the Togean islands and Bunaken

I learned how to scuba dive in North Sulawesi. Well, technically I didn't learn to scuba dive in North Sulawesi but on the strings of tiny tropical islands and coral beds that surround it.
I hadn't originally planned to scuba dive up there and only did so as a result of the millions of personal recommendations i received from other travellers. The further north I ventured, the more and more wide eyed people spoke to me of the sub-aquatic wonders as if there were some secret coral lair where Poseidon himself offers personal wisdom to his harem of beautiful water nymphs while an infinite number of rainbow coloured fish dance and swirl around his shimmering tail.

Given that impression, i began to consider leaving Sulawesi without having dived in the same way i might consider murdering all my friends and family. Utterly wrong.
Now I'm glad my overactive conscious drove me beneath the waters, because what I found there was wonderful. The description I gave earlier actually turned out to be quite accurate, with the possible exception of Poseidon himself being present.
The Togean islands, where i completed my PADI course, boast the intriguing claim of every known type of coral in an unusually small area. I personally have enough coral knowledge to identify exactly 0 species of coral other than by my own preschool terms such as "the one that looks a bit like a cabbage" and "the one that looks a bit like a brain"; but the colourful coral gardens teeming with tropical fish were no less astonishing as a result. The other area I dived, around Bunaken island, north of Manado, is rumoured to have been one of Jacques Cousteau's favourite destinations for diving. It might  take another few trips before I have the same level of experience as monsieur Cousteau, but after diving there I'm not at all surprised he enjoyed it.

I was lucky enough to see sharks, rays, lobsters, groupers, baracuda, ghost pipefish, and many more, but my personal favourite underwater inhabitant had to be the snoozing turtles hidden in their coral beds.

This fellow and many others like him weren't always easy to spot, having chosen their resting places hidden in caverns in the coral-wall, but it was extremely exciting when we did. Sometimes they would sense our presence and stir, watching us hazily for a few moments then shaking the lethargy from their plated heads and gliding out between us into the big blue.
One such fellow was the biggest turtle I had ever seen. His shell alone was easily six feet long. Having your breath taken away should be an enchanting experience; but since I had run short on cash and was free diving at the time (just a snorkel and fins) with the closest air source ten metres above my head, the taking away of my breath did nothing but endanger my life.
And when the giant beast finally heaved himself up and began his flight in my direction, it was less like witnessing a magical encounter with nature than standing in the tracks of a living freight train on the approach.
Nevertheless, I made it to the surface live and kicking (albeit kicking furiously). After a huge gulp of fresh air, I peered beneath me and was just in time to watch the slow Goliath of the sea disappear into the abyss.
Free diving is an exhausting activity, but it always seemed a lot easier knowing the place I had to recuperate.

Here, you are always warm and comfortable. Here, the soft breeze brings no sounds except the distant melody of tropical birdsong and the hiss of waves. Here, time seems to move as slowly and peacefully as the fluffy clouds across the blue sky...
Which would be simply lovely if I weren't relentlessly hunted by my own personal cloud of thirsty mosquitoes LIKE EVERYWHERE ELSE IN ASIA.

Tana Toraja

Each person lucky enough to be born in this stunning region saves up for half their life to afford the funeral ceremonies for themselves and their families. In many cases, the funeral takes place up to ten years after the death of a person just so that the family can work and save enough money for the ceremony.

Some of these costs are what you would expect, catering, decoration, travel, etc. But far and away the highest cost for any funeral, is the cost of the sacrificial animals.
Torajans have been sacrificing animals for as long as their animistic history can be traced. It was only in the first part of the 20th century, when they embraced Christianity from the Dutch, that they stopped sacrificing human slaves along with the beasts.
The amount of buffalo slain at a given funeral serves as an indication of the deceased's social standing. Some extremely high profile funerals will see as many as 50 buffalo ritualistically killed, but most entertain the slaughter of a more modest seven or eight. Still, at two thousand euros a pop, that's not cheap for rice farmers in one of the poorest parts of Indonesia.

I stood in the front row at one such funeral and watched the life drain out (literally) of seven huge buffalo. I feel confident in saying that it was the most violent and gruesome thing I've seen in my life. There are usually two or three groups of tourists amongst the crowd. These are visible to an observer not only because of their relative heights and white skin, but also because of their sickened, tortured facial exoressions in contrast to the joyous faces of the locals, who laugh and cheer more and more ecstatically with each of the beast's thrashing, blood-splattering lurch and gurgling moan.
It was an extremely interesting spectacle, but a shocking one, and naturally I felt a little shaken up when the ceremony was over and the seven heaped carcasses were finally still and silent.
Even the exciting buffalo fighting event after the performance failed to soothe my soul. Then again, that probably had something to do with the nature of the fight. One buffalo, defeated and terrified, turned from his oponent and bolted, thundering out of the the enclosure with the victor in furious pursuit and toppling several spectators. The crowd scattered around me as the horns approached, and I managed to jump over a ditch and escape just in time.

I retired to bed that night and fell immediately to sleep, probably one of the normal symptoms of a near-fatal dose of adrenaline. The next day I decided to head to the northern hills for some light hiking, where hopefully my heartbeat could slow to something beneath 300 bpm. Here are some pictures.

As you might expect, the immense sense of nature's presence around me left me feeling calm and peaceful. Little did I know that my mellow psyche was about to be drawn into torment, faced with a dilemma requiring me to draw up all i knew about social protocol, etiquette and parental advice.
What should you do when a male stranger invites you to his house out of nowhere?
Actually, in this case the decision was relatively easy. The man in question couldn't have looked less threatening. I considered his proposition for all of three seconds and after making the conservative estimate that, if necessary, I could probably defend myself against at least four people his height simultaneously, I jumped on his motorbike and we rode down the hill happily to his village.
I spent four days and three nights in Booer's home, the first tourist to stay in Mendetec village ever. He lived there with his wife, his niece, his pregnant sister-in-law and hyperactive yet adorable daughter, Chelsea. I spent the days walking around the village with his extended family whilst acting as a mobile climbing frame for Chelsea, who had worked out rather ingeniously that human hair has a fantastic gripping quality. In the evenings my host would summon his large group of friends from the village for impromptu parties. Very few of them spoke English, but all of them were happy to make up for their linguistic shortcomings and keep their mouths occupied by pouring constant streams of Tuok (palm wine) into them.
Tuok is brewed locally and comes from the sap of palm trees. It is purchased either loose in plastic bags or in grubby 5 litre tanks. It has a sour, acidic, fermented taste. It is not very nice. Of course, I was far too polite to voice my dissatisfaction with the locals drink of choice, and kept up as best i could with the first evening's drinking.

The following night, I admitted that I didn't think it the most pleasant thing in the world, and Booer, my host, gave me some good news. He assured me that the locals had a solution to bad tasting Tuok: just add durian! Yes, the addition of this abundant fruit would surely sweeten the otherwise bitter drink! Wrong. durian is a foul smelling yet sweet tasting fruit, and there is a tendency in Southeast Asia to eat durian as it is turning rotten, a little like the Western fascinaton with blue cheese, i suppose. When the off-white lump of durian flesh is plopped into the concoction, it certainly has an affect on the taste. The Tuok is transformed from a fizzy, sour, acidic, fermented liquid to a fizzy, sour, fermented, lumpy liquid with a pungent smell and an aftertaste of fried onions. Of course, after my first sip of this repugnant fluid I did what any red-blooded, uncowardly Englishman would have done in my position. I smiled and drank the remainder without complaint.
On the third evening, Booer seemed somehow to have sensed that I was keen for a change of drink, and we went out and I brought us all some new and exciting beverages from the local town. Lager beer, local white wine and red wine from Bali! However, I was distraught to find that the local way to consume such drinks is to mix the three in a frothy jug, pop in a few lumps of durian for good measure, and then pass round a single glass to be downed by each victim and then refilled for the next.

This was easily the worse tasting potion of the three days, as any of you who have mixed the above drinks and then added fried onions will testify, and I surprised myself when i opted to return to Tuok.


Booer didn't ask for money in return for his hospitality, and wouldn't accept it when I tried to push it on him. I decided to buy dinner for him and his family instead. After we had visited the farm and personally selected the prime cockrel, my host informed me that the polite thing to do would be to kill the bird myself.
Killing the bird was much more difficult than i had expected, and then the bird was plucked, gutted, butchered, cooked and eaten.
It was truly enlightening to see the bird go from swaggering around the courtyard to steaming on a bed of rice. In the UK most of us never having a passing thought of the animal in the field when we buy our prepacked, preprepared cuts of meat from the supermarket. I stared at the roasted thigh in my hand for a long time thinking how the tasty morsel had gone in under an hour from a flexing, throbbing, lively muscle to an edible snack.

Then I ate it. It was absolutely delicious. I don't think I'll ever be able to look at a meat dish again without imagining the animated, dynamic animal it once was a part of... but that doesn't mean I won't be salivating when I do so.

Detained in Bali for another week

The bureaucratic problem quickly turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. I had been told I had to remain for four days in Bali. Disgruntled but not defeated, I booked a flight out on the forth day, but when I arrived at the office on that day, my hopes of catching my plane were quashed by just three words from a stern faced officer behind a pane of glass. "Two more days". The extra postponement had several effects. It necessitated the cancellation of a flight to Sulawesi at great expense and a rebooking at even greater expense, it forced me to decide where i might stay for an extra two days in Bali, and it augmented my hatred for the staff at the Bali Immigration Office to a nearly murderous level.
The long and short of it is that I spent an extra week in Bali than I had planned.

Ubud, surrounded by jungles and rice paddies and steeped in the odd Balinese style Hindu religion, is the culture capital of Bali. My days up there were characterised by lazy walks around the countryside, visiting temples, and watching traditional Balinese dance. One of the temples i visited was named Goh Gajah, which is built into a natural cave in the rock and is believed to have been scratched from the rock thousands of years ago by a giant spirit. In person, it felt less like a mystical portal to the spirit world than a human scale ants' nest infested with human tourist ants. It was an extremely small space anyway, and after I pushed through the throng of scurrying tourists and ended stooping at the back of the earthy crevice, i couldn't help feeling a little underwhelmed.
Most tourists remain in the main enclosure with the Goa Gajah cage, but the park has some stunning grounds, and covers a huge space of sloping jungled valley with a wide river at it's centre.

It was while I was clambering upstream that i found these less well known ancient caves built into cliffs on the riverside:

They certainly aren't mentioned in the guidebook, which is probably why they're happily void of tourists. As spooky as they look, I couldn't betray my curiosity and soon found myself wading through strong currents of chest deep water to enter them. Inside the water is cold and stagnant, the only sound is the echoing hiss of running water from outside, and beyond the first few metres everything is pitch black. I could only navigate my way through the tunnels by running my hand along the damp walls and low stone ceilings. Several times I felt wind sweep over my torso as a result of what I later learned were sweeping bats. Try as I might to make a mental picture of the caves, I had had too little experience of blindness, and so I made a second journey to the caves with my camera using flash photography to navigate.
It was still difficult to map the caves, since my vision relied on half-second long camera flashes which did more to blind me than to leave an impression in my head. But after a few minutes, my inefficient reconnaissance tactics had revealed to me the rough structure of the tunnels. There were two doors to the cave. The large one was presumably the main entrance, through which a corridor of cold, chest deep water ran for fifteen metres or so into the cliff , ending at a stone bank from which raised steps led to a little platform of rock. There were narrow cutouts in the side of the corridor that led through more chest deep water to the side doors.

Stone platform at the back of the cave

Eventually, shivering as much for fear as from the chilly water, I hurried back out of the caves, scrambled up the bank and began making my way through the jungle to the car park. On my way I met an eldery Balinese lady who told me the caves were used hundreds of years ago as a hermitage for meditation. She said ancient yogis used to spend one month and seven days meditating on the stone platform to cultivate the spiritual energy that is apparently abundant in this area. During their time they were permitted to do nothing but sit, not even eat and drink.
I like to think I'm an openminded person, and I'm sure that some people are capable of feats verging on the supernatural, but I'm sceptical about the chances of survival for anyone who starves himself for a month and seven days in a dark damp cave. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that that's what the side door was for; perhaps one of the yogi's attendants used to sneak in from the side while the spirits weren't looking and offer him a sandwich every now and again.
I spent a few more pleasant and relaxing days in Ubud, including an evening at the local Legong dance show. In this traditional style, the dancers are trained to use their facial expressions and fingers to convey the story of the dance as much as their bodies. It was very entertaining and strikingly different to the style of the inebriated Swedes and Australian tourists that I had been subjected to the week before in Kuta. Perhaps though, you have to be something of a Legong connoisseur to truly interpret the meaning of all the finger movements. The finale of the dance involved the man below, who wore an odd mask of an old man and sat on the step at the back of the stage waggling his fingers at me for about ten minutes while a xylophone was beaten rapidly and out of time. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it.

It was after my culture rich experience in Ubud that I was given the infuriating "two more days" command and was back on the road deciding what to do with myself. I was still nurturing fond memories of gliding over the waves on my surfboard in Ulu Watu some weeks before. Okay, I'll concede that a more accurate description of my previous antics at Ulu Watu woudl be thrashing about helplessly through viscous breakers, standing briefly on wobbly legs and then almost instantly being torn off the board by torrents of water and hurled into the seabed.
Either way, surfing was extremely entertaining, and I decided to go further south than previously, to Padang Padang. This is a small town with a gorgeous beach, and a worldwide Mecca for the surfing crowd.

I stayed in a block of rooms with four hardcore surfers, and by that I mean people who spent six months of every year in the water. Most of them were Australians, all of them had scars from head to toe from battling with the surf and the coral, and all of them had tattoos.
The most notable example of the body art was on Craig, a wide eyed and lively Australian man with "SURF OR DIE" scrawled across his chest in huge,graffiti style script. Craig was perhaps the most keen of the surfers, who seem to have visited every notable surfing destination on the globe and had stories of bigger and bigger waves from each location. A few years ago, on a Christmas eve in his hometown of Sydney, he decided surfing exclusively in the sea wasn't supplying him with his enough adrenaline, and resolved to climb out the window of the inter-suburb bus and surf through the night on the steel roof.
Predictably, this didn't go very well, and although he loses the story at this point, witnesses claim they saw a body flash past the window and then a bump. Miraculously he was alive, although he lost a lot of skin and crushed his ankle. When you bail in surfing, always remember concrete is less forgiving than water.
But if you were already aware of the stereotypical surfers addiction to adrenaline, perhaps you weren't so knowledgable about their intense loathing for body boarders.
The subject of body boarding endured a lengthy focus of our conversation around the table on evening, each surfers offering a seething remark or story about being cut up in pursuit of the wave of their dreams. As an excuse for this contempt, one surfer offered the following explanation. In the natural world, humans evolved from mammalian ancestors who crawled on their bellies. Even in the lifespan of the modern homo sapien, the juvenile practice of crawling along the floor is discarded when we learn to walk as toddlers. The natural conclusion is that standing on a board, according to sound darwinian logic, is the natural progression from body boarding and surfers are therefore better people.
Craig let the congregation know that he once had to "teach some body boarders a lesson" after they got in the way of him and his surfing buddies in Australia. I pressed for further details but was told to "leave it at that. I taught them a lesson they wouldn't soon forget".
The subject of conversation fluctuated over the night, and it wasn't until the next day while I was reading a book on the beach that I remembered Craig's ominous words. I had seen a troops of body boarders prancing towards the sea with their boards under their arms. They were heading for the area where I knew Craig was surfing.
I toyed with the idea of warning them, but wasn't sure what to say. I'm afraid I simply turned the other way and re-engrossed myself in the novel without a passing thought for the potential bloodbath unfolding on the waves behind me.

East Java and a week in Bali

The train pulled into Jogyakarta station at approximately 4 am. The cramped chair, chattering locals, wailing children and an intrusive horde of cigarette and snack sellers at every stop through the night had kept sleep well at bay. I nearly fell out of the train onto the platform in a confused state of sleep-deprived delirium.
I am well aware that the sensible thing to do at the time would have been to check into a hotel as soon as possible and permit my tired brain a few hours of blissful unconsciousness. In hindsight, it was exactly because my brain was so tired that I decided, with the help of a tourist office on the platform, that it would be a good idea to go on an early morning tour of Jogyakarta's famous temples.
Little more than an hour later, I found myself on an uncrowded minibus with a chemical engineer from Munich and a group of Indonesian tourists from Jakarta. I was able to get forty or so minutes of sleep before we rolled into Borobudur car park.
Borobudur temple is a 8th-century Buddhist monument, and since its creation has retained the title of the largest Buddhist temple in the world. The monument comprises six square platforms topped by three circular platforms, and is decorated with 2,672 relief panels and 504 Buddha statues.

Almost as striking as the temple itself was the celebrity me and the chemical engineer were afforded simply because we were white. The overwhelming majority of tourists at the temple were children on school trips from other parts of Indonesia where they had never seen a white person in the flesh before. We were constantly swarmed with awestruck adolescents asking in broken English if they might take a picture with us, since white skin and Caucasian features are fundamentally linked with movie stars and famous musicians.At first the attention was flattering, but it quickly became irritating, and on the way back towards the minibus I began behaving like a flustered Hollywood star pushing through paparazzi to reach the privacy of my trailer.
Immediately after a quick breakfast of fried cloves of garlic, we were on the road and I indulged in another forty minutes of sleep before we reached central Java's second most famous religious monument: Prambanan.

This 9th-century Hindu temple consists of several huge towers surrounding an even huger 47m high tower in the middle. The temples contain statues of the Hindu trinity, Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu, while relief panels around their outsides tell the famous story of the Ramayana, and a less famous story of which i've forgotten the name. The latter was rife with Kama Sutra engravings, and the hundreds of oversize sexual organs and impossible positions reminded me of the adolescent graffiti scrawled all over the maths textbooks from School. I wondered if this temple had been left to the Sculpture schools class clowns.
Prambanan, with its tall spires, looked extremely similar to Angkor Wat, Cambodia's famous 12th-century temple. Further inquiry revealed that King Suryavarman II visited Java to study and copied the idea when he returned.
To be honest though, there's no way of knowing for sure whether the temple on view today is similar to the temple that aroused Suryavarman's jealousy some 900 years ago. Central Java is the most seismically active area in Indonesia, and the temple has been brought to rubble and rebuilt several times since then, most recently in 1918 after years of earthquakes and several coats of volcanic ash had all but hidden the temple from view. Dutch colonialists had been carting off sculptures for their gardens and locals had been using the stone rubble for construction materials elsewhere, like grave robbing from an Eastern Pompei.
Whatever the temple used to look like, it was a very impressive sight, although the central tower of Shiva has a very obvious tilt to one side like the leaning tower of Pisa, caused by a recent earthquake in 2006. If one thing can be concluded from a tour of the temple, it's that central Java isn't the right place for architects who dream of longevity.

3am two days later, and I was in the middle of a difficult trek up a mountain in Mt. Bromo national park, which is essentially a single gigantic volcanic crater with several smaller (but still massive) volcanoes inside it. The difficulty of the trek wasn't really a result of the terrain as much as it was a result of the lack of light. Neither I, nor my three Cumbrian trekmates had remembered that there's no light before dawn and had all forgotten a torch. We trudged on, cursing and tripping as we stumbled across invisible potholes or stubbed our toes on invisible rocks, determined to reach the viewing point before sunrise at 4.30.

To our surprise and elation, we made it just in time to watch the sun emerge shyly from behind the high ridges behind us and wash away the thick mist that had filled the giant crater. Standing in the centre of the plain was Mount Bromo, steam pouring out from it's smouldering centre. Mount Semeru looming in the background, and it had recently started erupting again. Every twenty minutes a cloud of ash and steam burst from it's summit. All the active volcanoes could easily have fostered a sense of unease, but it was difficult not to relax with such an awe inspiring view.

On the way back down the hill, we were blessed with the light of the sun and were able to see the paths we had walked. As we suspected, they were covered in holes and debris, and much steeper than they felt while we were blindly walking them. However, our struggle paled into hilarity when we saw the steep farming land built on the slopes of the mountains. Farmers here must have worked out a way to defy gravity, working every day on the punishing mountainside gradients.

Twelve hours, three minibuses and a rumbling ferry later, we arrived in Sanur, a touristy coastal town on the east coast of Bali. I stayed there for four days with the Cumbrian lads I met at Bromo, spending most of that time stretched out languidly on beaches and kayaking through the surf in the warm waters of the east Indian Ocean.

We soon moved to the West coast, even more beautiful and even more packed with Australian tourists, who spent their days surfing on the famous Kuta beach or otherwise drinking Bintang beer on the sand. It is a curious thing that all over Southeast Asia tourist feel compelled to by clothing adorned with huge labels of the beer they drink there, but in Bali this is taken to an extreme. There isn't a group of Australians in Kuta who don't have at least two Bintang garments between them. It isn't rare to see a smiling Aussie sitting on the beach simultaneously wearing Bintang shorts, a Bintang vest and a Bintang hat sipping on a bottle of Bintang from a Bintang beer holder like a mindless living advertisement for the beer company.
It isn't really fair that I make fun of those walking reminders of Bintang's Bali beer monopoly, since I indulged excessively that night in the ubiquitous beer in celebration of Jonny's (middle right) birthday.

It isn't cheap to drink in the clubs and bars of Kuta, hence why we did most of ours beforehand. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) we arrived already drunk into town and found out that the tourists of Bali were only too keen to buy Jonny all the Bintang he could drink in honour of his birthday.
Often, he couldn't drink it and simply passed on the unrequested beverages to the rest of us, who quickly found our uninhibited selves on stage on the second floor of a popular club, breakdancing to Run DMC with some employed dancers. This celebration was brought to an involuntary halt by the bouncer, who watched Jack smack his head on a low iron beam and perceived that I very nearly tumbled into the bar beneath us in a futile attempt to do "the worm". I maintain that I was in control, but my negotiating power was limited in the broad shadow of the 6'5" hulk demanding we leave the stage, so we scuttled away obediently and took our dancing talents elsewhere.
The Next day, the 100m stroll to McDonald's for breakfast (or lunch, more accurately, since it was afternoon) was a challenge for all of us.

Yesterday, we enjoyed a final sunset over Kuta beach before all going our separate ways, one home to Cumbria to quench the growing desire we all share for mother's cooking, real milk and real chocolate, the other two to Thailand to continue their travels, and me to some as of yet undetermined location in Indonesia.
I had met them in the last two week of their two month stay in Indonesia, and they gave me invaluable information and advice about what to do in the vast subcontinent. I attempted to get to Sulawesi, the spidery shape island in the north, but was let down to hear that I would have to remain in Bali for four days for my visa to come through.
Instead, I motorbiked to Ubud, Bali's culture capital, and I intend to cycle around the temples and craft shops here for four days while the irritating bureaucrats in the south tear their way through red tape in my name so that i can stay here a little longer.

Here's a joke in their honour:
What does an immigration officer use for contraception? His personality.

Saya membeli anak anak (My first Indonesian lesson)

Jakarta turned out to be everything i dreamed it could be. Unfortunately that dream was a nightmare.
I've decided to begin this story on the night train to Yogyakarta because everything that happened before that point was markedly uninteresting.

Anyhow, I was sitting in the business class section, which basically means there's a single squealing fan in the centre of the carriage and the lights are dim as apposed to non existent. I was using ointment to nurture the atrocious amount of mosquito bites acquired in Jakarta. I can't read Braille, and hopefully I'll never have to learn, but as I ran my fingers over the myriad of raised lumps on my biceps and deltoids, I would conservatively estimate there were enough of them to write out the Bible in full.
Soon an overly keen yet friendly looking Indonesian youth arrived (interrupting my medical routine) and asked if he might sit next to me. Within seconds he attempted to strike up a conversation in English. As soon as we began, it became evident that the level of his English was extremely low. Nevertheless, I spent some time last year learning French in Paris, and as memories of hundreds of painfully awkward conversations rushed into my head I immediately felt a deep sympathy for the boy and was determined to oblige his thirst for language for as long as i could.
The labour soon became impossible. As we moved away from the simpler subjects such as names, siblings and ages, i was lucky if i understood two words in a solid minute of dialogue. We were both aware of the fact, and he was becoming visibly anxious as he strained to form English syllables with his inexperienced mouth. So hard was he trying that beads of sweat were forming on his wrinkled forehead. I had to put him out of his misery. I needed to change the language, and decided that asking him to teach me some Indonesian was the only way out.
I considered breaking off the conversation by telling him his English was good, but I was certain that he knew as well as I did that was an outright lie and I didn't want to offend the keen student. Instead I tried asking him outright, and fortunately I only had to rephrase the question four times before he grasped my meaning.
He began by opening the book I was reading and translating the sentences he could read.  He opened at a random page and offered me such enlightened phrases as "The ugly little bastard has only one nipple." While amusing, I was dubious about the practical value the sentence offered .
Some food vendors had boarded the train, and I asked him how I could ask for fried rice. "Saya ingin nasi goreng". I buy fried rice, "Saya membeli nasi goreng". A baby began to cry and he told me that the word for "child" is "Anak" and "children" is "Anak anak", owing to a peculiarity in Indonesian grammar by which pluralisation is as simple as saying a word twice.
The Indonesian lesson he gave me was undoubtedly more successful than the English conversation I tried to conduct, but soon my teacher had to disembark. I sat in the rumbling half silence of the train carriage reflecting on my lessons. A frown slowly emerged on my face as i realised the extent of what I'd just been taught.
I had long since forgotten how to say the thing about the one nippled child, and since i already knew the indonesian for fried rice (nasi goreng), I was left only with two new constructions to use: "I want children" and "I buy children".
If we had been in a genuine school setting, I may well have been put on report for failing to conduct a successful English conversation, but I'm pretty sure he'd have found his way onto the sex offenders' register after the next OFSTED inspection for his efforts.

Bangkok and the Gulf of Thailand

So I left Pai, one of the most naturally beautiful and peaceful places on earth, and the next day found myself immersed in the urban sprawl of Bangkok. I had been reliably informed by the boys (who were already there) that I shouldn't be coaxed into getting a taxi to the hotel since it's a walkable distance from the bus stop. SO, after waving away a horde of taxi drivers, I plunged straight into the metropolis, keen to find the hotel before the sun reached it's highest point.
Much to my dissapointment, it turned out that my bus had stopped at the other end of town than the boys' bus, and after an hour of painfully bad sign language sessions with non-english speakers, i climbed onto a rickety public bus and endured a 50 minute journey through the city to Khao San road.
Fortunately, the hotel the boys had found was cheap. I use that adjective alone because the price was literally the only thing that was nice about it. Ed and I were staying on the fifth floor of a cramped building with just enough room to take a stride between our two beds, an irritating absence of curtains, and graffiti scrawled all over the walls. Ordinarily, I don't mind graffiti, but it is a little discomforting to see a tally of the "amount of girls  shagged" in the bed while you're trying to sleep in it. It wouldn't have made a difference anyway; the hotel was placed directly next door to 'the club', one of Bangkok's loudest and busiest nightclubs. The insomnious episodes instigated by worry about the hygiene of the bed were perpetuated by the incessant "OOMPH OOMPH" of house music, the same volume as if you'd been on the dance floor below.
To be honest, I was glad we stayed there. On our budget we can't afford to splash out, and given some of the places we've stayed, this one only ranked at about "mildly uncomfortable". My initial upset with Bangkok definitely had something to do with it's stark contrast to the Pai valley, and the next day I had already grown to appreciate the city.

Khao San itself is basically a long crowded tourist gauntlet of touts, taxis, fortune tellers, street vendors and prostitutes. While it quickly becomes annoying to push your way through it, it is extremely amusing to watch others make the attempt. The other two boys had a balcony facing central Khao San road, and it was perfect for people watching. People watching is the wrong term, what we were doing is probably better described thus; watching exhausted strangers struggling under the oppressive heat and smog to escape the swarm of predatory locals. Very much like a nature program, wildebeest crossing the Masai Mara through a labyrinth of crocodile jaws.
We watched a championship Muay Thai boxing match in ringside seats and that was fantastic. We ate the pad thai from the street and that was delicious. We visited 'the club' next door instead of trying to sleep through it, and that was fun.
Bangkok has a charm of it's own that's impossible to communicate if you haven't been there. Nevertheless I was extremely happy to leave and our flight South to Surat Thani couldn't have come sooner.
Back when we crossed the border from Laos into Thailand, we made the mistake in our sleep deprived state of not buying the appropriate visa. This basically means that every fifteen days we spend in Thailand, we have to do a visa run.
In one busy day, we got a bus from Surat Thani to Ranong, took a longtail boat over the sea for thirty minutes, entered Burma for ten minutes, returned to Ranong on the boat, and took a bus back to Surat Thani. We arrived in Surat Thani and had exactly one hour until the last ferry left for Koh Samui, our destination island. The trouble was that Surat Thani is about an hour and a half from the port. We managed to persuade a driver to take us there, and after a 120km/h average drive that felt less like a taxi service and more like a suicide attempt, we made it just in time.
The next day, happy to have made it to Koh Samui, we were reunited with Reuben, who had left us in Vietnam, and our three good friends Emma, Zara and Emily who had recently come to Thailand from Australia.

Ed enjoys a sneeze during our reuinion

A little later on

The next day we all felt suitably awful, and it was our saviour, Ed, who valiantly woke up at 9am and braved the two flights of stairs to book a ferry at reception. Doubtless we wouldn't have made it to Koh Phangan if he hadn't done so.
Koh Phangan earned worldwide notoriety a few decades ago with it's principal attraction, the full moon party. Each year more and more tourists visit the island to coat themselves in ultra-violet paint and dance until they pass out under the light of the full moon. Most people visit Koh Phangan for this reason alone, and anyone coming with the intent to experience even a tiny amount of Thai culture will be disappointed. We knew what we were in for and we made the most of it. Little more needs to be said about Koh Phangan than that we all had an absolutely cracking time there.

Quick pause from the party to visit a clinic. Ed stepped on an urchin.

But he was back on his feet almost immediately.

Aftermath

We spent five days there in all. Nathan will be pleased that i mention he was the 'winner' of the full moon party. He earned this self imposed title by staying out slightly later than the rest of us on most of our nights there. Congratulations to him.
I ought to give an honourable mention to our good friend Sam Hamilton, who hurried down from Saigon to be there for the party, and put up with a terrible fever for two nights in spite of it's terribleness. Unfortunately, he was overcome on the penultimate night, and showed up at the door of our bungalow at 5 in the morning with a nurse holding an IV drip. He spent the full moon night drugged on morphine in a Koh Samui hospital suite, and to be honest, probably was having a better time even than us.

Here's a lovely sunset picture I stole from Emma Gutteridge because I didn't take any. (thanks babe!)

After a string of gut wrenchingly heavy nights on Phangan, the five of us boys who had survived the party ventured north for Koh Tao, to be reunited with Sam later after his discharge from hospital. Koh Tao is the dive capital of Thailand, and boasts the cheapest PADI open water diver course in the world. Cheap though it is, our budgetary constraints wouldn't allow it and we were satisfied to spend our days lounging on Sairee beach, and our evenings zigzagging between the various bars and clubs on the narrow strip of road above it.
We were delighted to meet a group of Irish girls we had befriended back in Koh Phangan and spent a couple of happy evenings sharing stories, drinking games, and embarrassing dance moves.

Right now I'm in Jakarta.

It took me forty five hours in ten different vehicles to get here from Koh Tao. I haven't yet seen enough of the place to think of my own witty description for it, so here's one from the wikitravel website i like:

"A sweltering, steaming, heaving mass of some 10 million people packed into a vast urban sprawl. The contrast between the obscene wealth of Indonesia's elite and the appalling poverty of the urban poor is incredible, with tinted-window BMWs turning left at the supermall with its Gucci shop, into muddy lanes full of begging street urchins and corrugated iron shacks. The city's traffic is in perpetual gridlock, and its polluted air is matched only by the smells of burning garbage and open sewers, and safety is a concern especially at night. There are few sights to speak of and most visitors transit through Jakarta as quickly as possible."


...I think i ought to go and book a train.

Riding Solo in Pai

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, coming to Pai on my own. My decision to come here was made because of a single sentence i heard from a friend in Vang Vieng. She had said, "Stay over the bamboo bridge, it's really nice".


I spent the bus journey speculating on what I might find in Pai, and eventually we rolled up outside a tourist office on a drab, uninteresting street barely visible through a thick blanket of rain. Determined to find the fabled bamboo bridge, I plodded through the rain for a long time, passing plenty of concrete bridges but no bamboo ones. Everyone I asked seemed much more interested in getting out of the rain than aiding me in my quest.


As i walked, Puddles became ponds, and ponds became oceans. I found myself making choices at crossroads based on which way i was least likely to drown. Promptly the sun abandoned me, it dipped behind the mountains and I was left half blind to everything but the silvery veil of rain around me. I didn't let my near loss of sight discourage me, failure was not an option, and eventually I found a sloping muddy road with a sign: "bamboo bridge".


This revelation had me practically skipping through the mud in jubilation, but my elated mood was ruthlessly murdered by what i found at the bottom of the slope. All that remained of the bridge were the two broken ramps on either bank, and between them was nothing but a hopeless expanse of muddy brown water. Presumably the fast flowing river had carried it away some time ago, and what made it worse was that i could see the fabled bungalows on the other side, they did indeed look "really nice".


I stood for a few minutes staring ahead with a scowl on my face as if the river had personally insulted me, before squelching back to the centre of town and checking in the first guesthouse i stumbled across. The walls were paper thin and I was not provided with a mosquito net. Normally I wouldn't really have minded about the net, but it's a necessity rather than a luxury here, because Pai is home to an abundance of the bloodsuckers worthy of a biblical plague. After smothering myself with mosquito repellent, I lay down with my book, but that comfort was short lived since the couple in the room next to me began copulating loudly almost immediately after i lay down, making it impossible to imagine what was going on in my book. They finished and I fell quickly to sleep, becoming an unconscious blood banquet for the group of insects circling menacingly overhead.


I wasn't discouraged by my train wreck of a first evening, I had faith that things would get better, and they did. Much better.


The next day the sun was high in the sky. For the first time I could see what was around me, a busy little town surrounded by farmland and spectacular mountains. It seemed to be the thing to do to rent a bike here, and so I found a rental shop and chose a sturdy looking road bike for one pound. I decided to call my steed Kevin, for no particular reason other than that he looked like a Kevin.


After aimlessly cycling around the countryside, admiring the stunning views, I met a group of people and amongst them was a tall German man with shaggy hair named Danny. I think I ought to tell his story here since he's so modestly unwilling  to tell it himself. Danny has hardcore beliefs about sustainability. For example, he doesn't eat farmed meat on the grounds that every cow farmed is fed in its lifetime multiple times it's weight in grains that could be put to better use feeding the hungry. He isn't intrusive with his opinions, and gives them only when asked.


Upon meeting Danny, it would be easy to place him as a lazy hippy, but there is nothing lazy about this man. A few years ago, Danny decided to vent his convictions about the negativity of fossil fuels by kayaking the entire Danube river from it's source in his hometown in the Black Forest of Germany, to it's estuary on the Black Sea in Romania. Danny was the first man in the world to achieve this feat; the Danube is 2850km long and it snakes through 10 European countries. He reminded me of the many other unsung sporting heroes, such as the little known Martin Stel, a Slovenian who has swam the length of three of the four longest rivers in the world, including the treacherous Mississippi and the piranha infested Amazon. Possibly the most impressive thing about Danny is the humility he shows in his reluctance to publicise his achievement, saying that he did it exclusively for the challenge, and he has now hiked alone over Everest, although he didn't journey to it's peak.


I was inspired. The weather for the next day was forecast at being clear skies and 37 degrees Celsius. I planned out an ambitious bike ride through the surrounding valleys, and my steed, Kevin, and I were up for the challenge. The next day the heat was truly oppressive. It might easily have been hotter than 37, not only could an egg be fried on the tarmac, I'm pretty sure I could have boiled iron on it.  Kevin looked on earnestly as I packed a bag of provisions: my mp3 player, my book, some coconut biscuits, my camera, and a big bottle of water. I peddled out onto the road and instantly became soaked in perspiration... It was going to be a tough day.

So there I was, riding solo in Pai.

I used my mp3 player to distract myself from the feeling of my shoulders bursting into flames, but my mp3 player is rubbish. For a start, even at top volume it's incredibly quiet, if there's any background noise then you have to guess what the song is from the occasional loud or high pitched note that drifts into your ear over the outside noise. For that reason i felt it was perfect for the bike ride, since out in the countryside it would just be me and the crickets, who at least gave moments of silence between their chirps. The other problem with the mp3 player is that for some reason it failed to accept most of my music library when i synced it. Annoyingly, I was left without most of my favourites, so all I can do is set it to shuffle and hope some adequate song appears when i'm in the right mode for it. Actually, while I'm on the subject, I think I'm going to offer a review the player for potential consumers.

Review of "SanDisk Sansa Clip+ 8GB MP3 Player with Radio and Expandable MicroSD/SDHC Slot" 
by Sebastian Mayer. 7/5/11.
>Do not buy one.


Anyway now that that's out of the way I can tell you why I gave you all that boring information about it. The random selection of songs was quite amusing. As you're about to see, the countryside surrounding Pai is some of the most stunning I've ever seen; it was just made a little more interesting by the songs playing while I admired the views.

After an arduous climb to the crest of a hill, I came upon this view. My sandisk had selected Hot Chocolate's funk classic, "I Believe In Miricles" to accompany it. That made for quite a surreal experience.

 A few kilometres down the road I was surprised to find an elephant camp. I sat for a while and watched the magnificent beasts listening to "The Flower Duet" from the opera "Lakme" by Delibes (the song in the BA advert if you're unfamiliar). Such a graceful piece of music was amusingly inappropriate for the lumbering giants.

I passed the Japanese 1912 bridge to the tune of "Yellow Submarine" by the Beatles. For a local landmark the bridge wasn't very imposing and to be honest, the song was far more interesting. So I won't bother with a picture.

Eventually I reached Pai Canyon, another signposted attraction. It was a strange geological feature. I would have called it an inverse canyon, since it was like a thin raised path of rock and sand with cliffs on either side. I was the only person there, and it would have been extremely serene if I didn't have Tupac Shakur's gangster rap classic "Hit 'em Up" filling my ears. As I stepped into the radiant sunlight, alone before nature and felt the wind on my face, Tupac shouted in my ear "First off fuck your bitch and the click you claim, Westside, when we ride, come equipped with game." I skipped that one.

My last stop was a hill temple. There was a horrible 400 steep steps ahead of me, and I'd had to cycle to the base of the hill in the first place. Kevin, the lucky bastard, was permitted to wait at the bottom of the hill bolted to a signpost. The sun increased it's intensity with impeccable timing, and I slogged up the steps in what must have been 40 degrees.

I stumbled through the temple gate and saw the temple. It was a predictably garishly coloured temple scattered with Gold Buddha statues and orange robes hanging out to dry in the sun. I'd have guessed that in this heat, a full robe could probably dry in about 4 and a half minutes. After customarily removing my flip flops, I collapsed onto a bench under the forgiving shade of the veranda roof, and greedily scrambled for the bottle of water in my bag. A sideways glance brought a silver Buddha statue to my attention, his fixedly serene face gazing straight ahead at the view infront of us... Wow, what a view.

The steep hill ahead of us was blanketed in bright green jungle foliage, which met the flat ground ahead and gave way to acres and acres of rice paddies and mango orchards. Ahead from there, the richly green land rose steadily, and eventually became the sweeping mountain range in the distance, their peaks lost in white fluffy clouds.

The town looked quiet and restful in the distance; only the occasional murmur of a motorcycle engine floated up to me and reminded me of Pai's vitality. All other sounds had been drowned out by the animals. Choruses upon Choruses of chattering insects were coming from all directions, tropical birds whooped invisibly from nearby trees, and dogs woofed conversationally somewhere below.

The view coupled with the sounds was incredible... With the paddy fields it reminded me of the rolling patchwork countryside in England, except a million times more exotic and not partly hidden by a grey veil of rain.

I do have a picture of the view. When I look at it, I am reminded of that old saying: "a picture speaks a thousand words". To me, this picture speaks eight: "Not nearly as good as the real thing"

I permitted myself a sandwich on the way home. It was very expensive by Thai standards (nearly 90 pence!), but since all I'd spent that day was a few Baht in 711 and Kevin's rental fee (That allusion to prostitution can be ignored), I bought it anyway.


I don't know how far I went but can estimate from my map it was about 35km. My mind was blank with fatigue as I returned to the idyllic bungalow where i am now staying and stumbled shakily to the shower. I crumbled under the feeble pressure of the cold water, and delighted in the feeling of the film of sweat being swept off me. After some time, i emerged, and found danny waiting at the bar. I confess, he wasn't as dumfounded by the tale of my adventure as I had been of his the previous day, but he was mildly impressed and mildly impressed is good enough for me.


After that trip, I felt like i'd earned a beer. So I had ten.