The Day The Earth Moved

Up until six and a half years ago Aceh was a name that few people knew. For years the region at the northern tip of Sumatra was a no-go area thanks to the Free Aceh guerrilla insurgency that was seeking independence for the region underpinned by discontent about central government appropriation of Acehnese resources (oil had been found offshore Aceh in the 70's), an influx of outsiders and a desire for a greater role for sharia in local law. The almost three decades of conflict had claimed some 15,000 lives. All that was to change on Boxing Day 2004 when the third largest earthquake ever to be recorded struck off the northwestern coast of Sumatra. The resulting tsunami spread far and wide, causing immense casualties in Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Somalia and even as far as South Africa. The brunt of nature's force, however, was borne by Aceh which experienced some 70% of the total 185,000 casualties and the capital, Banda Aceh, was almost wiped from the map.

The owners of this house probably weren't too pleased to find that someone had parked a boat on their roof despite the very obvious sign.

Hello Mister!

After a week with my friends in Cyberjaya it was time for me to move on. They had already postponed my departure by insisting I spend the weekend with them, but the easy life wasn't getting me any further, and so with a last farewell I set off for Port Klang, Kuala Lumpur's port on the coast. It seems strange to me that despite all the difficulties in getting by sea from one part of the country to another, Peninsular Malaysia has good maritime connections with several neighbouring countries, including Indonesia. Although I liked my time in Malaysia I find it a rather dull place to be honest. Whether it's to do with the rather staid, conservative Muslim culture favoured by the authorities, or whether it has to do with reaching a certain level of development and therefore eschewing the happy chaos of less developed countries I'm not sure. But a difference in chaos was certainly evident in the transition from Malaysia to Indonesia. Boarding the ferry at the Klang terminal was a muted affair, with slowly shuffling rows of passengers trickling through immigration. Disembarkation, on the other hand, was joyously raucous as porters, passengers and onlookers jostled for position on the jetty. The immigration hall was full of shouting, sweaty bodies and a dense fog of sweet kretek (clove cigarettes that have already become one of the hallmarks of my time here in Indonesia) smoke. Nevertheless the bureaucracy was dealt with surprisingly swiftly as people huddled round the immigration desk where the clerks were a blur of furious stamping. The crossing was also quite merry as there was a karaoke video of popular dangdut (the Indonesian music of the masses, best described as the bastard offspring between Polish disco polo and Romanian gypsy manele) songs, which the passengers sang along with when they weren't quizzing me about who I was, where I was going, and other personal questions.

Medan's crowded public market has possibly the largest collection of dried fish in the world. It also has lots of smiling vendors who seem to want to talk about Chelsea or the upcoming Euro championships.

Putrajaya, Pants, And Other Ponderings

So, getting from East Malaysia to West Malaysia by boat didn't work out either. My German couple were ready to take me with them, and even wanted to go to Singapore. But it just didn't seem like it was meant to be as they discovered their boat had a leak and were forced to leave it in Borneo themselves. I'm sure Charley Boorman didn't have these problems when he was filming By Any Means, but then again he has his own BBC film crew and lackeys to organise his itinerary. Kuching was getting boring and 16 days really were enough. I had seen all I wanted to, and had begun to get itchy feet. With a heavy heart I headed down to the airport as soon as I got the bad news and bought myself a ticket to Kuala Lumpur (although, as an aside, I did get to do something that I had dreamt of doing for some time, namely turning up at an airport and just buying my ticket on the spot).

The famous Petronas Towers which I revisited 7 years after my first trip here.

Travel Frustrations

I have now been in Kuching for over two weeks, the longest I've been in any one place on this trip (apart from Tehran). And it's not because it's a terribly exciting place; quite the opposite in fact. No, the reason for my extended stay is my stubborn desire to do this journey overland. I had already broken the no-flying pledge I had given myself by hopping from Taiwan to the Philippines, but I was damned if I was going to do it within the same country. Despite Malaysia being split neatly into two halves separated by some 500km of sea, the sole means of transport for ordinary civilians trying to get from one to the other is by plane. The last passenger ferry sailed its last over 20 years ago. That air travel is the default option is totally understandable: its faster, more comfortable and (thanks to the lack of tax on aviation fuel) is cheaper. But that it's the only option seems to me ridiculous. What of people who, for whatever reason, cannot fly; or if flying became impossible - not such a far-fetched idea for those who remember the chaos caused around Europe a couple of years ago when an Icelandic volcano started rumbling (and Java, with its collection of active volcanoes, isn't that far away)? I refused to to believe that there was no way to get by sea from East to West Malaysia so, when I arrived, I set about procuring myself passage to the mainland. Little did I anticipate how hard it would be.

Kuching is known as the "Cat City" - this is one of several such statues dotted around town.

Village In The Ayer

Brunei is one of those tiny countries that you might have heard of, but aren't really sure about: who lives there? what do the people do? how can such a tiny country be viable? The answer to the last question, of course, is oil. Although small, Brunei sits on substantial reserves of both oil and gas. Indeed, one of the reasons why people may have heard of Brunei is that, up until 1997, the Sultan of Brunei was the richest man in the world and a byword for profligate extravagance. Indeed it was the tiny sultanate's abundance of wealth that led to it refusing to join the Malaysian Federation in the 60's so as not to have their riches siphoned off to Kuala Lumpur (the sultan and his family were adept enough at that already).

A panorama photograph of the old stilt-houses of Kampung Ayer.

Making A Molehill Out Of A Mountain (Of Costs)

As I stood on the deck of my ferry, carrying me from Zamboanga to Sandakan in East Malaysia, in the still night, watching the rippling wake reach behind us through the mirror-smooth Sulu Sea, I found it hard to believe that this is one of the most notorious stretches of water in the world. From Mindanao to Borneo there stretch several island groups -  Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi - that form the heartland of the current Muslim insurgency in the Philippines. Piracy is not unheard of around here and only two months ago a couple of European tourists were kidnapped on Tawi-Tawi whilst taking wildlife photographs. These are certainly not places to travel to thoughtlessly, although peering at the soundlessly calm expanse around me when I awoke in the middle of the night, with only a small glow on the horizon indicating a mini flotilla of sardine boats, it was hard for me to equate the view in front of me with any sort of danger. And indeed there was none to be had as we arrived in Sandakan without a hitch (except for the 9-hour wait in Zamboanga as the 300 passengers cleared the customs inspection that was manned by only two officers - although there were about a dozen soldiers milling around doing little else than motioning the queue to shuffle along every now and again).

A suburban cul-de-sac in Sandakan that reminded me of middle-class suburban neighbourhoods in the UK.

I Get Around

Spending a lot of time getting from place to place is a natural byproduct of travelling the way I do. Not only actually sitting (or standing) in some sort of vehicle, but also researching about how best to get around, where the bus leaves from, what time, whether I need to buy a ticket in advance, and so on. I have therefore become something of an expert on public transportation around the world. Although it isn't something that we often consider when thinking about a country's culture or traditions, mobility is an important aspect of our lives and impacts it more than we might think. Especially in poorer countries where people can't afford their owns means of transportation then it is their lifeline to employment, getting their goods to market, accessing basic public services or shopping for life's necessities. Sitting on a bus can therefore end up being a small study in anthropology rather than a dull commute between point A and point B.

An old-school, overloaded jeepney plying the mountain roads of northern Luzon.

Leaving Luzon

From Luzon (the main island of the Philippine archipelago) I took the boat to Coron, at the northern tip of the Palawan group of islands in the western Philippines. The island group ignores the prevailing directions of the rest of the archipelago (towards the southeast) and juts out at a right angle towards Borneo, like its own, personal sword of Damocles. Palwan is a region apart from the rest of the Philippines, with a small population and little development, and so getting there by boat is not straightforward. My guidebook mentions several companies that do the trip, but unfortunately it was published in 2006. Since then budget airlines have eaten into the market for ferry passengers and as I contacted the ferry companies one by one I discovered that their Coron services had long ago ceased to run. Luckily I found a single company that still plies the route twice a week. I rushed to buy myself a ticket and, with it safely in my pocket, proceeded to find things to do for the next few days as I waited for the departure.

A view from a boat. Whilst lazing on our ferry before it left Manila I had plenty of time to contemplate the city's uninspiring skyline (as well as the nearby slums).

Rucks And Malls

I had bought my plane ticket to Manila online with Cebu Pacific, the Philippines' answer to Ryanair. I had no problems buying the ticket, with the online check-in, or even with getting to the airport by midnight (my plane was scheduled to depart at half past one in the morning). What I hadn't counted on awaited me as I came to deposit my rucksack at the check-in counter and get my boarding pass. I handed over my passport and check-in printout. "And your return ticket sir?" I replied that I was not returning to Taiwan and that from the Philippines I was travelling onward to Malaysia. "But Philippine immigration requires that you show us an onward ticket." Ah... I tried explaining that I was planning to catch the scheduled ferry to Borneo and that these tickets were impossible to purchase without turning up in person. This failed to make an impression on any of the staff of the airline. So, with 15 minutes left before the end of check-in I persuaded the stewards to let me use their computers and quickly bought the cheapest online ticket I could find, one that I don't intend to use at all. I suppose it's an unofficial visa.

The streets of Manila are overflowing with life. Around every corner there's a hive of activity.

Formosa

Ask most people of what they associate with Taiwan and they will likely say the words "Made in". And it is true that Taiwan produces a lot of things, most notably hi-tech equipment, microchips and bicycles (more on that in a bit). As for the island's other notable points,apart from along-running political mésentente with China, you would be hard pressed to find any that are well known beyond its shores. Like its other East Asian peers, such as South Korea and Japan, it is densely populated, yet it also has large tracts of unspoilt, mountain areas. The island can be neatly divided into eastern and western halves, with most of the cities, industries and agriculture concentrated in the frenetic west. There is then a long mountain chain that runs the entire length of the island from north to south, reaching a peak of almost 4000m at Jade Mountain, whilst the east coast remains relatively sparsely populated and devoid of much economic activity apart from agriculture, fishing and tourism. It is here on the east coast (and in the central mountains) that nature lovers and outdoors enthusiasts can slake their thirst.

The entrance to the Taroko Gorge, Taiwan's most popular attraction. Unfortunately it's impossible to give you a picture of the narrowest, steepest parts of the gorge as my lens just doesn't have the wide angle necessary to catch the vastness at such close quarters.

Getting To Taiwan The Slow Way

My dream is to be able to complete my trip, travelling round the world, without needing to resort to flying. It will be difficult to accomplish, and almost certainly be more expensive and take longer than if flying, but I feel that airplanes have somehow trivialised distances so that we no longer really appreciate how far away places are. And when travelling by plane from point A to point B you do not see what is between them, how the land changes, how cultures, traditions and people connect the two. Furthermore flying is also the most polluting form of transport (per kilometre travelled) out there. (And in one of the world's ironies/hypocrisies, it is also the form of transport that is taxed the least, thereby benefitting the most affluent as well as the most profligate polluters.) The dream may not work out, but I will certainly try.

The fearsome Taiwanese army, ready to fight off any invasion from Commie China ... OK, maybe not. But they did help me cut my way through the bureaucracy of buying a SIM card in a 7-Eleven on Matsu.

Chinese Landscapes

I remember, as a child, seeing traditional Chinese landscape paintings. I remember thinking to myself that they didn't look real: they were permanently misty and the mountains looked like caricatures, sort of ideal mountains that a child would draw, but far more "mountainy" than any real mountain. They didn't look like anything I had ever seen in Europe and so I simply dismissed them as fantastical make-believe landscapes ... how wrong I was.

Yangshuo's iconic karst scenery and idyllic rivers make it one of China's most popular tourist destinations, and for good reason.

Not Quite Bavaria

I left Japan via Shimonoseki's ferry terminal, my port of entry to the country. It wasn't something I had wanted to do but there was no other option if I didn't want to fly. Not only was it my first and last stop, but the last person I saw in Japan was also my first: by chance I ran into my host from my first days in Shimonoseki, Seiji, who was seeing off another guest (a Mexican named Homero) who was also headed to China on the same boat as me. It was nice to have someone to talk to among the 24 other passengers (all of them, from what I could gather, Chinese working in Japan) on the 29 hour passage to Qingdao as entertainment options on the ferry were limited to a single channel of Chinese TV, a meagre onboard library of half a dozen foreign books, and taking long, hot showers and soaking in the public bath.



The ferry bathroom where I spent a considerable chunk of time on the crossing from Japan to China, simply because there was little else to do, and baths are a rare luxury on the road (figuratively speaking, of course), to be taken whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Climb Any Mountain (Just Take A Map)

In palaeontology the thin, iridium-rich, band that marks the K-T boundary is indicative of a cataclysmic event that wiped out the dinosaurs and changed the face of the world entirely. Similarly in archaeology, throughout Eurasia there is often a band of ash that is consistently found towards the beginning of the 13th century and which marks the Mongol conquests; from Novgorod to Nishapur and Kiev to Korea. They did a truly thorough job. Yet despite their prowess at razing cities the nomadic warriors were less adept at building them. Under Genghis's successor, Ögedei, they realised that their sprawling empire needed a capital and so they founded Karakorum. By all accounts it wasn't that impressive and housed mainly foreign subjects - artisans, merchants, clerics and envoys from all over the dominions, whilst the Mongols preferred to continue living in their gers on the outskirts of the city. One astounding aspect of the city, and the Mongol empire in general, was its liberalism and tolerance regarding religion. Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Islam, Manichaeanism and Shamanism were all represented and coexisted equally, each with their own places of worship. Something that European civilisation still hasn't really managed to properly do today.

Holding history. A fragment of 13th century, glazed, clay piping from the Karakorum ruins. Bits like these lie scattered around the site whilst most of the ruins remain under the soil.

Buddhist Travelling

Most visitors to Mongolia, even backpackers, form groups and hire a van and driver to travel around the country. If there are four or more of you this is barely more expensive than taking public transport, allows you to get to those hard to reach places (of which there are more than a few in Mongolia) and saves a lot of time. The latter aspect was made all too clear to me when I popped into the tourist information centre in Moron to get some info about getting to, and hiking around, Hovsgol lake, Mongolia's second-largest and the little sister to lake Baikal just across the border in Russia. The information centre was staffed by a Czech and a German volunteer and so, pleased at finding a fellow countryman, I ended up spending about an hour with them chatting about this and that. A topic that invariably cropped up was visas, as they were having problems with theirs. I still had 9 days left on mine and was feeling relaxed about getting to Ulaan Baatar in time to extend it ... until they informed me that applications for extensions must be submitted four working days before expiry and that the application can only be done in the capital. There wasn't a hope in hell that I would make it to the lake and back in time so I quickly altered my plans and plotted a new course heading east.

Empty vodka bottles littering the steppe. Mongolian men are more than a little fond of the hard liquor and you will often meet some that reek of alcohol, even early in the morning. Usually they are harmless, but sometimes they can get aggresive.

Historical Turning Points, And Crayfish

The road from Almaty was initially a railway. The town of Kopa is a forgotten stop on the edge of the steppe on the line heading west out of Almaty. Only one train a day stops there and on that particular day I was the only person to get off. It is, however, the nearest town with any sort of public transport to Tambaly, where there are the greatest collection of petroglyphs in Central Asia. OK, perhaps not one to get the hearts racing, but interesting nevertheless. I sat myself down on the road out of town hoping to get a ride the 30km out to the site. At least the tumbleweeds kept me company. My wait wasn't as long as expected and the very first car that passed took me all the way there (hitching is not only reasonably common in Kazakhstan, but I also don't feel uncomfortable asking for a free ride here where the standard of living is significantly higher than the rest of Central Asia). And in a textbook example of things generally working out in the end, as I was wrapping up my visit of the site, and beginning to wonder how the hell I would get out of there, I spied a group of visitors (the only ones to visit that day apart from me) who had obviously come by car. So I went over to see if I could bum a lift, at least to the main highway. They turned out to be a group of 3 Mexicans living in China, a Kazakh girl (girlfriend of one of the Mexicans) and her father. Certainly not people you would expect to meet in the middle of Kazakhstan. Nevertheless they said, sure, they could take me to the highway as they were going back to Almaty that evening anyway. And so once they had finished visiting the site themselves we set off. I was happy as I got to practice my Spanish which was encased in a sizeable coating of rust, but at least I was still able to conjugate the verb chingar in several different levels of impoliteness, which impressed the Mexicans considerably. As we approached the highway Aina (the girl) suggested I come crayfishing with them. It was getting late, it was in my general direction and I had never been crayfishing before (hell, I hadn't even ever seen a live crayfish before) so I heartily agreed.

Monster from the deep comes face to face with a crayfish.

Pamir Travel Travails

From Langar the road follows the Pamir river slowly upwards. The mountains recede to the distance, hanbitations disappear as do the trees and the fields as you leave the valleys of Badakhshan behind and enter the high, desolate, windswept Pamir plateau. The land is parched and the driving wind coats everything in a fine layer of dust in an instant, seemingly forcing it into your very pores. There are few inhabitants except for Kyrgyz herders driving their flocks of sheep and goats from one sparse pasture to another, and a handful of settlements servicing them and the Chinese truckers importing cheap, shoddy goods (it's not just Westerners who complain about the quality of Chinese manufacturing, or lack thereof). But for the most part the plateau is an intensely inhospitable place, a fact noted by Marco Polo over seven centuries ago. The floor of the plateau rarely descends below 3500m and I could feel the effects of the altitude on my first day whilst crossing the pass from the Wakhan at 4300m - a shortness of breath and slight pounding of blood in my head.



The Pamir plateau is beautiful yet barren. Very little can grow at such high altitudes and with such little water and the winters are bitterly cold.



You Can Have Any Colour You Want, As Long As It's A Daewoo

I had wanted to take the train back east from Khiva, and had my eye set on a particularly useful departure, but I had underestimated the popularity of trains here in Uzbekistan (or perhaps how much people detest the crappy roads). There are few buses and often the only other form of intercity transport is the shared taxi, not a means of getting round I particularly enjoy. It's not very efficient and taxi drivers are notoriously rapacious and will stop at nothing to squeeze every last penny out of you. From Urgench to Bukhara I knew the price shouldn't be more than 40,000 som (the Uzbek currency), which is the equivalent of $17 - a hefty sum for me (pun intended). Not only did the driver start off by quoting me twice that to begin with, but when I remonstrated with the other passengers they told me that they had been instructed not to tell me how much they themselves were paying. Nevertheless I managed to get the ride for 40,000, but it cost me unnecessary time and annoyance. It also reinforces my belief that taxi drivers are amongst the lowest and least scrupulous forms of human life.

Off Road

Many Westerners think that Iran is a dangerous country to visit, fearing terrorists, Islamist violence, corrupt officialdom and rampant theft. Unless they are really stupid and go mouthing off about the regime to all and sundry their fears are very much misplaced. Nevertheless there are a couple of real dangers whilst in Iran: being suffocated by the overwhelming hospitality, and being run over by a crazy Iranian driver. Although I enjoyed the road trip I was also a little glad to get back to Tehran in one piece and ensconce myself in the traffic-free zone of our apartment.

Luckily the roads in the desert interior of Iran are relatively empty.

Road Trippin'

One of the things I had wanted to do whilst here in Iran was to head south to the Gulf. Firstly because it's a part of the country I have not really seen, and secondly because winter is the best time of year to visit, when the temperature and humidity are bearable. Normally I would travel by public transport, but as my father has also come over and wants to travel with me I thought that it would be more interesting to make it into a road trip by taking my mum's dinky little Kia Pride, the workhorse of Iranian passenger vehicles, on an epic tour of Iran.

An extraordinary Martian landscape just off the road in the middle of the kavir.