of describing. There are girls dressed perfectly as twin dolls, with the exact same make up except one is blue and the other is pink. Another girl/guy wears a black leather mask with what look like udders hanging down from their face. He stomps around semi-crouched, on stilts like bar stools. A scary looking midget wanders around. The MC is a tall japanese cross-dresser and he has the whole place under his spell. One girl wears only a chicken mask and a one-piece white skintight suit. With much fan-fare from the MC the chicken, ahem, lays eggs onstage.

04.00

When I tire of the farmyard fun I head outside. I have been warned that taxi fare to my hotel is about twice what I am paying for my capsule so I retire instead to an internet cafe. Here you can get your own internet booth with a black leather recliner and footrest for the night for about 6 euro. I try and stay awake to read minute by minute accounts of the Ireland vs Georgia game but I have to take refuge in sleep.

07.00

I arise for the subway journey back to my hotel. There are pairs of shoes neatly lined up outside all the booths in the internet cafe, a popular place to crash. Out on the street a guy sleeps casually on the pavement. There is no pool of vomit or blood by his head, he still has his shoes, in fact he still has his whole suit on. As I watch he gets up, quite refreshed looking, and walks away. It turns out the police here are happy to let drunken businessmen sleep it off on the pavement.

08.00

I arrive in my hotel needing the bathroom. This toilet is plugged into the wall. It switches on when I sit down and the seat warms up. There are buttons on the side and I press some absently. It whirrs a bit and beeps. There's a bidet option on which I can even control the pressure. But it still doesn't talk to me.

Last night a dj broke my leg...

I have been hiding in Thailand for three weeks now, mostly on the island of Koh Tao with Matthew. We have left now on our way down to Borneo for more diving.

I was all set to live the dream on the island having borrowed a bouldering mat for the huge granite boulders dotted around the island, obtained the promise of cheap scuba lessons and even started thai kick boxing training. Then, in a fit of over excitement at all the potential, I went dancing and sprained my ankle, badly enough to need an x-ray on another island. The dream lay shattered in a pool of self pity and spilt vodka.

So in the week following the accident I realised that free diving was my best chance to get active, as my sprained ankle ruled out the use of fins needed in scuba (and bouldering and kick boxing and walking comfortably). Free diving is diving to depth without supplementary air, basically one long preparation-enriched breath at the surface and descend as deep as you can. That was my goal anyway. In the end I managed to go to 28 metres on a line, quite a surreal depth to descend to. I think its roughly equivalent to a 7 storey building and at the bottom your lungs have shrunk to almost a quarter of their surface size.

Training for all this involves a variety of techniques. Static apnea is basically holding your breath with the body at rest, which we practiced once in shallow water. Before whenever I tried holding my breath in a swimming pool I would last about a minute and come up bubbling. So I was not optimistic as I worked through the long warm up of structured breaths. But it seemed to work. The first two minutes were amazing. Your body is rich, almost doped, in oxygen. As you sink under the surface your senses are reduced to that lovely white noise of underwater sound, your eyes closed. The warm temperature of the water means your skin feels comfortably numb, the only sensation an occasional current rippling down the hairs on your legs.

My mind is empty. Floating there I have completely forgotten whats to come. After two minutes I start to feel uncomfortable, my body lying to me, wheedling, telling me I need to breath, seriously. I ignore it, a little peeved that the fun bit is over. After about another minute it starts to insist a little more persuasively. My diaphragm starts into contractions, slowly at first, kicking up into my lungs, trying to make me exhale. As the seconds tick by the contractions get more intense, my body physically jerking as the diaphragm starts getting a little desperate an I'm really fighting now. Finally I can hold it no longer and rise up from the water, aided by the instructor, and open my eyes, breathing in and out in controlled desperation. The world has gone white around the edges. A semi circle of 3 faces look back at me expectantly and then laugh as I sway drunkenly. Apparently my face is ghost white, my lips included. I have the air of someone who has just returned from somewhere narcotic. "Sheeeeeeit." 4 minutes on the clock. High five, I say and miss.



It would be remiss of me to pretend I was any good at it. I was technically the worst in my class (of 3) and have no aspirations as a free diver. But it all just impressed on me the hidden abilities and untold limits our bodies can attain if we know how to harness the power within.

Seriously.

The Orphan Help Centre

Just some of the reasons why the children tolerated a hairy stranger in their midst...

My phone, whoever invented the game Snake deserves some sort of medal.
My mp3 player.
My penknife.
My watch.
My torch.
My camera.
My bicycle.
My medical supplies.
My hat collection.
My hairy legs.
My beard ( known locally as my junga).


Just some of the reasons why I tolerated 6 am wake ups, 10 pm lock ins and eating dhal bhat every night for 5 weeks...


Playing the drums on buckets on the childrens heads as they danced to the beat.

One of the kids eating chewing gum and it falling from her mouth to the floor. Her quickly stepping on it, mashing it between her toes, transferring it discreetly to her hand and then back to her mouth, all in a heartbeat. I probably should have tutted but I nearly cheered.

Two little girls listening to my mp3 player and happily dancing to the tortured creations of Aphex Twin.

The persistent talk and (presence) of gassing.

Being obliged to eat with my fingers. Being told I reminded them of a 4 year old learning to eat, me not being sure who said it cos of the curry in my eyes.

Despite my protests, me getting my own seperate small bowl of chilli-less curry every night, thank you kindly Anti and Didi.

Watching the kids hunting dragonfly, stalking through the long grass until they spook one out and then their thrilled charging around after the unfortunate insect. Others content to just bumble around getting in the way of the earnest hunters and laughing off the resulting scowls and occasional thumps.

Taking the kids swimming for the first time. The look on their faces, the sheer laughing terror of them all, I felt privileged to be there to witness it.

Watching Nepali tv with the kids for half an hour every friday evening. Indescribable shite but they watched open mouthed, perched on the floor a foot from the screen for the thirty minutes.

Drawing henna tatoos on everyone including myself. "I Love My Mom. "

Being told matter of factly that I am a loser when playing karom ball, their staple game. I was a loser though, as bad on my last day as I was on my first. I took revenge on them by whipping all-comers at the card game Spit. "In your FACE loser" I would shout, victory dancing around teary eyed 8 year olds. (Revenge is a dish best served to someone you're pretty confident you can beat up.)

Nepal part II

It is difficult to write anything about politics here because I know so little but it is an unavoidable part of the country. There seem to be a host of armed groups operating here. The Maoists, despite there presence in the political arena, are still very active as a military group. Their youth wing seems to comprise of a large number of thugs which the Maoist leadership refuses to condemn for atrocities they carry out, showing a worrying lack of control over its own people. In the Terai, the southern, flat lowland half of the country, increasing numbers of splitter groups are carrying out attacks on officials and tit for tat raids on the Maoists. Some groups are demanding that any migrants from the hills return to the hills under threat of death, a threat which seems to be carried out on a daily basis. Hundreds of civil servants no longer turn up for work as their security cannot be guaranteed by the government.

The military may not be able to keep the civil servants safe in the Terai but in Kathmandu and surrounds it is impossible to escape them. Machine gun nests abound, sand bagged little bunkers guard the entrance to any buildings remotely connected to officialdom and gun toting patrols roam the streets. And these are not Indian police with their WWII colonial antiques, these lads tote some serious weaponry including sub machine guns and tear gas cannons. In addition the UN landrovers are everywhere, with the big aerials at the front, their blue and white logo looking particularly reassuring on the huge vehicles, and the people in the jeeps always looking strangely refined and detached from it all. In embassy alley, cycling past the American embassy, I get that childhood twinge of security, a throwback emotion to when the world was black and white and America were the good guys.

From what I could gather the Maoists have huge support and there seems to be a strong inclination to overlook any atrocities they carry out. Their cadres seem to control most of the labour unions and so have the power to paralyse the whole country. They call general strikes on a regular basis and the city shuts down, with nearly no vehicles on the streets. Some folk I talked to spoke about them with a childlike wonder in their voices. Most though are more realistic, shrugging and smiling, rueful of all thats gone before. A lot of students I talked to just want to get out, to go and work in Australia or America or England. Some saw my mere acquaintance as being maybe the first step to getting to Ireland.

One day wandering through Kathmandus narrow alleys and squares I was held up my a Maoist march. The participants seemed mild mannered, some had numbers pinned to their shirts like marathon runners, and the chants were half hearted, as if their demands had already been met. It was only when the march had passed through and the square erupted into the usual din of car horns and bicycle bells that I realised how subdued everyone had been while the march went past. Another day I was taking some of the kids to the library when we got caught up in a mob of red flag wielding youths, a bunch of whom took off at a sprint around the corner and out of sight. I found out afterwards that it was the kings birthday. The king is at this stage pretty much a prisoner in his own palace, his allowance has been severely reduced and he's been replaced in all his official duties by politicians. He is not well liked and for his birthday the Maoists were out in force in the hope of finding some royalists to roll. They were in luck and managed to hospitalise quite a few people. One of them was a badly beaten 84 year old man.Vive le revolution.

Ich bin ein Nippler...

Brother and sisters of Nepal, embrace me as one of your own! I have been here only a month but I feel your pain, I know your thoughts, we are the same you and I. I too eat with my hands, licking my fingers clean with relish and leaving the steel plate as clean as the day it was forged. I too eat dal bhat until I can taste the tasteless mush in my sleep. I too squat over hole in the ground toilets ignoring the screams from my thighs. I too use your roads like I was the only one on them, weaving and swearing and ringing my bell with great self importance. (That's me, on the local bike with the curved in handlebars, no foreign mountain bike for moi.) I too speak english very badly. I too walk in the rain without a jacket and pretend its only a shower as cars float by. I too drink chai and eat momos in little greasy spoons outside of the popular areas where the, pah, tourists go.





Yes my knobbly bare knees knock against my handlebars cos the bike frame is too small. Yes I use toilet paper (but only because the other way I kept getting my pants wet, given time and maybe some sort of pamphlet I will learn.) Yes I know only four words of Nepali, dal bhat, namaste, dhanyabad. Yes if there was a McDonalds I would go. Yes I say thank you too much. Yes I occasionally wear white linen shirts with shorts and sneakers. Yes I am as white as your snowcaps. But being Nepali is, like, totally a state of mind. Embrace me to your obscene Himalayan bosom, mother Nepal, thank you please.

Nagarkot

I haven't had a huge amount of time to do touristy stuff in Nepal so last weekend i stole a couple of days to myself to get out of the city and cycle up to a little village called Nagarkot. Nagarkot is famous here as a viewpoint where on a good day you can see the length of the Himalayan peaks. During the monsoon you don't get many good days and so travelling up to a viewpoint villlage was faintly ludicrous but I needed the break.



Kathmandu ends very suddenly, you're urban and then in the space of 100 feet you're rural, bouncing along through impossibly green paddy fields. Ahead of me I could see a wall of cloud and mist coming down to meet me, completely obscuring the ridges of the Kathmandu valley. In the paddy fields women stood up to watch me pass, laughing. These women were big women, fat in most cultures, but stooped in their fields they looked full of latent power, like sumo wrestlers at the off. Their faces worn, with wrinkles you could hide your change in. In the cloud bank and the rain they were all wearing bright coloured tarp anoraks, simple sacks slit open on one side. Kids wearing them looked like they were playing at superheroes in their hooded cloaks, stomping through the stalks.



I started getting those strange looks that I had missed from my time in Kathmandu. The locals watching me struggle up and down their little hills with smiles somewhere between welcome and ridicule.



I left the road and took to the mud track which my very general map told me would take me to the Nagarkot. I alternated between cycling and walking as the going got steeper and track got worse. The cloud cover was complete now, you could see little around you except windows of terraced hillsides and the occasional little village where kids would stare at me and ignore cheery greetings. There's nothing like people blanking a good old cheery greeting to make one feel like a knob. When I finally reached Nagarkot the visibility was even worse. Fittingly my hotel was called the Hotel at the End of the Universe. Exhausted and drownded, i crashed on my bed, me, my bike and my mist-wrapped little cabin, in a silence that made my ears ring.



After a couple of hours doze I felt obliged to go for a stroll, it felt like something People do. Down in the village was a little yellow information booth, visible even in the mist. Inside four lads maintained a fog of their own. I asked about the look-out tower where the view was supposed to be best. 'What view?' they asked, and I left them, their eyes glazed and giggling.



Everywhere in Nepal there are signs of the military. That is another days miserable writing. Here in the misty middle of nowhere it was no different. An army training camp sprawled out along the ridge with the road winding back and forth through the hillocks of assault courses and watch towers. I stopped to take photos of a watchtower silhouetted in the mist and was shouted at by men with guns. I did my cheery greeting routine, looked suitably ignorant and walked away with my camera intact.





I continued along the ridge, tending uphill, towards the look-out tower 4 km away hidden in the thick cloud. Things got eerier as i rose, and I realised it was the sun lighting up the mist. As I cycled the localised cloud lifted and beyond I could see the denser heavier clouds breaking up over the valley. And beyond them still was the sun, setting spectacularly behind its own ridge of cirrus clouds.













Apart from a tantalising glimpse of snow slopes disappearing up into thick cloud bands, I saw nothing of the majesty of the Himalayan peaks. I free wheeled down the ridge, the last sunlight strobing through the coils of razor wire on the roadside, and realised I didn't care. As the man said, I'll be back.

A bit of a day in the life...

I wake up to the patter of feet on the marble floor outside my window. It is probably 5.30 am. In the courtyard below the sari workshop is coming alive. The rhythmic creak and rush of the pump being used for the wake-up wash or to fill the bucket for the squat toilet. The hocking and spitting, like they've all just been sick. Every morning the sound of different taped preachers, echoes of fire and brimstone, lets wake up the infidel.

The orphanage occupies the first and second floor of a three storey building. On the ground floor about 15 muslim men and boys work from when I wake up until a couple of hours after I go to bed. Effectively they live there, as they work there all day and when they finish work, they sleep there. The lads themselves seem friendly enough, some of the younger ones seem slightly cowed, smiling warily at me, conscious of disapproval from others perhaps. Others are openly friendly, trying to strike up conversations but these are quickly reduced to painful exchanges of facial expressions and gestures as they don't speak english and I don't speak muslim.

It can be difficult to ignore though, there is one particularly Hitleresque taped preacher and despite the language barrier you can hear the hate dripping from Every, Shouted, Word.

Across the road is a butchers, more of a stall than a shop. The first few days I saw goats tethered on the grass verge and thought to myself, Hmmm, that's a funny place to keep goats. Spanner. A couple of days later the kids and I watched in grisly fascination as a headless goat was disembowelled on the pavement opposite. Who needs tv?

The kids are only marginally slower to be up and about. Straight into play or homework or a muddle of both. The single tone reading of fairy stories, out loud, becoming just a list of words. Several reading at once, the volume increasing as they fight to out-monotone the rest. The clack of the carom board, a kind of snooker/subbuteo/backgammon hybrid. The screechs and thuds of the lads wrestling, their laughter and inevitable tears. I lie there and curse everyone for sounding so happy, knowing that I will also have to sound that happy when I open my door, and I delay as long as I can. But generally, between creaking into an upright position and reaching the bathroom, a smile will creep up on me, morning D sir, namaste D sir, hey D, they're a difficult bunch to be grumpy around.

Confessions of a burnout...

Warning this be my rant space. Comments telling me the error of my ways and reminding me of the other side of the story are a waste of time. I know, I know, I know. Let me vent, I'll be fine come morn...

A district seminar to educate the local disabled population on their right to vote. Disabled people, in wheelchairs and on crutches or limping. The car park is a building site, a war zone. A conga line of wheelchairs and their helpers pick their way through an assault course of piles of gravel, planks and steel cables. The wheelchairs have to be ramped up, tilted backwards to scale each new obstacle. One wheelchair is tilted too far back and the female helper is unable to stop it falling right back onto the ground. They're quickly helped up and it's laughed off. I realise the toilets for the venue are on the other side of the building site and anyone wishing to go has to navigate back through it all. Inside the hall people in the wheelchairs freewheel through a large puddle which pedestrians have to skirt to get to their seats. The sound system doesn't work and no-one sees fit to turn on the lights. Various delegates are gathered on the stage and at some point someone quietly starts talking and I think the show is on. The various delegates assembled on the stage take their turns speaking to the gathering. It is difficult to tell who is talking, they generally talk quietly and the lack of decent light makes it difficult to see their lips move . Mobile phones ring and are answered even by those on the stage. One speaker waits patiently for one onstage phone call to finish but then has to plough on when it shows no sign of ending, struggling to make himself heard over his pompous companion.

The director of NSD,N ( hah!) takes the floor. The pompous one takes another call. The audience is no better. People are talking all around me. Pouring in the wide open windows are the sounds of the building site, the general hammering, the crash of sheets of ply, the shouts of the workers. Back in the hall, down the back, cups are being noisily unpacked for tea. It has become entirely irrelevant that I do not understand the language being spoken onstage as I can't hear it anyway. The guys on either side of me start talking over me. I have to struggle not to laugh. I wouldn't mind if it was just chaos. But this meeting stays on the borderline of chaos, the speakers refusing to surrender it to anarchy and continuing on with earnest faces and gestures and just making it worse. It starts to piss me off a little. I want to stand up and tell the audience to grow up and stop being so fucking ignorant. But I'm angry at the people on the stage as well for such a piss poor showing. Then I realise I'm angry at the whole bloody country.

In all facets of everything I am doing here I have to increasingly often avoid this temptation to grab people and just fucking shake them until they see things my way. The logical way. Some structure, some common sense, some ambition. Not just in the various work environments but everywhere, on the roads, in shops, at the pool, in the cinema. It even pisses me off a little that nobody says thank you. Thats how bad its got. I know, stupid, pointless sentiments, betraying more about me than about the country.

But thats just the way I roll, dogs.

Nepal I

I was a little worried in India that I was enjoying it so much and that it was all so exotic that from then on things would start to stale a little, that the a lot of my travels subsequent would be not so interesting. However I've started volunteer work so currently I'm not travelling. I have a regular lunch place. I swim in the same pool same time every day. I own a bike. I live in Nepal.

I stay in an orphanage where I help out in the mornings and evenings. As this work is outside work hours, during the 9-5 shift I work in the Nepal Society of the Disabled, Nepal (sic) in the morning and then help in The Mountain Fund volunteer agency in the afternoon.

I started in the NSD,N ( you gotta love it) on the back of just another ill communication. When I told the TMF agency that I worked with learning disabilities at home they insisted the NSD,N were the same, but in fact they are strictly a physical disability organisation which is an entirely different thing. Also its not a "coal-face" organisation, it's an advocacy organisation trying to make a difference at a policy level which means I don't work with disabled people directly ( except for employees of the organisation). What's embarassing is the prestige that seems to be attached to my presence there. The diminutive director is wheelchair bound and his penchant for white clothing and a white head wrap give him quite a Gandhian air. Everyday he comes to me to try and talk to me, to see that I understand what they are doing and he always waits for me to say something but there's never anything I can convey in the pidgin-ness of our conversations.

Part of the problem of my advice being sought is I have so little to offer in the face of such a steep (and unfamiliar) hill to climb. Disabled people are the bottom of a very high and unhappy pile here. The general population is poor and by the hierarchy of needs of society not a whole lot of people give a shit about the disabled, between dealing with poverty, corruption, an autocratic king, and weekly demonstrations and strikes. Add to that the traditional belief that disabilities are a result of previous life's indiscretions and you have a very unsympathetic atmosphere. The coordinator who I work closest with is there on a contract basis, is not disabled and refers to all the others as "them". I'm not sure if she means the company or the disabled but either way it reflects something of a detachment from the cause. Every couple of days the director of the NSD,N has to argue his way past the motorcyclists who park in the driveway of his building, they are uncowed by his appearance and shout down his soft-spoken entreaties. His own employees (most of them also disabled) forget to hold the door for him. Its staggering.

Then this weekend I was invited to a seminar in the second city, Pokhara ( being an executive kinda guy I flew while the bus would have cost 4 euro). This was attended by journalists, politicans and the UN. I liased with the UN representative over coffee, she talked about monitoring the upcoming election and the stability of the current regime, I talked about how icky it was that the people wiped their bum with their hand. I also talked for a long time to the vice president of the NSD,N who holds degrees in law and in social science and is studying for a masters in rural development and who's attention to my opinions made me feel like some sort of charlatan. The next day I was introduced to the head of another local disability organisation who showed me around the area. After much discussion he frankly and directly asked me how his organisation could proceed, like one might ask a consultant. Bewildered as to what they could possibly do that they weren't already, I offered some empty comments before I struck on a notion that if he petitioned the local disabled population and approached politicians and offered them the petitioned votes in the upcoming election in return for pledges (with journalists present) that that might work. He seemed to genuinely like the idea. Useless notion maybe but it made me feel like Erin Brockovich.

***

Before I started the volunteer work I spent a few days getting settled. I went out drinking on my own one night ( first time ever). There was a band and they were good, they played classics by Dire Straits, Santana, Pink Floyd, The Beatles. Then into this gallery of greats like a shit in a paddling pool came a song by James Blunt. I'd like to say I got up and bottled the lead singer as a lesson to all the long haired, trendy locals that singing "You're Beautiful" is just not cool. But as I was sat on my own drinking a pink cocktail any protest I made would have come across a little ironic. I later went to a club on my own (not first time ever). I sat at the bar and resented the youths on the dancefloor for their enthusiasm. This made me feel old and I went home.

To make up for this I went drinking another night not on my own. It was with a guy called Graham and his assortment of friends in the local music scene. He was a (very good) trumpet player. He used to play with the Fine Young Cannibals and had also played with UB40. At the end of the night he said, "The world needs more people like you, D." This from a world famous celebrity musician, who am I to disagree?

I'm Brian and so is my wife.

So I've escaped the clutches of the hills of spiritual India, of those bleedin hippies and their enlightened views. Bastards with their open-mindedness, their live and let live attitudes, where's the hate, the good old fashioned bigotry? I remember once upon a time you could safely think someone was a dick because they thought the body had special "energies". Or if someone said you had a good aura you'd know it was mushroom season. Or when someone talked about different dimensions they were probably talking about Star Trek and you were probably barely listening anyway and they were certainly a dick. And what happened to the fact that all the different religions can't be right, that it is impossible that all these differing religions with their monkey gods and Wailing Walls and Eucharists and merciless killing in the name of their all-merciful gods, that they can't all be the One True religion. Apparently they can, if they're all just different interpretations of the same thing. Goddamn ecumenicism and understanding. And chakras and acupuncture and reiki and feng shui and mantras and personal moons and feckin tea-tree oil. And God help us all, creationism.

I went to a yoga class in the hills and they talked about sleep and yoga. And they said that a wet dream was someone stealing your energy in a different dimension. A sort of inter-dimensional rape. Mentalists.











And the scariest thing, of course, is that in some small way I've started to Believe.










Hommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.





Postscript robbed from Irish Times.
The old Irish woman who was asked by the anthropologist if she believed in the fairies: "Indeed and I do not," came the dismissal, "but sure they're there all the same."

The story so far II...

Some pics from the principal places of the last month, most places deserve a write up...

Udaipur

Octpussy was filmed here but i can't find the relevant photos so here's a nice one from Jaisalmer.

Jodphur

The most impressive fort I ever expect to see. This place has never been breached. Jodphur is the blue city, as long as you are selective with your camera angles.

Jaisalmer

Desert trek, i don't know how i ended up in all the shots.

Pushka

Lake where Brahma apparently dropped a lotus flower, very holy to Hindus. My camera had filled with sand from desert and was not functioning.



Agra

My future home. Pity the town around it is such a dump. I might have to have it razed.

Amritsar

Golden Temple, the Sikhs most revered temple. Also close to the border with Pakistan and their insane flag down ceremony.

McLeod Ganj

Home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile, also something of an Israeli community in exile. Foothills of the Himalaya.

Varanasi

One of the Hindus most sacred spots, on the river Ganges, people come here to die and are burned on the rivers edge. Pretty mental place.