TravelStream™ news feed for member kevinwalls on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/kevinwalls en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Tue, 25 Jul 2006 05:46:21 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1151078280/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1151078280/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1151078280/tpod.html Tue, 25 Jul 2006 05:46:21 -0400 It's time to get a few stamps on my passport while the photograph still looks young.

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Beijing, China

06-06-23

"He who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man"(Mao Zedong) I think that makes me the only true man in the family, which is very poor form given the surname and legacy. I teamed up with a Peruvian/American/Italian (one person) called Fiorella, to hike one of the connoisseurs sections, which was 10k up-down-up-down-up-down in mad heat. But it was definitley worth it. Because it's so gruelling this section of the wall is not so popular with tourists so you pretty much have the wall to yourself. The views are very impressive. There's no point waving up at the astronauts when you're doing it as apparently the story that you can see the great wall from space is a myth. They are currently in the process of removing the story from school text books out here.

We also did some hard bargaining at the pearl market using a very effective mix of calculator talk, good cop/bad cop, and amateur dramatics. It´s amazing how much you can knock the prices down coming up to closing time, especially if you are prepared to walk away. But since I was buying presents for the family I thought it better to pay the full price anyhow.

On my last day I braved a hutong(backstreet) barber, which actually worked out really well. They had a book of styles, but the slaphead wasn't in it. So the wee guy showed me a list of english expressions, one of which was "shave it all off please". Too easy, as the Ozzies say.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1153584960/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1153584960/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1153584960/tpod.html Tue, 25 Jul 2006 05:32:07 -0400 It's time to get a few stamps on my passport while the photograph still looks young.

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Renchimlumbe, Mongolia

06-06-30

I signed up to do a 7-day horse trek for my second week there. Not the best type of exercise after a marathon. I was saddle-sore before I started, and we´d be doing 30-40k through Mongolian wilderness everyday. Maybe it was because the ground was so soft, but 2-3 days into the trek and my muscles felt great.

At the start of the trek the horses are nervous because some complete stranger is trying to take control of them. But after a week in the saddle they start to recognize you and relax alot. Or more precisely they start to recognize their own smell off you.

Horses generally aren´t my thing. Usually the horse I´m on always takes some mad notion to just run off for a gallop and won´t stop no matter how much I pull on the reins. So far I´ve never fallen off and I was hoping to maintain my 100% record. True to form on the first day my horse just kept taking these mad notions to go galloping on his own away off to the right. I didn´t fall off, and he did stop which was good. But he´d just stop, look back at the other horses trotting along normally, then look over to the wee house away off in the distance on the right, and burst into a gallop straight for it again. This happened 3 or 4 times and I was thinking to myself that this was going to be a tough week. Then my guide explained that the wee house in the distance was where he lived and he thought he was going home. Once we got out of sight of the house he was grand. He pretty much knew the score and my input wasn´t needed very much. About the only thing I had to do from time to time was turn him round so that he could see the other horses, then dig my heels into him, and shout "tschoo", which is the horse equivalent of "follow that cab".

As far as scenery goes Mongolia could compete with anywhere that I´ve been to. Many countries have beautiful landscapes of mountains, forests, rivers, etc, but mongolia also has lots of wildflower meadows which are in their full glory at this time of year. Right outside the tent door you have a beautiful wild flower meadow where the horses are doing their overnight grazing. Oranges, whites, yellows, and pink flowers blanket the place. Huge snowcapped mountains frame it.

Travelling by horse is a really nice way to see a place. We were fortunate enough to meet some reindeer herders. There´s only about 30 of them in an area about half the size of N´Ireland. The other day we saw some children training horses for the racing next week. They were riding round in circles singing old racing songs to the horses. The nomad children start to ride soon as they can walk. We´ve come across many sacred spots along the way, where you all have to get off your horses and walk round them 3 times, CLOCKWISE! It must be clockwise.

Another day we rode into the very remote village of Renchilumbe. It was like the Magnificent 7 riding into a small mexican village. A couple of locals peeped out at us from behind curtained windows. Some took their siesta in the shade of a wall. Cool stuff. The riding in that area wasn´t so much fun as there was alot of marsh. So it´s not to be attemptd without sunglasses.

At the end of the week I´d had a lesson in all things horsy. I knew how to saddle up my own horse. (The guides trained us up for a saddling competition on the last day, which Dirk claimed he won. Though after his antics on the last night I´m sorry I didn´t call for stewards inquiry.) I also learned how pack animals behaved, why they like to trot along with their noses right in the tail of the horse in front. I had first hand experience of the expression chomping at the bit, and knew the implications. Lucky for me on the last day my horse was chomping at the bit, just in time for the end-of-week race. At the starting sign he took off like a wild thing, only to be caught by an ex-race horse ridden by Sabine, who won by 2 lengths. The race was great crack. Seven horses going at it full tilt, muck flying up in the air, hooves thudding, horses breathing down your neck. You can really feel the excitement in the horse when your on it too. And they really do seem to enjoy it. In fact it´s a real challenge trying to calm them all down after, and stop them from running off again.

I never would have believed that I´d enjoy this trip so much. The organization was excellent. The food was top notch. We even had mongolian campfire pizza! The group and the guides were great. We had a few sing-songs, plenty of crack, and plenty of mongolian folk-stories. There´s something very relaxing about trotting along on your horse through the wilderness. Not that I was feeling stressed beforehand. But if you ever were, I´d recommend it as a trip to ease all the troubles away.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1153069560/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1153069560/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1153069560/tpod.html Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:47:58 -0400 It's time to get a few stamps on my passport while the photograph still looks young.

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Singapore, Singapore

06-07-16

3 days in Singapore. Shame I didn´t have longer as it seems a really nice spot. Like Hong Kong but not as frantic. Much more laid back. Unfortunately my plans to meet up with the Wiz didn´t work out but he very kindly gave me the keys to his apartment and girlfriend. I did a reasonable job of doing all the tourist things, Raffles for Singapore Sling, Sun Lim for a cheap laptop, Orchard road for clothes, and Little India for good food. The only thing I didn´t do was make it to he top floor of he "Four Floors of Whores" where the Wiz´s most recommended bar is. It´s called Crazy Horse, and it´s full of the most beautiful looking women in Singapore. The only catch is they´ve all got willies. Apparently you´d never know, and I´ll just have to take the Wiz´s word on that.

It´s a nice city though with an amazing amount of pubs. It must have the highest number of pubs per square mile in any asian city. It would could hold it´s own with any Irish town.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1152290160/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1152290160/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1152290160/tpod.html Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:45:39 -0400 It's time to get a few stamps on my passport while the photograph still looks young.

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Erdinbulgan, Mongolia

06-07-07

Another reason for coming to Mongolia was the Taimen fishing. Taimen is the largest species of salmon in the wolrd, and Mongolia is the best place to go fly-fishing for them. Lucky for me I´d come across a guide at the camp who is used by all the scientific expeditions to locate and catch the fish. I´d found my man, now all we had to do was find the fish. Actually there was three of us, Bayaraa the guide, Zagd the driver and me the international fly-fisherman. This was my last week in mongolia, and I was expecting it to be the highlight, even better than the marathon and the horse race put together. I´d seen lots of pictures of fish that had been caught just 2 weeks earlier by Bayaraa with some rich american clients. These guys had been catching 3-4 fish a day. All I wanted was one, and I had about 6 days. It should really have been easy. But I finally got a taste of the mongolias famously erratic climate, and how it plays havoc with the rivers. Instead of sightfishing for these beasts in crystal clear rivers, all we could do was throw out a fly into a muddy torrent and hope for the best. Fishing-wise it was a disaster, we didn't even see a Taimen. Adventure-wise it was great.

On the last day of the horse trek we´d had a fair bit of rain. The day we headed off in our packed-to-the-gills jeep with fishing rods, it rained a lot too. Reports on the roads were bad and the flash floods can be terrible in mongolia so we got travelling fairly early and got through the danger spots ok. The other horse trekkers who left the next day got stuck in a river which was only 6 inches deep when we passed through it.

I hadn´t really travelled much along mongolias roads so the first day was an eye-opener. If you like off-roading in a jeep in mud and marsh it was heaven. The weather caused havoc with the transport. I can't say roads because there wasn't any. We ended up spending most of the trip just trying not to get stuck. At one point we got stranded on a mountain looking for a safe passgage down. After 2 hours of driving round in giant circles we ended up back at the same dead tree. But full credit to the driver we didn´t get too seriously bogged down anywhere. The only time things got really bad, some nomads looked after us, and that was only for one day when got sandwiched between 2 flooded rivers. Many people got stuck for several days, hundreds had to be helicopter rescued, quite a few people died because of the floods, others got killed by lightning!! I kid you not. Like I say it was a bit of an adventure.

The day with the nomads was one of the highlights on this bizarre trip. Their hospitiality is the stuff of legends. They stuffed us full with every dairy product imaginable, then we sang songs together and got drunk on fermented mares milk and homemade milk-vodka. Nomadic mongolia is dairy product heaven. Fresh cream, butter, sour cream, yak yoghurt, dried curds, you name it. The mongolians are a bit like the Irish in that they all like to sing or do a party piece. I was really amazed at how many of them can play the guitar. As well as the food and singing we had a great time fishing. Ulagan, the eldest son (26), had recently been in an accident and was paralyzed from the waist down. His mother Enchtuya, said that he was depressed and that it would do him good to come out with us. So we brought him down to the local spring creek and let him loose wih a fly rod. Between the lot of us we caught an awful lot of grayling. The next day Enchtuya cooked these up as empanadas and fish head soup which was delicious.

The food got more adventurous when we left the nomads. The high point was the mongolian equivalent of Christmas turkey - which is boiled sheeps head, with trotters, tail and lashings of fat, all served in a plastic bucket. Mmmmmmm. As special guest I was allowed first pick of all the extra tasty bits, like the lips, eyeballs, brains, etc. As special guest there was no backing out of it. I particulary recommend the left eyeball, provided it's not overcooked. You still want the hot runny juice to shoot into your mouth when you bite into it.

Luckily we ended up in Erdinbulgan village (4000 people) for the Nadaam festival which was superb. At the villages you can get right up close to everything, which you can't do in the capital. It's also just a really good excuse for the whole community to let the hair down and party. So I thought, what-the-heck, why not do a spot of wrestling? I mean what's the worst thing could happen? The boys put my name down, and next thing I know I'm in the middle of the stadium, dressed in the garb, doing the falcon dance in front of a couple of hundred very tough mongolian villagers, cheering me on. My first opponent like myself saw the funny side of it, and I managed to wrestle him down quite quickly. My coach had me well tutored. Another falcon dance, pass my wing over the loser and pat him on the bum, grab some sweets from the judges table, and run round the stadium tossing them into the crowd.

It's a sudden death competition, so the next opponent had already won a bout, and was a better wrestler. There were also many little things that conspired against me, and to cut a long story short I lost the second one. Only just. It was a long contest, my clothes started to rip, the crowd went mad when I had him on the backfoot. I started laugh and before I knew it I was on my arse. To be fair he was very quick, and like all mongolians he knew how to wrestle. It is officially their national sport. So it was like going to Brazil and trying to play football. It was a good laugh though. A great idea for a stag weekend!

The wrestling gives you a bit of a thirst for the fermented mares milk. It's not that bad, just like drinking runny natural yoghurt. According to my guide it's very good for you too. "Many shitting, many many shitting next day, very healthy!" I mustn´t hve drunk enough as I didn´t get to enjoy the health benefits that were promised. It's pretty weak too so I didn't even get drunk. I did manage to get typsy on homebrew vodka made from distilled yak milk. It's fairly weak so you could easily polish off a litre, if you can get used to the taste. The tasting notes should read "a very, very long lingering aftertaste of bad milk, with a bouquet of baby-burp." Still you can't complain when it's free. It all added to a very memorable week. And I can still taste it now.

As ever it´s the people that really make travelling interesting. We stayed with a family who were racing horses in festival. I watched the mother stitching up jockeys outfits for her own boys while I sipped my salty tea. Most of jockeys are less than 7, and ride bareback. (The races are between 20-30k long! Even better it´s a straight course so they have to trot 20-30k to the starting line. And people joke about the Irish!) There was a big hulk of a guy stayed with us who´d come to town to try his hand at the wrestling trophy. The winner in every village gets a motorbike! Myself and Bayaraa got a very tempting offer to a party at the river. Apparently, there were a lot of women there who were "in very good condition" because they´d been drinking all day. There would be Big "Chiggyboom" that night. (Chiggyboom is a mongolian word for the reproductive process.) Real shame I had to save myself for the wrestling.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1153584120/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1153584120/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1153584120/tpod.html Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:22:36 -0400 It's time to get a few stamps on my passport while the photograph still looks young.

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Toilogt, Mongolia

06-06-28

Mongolia is and outdoor lovers paradise. One of the last remaining natural resources in the world. There's no roads, no people, no pollution. Say what you like about Genghis Khan but he was a strong evnironmentalist, and his legacy remains to this day. It´s thanks to his law that people were not allowed to put any impure substances into the water, that the rivers and lakes are of such high quality. Presumably the penalty for pollution was a Genghis Khan short back and side, with an axe.

One of the main attractions that brought me here was the marathon they hold in the northern region. It's called "the sunrise to sunset marathon", as it's a 100k event. They also do a 42k event for the more sane. The course goes through mountains, valleys, forests and wildflower meadows. It's pretty spectacular. It's also bloody tough. During the first 42k you do the equivalent of climbing Slieve Donard two times.

For once in my life I didn't do the stupid thing. I was smart enugh to resist the temptation to upgrade to the 100k. Though it was a close call. What with the peer pressure, excess pre-race positivity, everybody claiming that they hadn't trained much....

Needless to say an event like this attracts a fairly interesting group of people. And just hanging round the camp talking with the other competitors is pretty entertaining. One guy cycled here from France, via the Gobi desert (over 3000k). One motorbiked it from Germany. There was even a 76 yr-old doing 76k. Our camp was called Toilogt, pronounced "tallogged", not "toilet". It's about 25km from the middle of nowhere. We stayed in Ger's which is the housing used by mongolian nomads. They are structured like a tee-pee, with a fire in the middle, and are surprisingly cosy.

You start the marathon at 4:30am in the pitch dark through a forest. A great spot for spraining your ankles nice and early in the race. I´d heard that the mongolians usually win, and it's no wonder. At the starting whistle they tore into the forest like a herd of startled deer. After 5 seconds you couldn´t even see their nightlights.

All in all, the race itself went fantastically. They say it's the most beautiful course in the world, but it's got to be one of the most difficult. When it's over you're both glad and sorry. The hills are "demanding" so after 42k I had nothing left. Saying that I ran the last 10k faster than I've finished any marathon before. Once I sat down, nursed the cramps, and watched the 100k competitors hobble off to do another 58k I started to really bless my commonsense for once. When the first guy got back after 12 and a half hours I was even more grateful. The last ones didn't make it back till 02:20am the next day. They have my utmost respect. A couple of hours more and they will have to call it "the sunrise to sunrise" marathon.

The night after the race we had a party which kicked off with a traditional mongolian folk band. Some Mongolian music sounds surprisingly like Irish trad. They even play the "Sheeps Ankles" similar to how we play the spoons. One of the highlights was the mongolian throat singing which has got to be heard to be believed. It's like Popeye singing a song on one long note. I was lucky enough to get playing along with the band. They taught me some mongolian music, I taught them some John Denver and Beatles. Then we played along together with myself all decked out in the mongolian traditonal garb (Dell and Malgai). The singing and dancing went on till the wee hours. An excellent end to a great week.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1150818960/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1150818960/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1150818960/tpod.html Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:09:56 -0400 It's time to get a few stamps on my passport while the photograph still looks young.

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Guillin, China

06-06-20

Spent a bit of time in Yanshou and Guillin. This is one of Chinas most scenic areas. It says in the book that if you say to a chinese person that you are heading there, you can just watch their eyes light up. This is true, and the scenery is amazing. This is the Li river valley which is famous for its zany landscapes. If you're ever been in a chinese takeaway waiting for you curry chips and you see a calendar with some lovely paintings of spikey mountains, rice paddies and jade river valleys, that's the place.

I took the boat cruise down the Li river and opted for the Chinese tour rather than the English tourist version, which was great because it was much easier to ignore what the guide was ranting on about, and they don't half go on a bit. Guillin is a region famous for its cuisine. Local specialities include snake soup, wild cat, bamboo rat which you can wash down with a glass of snake bile. Actually I was a bit disappointed with the food because the menus were all in chinese. And I didn't want to risk ordering in chinese. God knows what you might get served to you. You might end up with chicken or duck or potatoes or something.

I was a little disappointed with the service in the gourmet capital. Usually I try to roll with it, when in Rome and all that. But I do object to waitresses farting very loudly beside my table, especially when I'm having my breakfast. I know it was them as apart from myself they were the only ones there. They were having a right old giggle about it too. My waitress on the boat cruise didn't impress me much either. She spent a good 5 minutes squeezing her spots onto the dining room mirror in between courses.

One star find here was Johnsons baby lotion. A needle in a haystack of ramshackle hocus-pocus vendors that pass for pharmacists out here. I'm sure some of the potions they've given me here have eye of newt and tongue of frog. Although that's got to be on a menu somewhere here. The baby lotion is for chapped thighs that I've picked up from jogging in the heat, humidity and pollution. Normally if you go into a chinese Chemist and try to explain that you have a skin rash at the top of your thighs, using only sign-language, they produce all sort of goodies, including stay-hard cream from a pharmacist in Beijing. So baby lotion was like gold-dust.

This was also a great place to watch the world cup, and I ended up bumping into an english guy 2 matches too late. He hated the England football team more passionately than any scotch or irishman, and always cheered the other team. Get this. He thought the english pundits were too jingoistic and that they harped on about '66 too much. He was preaching to the converted. Like myself, he was a wine buff and we got to watch the Australia/Brazil game in a chinese Ozzy-pub drinking some excellent Australian Merlot. It was an excellent night, whatever the score was.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1150471920/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1150471920/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1150471920/tpod.html Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:03:34 -0400 It's time to get a few stamps on my passport while the photograph still looks young.

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Beijing, China

06-06-16

I´ve been in China 10 days now. Sofa so good, as they would say over here. The food is a permanent adventure. I'm getting a lot better with chopsticks. The secret is to use the cheap wooden ones as they grip the food better. Using them I knocked about 3 minutes of my rice krispies in the morning. I can now eat my krispies in less than half an hour. I guess that's one advantage of the chopsticks, in that it forces you to eat your food more slowly, so your food gets digested better. Another advantage is that the clean end makes an excellent implement for picking your nose, after the meal of course.

I managed to stay in a bunker for the end of the world on 06-06-06. It's actaully what's called a U-tel. The "u" must stand for underground. It's 4 floors beneath ground level, maybe not great if you're claustrophobic. Needless to say there's no windows on the rooms. On a positive note it's great for sleeping. Maybe it's something to do with being so far underground, but every night I've been there it's like you sleep the sleep of death. Which also makes it good for watching the world cup. As it doens't matter what time you go to bed at, it's always pitch black once the lights are out. It's also extremely cheap. (World cup coverage is dire. They do Karaoke for the build up to the game. No replays at half time, just computer-game type simulations. The show is presented by a wee fat chinese man who looks like he never kicked a ball in his life. No atmosphere, and too many chinese men and women supporting england.)

Beijing is a huge city. Everything is miles apart. I was looking for a gym the other day and there were three on the same street, at numbers 1,7 and 9. Numbers 1 and 7 were over 2 miles apart. It's like the city was designed with small man syndrome. They aren't a huge race after all. I haven't made it round to mausoleum (Maosoleum?) to see what size chairman Mao was, but I'm guessing he was no giant. Aparently he's very well preserved, or pickled. The official party line on him is that he was 70% right and 30% wrong. A bit similar to Irelands view on poor old Charlie Haughey in the end.

The language isn't as big a barrier as I thought it would be. I'm still trying to learn a word a day though. Actually if you stuck with it, it wouldn't be that hard a language to master I reckon. There is practically no grammar, no tenses for the verbs, no articles like "the" or "a" and no genders for nouns. The building blocks of the language are one syllable words which combine together to make words of new meanings. For example, you join the words for east and west together to make up the word for thing. Even the symbols start to look familiar once you are exposed to them all the time.

Two words I must learn next are beer and emergency. Foodwise I moved into unchartered territory the other day. I got a dish called spicy chicken in a Sichuan restaurant(Sichuan is known for being spicy). When the dish came it was a mountain of red hot chillies under which a few pieces of chicken were buried. After about 3 pieces of chicken my lips felt were fizzing like a sizzling platter. What's worse was the waiter had forgotten to bring the beer. Only after I had done lots of frantic sign language did the guy disappear and come running back with ice-cold Tsingtao. Beer never tasted so good. The words of the Johny Cash melody "ring of fire" haunted me for the rest of the day.

Crossing the road can be good fun too. The little red man is the same as ours, meaning don't even think about it. The green man means have a go if you think you're quick enough. It still doesn't stop the cars. Some of the lanes keep flying on, and you just have to weave your way through.

I love the guys who work as security men. You'll often see them practicing their martial arts moves when they've nothing to do. Especially the nightwatchmen. Actually I've seen quite a few fights. In Tianamen square two women slugged it out before one of them ran off the other ones handbag, right in front of a policeman who did nothing. He really didn't want to see anything. At the airport at the customer complaints desk for one of the airlines an angry mob gathered. Tensions were high and they soon started fighting amongst themselves. There were a few westerners there who managed to get behind the counter for safety. Then some of the chinese got behind the desk and started punching it up in there. Meanwhile lots of chinese tourists stood by taking photos. The biggest punchup was on the subway. I couldn't even get a look at what was going on because of the crowds, but it sounded like there were at least a dozen of them going full at it. YOu could still hear all the screams, chops and roundhouse kicks flying.

There's lots of scammers over here in Beijing. There's also lots of genuine students who just want to talk in english to you to just get some practice in for free. So you're never short of company just walking down the street. Interestingly 90% of the scammers claim to be artists. Most of them are pretty crap and would need to work on their scams a bit more before the Olympics come, but I did meet one American guy who'd got a lot of stuff knicked from his rucksack as he walked down the street. Saying that he knew something dodgy was going on with this woman who plagued him and kept grabbing him but he didn't really try to get rid of her.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1149434520/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1149434520/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1149434520/tpod.html Mon, 24 Jul 2006 11:56:52 -0400 It's time to get a few stamps on my passport while the photograph still looks young.

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Kowloon, Hong Kong

Hong Kong was great. I really like that city. It's like timetravel to another world 50 years ahead of Ireland. The airport, the transport, buildings etc are amazing. The HongKonkers seem to like living in skyscrapers. I suppose it suits their maximum efficiency ethic. Optimal use of space and all that. When you look up at the huge skyscrapers full of hard-working little HKs it would remind you of loads of little bees tucked away in their honeycomb homes. I ended up staying in a typical high-rise pea-sized room. It was tiny. You could have used it for astronaut training of pygmies. I'm only 5'9" and my feet were hanging over the edge of the bed by about 8 inches. If I were a little taller they'd have been touching the front door.

The weather was pretty lousy. It rained everyday at some stage. Without warning a mini-typhoon would start, sending everyone scuttling into doorways or MacDonalds.

The names of the places were great. If you had the time you could find loads of gems, but my favorites were "Ho's Fashions" and the "Ka Ka Lok Curry House". Almost as good as "Mr Stiffys Toy Shop" in Bariloche. The food was superb. So far I've played it safe with the food. I haven't gone any further than marinated ducks tongues. It's hard to say what the nicest thing was, but I know it was chicken of some sort because the head came out on the plate too.

The people were fairly sound. There were plenty of hawkers selling genuine fake rolexs, but after coming from Bali, they were kittens. It's a great place for just people-watching. From the severely depressed to the constantly happy ones, they are just so different from westerners that they always entertain. Jacky my landlord was good fun. Always laughing. Maybe he was charging way too much and he was laughing at the fact that I was paying it. So far the language has not been too much of a problem, but I expect Beijing to be a bit more challenging.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1148569140/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1148569140/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1148569140/tpod.html Mon, 24 Jul 2006 11:53:44 -0400 It's time to get a few stamps on my passport while the photograph still looks young.

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Bali, Indonesia

06-05-25

I've been in Bali a week now and had a fairly interesting time. I arrived into Kuta which is very Costa del Bali. Very commercial and built up. But even there the people were very friendly, especially the Balinese women. When I first arrived I went for a walkabout with my scotch mate Dave. I felt pretty good but must have looked very stressed out or something, because lots of people asked us if we needed massage. They are really into their natural therapies. As well as all the usual stuff like Indian head massage and reflexology, we were offered some pretty unusual massages. "Massage with love" - they tell you what a really great person you are when they massage you. "Massage with happy ending" - they read you a nice story at the end of the massage. "Massage boom-boom" - I haven't a clue about this one. Actually I'm only guessing with the first two about whats involved, but I'm sure all of them are very holistic.

Everything is really cheap, accommodation, clothes, whatever you want. Though I still haven't bought any clothes. Well I haven't found a T-shirt yet that says, "NO TAXI REQUIRED". It's unreal the amount of times you get asked "Hellooo, taxi?" by some guy pretending to turn a corner with an imaginary steering wheel. You don't get rid of them if you just say "No" either. They nearly always say, tomorrow, the next day? Maybe the problem is made worse by the lack of tourists, as it's out-of-season at the moment. The suicide bombs haven´t helped much either.

The low points have been getting stranded in a dumphole mountain village because the bus-driver forgot to stop and pick up passengers - there was only one bus a day. Having to rid my toilet seat of an army of ants and an advancing column of reinforcements coming down the wall. The footpaths are deathtraps. They are riddled with gaping holes, with a 3ft drop into dubious looking water. The place where I'm staying at the moment has a few too many cockerals for my liking. Cock-fighting is pretty big over here. I was thinking the other morning (at about 6am) of introducing a new event - extreme cockfighting. You get all the cockerals of the village and put them in a barn, then I go in and fight them all at once, with only a chainsaw. The prize for the winner is a deluxe comfy bed, in a secluded shady courtyard, where the only sound is the gentle trickling of a fountain.

Apart from that it's been all good. The food is excellent, if not a little on the spicy side. What the potato is to the Irish, the extra-hot chilli is to the Indonesians. I think there'd be a great market out here for cool-mint flavoured toilet roll. (Fortunately all the rooms I've stayed in have a fridge) Last night I went for the local speciality - Balinese suckling pig(let). It was the best pork I've ever tasted. (excluding my ma´s sunday roast of course) Even though it's only a little baby piglet they manage to make three courses out of it. Each one is delicious, but the highlight for me was the third course, which was a mountain of delicately spiced meat, topped off with a lots of chunks of crackling. Because it was a young pig, a "Babe" if you like, there wasn't a trace of hair on the crackling and not much fat. It was out of this world.

06-05-31

I'm still in Bali - tropical paradise my elbow. It's the worlds 4th most populace nation, and they all harass you day and night into buying something. Taxi, t-shirt, woman, sunglasses.....it's like a bloody power-selling convention. I've given it my best shot but there's no escaping it. I've been up to the mountains, the north of the island, the east and the south. Even the so-called deserted resorts are hiving with local harassers. It helps a little if you walk around with headphones on, as it puts some of them off. But still lots of them aren't that easily deterred. I kid you not, when I was out jogging, guys on mopeds would drive alongside me asking you if "you need taxi". Please!

To go to the beach you have to run the gauntlet of traders hell, millions of little stalls and side-shops, and everyone of them comes out and hits on you. "Hello boss, you buy sunglasses", "Looking, looking", "Massage", meanwhile guys on mopeds sidle up alongside saying "taxi boss", "what you doing today" "where you go". You feel like the Pied Piper of Hamlet.

I think it's starting to get to me a little bit. I've tried just standing in the street and screaming, but nobody notices. The motorbike men kept coming up and offering "taxi to hospital". I've tried covering my face entirely with a scarf and sunglasses and wearing a padded jacket like a suicide bomber, but I started getting hassled by the "polisi". I considered buying hard drugs but you can only buy them from the polisi, and I'd already blotted my copybook there. Ah well, only 2 hours to go, then I'm off to Hong Kong.

The food has ranged from excellent poor. In Ubud I had that Balinese suckling pig, which was out of this world. Food for the gods. In Kuta I've had the runs 5 times from the hotel restaurant. I'm still working my way through the menu. Well, it's not so much a menu as a list of different flavoured diarrohea-inducing recipes. I must suggest to them introducing a "diarrohea of the day" to their menu. Get me out of here.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1147158000/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1147158000/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/kevinwalls/midlife-05/1147158000/tpod.html Thu, 18 May 2006 03:43:01 -0400 It's time to get a few stamps on my passport while the photograph still looks young.

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Darwin, Australia

06-05-09

Darwin. Austalias tropical corner, and my last week in Oz. It's the thunder and lightning capital of the world, (during the wet season.) There's plenty to do here but not much time. My first stop was Kakadu National Park - the home of Crocodile Dundee. I booked a 3 day tour where we did all the usual things. First we stopped off on the Adelaide river to feed the jumping crocodiles. These are crocodiles that are so hungry they'll jump out of water to get their meat. The smallest one was 3m and the biggest was about 5m - what a beooooty. They put up a good fight if you accidentally fall into the water. I also got the chance top play with Monty, the python. After that we headed off into the bush to some of the locations where Crocodile Dundee was filmed. You camp out in the sticks on the banks of the South Aligator river where there is no shortage of hungry mosquitos. The heat and humidity is stifling after about 10am, so we spent the next day swimming in lagoons and waterfalls. The guides assured us that all the lagoons were 90% safe. After trudging through the bush in 35 degree heat, theres nothing like plunging into a lagoon and drinking the water. We also got a chance to eat termites. There's not much meat on them but they have a very distinctice peppery aftertaste. Perfect complement to a crisp Sauv Blanc.

Sunday in Darwin is famous for the Mindil Beach market. It's a cross between a new age market, a food fair, and a didgeredoo competition. When I first came to Australia the "didge" didn't rate too highly in my favorite list of instruments. I thought the worst 3-piece band in the world would be bagpipes, lambeg drum, and a didgeredoo. But once you hear it played properly it can be pretty amazing. Especially when there's an amazing sunset and all sorts of wonderful food smells. The sunset at Mindil beach is probably the best I've seen in Australia. For some reason here the whole sky lights up red just after the sun goes down. Everybody comes out to watch it, and just sit and soak up the atmos.

The tropical rains finished here about 6 weeks ago, and the rivers are now starting to drop in whats called the "run-off". This is the best time to do the Baramundi fishing, made famous by Rex Hunt, or Rexy as he's affectionately known by the poms. (Rexy isn't so popular over here, he also does sports commentary and I think he's developed "Dunphy-syndrome". He got beaten up in a pub Byron Bay a couple of weeks back by the locals!) I booked a trip on the Adelaide river for a day. Yes, the same Adelaide river which has jumping crocodiles up to 5m long. We did see a few, but the boat was made of metal and fairly hefty, so it wasn't really that dodgy. The fishing was good, and we caught a fair few decent barramundi. They are very hard fighters who love jumping out of the water shaking their heads, so we lost as many as we landed. The biggest one got away.

This is my last night here, and though I've done alot in Oz I'll be glad to be moving on. It's just a little bit too expensive for my liking. Especially the beer. But tonight I've got a ticket for a free dinner at the Vic hotel. It's painted breast night too which is a good reason to get there early. I think it's important to as much support as possible to the up-and-coming young artists.
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