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.

Chiang Mai

So finally we made it out of Laos. I'd be lying if i said i wasn't still feeling the sickly affects of our two week stint in Vang Vieng, but we expected that going in so i can't really complain.
Chiang Mai is a large city in north thailand surrounded by mountainous jungle and fertile farmland. After so many weeks in modest towns and villages in Laos, we found the wide busy streets and cluttered pavments slightly intimidating. The city is awash with travellers, so guesthouses and hotels are everywhere. I'd like to be able to say that we found a place to call home here, but it's difficult to draw any comparisons between the spotless, comfortable english homes in our minds and the underlit, cramped rooms we have here with disfunctional toilets and matressess that might as well be made of granite.
Anyway, it seems that rather than the city itself, most people come here to indulge in the hundreds of treks, cooking courses, elephant reserves, tiger kingdoms and hill tribe homestays offered by the tourist offices. We were happy to find that the headquarters of an organic farm cooking course was directly over the road from our hostel/dungeon, so we booked on to the course the next day.
We were entered into a group of 10 other budding culinarians, and the first stop was a local market. Here, our thai guide Tommy provided us with his encyclopeadic knowledge of different rice varieties, and then let us amble through the stalls to see what else was on offer. Some of the group were a little horrified by the pigs heads and chicken guts available, but we had been happily desensitised to these strange food preparations back in Hanoi, where we watched a freshly decapitated frog hop from a startled woman's stall and attempt to cross the road in front.

Next we made it to the farm; a quiet, lushous piece of land surrounded by lotus ponds and forests. Tommy showed us some of the produce they were growing. We were shown papayas, thai ginger, mangoes, thai basil, limes, lemongrass, corriander, chillies and many more. Tommy gave us some information about each, and sometimes some jokes as well. A notable example was the thai aubergine, which is the size of a marble and has a much stronger flavour than it's european cousin. Tommy explained that everything in Thailand is smaller, and gave a cheeky self deprecating grin, much to our amusement.
We had booked into a full day of cooking, and each of us had chosen five dishes from a list of options. Personally, I had chosen a chicken massaman curry, tom yam kung, papaya salad, spring rolls, and sweet sticky rice with mango. The curry was easily the most challenging, and also the most delicious. We began with a mortar and pestle, and were instucted to vigourously smash our raw spices into a paste. Tommy explained that the required movement was a short upwards and downwards motion with the wrist, and if performed properly, it should create a loud and frantic banging on the bottom of the mortar. He added that when a thai man is trying to choose a bride, he waits in the living room and listens to the sound of curry paste being made in the kitchen. Satisfactory banging noise means "Good wife because she has good hand". He chuckled and repeated the motion with his wrist, flashing a grin my way. I wasn't particularly disturbed at the time, but i found it a little disconcerting later on when he sidled up to me while i smashed the spices and whispered "good wife" in my ear.
All in all, the banquet was a success, and we gluttonously feasted on our creations in a open air dining room in the middle of the lilly ponds. There were a few slip ups with the chillies, which we perhaps hadn't used as sparingly as we should have done, given that they were the hottest variety in thailand. My papaya salad, for example was a blazing inferno so hot that it nearly warped the air above it.
A fantastic day, nonetheless.
The other trip we went on was a packed day of elephant riding, jungle trekking, waterfall swimming, white water rafting, and bamboo punting. The elephant were good fun. We sat on the back of the huge beasts in twos, with the thai driver placed on the head. At one point, our driver was distracted by a stray chicken in the jungle, and he jumped off the head with a slingshot presumable attempting to hunt it. Ed and I found ourselves in sole control of the behemoth, who was far more interested in spraying herself (and us) with cool mud and drinking from the river than going the direction we asked.

Even more worrying was the fact that we were being pursued by a notably well-endowed bull elephant who was ignoring the minute chinese ladies on his back and seemed to be threatening penetration at any moment. Fortunately, nothing came of his advances.
The jungle "trek" really turned out to be more of a jungle stroll. We walked for forty minutes towards the waterfall, crossing streams and inspecting the exotic insect life along the way. The waterfall was lovely and cooling after our "trek", but as soon as we felt suitably cooled for the return journey, it began to rain.
It's impossible to truly understand the word "rainforest" if you havent been slipping and sliding down muddy streams that were once paths with all of heaven thundering down overhead. There was thunder and lightening. Gigantic bolts which lit up the dark sky to a blinding white, and deafening crashes of thunder that sounded like a skyscraper being demolished with you on the bottom floor.
The guide was dubious about taking us rafting after a storm so terrifying, but we decided to do so anyway. The rapids were perilous. Four of us sat staggered in the inflatable boat with a thai skipper on the back barking out hurried commands as if we were in a warzone. "FO'WARD!" "BACK!" "RIGH'!" "LEF'!" "STOP!" "DOWN!".

Down was the worrying one. Usually this meant we were seconds away from sliding down a not unimpressive waterfall, and we had to crouch down in the middle of the boat with feet jammed beneath the seats for support, one hand firmly gripping the rope at the side of the boat. During these times, the boat would topple down the rapids, crashing into the angry water and basically putting the boat (and us) fully underwater for a split second. Besides a minor fall when the french girl opposite me lost her grip and slammed into my side of the boat nearly sending me over the edge, our team managed to pull through. There were comparably calm stretches of river between the worst rapids, and we use the time to catch our breath and let the adrenaline settle. We floated past a boat containing a crying girl being comforted by her friend; apparently a member of their team had tumbled into the rapids and it had scared her. The man-ovrboard was unharmed.
Once the rapids had been defeated, we left the boat and climbed precariously onto a long, unstable bamboo raft. With the weight of us all on it, the actual raft was drifting invisibly a foot beneath the murky water. Nathan used a long bamboo pole and punted down the river to the finish line, and although we did get there quite fast, he had some trouble breaking in the fast flowing current. In his defense, he had recieved absolutely no formal instruction, and our well meaning skipper's limited english vocabulary did nothing to help matters. A swiss man and I bailed as we crossed the line and strenuously swam to the bank, moving about an inch a second against the strong current. Nathan dissapeared along the river struggling with the raft. We waited at the camp for five minutes and I presumed Nathan was lost to the river, but he appeared shortly after, half drowned and wheezing with his five foot thai rescuer.

I'm leaving Chiang Mai today to visit the town of Pai in the north, while the other three go to "Tiger Kingdom" to pet and wrestle with a tame half-ton tiger and it's cubs. I don't know how tame such a beast can be, and we were assured that the tigers are not sedated. Given the mane-like shape of Ed's beard and hair, I wouldn't be suprised if he was mistaken for a lion and attacked by the monstrous feline.

I hope my goodbye was not the final one.