I might be a big baby, but I'll scream in your ear

Now, I've just moved from the UK which until now I thought was the epicenter of the nanny state, but they seem to have nothing on Australia. (Although all of the following can be considered for entertainment purposes only if any the following might jeopardize my pending residency visa).

Don't get me started on bike helmets. I haven't worn one for years in London and now I'm stuck with one here. A well meaning law but one that seems to me to do nothing to actually make anything about cycling safer.

Recently, a bike shop I was in didn't stock bunji cords (elastic straps with hooks which can be used to attach anything up to like a sofa onto a bike) because "they can be dangerous, mate", they can snap back and hurt people. They would only stock non-elastic straps. Sigh.

Today the news drove me over the edge. Peter Garrett, former front man for Midnight Oil, now minister of something or other (although much less of a position than he had hoped for after shooting his mouth off too much during the last election) after a recent photo opportunity had numerous people call the police for not wearing a life jacket in a rowboat (there is no legal requirement). Great, those are probably the same people who complained to bike shops about bunji cords after they heard that this one guy somewhere was hurt by one.

So much for my image of Australia as a rugged country.

Don't pay the ferryman

15 August 2008 - Coming down the Aurlandsfjord on the ferry on the way to
Flåm, Norway.

Heel on the shovel

28 January 2009 - Earning my room and board in Australia, shovelling loads of manure. Ok, it was just one load and I could probably still stay if I hadn't shovelled it.

Signals from above

14 August 2008 - Image of Bergen, Norway from the top of Ulriken mountain from our hike up to the top.

Instead of breaking up I wish that we were making up again

And skipping to the present, an image from 19 January 2009. Aaack, my frame, my bike that I shipped over to Australia, has cracked, apparently a known fault with the Fratello frames. I'm busy arguing with Condor about what they intend to do about it since it is still under warranty. I'm frustrated and having to borrow somebody else's bike. Grr.

Little boxes, made of ticky-tacky

13 August 2008 - The touristy famous row of shops in Bergen, Norway.

The rainbow connection

13 August 2008 - Some first glimpses of Norway when our ferry is coming into Bergen.

Brixton Blues

But first, feeling a little homesick for London, so a slight skip back in time to 31 July 2008 and a picture of Brixton Market and part of Electric Ave.

Said there's no returning from this chartered trip away.

Ok, I'll try something new since I haven't had time to write and organizing 5 months of photographs has turned out to be a monumental job. A photo of the day then.

Leaving the UK, 12 August 2008, the ferry leaving the mouth of the Tyne from Newcastle heading to Bergen Norway.

Club med sucks

I love an outdoor swim and luckily I was able to add a few new locations to my list while I was away. I could have possible swam somewhere in Malaysia or it was a bit rushed (and rather wintery) in Estonia and Finland. I dipped my arm into Lake Baikal in Siberia, as you are supposed to do. Those are probably the only somewhat realistic chances I missed.

Cottesloe Beach, Indian Ocean, WA, Australia - 19 March 2009
South Beach, Indian Ocean, Fremantle, WA, Australia - 15 March 2009
Frenchman's Bay, Southern Ocean, WA, Australia - 8 March 2009
Two Peoples Bay, Southern Ocean, WA, Australia - 6 March 2009
Southern Ocean 2 hours walk east of Pallinup, WA, Australia - 25 February 2009 (skinny dip!)
Southern Ocean at Beaufort inlet at Pallinup River, WA, Australia - 20-25 February 2009
Frankland River, Nornalup, WA, Australia - 13 February 2009
Greens Pool, William Bay, Southern Ocean, near Denmark, WA, Australia - 8 February 2009
Mistaken Island, Frenchman's Bay, Southern Ocean, Albany, WA, Australia - 22 January 2009 (also snorkeling)
South Beach, Indian Ocean, Fremantle, WA, Australia - 17 January 2009
Catherine Point, Indian Ocean, Fremantle, WA, Australia - 16 January 2009 (bonus dolphin sighting)
Sairee Beach, Koh Tao, Gulf of Thailand, Thailand - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 January 2009
Laem Thian, Koh Tao, Gulf of Thailand, Thailand - 28, 29, 30, 31 December 2008, 1 January 2009
Cua Dai Beach, South China Sea, Hoi An, Vietnam - 4 December 2008
Finnhamn, Stockholm archipelago, Sweden, 3 September 2008
Kalgardson, Stockholm archipelago, Sweden, 2 September 2008
Aurlandsfjorden, Norway, 17 August 2008
Liverpool Bay/River Mersey, Wirral, 27 July 2008
Brockwell Lido, London, 23 July 2008
West Mersea, Essex, 20 July 2008 (ok, only waded)
Grange Chine, Brightstone Bay, Isle of Wight, 15 July 2008
Whitecliff Bay, Isle of Wight, 14 July 2008
Hampstead Heath, mixed pond, London, 6 July 2008
Fraserburgh Bay, Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, 7 June 2008
Boulmer Haven, Boulmer, Northumberland, 20 May 2008
Loch Tay, Fearnan by Aberfeldy, Perthshire, Scotland - 13 May 2008
The West Sands, St Andrews, Scotland - 1 January 2008
London Fields Lido, Hackney, London - Sept 2007
Lake Bala, Bala, Wales - Aug 2007
River Usk (Afon Wysg), Crickhowell, Wales - Aug 2007
Cuckmere Haven, East Sussex - Aug 2007
Hampstead Heath, mixed pond, London - Aug 2007
Dunwich, Suffolk - July 2007
Westcliff-on-sea, Essex - July 2007
Druridge Bay, Northumberland - June 2007
St Bees, Cumbria - June 2007
River Cocker, Cockermouth, Cumbria - June 2007
Lake Bala, Wales - Aug 2006
Pett Level, East Sussex - Aug 2006
Winchelsea, East Sussex - Aug 2006
Hastings, East Sussex - July 2006
Dunwich, Suffolk - July 2006
Naples, Florida - June 2006

A quick one (while he's away)

S 31 54.700 E 115 57.100 - Perth - 15 January 2009

Ok, so I get complaints, I write way too much. Ok, maybe I don't write all that often but when I do, the entries tend to be a bit long and have lots of detail. "I have to speed read through your entries", "you should edit more", blah blah blah.

Loads of pictures in albums in this directory. The internet wasn't so great in Cambodia and Thailand so I didn't upload for a long time. And some last albums here, the rest of Thailand and Malaysia and then finally a few in Australia.

Well, ok, for the time impaired readers, let me see if I can speed up the whole thing for you. Perth is hot, Fremantle is less hot and pretty and by the ocean. It is sort of the end of the major travel on this trip, but it looks like it will be a while before I can look for a job and actually settle down here. But I dawdle, trip report then.

August, train from London to take the ferry to Norway. Cool fjords, way expensive, great camping. Sweden, slightly less expensive and a lovely week of camping on an island. Finland, grr, apartment fell through, to Estonia for a week in an apartment to relax, then a quick few days through Finland and the train onto Russia.

September by then, St Petersburg, a few days there seeing the stuff you are supposed to see and struggling with Russian. Just a few days in Moscow and onto the train across Siberia. A very cool 4 days watching the country go by, zipping through time zones and finally getting off at Irkursk and spending a few days on Orkhon Island in Lake Baikal.

October now, we take the train to Mongolia and head off on a 10 day trip around Mongolia, through the Gobi with some people we had met in Siberia. Then we take another shorter 5 day trip nearby Ulan Batar. Winter hits when we are there, deep snow to hike through before we catch the train to China and we head back into autumn.

China is awesome and the planned three weeks turns into every possible day of our 30 day visa. We take sort of a typical route, Beijing to Pingyao to Luoyang to Xi'an and finally down to Chengdu. There we have a nice 5 day bird tour up towards Tibet. Last few days of China through Yuanyang and over the border to Sapa, Vietnam.

November by now, a quite special home stay with a Red Dao hill tribe family and then the train to Hanoi, lots of yellow buildings and gigantic bundles of wire on the power lines. Another train to Hue, the old imperial capital of Vietnam and very close to the old DMZ area. A sleeper bus to Hoi An and a few days on the beach there. Train to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) so that we can make a dash up to Cat Tien, a national park with lots of pretty birds. Back to Saigon and then catching a three day boat trip (ok, lots of buses) up the Mekong to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Mid December now. A few days looking at Phnom Penh before heading out to Siem Reap. Time is starting to run short now, we have to make it to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia by 12 January for our flight. We spend a few days overdosing on temples in Ankgor, which is totally cool but overwhelming. We wanted to see the Prek Toal bird sanctuary on Tonle Sap Lake, but it was really expensive to get there (would have been like 300 USD for both of us) and apparently the storks haven't shown up yet and all that was there were some normal wader birds that you can see anywhere. So, we didn't stay over Christmas then and left early to head off to Bangkok.

Christmas eve we arrive in Bangkok. Christmas day wasn't overly festive because we picked a super cheap place to stay and they woke us up at 6 am when they were cleaning the bathrooms and with a loud tv in the lobby, so Christmas was spent finding somewhere else to stay a little nicer and getting myself a haircut. Most of the rest of the few days in Bangkok was spent figuring out where to go next. We didn't go to the south part of Cambodia to the beach there, or didn't go to northern Thailand, so Koh Tao seemed like it would be a nice place to spend a week or so just relaxing and also doing some diving.

We spend 4 days, including New Years Eve, on the east side of Koh Tao in a rather isolated bungalow. The roads are tough to get there and it was just the one group of bungalows, but on a beautiful cove with some fantastic snorkeling. Four days of doing nothing but swimming, snorkeling, eating, sleeping, and chasing away spiders from the bed.

Then we head over to the other side of the island. Koh Tao has mostly become known now as the cheapest place on earth to get your open water diving certification, so yeah, I want to do that, sign me up. It is a huge contrast from the other side of the island, loads of resorts, lots of people, and all the rest of that. I spend 3 days getting my certification, sitting in classrooms and doing 4 training dives. Classroom stuff is boring but the dives are really great. C does some fun dives while I'm in class and then we do a night dive together and one more day dive. I'm hooked. Luckily Australia is diving country.

Now we are basically out of time. Well, stupid Thailand changed their visa policy right before we got there, no more 30 days, it is only 15 days now so we got hit with a fine when we left after 16 days. We then dash across Malaysia to catch our flight. A night in Georgetown on Penang and another night in Kuala Lumpur before flying out. Malaysia seemed interesting, I didn't give it much of a chance being almost an after thought after all the planning what went into the rest of it. But KL is on the way to lots of places, I assume I'll be back there some day.

Then Australia, after five months and one day traveling, here we are. Australia has dawdled on my permanent visa application, should have been done by December but no known date in sight now. We had planned on goofing around in Australia for a month or so before heading to Melbourne and getting serious about where to live, finding jobs, and all that. The job market is a little worrisome considering how the world economy seems to be crumbling. Anybody need a senior level Java J2EE engineer? Drop me a line.

So yeah, another entry with lots of words but it covers five months. More stuff later, probably go back and write about China and other places I didn't say much about yet.

What you need my son is a holiday in Cambodia

N 11 33 397 E 104 54.988 21m - Phnom Penh, Cambodia - 16 December 2008

Of all the countries that were on our schedule, the one that seemed the most exciting, or maybe compelling (ok, maybe besides Mongolia) was Cambodia. I knew some about the country and history but when you really look at it, it is so much worse than that. There have been so many catastrophic events happen there in the last generation, it is amazing that the country works at all and isn't complete anarchy like Somalia.

For those who haven't seen much more about Cambodia than the Killing Fields and some Doonesbury comics about secret bombings (ok, this is kind of my list), Cambodia has had a horrible 30 years or so. Before that, the country, the Khmers, had been passed back and forth between Thailand (Siam) and Vietnam. They had previously ruled the entire region as part of the Khmer empire. When the French moved into Indochina back in the 1800s, the pressured Thailand to give them control of Cambodia at the same time they took over in Vietnam. The French though were more interested in Vietnam and sort of ignored Cambodia.

They then achieved a sort of independence from a war weary France after WWII but almost immediately got sucked into the the Vietnam War (known as the American War in Vietnam) by forces crossing over from Vietnam to hide out there which led to American bombing (the secret bombings of Nixon and Kissinger) further destabilizing the area and creating civil war. By 1975, the Khmer Rouge won the civil war and immediately turned the country into a nightmare, turning the population out of the cities in an effort to bring about an instantaneous agrarian Communist society and then proceeded to kill 1/4 of the population through violence and starvation. Their border war with Vietnam then brought down their downfall and by 1978, Vietnam invaded and installed a government of former Khmer Rouge and Khmer exiles. Pol Pot and the rest of the Khmer Rouge fled to near the Thailand border and waged a civil war until the late 90s.

So, it is only recently that active civil war has been ended and the Khmer Rouge era left the country on the edge of starvation and destroyed to its foundations. After you have killed all the teachers (or could read, knew how machinery worked, etc), how do you really rebuild a country. And despite what any money changers at the border will tell you, Cambodia's economy runs on the US dollar. The Khmer Rouge abolished currency and when later governments tried to reestablish a currency system, there was no confidence in it and informally the country formed around the dollar. Even now, the majority of banks only accept deposits in dollars. We had some Cambodian money with us and found you mostly get bewilderment when you try to pay for thing with it. If something costs less than a dollar, you will get change in Riel, but for the most part will never see any.

I've found the politics of the region interesting to see and to see how normal people in the country feel about things. China and Vietnam were obstensively Communist countries (or were perhaps just run by the Communist party of China/Vietnam) but it seems strange how that happened, considering that wheeling and dealing just seems to be part of the genetic makeup. The reality of it is that both countries seem more like oligarchies, run by well connected people with no time for less well connected ones (social net, ha).

Cambodia is technically a democracy, they even had major election a few months before we got there. I asked somebody how they went, what happened in them since I had read that things were mostly run by the Cambodian People's Party (CPP - mostly people installed by Vietnam of Cambodian exiles during the KR period) and a few other parties, old monarchists, human rights parties, etc. He didn't know, he had to go look up what happened, was even confused by talk of elections. Later, he reported back, oh the CPP won some more seats, the people with power and money just stayed. In an essentially one party state, elections are not terribly important.

My main memory of Phnom Penh might be dropping my camera (my nice shiny new one) on the first day there and bending the lens housing, making it so that lens wouldn't come out anymore. It took two days to find somebody (Lux Photo, hurray for them) to take it apart and bend it back into shape, for 20 USD. Much relieved. And I guess the guy waving the gun around. I still don't know if it was a real gun but it was really freaky. Just outside the big market, the one with the big dome (Psar Thmei), crossing the street, which is scary in of itself, luckily C was distracted by that and didn't see the guy with a silver handgun walking quickly and pointing it at everybody, cars, waving it around, towards me, aack, walk fast, don't look, just go, then wandered off down the street still waving it around. Surreal and strange. And then into the market which is really known for their fried bugs (spiders, crickets, and whatever, look horrendous and smell pretty bad too).

But ok, stuff to see and do. We walk down 240 Street a few times, the trendy hip arts and crafts sort of place to be. The vast majority of the streets in Phnom Penh are just number streets. I guess another relic of the KR days, if you have to quickly rebuild society, easier to name things 240, 242, 244, etc, than try to come up lots of names for them. We head through there on the way to the Silver Pagoda, closed for lunch at 10.30 (officially closed for lunch 11 to 2, guess they left early) so off to the National Museum which doesn't close for lunch. There were lots of moto drivers lurking outside the Pagoda who were more than ready to take us somewhere that wasn't closed, or just somewhere, anywhere, so we would have to pay them, but we ran by and went to the National Museum.

The building is quite cool, lots of pointy horns on the roof (sort of like bull horns on the front of a Texan Caddy). It was one of the major architecture points that changed quite a bit crossing over from Vietnam. It seems to be a big style point in Thailand too. Maybe it is supposed to be pointy dancing arms. The museum had a room full of thousands of Buddhas which was quite amazing. It had loads of things that had been carved off temples in Angkor and other things and all of these things had amazingly survived the KR era. There was an amazing head of Siva, 10th century I think, this smooth rounded face appearing out of a big block of sandstone which had lost half the face, sheared off or something. It was like seeing the face just forming out of rough rock. And there was a pretty amazing partial cast (I guess what is left of it now) of Vishnu lying down and floating through the cosmos. So, there were a few cool things in it I really liked.

After the previously mentioned camera incident and gun play, we make it back to the National Palace. A $6 entry fee, pretty expensive, it did have loads of shiny things in it. The throne room was quite gilt. The silver pagoda was silvery, with a silver floor, although a lot is tarnished or covered with carpeting. Rooms filled with various sized silver elephants, lots and lots of stuppas, a big golden Buddha footprint, well, lots of other shiny things I can't remember now. I guess you have to go see that sort of stuff even if it is so over the top.

We then move up our timetable for Phnom Penh, staying one more day and then heading off to Siem Reap the day after. We considered going south to the beach and ocean there but decide to save that time for a beach and island in Thailand instead. We are starting to run out of time on this trip.

I go to see S-21, Tuol Sleng Prison, the next morning. In the bad days of the KR reign in the mid 70s, most of the victims were just killed - ended up on a list, taken away, killed, no discussion or anything elaborate. There could be lots of reasons for it, caught singing the wrong sort of song, or there didn't need to be a reason at all. Some of those people, 17,000 or so (a very very small percentage) ended up at S-21 before they were killed to be tortured, sign confessions, or just be held a while before they too were taken off to some killing field somewhere and shot or bludgeoned. Some of them were relatives of former high officials and some of them were just normal people, and towards the end, some of them were KR members who had fallen out of favor and were being purged. Cambodia had been divided into regions falling under different groups, but by 1977, the entire eastern part of the country was deemed to be too liberal and was ordered to be completely purged.

S-21 then was then the main center for torture and confessions and all that. It was previously a high school with some classrooms converted into cells and others into torture rooms. I guess that was one of the really surreal things about it, it is pretty much a bog standard SE Asia school with just a lot more barbed wire around it. I expected it to be quite disturbing and gruesome but it was those things but not quite as much as I expected. There are walls and walls of pictures, those initial mug shot pictures when they were first brought in, and a few of some of them after they had been tortured. There is a 1 hour film about the search for what happened to one woman who was known to have been processed (and later killed) by S-21. There were also lots of exhibits about the guards (mostly small children who were indoctrinated and set to work as guards) and one that I really liked of pictures a Swedish guy took of a tour of Cambodia in 1977, a PR effort, see Cambodia isn't so bad, with his thoughts at the time and then updated thoughts from the present and his sorrow and regrets over being used in this way at the time.

So, it was a rather depressing but informative morning. I don't end up seeing the Killing Fields, a few kilometers out of town, but I've seen pictures and they look pretty much like fields with pits, and I wonder too, just how much do you really need to see. I mean I'm pretty strongly against genocide and I've read quite a bit about why it happened, how it happened and all that, but then how much do you kind of need to see and wallow in it. Am I really the right target audience for it either? I'm well educated, well traveled, have a decent grasp of politics and cultures around the world. But in Cambodia, apparently the KR years contain a few too many controversial items for the CPP, the ruling party, and the genocide isn't even being taught in schools right now. What a shocking state of affairs. Here I am kind of overloaded with information about it and where it happened, the descendants of those it happened to are not even learning about it.

Anyways, the day gets much better when my camera is fixed and I can put away my old one again, back in the bottom of my backpack. Some last minute running around, booking bus tickets and all and we are ready to head off to Siem Reap on what hopefully is a nice bus, we book the VIP one, with the intention of seeing loads of temples (the mega famous Angkor temples) and spend some time on the huge lake and at the bird sanctuary and probably spend Christmas there. Some of that could happen, you never know.