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.