Random bits and pixels...

Balinese dance


Kuala Lumpur Towers


Santiago scene


South American dawn


Just me and my beer, having a laugh at my drinking problem.


Sumatran house


Indonesian crater lake


The death throes of a Bali sunset


A Hindu celebration in a Muslim country

Bien Giorno!

So I have made it at last to South America, with 6 weeks at my disposal instead of the 6 months I had planned and still tender from the loss of my beautiful painted travel companion Toni.

Sure tis a tough life.

My accent was mistaken the other day for that of an American. This occurs regularly but this is the first time it was mistaken by another irish person. I have been away too long (I sooooooo didn't get it from Friends). At a climbing wall in Christchurch the receptionist asked where I was from and I told her Ireland. I love that accent, she says, practically doubling up, as if with indigestion. Yeah, well I don't really have an irish accent, I say, smiling winningly, meaning, tell me how hot my accent is. No, she says, you don't and turns away, tapping a pen in her teeth. It hurt a little. Even if she was a pig.

Now the problem is not one of accents but language, as I struggle to remember my 5 or 6 hours of Spanish lessons from ten months ago. In the hostel I stayed in in Santiago there was a bizarre mix of nationalities and languages. Ten of us around a dinner table with French, Spanish, Portuguese and English flying around and everyone seeming to be multilingual except me. If one of the French is talking to me a sentence may start in Spanish, meet a blank look, grind into English and then finish in French with a flare of frustration. It does not help that rogue elements of my long buried Italian and French keep rearing up and providing close but erroneous versions of Spanish words. I even had to babel fish the 'Diarmuid is a Tourist'.

I have painstakingly retro capitalised the languages in that paragraph. I think I got them all.

I visited a museum dealing in pre Columbian art and it was pretty fascinating. It struck me again the simliarities between races separated by oceans. The pyramid structures of the temples, so similar to the Asian ones I have seen. And the use of psychotropic substances by the shamans to predict the future and help cure ills, which sounds like what the druids of Ireland used to do. What we didn't have was a game called El Juego de Pelota, a popular ball game where the losing team was decapitated. (How did they ever keep a league running?)

In the same museum was a temporary exhibition on the Moche civilisation and the role of sex in the reincarnation of their leader. Various weird stuff involving slaves who had been skeletonised( ears, lips, nose, etc cut off) having, lets say, non procreational sex, with female slaves. And all participants would ultimately be executed. A quote "First 2 women give a stick to a bird with human features and then the figures use the stick to stir a potion, then the vessel is taken to a terraced platform where it is poured on the back of Wrinkle Face (a dominant supernatural force in the World of the Ancestors) while he engages in vaginal copulation with a woman in the shadow of a temple with a gable roof." The exhibition never really let you know if any of the acts or rites were actually carried out or were just legends which is mildly frustrating. Then again, childish as it may be, any exhibition featuring the phrase " A woman masturbating a pelican" can't be all bad.

But probably one of my favourite things about Chile so far is the mere existence of a character named, drum roll please... Bernardo O'Higgins. Brilliant. And he is actually a big deal in Chile's history, something about helping to found the country or something, but seriously, who cares, savour that name a little, its a thing of beauty.

The Tsunami Tourist

From when we started in Indonesia.

***

Another bus station in the early morning, hazy from an all night bus journey in a fridge. Sitting around the periphery of the station yard are the usual mix of gruff and grisly men taking their first coffee of the day. We are grunted into sitting at one of their tables and they hold forth over us, at us, ignoring us, chatting to us. They are serious men yet they goose each other and giggle like school girls. I wonder should I try and join in.

We have arrived in Banda Aceh. This was one of the hardest hit areas in the tsunami at the close of 2004. Somehow we have managed to arrive here with little idea of how the area was faring now, only having been reassured that any tourism was a good thing. We are aiming for the island of Pulah Weh just off the coast of Aceh.

It starts on the way to the boat. Our tuk driver points at a factory up ahead. Tsunami, he says but it is unclear what he means until we get closer and realise the "factory" is actually a ship. It is perhaps a hundred metres long and half that wide, a cargo ship. It has settled permanently in the middle of a residential neighbourhood of single storey houses. At this point we are still several kilometres from the sea. As if this marked some sort of border, the scars are suddenly everywhere. Houses crumpled in on themselves, the concrete and cable supports buckled and twisted, or plucked from their foundations. The occasional eery site where all that remains is the tile floors, rain washed maps to vanished homes.

There's a new bridge with the splinters of the old one still jagged underneath. At one point desolate black lakes clogged with debris and tree trunks line the roadside. Locals sift through them, I can only imagine what they find.

There is an occasional palm tree amongst the buildings, towering upto fifteen metres into the grey sky, their leaves still ragged and broken. Higher says our driver, the water went higher. And there was no higher ground, nowhere to run.

Suddenly we feel like vultures. We huddle down in our little seat as far as we can. People stare at you most places in Indonesia but here I imagine it to be accusatory, even when they smile. Our driver tells us with a small smile that he lost a baby and I shrink a little more.

The sea is so calm, we might as well be boating on a lake.

Pulah Weh is a breeze dried piece of paradise, snorkelling with turtles in seas that are brochure blues, framed by jungle and palm trees. Five naked brown boys prance around in the waves, the picture of innocence (though they show an impressive knowledge of the mechanics of love whenever Toni has her back turned. I try and put on a disapproving look but fail. There's five of them, naked, humping the air. "Are you?" their raised eyebrows ask.)

Pulah Weh island itself felt much less impact from the tsunami, with jungle hillsides rising up almost from the waters edge, but it still bears the scars. The water came as high the floor of our beachside cabin, raised as it is back on the hill slightly, and the Malaysian couple inside at the time were safe. But when the water receded it took most of the lower structures with it and the topsoil. Trees line the back beach, many now with their roots exposed. Some of them lie still slumped on the beach, untethered, a picture of defeat.

There are barely a handful of tourists here. The whole country seems to go through cycles of recovering from natural disasters and social upheaval so that tourism comes and goes like the tides. Aceh, with its regular natural disasters and an ongoing separatist conflict, seems to be one of the last places to regain the traveller's trust. And then this week there's another offshore earthquake, another tsunami warning and the area's battered reputation slips a little further.

Those stubborn grass stains...

It is standard with NZ's island ecosphere that anyone entering is strictly checked for any foreign matter that they may be carrying on their person. My trekking shoes always get pulled out and inspected and this time it was no different. The last checker before the arrivals lounge. Eh aisle 5 there, she says, they'll have a look at your boots. Grand, I say, relieved to be within an hour of a bed after 60 hours without.

There seems to be a lot of police in aisle 5 and they're taking their time with the people ahead of me, emptying entire suitcases. Turns out aisle 5 is not the quarantine people at all, its customs, those lovely folks with the stern faces and the rubber gloves. Apparently my hasty route down from Indonesia through small out-of-the-way airports has set some rubber clad fingers flexing. Someone's been behaving like a drug mule. I'm ok though, I don't think I'm smuggling any narcotics. Ha bloody ha.

A lady thoroughly roots through my bag, emptying every little thing. I apologise for the dirty clothes that have built up at the bottom of my bag and go to help her take them out but am told in no uncertain terms to sit down and not touch anything for the duration. Behind the lady is a two way mirror. Occasionally she disappears inside for ten, twenty minutes at a time. I'm starting to feel a little uncomfortable. At another counter a short-tempered model (or so she declares), is giving them all sorts of shit about how exhausting her day has been and that this is bullshit and etc. She is screaming guilt at them and its getting on my already shaky nerves, like listening to a baby crying.

The officer returns and the questions start.

Have you been in contact with any illegal drugs recently?
Eh...... no.
Please be aware that we have some highly sensitive machinery here that can pick up traces you aren't even aware of.
Riiiiiiight.

The thing is I might maybe just have once been in contact with a fella, our neighbour on one island, who had some locally grown medicinal plants on him which he wanted to share. And we did. Just the once. I'm honestly not a fan of the stuff (ask my dealer, not funny, sorry ma n pa). But we were drunk and there were no police on the island so we said what the hey. Anyway.

So I tell her about this once off. She promptly does some sort of smear test on my phone. Sticks it in a machine which beeps loudly (so loudly) and comes back to me with a print out.

See this line. That's marijuana.
On my phone?
Yes.
Shit.

I hadn't even used my phone on the island. She wanders off and I am sweating bricks. My stomach is rumbling ominously but I fear if I ask to use the bathroom they'll make me bring a sieve. She comes back and starts telling me my rights. I feel the situation sliding out of control.

Then I realise she is just talking about my rights with regards a strip search and I breathlessly agree to anything which will prove I am not smuggling drugs.

I am brought into a small room by two burly uniformed men. They run through the procedure, one of them dons some gloves. I strip slowly, and only as requested by an officer who thoroughly checks each item. I am strangely beyond shame, just seeking closure now. In no time I am standing naked before them.

Raise your balls.
I raise my balls.
Spread your cheeks.
I spread my cheeks.

Grand.

And thats that, suddenly they're all smiles. You can get dressed now, they say. That was painless eh? says one, like a dentist.

And I am free to go.

Sea the World!

Today I went diving again and all ( or at least some ) of those things I had meant to say about it before came flooding back. As much as possible I will limit my use of words like beautiful, gracefulness, magical, breathtaking etc. It's difficult though.

The colours of the fish are pretty much indescribable, the variety and seeming randomness of it all has no doubt bolstered many a man’s belief in God. I instead will postulate the existence of a little man in a cave under the waves, who decorates the fish using only a bottomless pot of rainbow paint and an intimidating imagination, whilst surviving on a diet of magic mushrooms. For me it is the only logical explanation.

The most impressive colours belong to the smallest in the sea whereas sharks, deliberately grey and background, impress instead with their size and potency. I’ve seen four of them aligned on the bottom, sitting out a strong current in formation, like fighter planes grounded by high winds. And these were reef sharks, the most pedestrian of sharks, but with white tips on the end of their fins like wing markings. On the same dive, while tacking across the current to avoid being slingshot off into the blue, I crossed over a green turtle. He passed a foot under me, his shell as big as a coffee table and the urge to reach out and hitch a ride was overwhelming, but we are schoolchildren touring a reactor, do not touch. The turtles are probably my favourites, they do not swim, they glide, taking off and landing. They look wise and patient, the owls of the underworld.

There are obviously a lot of species which deserve a mention. There’s the famous little clownfish who to be honest seemed a little cranky to me, guarding their little underwater shrubs so jealously. They zip out to meet you and audibly (if you listen close enough) bark at you and then disappear back into their shrub like a small dog back between its owners legs. The juvenile harlequin funnylips is like the clownfishes flamingly flamboyant, carefree cousin, his frilly fins whirling and spinning into each other so that you can’t tell where one starts and another begins. He bounces around upside down, no doubt humming a tune to himself as he nibbles his way along the sea bed. There's the not-so-fun banded sea snake, the black and white stripes of Danger! conveniently identifying him as containing enough poison to kill 15 of us mere men. And yet he is 3 feet from us and we are trying to get even closer as he weaves gracefully through the coral. Then there's the little cowfish with his big eyes and a body shaped like he's swallowed a building block. He doesn't so much swim as put-put around on his hover fins. Crocodile fish, the overdressed lionfish, the speckled leopard sharks, the angry and stout not-so-little titan triggerfish, the tripped out sea slugs, the list is already too long.

At one of the dive sites you swim out a mere 5 metres from the shore and a sea cliff drops away under you, ultimately to a depth of 2000 metres, imagine taking your kids there for a dip. Another time I snorkelled along the top of a slope where the shallows ended and the seabed disappeared downwards. Sand passed steadily under me and down the slope into the darkness and I felt as if I was perched on the rim of a giant egg timer which was gently willing me into its depths.

Going into the blue is to swim away from any features, in our case the sea wall we had been handrailing, until all around you is a blue infinity. With only your dive buddy as a handle you no longer have any relation to anything concrete, you are suspended in an empty void. It strikes me as one of those human sensations unencountered anywhere else in our existence, as with free falling from a plane perhaps. Once I’d drank my fill, I fixated on my buddy’s back and willed myself not to fall into the hysteria that was nibbling at the edges.

Ones in India perhaps?

I'm in Ind-ones-ia.

I like crosswords and stamps and books by dead russians.

In fact Indonesia does have distinct shades of India about it and I had a lot to write, but I'm afraid I've just gone and got bogged down in more scribblings. Read these as if I am mumbling them through my beard.

***

The call to prayer of the mosques still gives me the shivers, tugging at hidden strings in the music of a foreign language. Glancing into the mosques, seeing the rows of men, heads bowed. It makes me wish I belonged a little. In one town I sit on my balcony and listen to the different mosques loudspeakers drowning each other out, competing for worshippers. Some swallows on a balcony nearby chirp and cheep away, oblivious to the solemnity of the occasion, like kids in church. It is five in the morning and the sun struggles to rise over the volcano which dominates the skyline, its crown lost in cloud.

We get a bus out in to the countryside to go jungle trekking and see the orangutang. Numerous random stops, including one spent singing Maroon 5 with just another local guitar hero. Toni has her head out the window for most of the 4 hour journey taking in the sights while I, being a veteran of one Indian campaign no less, affect nonchalance and try to sleep.

We drive past a school. The kids are standing in ranks in the school yard, the girls like miniature nuns, the boys like sailor cadets maybe. The teachers stand at the front in military green, their shoulders and chests adorned with merit ribbons, like a visiting delegation of war veterans. Every couple of hundred metres is a mosque with a dome crudely hammered out of corrugated iron, streaked in rust, no fancy marble glazing here. Yet every house seems to have a satellite dish the size of a small car. There are rows of tiny minibuses, garishly coloured, brightly decrepit, going nowhere.

***

We decide to do a guided trek to see the orangutan, the jungle people. Our guide makes monkey calls and disappears occasionally in earnest searchings. We half expect him to come back in a monkey suit.

He is a little obsessed with the idea of a banana representing a penis. He tells us about the betel nut, is good for a young man's banana, he says and he gives me a worryingly knowing wink. Later he says I shouldn't give my banana to the orangutan, oh I don't have one, I say, yes you do, he says and laughs and I am a little afraid of what the locals do with their bananas and the orangutans.

He jokes about one of them being his wife. Brave brave man.

Then we actually get to meet them. A mother and a baby, the baby clambering and hanging from its mothers coat as if by velcro. They come and sit with us awhile. I have heard of people who meet these creatures and cry, and it makes some sense. The mothers face is wise, bored, patient, resigned. They make you if not tearful, at least reflective.

I reflected that it is funny that those who decry the concept of evolution are offended by the notion that we might be descended from apes. I think it is us who are the embarassing relations, in our gluttony and our haste and our short sightedness. And me making it all a little worse with my many tonnes of air-fuel carbon emissions.

Our guide carries a machete which I hope he will attack the vegetation with as we battle our way into the untouched wilderness. But the trail is distinct and well worn, and he uses his knife only to slice and dice some pineapple. Which he has brought in his bag. He continues his monkey calls and sometimes it seems to work only as an echolocation system for the other guides and their parties who we occasionally meet. It starts to feel like we are 20 groups painstakingly criss-crossing and avoiding each other in an area the size of a football pitch. And it is all good.

We are in a little wooden restaurant shack on the rivers edge in the darkness. The electricity has gone again so the mood is candlelit. There are cats somewhere nearby making that unnerving crying infant sound, their pitch rising and falling like wind through bottle tops. They know the weather is about to break. Thunder passed up the valley earlier in the day but it was lost without its rain and lightning. Now the narrow valley is lit sporadically, as if by a broken strobe. Above us the gods beat their drums and the heavens open on our corrugated roof. We are lost in noise.

You can drown in the jungle noises, your senses numbed by it, and sit idle for hours, stoned on it.

The Tsunami Tourist

Another bus station in the early morning, hazy from an all night bus journey in a fridge. Sitting around the periphery of the station yard are the usual mix of gruff and grisly men taking their first coffee of the day. We are grunted into sitting at one of their tables and they hold forth over us, at us, ignoring us, chatting to us. They are serious men yet they goose each other and giggle like school girls. I wonder should I try and join in.

We have arrived in Banda Aceh. This was one of the hardest hit areas in the tsunami at the close of 2004. Somehow we have managed to arrive here with little idea of how the area was faring now, only having been reassured that any tourism was a good thing. We are aiming for the island of Pulah Weh just off the coast of Aceh.

It starts on the way to the boat. Our tuk driver points at a factory up ahead. Tsunami, he says but it is unclear what he means until we get closer and realise the "factory" is actually a ship. It is perhaps a hundred metres long and half that wide, a cargo ship. It has settled permanently in the middle of a residential neighbourhood of single storey houses. At this point we are still several kilometres from the sea. As if this marked some sort of border, the scars are suddenly everywhere. Houses crumpled in on themselves, the concrete and cable supports buckled and twisted, or plucked from their foundations. The occasional eery site where all that remains is the tile floors, rain washed maps to vanished homes.

There's a new bridge with the splinters of the old one still jagged underneath. At one point desolate black lakes clogged with debris and tree trunks line the roadside. Locals sift through them. I can only imagine what they find.

There is an occasional palm tree amongst the buildings, towering upto fifteen metres into the grey sky, their leaves still ragged and broken. Higher says our driver, the water went higher. And there was no higher ground, nowhere to run.

Suddenly we feel like vultures. We huddle down in our little seat as far as we can. People stare at you most places in Indonesia but here I imagine it to be accusatory, even when they smile. Our driver tells us with a small smile that he lost a baby and I shrink a little more.

The sea is so calm, we might as well be boating on a lake.

Pulah Weh is a breeze dried piece of paradise, snorkelling with turtles in seas that are brochure blues, framed by jungle and palm trees. Five naked brown boys prance around in the waves, the picture of innocence (though they do show an impressive knowledge of the mechanics of love whenever Toni has her back turned. I try and put on a disapproving look but fail. There's five of them, naked, humping the air. "Are you?" their eyes ask.)

Pulah Weh island itself felt much less impact from the tsunami, with jungle hillsides rising up almost from the waters edge, but it still bears the scars. The water came as high the floor of our beachside cabin, raised as it is back on the hill slightly, and the Malaysian couple inside at the time were safe. But when the water receded it took most of the lower structures with it and the topsoil. Trees line the back beach, many now with their roots exposed. Some of them lie still slumped on the beach, untethered, a picture of defeat.

There are barely a handful of tourists here. The whole country seems to go through cycles of recovering from natural disasters and social upheaval so that tourism comes and goes like the tides. Aceh, with its regular natural disasters and an ongoing separatist conflict, seems to be one of the slowest places to regain the traveller's trust. And then this week there's another offshore earthquake, another tsunami warning and the area's battered reputation takes another knock.

On the Road...

Dear Diary,

I told the guys I'd be writing to you about them and they insisted I disguise their names which I have duly done.

J.ames has given me a wetsuit with holes in it that give views which only one's doctor and one's darling should be subjected to. The lads qualify as neither so I wear togs underneath. I am still worried the lads will start calling me SeaGimp.

J.ames insists on talking to me while I am sitting on the toilet, even though he knows how uncomfortable this makes me. We might have to have a family meeting about it. P.aul says he is Canadian but does not have any Canadian flags sewn on to his bag. This makes me suspicious, I will see if he likes Celine Dion.

J.ames has R. Kelly on his iPod. This threw the future of the road trip into doubt but I quietly checked with the local authorities and they said they were aware of the situation and to continue as normal. I soldier on but have taken to sleeping with an open penknife.

J.ames wets his wetsuit when its dry. We will be walking down to the sea to surf and he will get a slightly distracted look and then smile slightly and we know he has just got a headstart on getting his wetsuit wet. It's wrong I tells him but he only laughs slightly hysterically.

My eyebrows, no doubt bolstered by the sun, wind, fresh air and water, are growing at a prodigious rate. I am worried that soon my eyelids will become obsolete. The lads will call me Curtains.

I have got that strange man pride of wearing the same boxers for 5 days. I also went unshowered for 7.

There is a condom kept in the tent in case anyone "gets lucky". We fight over who will get to use it, bald men fighting over a comb.

****

I went to the hills on my own after the lads went back to work, lived out of J;ames car, walked the peaks, swam in streams every day and watched solo sunsets with a bottle of red wine and a book. I camped in a valley ringed by slag heap giants, the barren peaks huddled together in a line, their shoulders rubbing like a barbershop quartet. On one of my walks I got lost on one of these shoulders. I battled my way through irreversable shrub forests and barbed wired plantations and then ran out of water in the midday sun effectively passing out when i got back to the car. Inevitably one of the highlights of my time here.

****

In a way my sense of direction has just failed me again only on a grander scale and I have caught a flight back up to Malaysia instead of to South America. Eleven hours in the wrong direction perhaps but then every direction is homeward bound on this side of the world.




Thats right, yours truly. Rad.

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.