East to West...

Padi Scarecrows

2012-02-10T19:03:00.001+08:00

The rice fields have been growing for some time now, getting taller and greener day-by-rainy-day, and they're just getting to the point where greedy birds are an issue. The farmers near me are amazingly inventive about keeping these scavengers away - there are black plastic bags strung up on wire, lovely homemade wooden windmills (which I haven't yet been able to photograph) and old t-shirts. I took this picture at dusk on my way back to town from the villages.

Some have made scarecrows - and they wear hats that I would scavenge, were there not family members living on-site to protect their plot.

On my way home from a relaxed walkabout on the mountain last weekend, I passed one that was bright and red and beautiful amongst the rich greenery - I wish my photos did it justice...

New Year Number Three

2012-02-07T20:21:00.000+08:00

The Islamic new year was celebrated very quietly in Malaysia last November. The Western new year was celebrated in the big cities with fireworks and a few drinks. Finally, though, we've reached the most impressive new year of them all: the Lunar new year, the Chinese celebration of the move into the year of the Water Dragon. This is such an auspicious year that midwives and baby equipment suppliers are already hiking their prices for the expected rush of Dragon Babies.

Muharram was a single sober day, New Year was a few hours of celebration. The Chinese in Malaysia have been partying for two weeks. It began on January 23rd with children chucking firecrackers in the street, loud karaoke in the Chinese cafes, outrageous shopping sprees and a sudden explosion of red - an auspicious colour. Even the traditional Malay shops - shops that cater to Muslim women - got in on the action.

The celebrations have been a little more muted than those of Hong Kong, Singapore, and China itself. My experience of lunar new year has been one of glimpses - a glimpse of a man wearing the golden legs of a lion after performing the lion dance, the sound of drums as a lion dance finishes, the discarded confetti after a lion dance has been there. Yes, the lion dance occurs a lot. It is fundamentally to scare away the evil spirits and to attract luck and fortune, and dance troupes travel the country during the new year visiting businesses and organisations. They are rewarded with ang pow - the little red envelopes containing money that rival the lion dance for sheer visibility at this time.

Last night was our little town's official celebration. I was invited with my colleague and some other long-term homestay residents by the owners of our homestay, who are delightful and warm and friendly and who have the added ingredient of being ex-politicians, and pillars of the community. A friend who came to visit this weekend also came along. I probably didn't prepare her enough, in retrospect, but then even I didn't expect to be driven through the security barrier to the steps of the hall, where we clambered out in front of an audience of lesser persons, and were greeted by our very own lion dance - and when I mean our very own, I mean they performed for just three groups - the head of the Chinese Association of Ranau and his entourage, the Member of Parliament for Ranau and his entourage, and Doctors Lungkiam and Othman and us. The plebs just walked in a side door and sat on benches or rows of chairs. We were guided to one of five tables in the centre. We were, you might say, the centre of attention. Haha. Ahem...

The evening started with a lot of speeches by the proper VIPs (they had white coverings on their chairs, to differentiate them from the RIPs (the Relatively Important People) - that's us) whose pictures were prominently displayed on the stage. Then each table received a large plate with neat and tidy piles of various shredded food, like ginger, and onions that had been dyed green - and we all stood up; the MC counted down from three, and we all grabbed our chopsticks and gleefully and communally mixed up the "salad".

Then we got to eat it while the povo looked on. That wasn't uncomfortable at all.

The lion dance was the main draw of the evening for me. The lion is made up of two men, one in the rear, one in the head, and it is a mastery of martial acrobatics. The head is the most ornate part, with enormous eyes with blinkable eyelids that turn to eye out the audience and other lions, giving him a remarkable character and personality. The mouth opens and closes, and there's a mirror on his forehead - demons are frightened off by their own appearance. Our main lion was black, and he leapt over the stage and strategically placed tables, twitching in time to the energetic drums that waxed and waned throughout the performance, building up to crescendos and then suddenly falling away to almost complete silence.

Pretty spectacular. I think, though, that next year I will leave the glimpsing behind and head for the centre of the action in Singapore...

Repository

2012-01-26T22:08:00.000+08:00

A dusty place for old things, uncomfortably outdated in its gallery of cloudy-eyed stuffed animals, and the skulls of creatures hunted to the far edge of the critically endangered list. The Muzium Sabah is just what you might expect in a downtrodden outpost of an ex-colony. Helpful signs such as "Kereci - Chair" and "Dressing Table" tell you precisely what you don't need to know about exhibits. Other signs are only in Malay - "Teapots" above a collection of bronze, yes, teapots - each one different in their intricacy and beauty, their story veiled by the simplicity of the sign.

There are English mistranslations, like the horribly insensitive "All except six Australian soldiers survived the terrible [Death March]" - the exact reverse is true. And there's a small-minded and meanly racist video from the early 20th century showing ladies in hats directing porters in the rainforest, calling the native tribes lazy and stupid, with not an explanatory sign in sight to put the plummy Oxford accent into context.

In one small room, an odd film is showing on repeat, telling the history of Sabah - made some time in the late sixties, I'd say, with gloating accolades (it was all in Malay, of course, so I have to guess at specifics) to progress and development and deforestation and young college students dressed as perfect mimicries of Princess Margaret - all white gloves and coiffed hair in the tropical heat of Borneo.

And yet, and yet... beautiful ceramics from the 11th century wreck of a Chinese trading ship, dredged from the depths and lovingly displayed in a dry aquarium, the barnacles still clinging to a thousand-year-old jug, broken plates stacked on their sides to hide the shattered sides... The ceramics gallery is a vivid picture of the cultural crossroads that Borneo has forever been - Qing ginger jars, Murut burial vases, uncomfortable ceramic pillows, ritual Ming dynasty porcelain, a mysterious Mediterranean amphora, Thai bowls, intricate Japanese kendi from the 1600s, Vietnamese dragons competing with traditional Chinese depictions, a Laotian ewer, and then at the end of the gallery the more familiar designs of the 19th century Dutch factories. There's a Thai water jar used by the Dusun in the 16th century, and when I compare its glazed beauty and gentle symmetry with the garish blue plastic tanks that store my water, well, there really isn't a comparison to be made. How have we rejected this kind of beauty from our lives in favour of such ugly practicality?

In pride of place, of course, is the entire, jawdropping skeleton of a Bryde's Whale, which died just off the Kota Kinabalu coast in 2006, and which is the biggest in existence today.

It caused a small commotion when some anglers found it in the shallows off one of the islands across the K.K. bay (Pulau Gaya); tourists and fishermen spent the night pouring water over it to keep it alive and the following day it was towed out to deeper waters. Relief all round. Until it appeared again a few days later, this time dead. It's a little sad that you aren't allowed to take any photos inside the museum (for absolutely no apparent reason than that they think that's a rule a museum should have...), but no photo I could have taken would have conveyed the amazingness of this being - and the thought of it living and breathing far beneath the boat I took out to the islands last year is one of the wonders of my world.

I probably wouldn't go so far as Sabah Museum staff, though, who suggest that you might "Come and Romance it"...

The rains have come

2012-01-19T18:00:00.000+08:00

The rains have come, and everywhere there is water. My route out to the village schools has progressed from bad to worse to scary, a 4WD obstacle course of mudslides and potholes hidden in puddles. The rivers break their banks, the dams overflow their walls, and the road disappears beneath muddy running water. When the waters recede, a slippery, knee-deep quagmire awaits drivers – I am lucky with my big four-wheel-drive; for some of my teachers, the mud would theoretically reach above the floor of their little Malaysian cars. I say theoretically, for when the road is like this, half the teachers simply don’t go to work.

Sometimes the road just disappears entirely, sliding down into the rainforest a hundred metres below. A couple of days later, I drive past again to find that diggers have been at work, cutting into the cliff above – there is little else they can do but write off the collapsed side, which is now a lump of pale clay clogging up the river in the valley.

Sometimes even my rough, tough tractor of a car can’t cope, and I’ve spent a few scary minutes in the past fortnight, the engine wailing, the wheels slipping, wondering if I’m ever going to get up a hill.

All this makes me wonder if it’s bad news or good that the Ministry and the British Council have finally decided that this placement is too difficult, and have found me some new schools to work with. While I’m sad to say goodbye to the beautiful place I live in, and to my sweet little house, I will get to keep one of my schools, which I will visit once a fortnight for a whole day (leaving at 5am, and getting home around 7 in the evening). Theoretically the teachers at the other four schools will come and take part in afternoon sessions there, but I’m not too hopeful, given past experience.

My four new schools are within a 40-minute drive from Ranau, all but one on tarred roads – what luxury! I began visiting them on Tuesday, and so far, it’s been pretty positive. These schools have seen a little of what the project can offer, through their links with my colleague Fiona’s schools in town, and they’re keen to be part of it. Their understanding is still very shallow though, and I have been spending most of the time explaining again and again.

“So, you will teach the children?”

“No, I am not a teacher here – I will be helping the teachers, working together to look at their classrooms and teaching practice.”

“Okay, so you will teach them to be better?”

“Well, not really, we’ll work together on things that interest them, like teaching methodology.”

“Okay, so you will train them to be better?”

“No, I’m not a trainer, I will be working WITH the teachers to help them.”

“Uh. Okay. So next week, can you train all the teachers on how to teach?”

At that point I leave it, and hope that the next chat will be more productive…

Shopping in Sabah

2012-01-11T13:54:00.001+08:00

Not for me the strip-lit, noisy, impersonal malls of England - when I shop for fruit and vegetables in Malaysia, it's at the marketplace in town, a mass of brightly-dressed women, each crouched beside a mat that holds the produce of their little plot of land in the village - a few bundles of rambutans, a bag of wild rice, perhaps, or some little packets of red chillies, the fewer the chillies the higher the potency.

When I drive out to the villages I have another option: the roadside stalls. Often built of scavenged wood, they are a representation of one of my favourite aspects of living here in Sabah. The owner of each stall will visit it in the early morning, bringing whatever produce she has harvested from her land the day before. She will string up each bunch of bananas or packet of chillies on its own nail, and price it - usually one ringgit (25 pence) per item. And then she will leave it, return home to work. A customer will come along, choose her item, and tuck the ringgits into a rusty tin or sometimes a custom-made wooden box - my favourite cashbox so far is an old baby's bottle, a slit cut into the side, nailed to a wooden post. No one steals, no one leaves without paying. At night, the owner returns to collect her cash and take back any unsold produce. I simply cannot imagine it working anywhere but here.

Fruits of the monsoon

2012-01-11T12:32:00.003+08:00

I arrived back in Borneo on New Year's Day. I haven't seen a blue sky since.

December to February is the "rainy season" in Borneo, and although when I first heard this term I laughed it off, it raining every day in Borneo regardless of the season, I now understand. It rains. And rains. Every day. At 5am, at noon, mid-afternoon, and crashing down on my roof in the middle of the night. The rain god does not care what I am doing; if I am running to my car with a pile of books in my arms, if the only nearby shelter is a very flimsy tree, it rains. Sometimes it's just a light scattering of raindrops that goes on for five hours, sometimes it's a shake-in-your-gumboots, Thor-striking-the-Earth thunderstorm that goes on for five hours. In the rainy season in Borneo, it rains. You have been warned.

There are some good side effects though, one of which is the fruit. An American colleague of mine, here on her first foreign job, was holding forth at the breakfast table at a Project meeting last year. "I don't mind the food here," she said, "but what I can't understand is why they don't sell all the fruit all the time. Last week I could buy oranges, this week none of the market stalls are selling them. It's so weird." The rest of us looked at each other, wondering who was going to explain the concept of "seasonable food" to a girl who'd lived her life in a place where, if oranges are out of season, they get flown in from somewhere they are in season.

I think it's great - it's a kind of marking of the seasons that you just don't get in England. When the rambutans started appearing on trees in mid-November, everyone got excited. It's a little like Xmas - if the decorations are up half the year, the actual event doesn't seem so special any more!

Rambutans are one of my favourite Bornean fruit. They taste a little like litchis, but with a ragged, woody centre instead of a smooth pip. They have a bright, prickly covering – you can spot them at the market a mile off, ranging from a watercolour-yellow-pink to a deep, sensuous purple.

Then there’s tarap, a peculiarly gross fruit with a hard shell protecting segments of wet, sticky flesh that cling to their stems with inner tentacles, and which make a squelchy sound as you pull them off. You suck the sweet-and-sour flesh off a grey inner pip.

Buah tampoi is a much neater fruit, encased in a thick shell that is squeezed to break it into two clean halves.

Langsat feels a little like it comes from the citrus family with its thin peel and segmented innards, but it has a subtler taste than that of oranges and lemons.

Of course, it being the rainy season, the air is thick with the stench of that most Malaysian of fruit, the durian. The durian is famous for its smell; it’s not unbearable on its own, a sort of slightly sickly-sweet air that makes you wonder vaguely what’s gone off; the durian, however, is not sold bit by bit, but by the truckload. The road to Kota Kinabalu is lined with pop-up stalls, trucks with an umbrella stuck over the heap of yellow fruit, a scale on a table, an old granny or a teenager guarding the family fortune. These sections of the road are problematic for a foreign driver – I simply never expect the person in front of me to suddenly slam on brakes and turn, squealing, off the road, as if just the glimpse of a durian turned on the desire switch in the driver’s brain. People go a little crazy here for durian; luckily, as a foreigner, I’m allowed to say no. The conversation goes a little like this:

“Emily, have some durian!” (laughter all round)

“Oh, uh, no, thanks.”

“Ah, you don’t like it eh? We Malaysians love it!”

“I know, I’m sure I’ll learn to love it while I’m here, but not just yet.”

“Inshallah, inshallah, you will learn.”

And then their eyes light up, they make a comment along the lines of “all the more for us then!” and everyone adoringly grabs a slimy piece to suck on.

Little Men

2011-11-11T18:36:00.000+08:00

Of all the unfortunate obstacles to come across when working in an under-developed part of the world, one of the biggest must be the Little Man in a Little Job. Deprived of the intelligence that would enable him to buy his way to the Big Man's Table, and with no job satisfaction or life fulfilment, the Little Man relies on his limited power to make life a misery for those unfortunate enough to work beneath him. Oh, and squirrelling away enough public funds to support his car habit.

My personal Little Man, unfortunately an official in the Language Division of my local education authority, goes by the name of Mr Jeafry Goh. I knew this from the first time I saw him getting out of his ENORMOUS four-wheel-drive. This is because it was emblazoned on his car door: MR JEAFRY GOH. Underneath he'd had his address inscribed. On a personal car. I think that was the first time I thought he might be trouble. The second time was when he called me over to a group of teachers, and said "Emily, isn't it true that you are paid RM15,000 a month to work here?" RM15,000 a month is around £3000, so I laughed out loud and said I wished that were the case. Since then, every single teacher I work with, and some I don't, have asked me to confirm the huge amount of money I earn. Bearing in mind that the average wage of a teacher is RM2000, this was insensitivity of the grossest kind. Particularly when he bought his seventh car recently - RM75,000 in cash, he proudly told us, showing us a picture of it - on a local civil servant's salary...

Then he overheard me speaking to a teacher about a car he wanted to rent me. Mr Goh immediately and without pause waved away all competitors, and said magnanimously that he would rent me his pristine, foreign-made 4WD. The teachers all immediately retracted their offers. The local agent from British Council fell for it, but when I turned up to collect the car with the agent, the foreign-made 4WD had turned into a Malaysian-made tin can. When I complained, he told me that "women can't drive bigger cars anyway." I took it on the understanding that I would be looking for something bigger, and when that something bigger turned up, he accused me of having requested something smaller in the first place... He also sent me threatening text messages, which is okay, because he's about two feet shorter than me - I think I could take him on.

Perhaps the funniest things about him, and I am not someone who laughs at another's language errors, are his language errors. He marked one of my teachers down on their annual observation for teaching Good afternoon - "Good evening is used from 1pm", he confidently told the teacher, who then taught it to his whole class, making for an awkward encounter between us one afternoon when I had to correct him.

My colleague the other day went to see him to ask him if she could use a certain budget for a concert she's holding. "No," he said, "that budget's only for meetings. I don't know what sort of hanky-panky you're going to get up to."

Fiona stared. "Jeafry, I don't think that word means what you think it means."

"No," he said decisively and positively, "I can't have you and those teachers of yours getting up to hanky-panky with this money."

Fiona left it. Hopefully one day he'll repeat it to a higher official who can actually speak English.

But the reason for this little rant is that he has now taken his vendetta against me one step further than spreading rumours about me. One of my teachers, who has worked in the same school for 18 years, has just been notified that he is up for transfer. He doesn't want to move, and will have to leave his wife, who works in another local school, to live apart during the week. Two more teachers are being moved from another school, despite the fact they have below the minimum student-teacher ratio already. And herein lies the problem: Little Men in Little Places actually do have power. Jeafry is able to, at a whim, remove a teacher from his job, his wife, and his child, and plonk him down in a school six hours' drive away, in a region where they speak a different language. And he can do this in the middle of the term, if he likes. If he wants to, he can take away part of a teacher's salary. Or he can make sure that the teacher is never put up for promotion or further training. And if he doesn't like me, the only thing he can do to me is make sure that the ten teachers on my list no longer want to be on that list.

The next two years are going to be fun.

Morning drive

2011-10-28T20:43:00.000+08:00

On Wednesday, due to circumstances beyond my control (Skyping opportunities…), I found myself still in town at 4pm, and, unwilling to make a trip to the village that might finish in the dark, I decided to stay the night and return early the next morning, in time for my first meeting at 8am.

That was an adventure I’m unlikely to repeat in a hurry.

I left at 4:45am, in the dark, very sleepy-eyed. The sky was just beginning to lighten as I reached the end of the tarred road, and, thinking I would be safe, I turned onto the dirt. But the dirt road drops from the tar, into a valley where they have cut the road down from where it was simply a track to ten metres or so into the earth, where a solid stone base forms a good foundation for a tarred road – the electricity poles still stand at the former level, but not for long – if the current rains are anything to go by, the man-made molehills that support the poles will not last a week after the start of the rainy season in December.

The dirt road drops from the tar into a valley. And the lightening sky disappeared just like that into a bank of fog. Houses were only just visible at the roadside, and it became almost as dark as it had been when I set off from town.

After a few minutes of bouncing around in the dark, a faint wash of pale pinks and blues began to push through the mist.

Then I reached the apex of the road works, just before the road turns into a dirt that will not be covered by tar for a decade or so yet, and just where the road soared into the sky again, I left the fog behind and shielded my eyes from the sunrise, breaking over rainforested mountains and waking villages. Another car stopped too, a Malaysian couple heading to town, they oohed and aahed with me without a word of translation being needed.

I jumped back in my car, reinvigorated by the cool air, only to round the next corner into fog with a visibility range of approximately… well… the end of my bonnet, basically. Thick, grey, gloopy fog that clung to the leaves of the trees and slowly poured its way over mountains and into the valleys I was driving through. Life tends to start early in the villages – I now wake up around 5:30am every day, like it or not, with the roosters and the dogs and the children screaming under cold water taps. And so, at 6am, figures started appearing out of the mists, the gaunt, hard frames of old men and women, baskets strapped to their backs, machetes in hands, off into the forests to forage for vegetables for the market or for home. Then children. Children alone or in packs, dressed in their traditional blue-and-white uniforms, headscarves on the girls, slicked back hairstyles straight off the football field for the boys. Even pre-schoolers walked along, some of them headed for schools still an hour’s walk away, tiny in their little blue uniforms but already independent, no need for a grown-up's hand to hold on this daily journey.

Apart from nearly nodding off at the beginning, and having to drive at 5km an hour, hunched over the wheel and watching for the first sign of an oncoming car, it was actually a pleasant drive, before the 30-degree heat of the day kicked in (that was at 7am). I even managed to get out to my first school by 8am - I was hoping for a little sympathy from my teachers, but it turned out one of them does the drive every single morning. Oh well.

R! E! F! L! E! C! T! I! O! N! Reflection!

2011-10-28T17:42:00.000+08:00

Here in East Malaysia, reflection is an important part of the teacher’s day. For every lesson, a teacher will complete a page in her book, marking down the lesson’s objectives, the aims, links to the curriculum, and a short outline of her plan. At the bottom, she will leave a space to be completed after the lesson: Reflection. Now, for me, reflection at university meant writing about how the children achieved the objectives, whether they learnt anything, what the behaviour was like, whether the children enjoyed the activities I designed for them, and what I might do differently in the future. Anything in fact that involves a little bit of introspection, self-criticism, and awareness of teaching practice.

My teachers will write something like this: “70% of students understood. 30% of students need more drilling.”

This makes me cry, on so many different levels.

How do they know that 70% of the children understood? Did they test them? Did they walk around the classroom asking insightful questions? Did the kids really understand, or did they just say “yes” when asked “Do you understand?” And more drilling? Really? Because the amount of drilling now seems a little excessive.

Becoming a reflective teacher is one of the mantras of my project though, and it’s certainly a vital part of being a professional and developing teacher. It’s a basic requirement for becoming a classroom researcher – which is another of the project mantras. So you can imagine my frustration when I sit down with a teacher and the conversation goes a little like this:

Emily: “So, how do you feel about that lesson?”

Teacher: “Um… it went bad.”

E: “Really? Why do you think that?”

T: “Uh… it was just bad.”

E: “Ok, but what did you feel was bad about it?”

T: “Aahhh… what did you feel was bad?”

E: “Well, I really want to know your opinion.”

T: “Well, can you give me the answer? Because I don’t know.”

Argh! Even my very best teachers ask me to give them “the right answer.” As if I were an expert teacher with all the knowledge in the world. I’m not here as an expert to teach them, but as a friend to help them find the answers that fit their own, unique situation. I’ve come up against a cultural barrier, as in Malaysia one person is always hierarchically superior to another, and is always deferred to. A local official didn’t help, when on my first day in the village, he told a group of teachers “Miss Emily is here to teach you how to be a proper, good teacher.” A proper teacher? What even is that? Some of the teachers I work with have been in the classroom for as long as I’ve been alive. How can I possibly say they’re not good teachers, when I’ve been in their country for just 3 months? The standard method of teacher training here, as it is in most countries, is as follows:

Expert visits from capital city. Expert stays in luxury hotel. Expert spends 6 hours each day lecturing teachers about theory. Expert flies home. Teachers return to their schools scratching their heads. Teachers pass on what they got from Expert. Everyone scratches their heads. Children remain uneducated.

My project is a big step, even for the British Council, in that it's relatively long-term, it's extremely focused and very localised, and it's based on good teaching practice - i.e. we want teachers to be more student-centred, therefore the teacher training has to be more student-centred. Whether it will work or not is dependent on change, not only within the teachers, but in the mentors, many of whom are begging to be allowed to train their teachers (it would be a hell of a lot easier, and would last until approximately one minute after the mentor got on the plane home). Instead we have to draw blood from stones, slowly moving our teachers towards a more introspective and developed way of teaching, thus creating teachers who will continue to learn and develop long after we're all back home.

The immense frustration I feel is probably worth it.

I just wish I could drop the probably.

An afternoon's work

2011-10-15T18:39:00.001+08:00

There's an enormous tree in front of my house. It towers above the path, five, or maybe six storeys high, with enormous leaves and strong branches, dripping with big, heavy, green fruit. Marang. Today the afternoon games included a raid on the fruit. A group of neighbourhood boys propped an old plank against the trunk then took a running jump, the plank springboarding each raider high enough to grab the lowest branch. Like lithe monkeys they swung up into the higher boughs. The last boy on the ground passed up a 4-metre bamboo pole, split at the end into a convenient fork.

A raider slid easily along a branch, both eyes not on the long fall to the ground below, but on the one-kilogram prize at the branch's end. When he was as far out as daring allowed, he swung the bamboo pole, whacking the fruit, or using the prongs to hook the bunch and shake it, until THUMP! a little spray of dirt, a frightened squawk from an unsuspecting chicken, the prize was won. When all the boys had dropped a few fruit, they swung down again through the kingly tree, landing on the damp earth to claim their spoils.

A poverty of education

2011-10-14T20:12:00.004+08:00

This week I went to visit the dumb kids. Not my terminology, their teacher's. "Emily, you want to see my lesson? But they are, you know, dumb kids, not too smart. You sure?"

The dumb kids in this school are not only relegated to dumbness for the rest of their school careers, they're also relegated to the worst classroom in the school. Now, I've seen some fairly bad classrooms in my time, both in Africa and in Malaysia. So when I walked in, I managed to smile despite the lack of ceiling, the broken whiteboard, the splintered desks. I didn't even blink an eye at the fact that none of the fans or lights installed in the other classrooms at this school were considered necessary for this classroom. It was when I sat down at the teacher's desk on the far side of the classroom. The "window" next to me wasn't glassed, but was instead secured with chicken wire, but that wasn't it either.

It was the sewerage I could smell from the open drain that ran in the ditch behind the classroom. Yes. The Dumb Kids are literally being taught in the... well, in the not very nice anatomical part of the metaphorical school body. Lovely.

There is hope though - these 18 children have been placed in the Year 4 remedial class because at the beginning of the year, despite having been through three years of compulsory schooling, they were unable to read - not unable to gather meaning from the written word, but literally unable to say what sound the symbol "a" represents. For the first six months, they remained in this state - mainly because for half their subjects, the teachers simply didn't turn up for class, because what's the point - they are Dumb Kids after all. Then along came Mr Walter, who had the lovely idea that perhaps they simply hadn't been taught how to be Smart Kids yet. Armed with a book on Montessori methods, and a vague understanding of phonics, he set out to teach them the alphabet. They're already onto consonant-vowel sounds - ba be bi and so forth. With his limited understanding, he's unfortunately taught them that in English, bi makes the sound bee, which caused some consternation when he asked them to read bike out loud. But the point is, they're already 26 letters and 10 phonemes on from where they were six months ago. I want to go to their previous teachers and shake them and say "You see what a rubbish teacher you were?" but I guess that would be a little rude.

The kids themselves are so sweet. They're about ten years old, and they are so proud of the task they're doing in this photo - drawing beautiful, big pictures of ba be bi bo bu to stick on their rubbish walls.

This week, I've also been coming to terms with the discipline that's used in rural classrooms. The law says girls can't be caned, and boys can only be caned by a headmaster in the presence of other teachers. In urban areas this is strictly abided by - my colleague in Ranau town hasn't even seen a cane yet. Out in the bush it's different, and most of my teachers carry canes into the classroom. I haven't seen much use of it yet, apart from using it to point at the board or at a student, and, just once, to lightly tap a little girl on the shoulders when she wouldn't go and sit down.

Most teachers use other disciplinary methods - not much better ones - one of my female teachers on the Project pinches her students. They just laugh at her, so I really don't know why she bothers. But then the other day, when I was trying to have a chat with a teacher about her class, my eye was caught by the teacher in the corner, the Discipline Guru, talking with some students who had been reported for bad behaviour. Two boys and a girl. All at once, the hands were out, and the cane came down, once, twice. I almost thought I'd imagined it, until the taller boy turned to the window and scrunched up his face, the wetness already falling from his eyes before he could hide it.

I've never been a fan of corporal punishment, but at the same time figured there was far worse abuse going on which could really traumatise children - canings were always laughed off by my male friends in Zimbabwe. But that was before I saw it in action, and realised it's such an unnecessary disciplinary technique - my students have always been far better behaved than the Malaysian students I've seen, who regularly climb up on desks and fight in the classroom.

That's because I traumatise my students in much more subtle ways. Bring on the long, hard stare, and put away that cane.

Drivin'

2011-10-07T19:42:00.001+08:00

I picked up my first two hitchhikers today along the dirt road. The first was an accident - the man - obviously a worker on the wooden house being built at the side of the road, with his toolbelt and deep tan - was standing in the middle of the road flapping his arms; I slowed down to avoid hitting him and paused just long enough for him to leap into the back of my bakkie. He hesitated slightly when he realised I was a foreigner, but he must have decided I looked trustworthy for he smiled and, waving a hand, said "Go! Go!" in English. So I went. Very conscious of having a passenger clinging to the edge of my open bakkie, I slowed down quite a lot, but he still bounced merrily away over the rocks and ditches, periodically waving to someone else on the roadside. After a few kilometres, he banged on my roof, jumped off and waved goodbye.

My second hitchhiker flagged me down in the usual way, and, seeing his bowed walk and heavy load, I stopped for him. He was a tiny ancient man, at least a foot shorter than me. He put his three sharpened sticks in the back and then climbed (and that word is used in its literal sense) into the high front seat with his other baggage: an umbrella with more holes than fabric, and an old Adidas satchel, only barely held together by a few pieces of twine. He smiled at me, a big enough smile to show a single brown tooth, then he sort of crouched in the seat, close to the door, taking up as little space as humanly possible. The only other interaction we had was ten kilometres later, when he pointed at a wooden shack and said "Saya rumah" - "My house." His sticks had fallen down in the back and he couldn't reach them. I had to get them out for him. Mumbling apologetically, he hobbled home.

Progress

2011-10-07T19:29:00.000+08:00

The electricity poles are coming!

Normally you might find me lamenting the encroachment of technology into the rainforest, but not this time. The people in the villages in this region feel so isolated and forgotten - they're close enough to town that they see the televisions and the newspapers and the fridges, and they want them. And whether that's a good or a bad thing, there are other things they want, which the new road being built and the electricity will bring to them. A link with education, for example - there will be better contact between teachers and the administration, which will hopefully lead to better teachers, once they are being regularly observed. Resources like the internet and English movies and songs can be used in the classroom, improving children's access to the language. It will bring them closer to different people, people who aren't like them, who are darker or lighter or wear funny clothes, or, yes, I admit it, buy food for starving animals (I'm such a weirdo.) And that will change the children, hopefully for the better, perhaps to be more tolerant and aware of other cultures.

Plus it means I get a fridge, and that is awesome.

It's not a done deal though. The poles are being put up at a rapid rate - I drive in on Sunday afternoon, the poles are up 42km from Ranau. By the time I drive back to town on Friday afternoon, they've already stretched to the 65km mark - which is just 3 km shy of my house. Wires are strung between a few of the poles, where the rainforest has been cut back; in other places they're waiting for the men with machetes still. But this pace is due to one thing: elections are coming. Elections are coming, and the men who want to win again are the same men who have been promising this region electricity for years. The poles are going up because they need the votes that cluster along the dusty roadside in this poor backwater. So we get a sudden show of support and awareness, and the poles go up, and at least the first few kilometres will certainly be connected to the power grid in time for elections.

Those places that aren't connected by then, though, will lose out. Because if the party wins, they will stop the construction so that they can use the electricity issue as an election promise next time. And if they lose the election (which would be a miracle) they'll stop the construction as a punishment. Lose-lose situation for us really. So everyone is rooting for the construction men - I see them everyday outside a different house, being served lunch by a grateful populace. Local teenagers go out with machetes ahead of the crew removing branches and cutting back undergrowth to make it easier for the poles to be put up quickly.

Malaysia is incredibly corrupt. Transparency International rates it 56th in the world this year. Money comes, it goes, it reappears in the back pocket of a prime minister, nobody does a thing. So when I expressed surprise in my first week here at the fact that electricity had been promised to my region every election for the last twelve years and every promise had been subsequently broken, people just shrugged their shoulders and said "That's Malaysia." Which doesn't stand up under scrutiny, as Singapore, which was part of the same country until recently and has the same people living in it, is the least corrupt place in the world.

At least I'm not in Indonesia, though, the most corrupt place in the world, where a colleague of mine (who is married to an Indonesian woman, and has 2 children) is stopped at immigration every single time he enters the country on his spousal visa, led into a backroom, and asked to pay an "immigration fee".

Orang Putih

2011-10-04T11:18:00.002+08:00

So I'm in the classroom, getting ready to observe a lesson, and the teacher begins with writing on the board "Things in Classroom." (Articles are a problem for Malay speakers - they don't have any.) "What can you see?" he asks the children, who respond in a mixture of Dusun and Malay, the teacher translating and writing on the board.

"Eraser!"
"I see table!"
"Pencil!"
"Orang putih!" ("White Person!")

It's always such a boost to the self-esteem to be named as an object in a classroom.

"Orang putih" is a cry I'm becoming familiar with these days. My little house sits on what in this village counts as a major highway - a dirt track that leads to about half the houses from the school. The children are fascinated by me in school; the way I say hello, the way I write in my book, the way I look at their work, all of these are endless sources of laughter and amazement. So how much more interesting is the way I brush my teeth, or eat my breakfast? The neighbourhood children are at my currently-curtainless-but-not-for-long windows from 6am until long after dark, gazing through the windows, giggling if I look at them. In desperation I started to ignore them entirely - and that's when the calls started, as if I were a panda in a zoo - you know, the hordes of visitors staring into the cage, clicking their fingers and calling out "Here! Look here!" in an effort to get the panda focused on their camera lens. Well, my zoo visitors call "White person! White person!" When I ignore it, the calls get louder. One teenager rapped on the glass, but he soon stopped that - a white person might be more interesting than a local, but an angry white person is a hell of a lot scarier...

The house is slowly coming together, with some minor issues. I ordered some furniture, which got delivered by a pair of very dusty men last week, looking between the village and the orang putih with incredulity. My kitchen is still a little unfinished...

I still have no electricity as the generator I bought broke on the very first go. Made in China. I usually make an effort to avoid Chinese products, both because of the politics and the quality, but it's difficult in Malaysia, with its large Chinese population. Chinese products flood the market, and both Chinese and Malay-owned shops are full to bursting with rubbishy, flimsy, rock-bottom-prices tat - it's nearly impossible to buy good quality kitchenware in Ranau, and the first pot I bought cracked - yes, a metal product cracked - the third time I used it... The generator was promptly returned to the shop the next day, where I bullied the poor man into refunding me with threats of the consumer association. At first he refused, and said he would refund me everything except for RM100 (£25 or so), because when he resold it it would have to be as a second-hand product. "Yes," I said. "A second-hand faulty product." But he didn't seem to get the irony. "He very hard woman," he said to my teacher friend (gender-specific pronouns also being absent from Malay.) The next generator I buy is going to be Korean-made, the next pot German, and my new car Japanese.

Yes, I got a new car this week - a great big Isuzu D-Max, the type of twin-cab that's driven by young men who need a big car and bigger speakers to prove themselves. I felt ridiculous picking it up this afternoon, dressed from school in my Malaysian-style sarong skirt and pretty Australian flip-flops (thanks to my little sister Lisa!) I had to climb up into it, and when I sat behind the wheel, I felt like a little girl playing dress-up, only with a car instead of mum's clothes. But at least, unlike my Malaysian baby 4x4, I won't rattle like a pebble in a tin can when I drive out to the schools any more!

Screamfest

2011-10-03T19:19:00.000+08:00

I discovered today why my teachers scream and shout in the classroom. I went to the first day of a three-day training session for the new curriculum for Year 2 teachers. In the Listening & Speaking workshop, one of the games the trainer suggested was "Student Scream." The instructions: "Students choose a phrase and then can scream it at the other groups until it's the other one's turn."

The trainer backs this up by saying "The louder you shout it, the more you'll remember it."

That's going to be the front page quote on my next report on Malaysian teaching practice.

The Big City

2011-09-17T18:42:00.000+08:00

Discovering you're a country hick is never fun.

Arriving in Kuala Lumpur on Friday, my first thought was, gosh, look at that - they've got trains. Then I mentally smacked myself, and boarded the express train to the centre of town, where I gaped at the existence of internet-connected tourist information booths. A taxi drove me through buildings taller than three storeys, and past beautiful old mosques. And I stared.

My first action at the hotel was to ask where the mall was, having some shopping that needed to be done (apparently in Kota Kinabalu, file dividers simply do not exist, and shop assistants repeat my words like I'm a crazy person. "File divisions?" "No, dividers." "Divisiers? You mean a document folder?" "No, I mean a divider, and if I meant a folder, I would have picked up one of those pretty folders on prominent display behind you.") The man at the desk suggested 6 malls, all within walking distance, and offered to call a taxi to take me to several more. I blushed and walked across the road to the Pavilion, Asia's Premier Luxury Mall, and owner of the Tallest Liuli Crystal Fountain in Malaysia, as endorsed by the Malaysia Guinness Book of Records. Truly. I'm not about to admit that I don't know what a Liuli Crystal Fountain is, because the look on my face already marks me as the hick I am.

The mall is about 50 floors high and probably covers more floorspace than the whole of Kota Kinabalu, and it has a Japan Street, which has a two-floor shop devoted to plastic cameras, and authentic Japanese street food stalls. There are two art galleries, and one hundred and seven restaurants and cafes. Four of those are Starbucks. Actually, I think it might have been three, but I got lost and passed one of them twice. There are two car dealerships - Bentley and Jaguar.

I'm overwhelmed, and not least because I've just seen two women dressed in black sacks with a mesh covering their eyes buying sexy lingerie.

I get lost.

Then I find the Nando's in the basement, and everything becomes alright again - and it's even okay that the waiters say "Yebo!" with a thick Malaysian accent, because Oliver Mtukudzi is playing on the stereo, and the vegetarian burger tastes of home...

Through the windscreen

2011-09-12T20:21:00.000+08:00

I drove down to Kota Kinabalu today. It's a two-hour drive, and is one of the best things about living in the mountains - it's a stunning drive to town, with a different view round every corner. On good days, you can see the sea from the mountains, and the blue of the sky draws the green out of the land and makes everything a shade of turquoise. On good days, Mount Kinabalu hides around each bend, playing peekaboo, and looming above the roads and villages.

Today was a good day down, and a bad day up.

A bad day is, well, it's bad for driving, because the twisty pretzel of a road becomes even more dangerous when you can't see for the rain, but the views are just as beautiful as on a good day. On a "bad" day, the blue mountains haul themselves up out of duvets of white cloud and drifting mists. On top of each ridge, the rain clears and the greenness of the forest is even greener for the wet.

Then you descend a little, and suddenly you hit a bank of mist, and for a kilometre all you can see is the brake lights of the car directly in front of you.

Just before sunset, I was around 2000 metres high when the air around me cleared and I had a spectacular view of thunderstorms in the distance.

It rains a lot in Borneo - pretty much every day, and it's the dry season right now. We get around 4 metres of rain a year, which is a lot of rain, especially for someone who comes from a country with an average annual rainfall of 80cm. But lots of rain means lots of rainbows - double rainbows, triple rainbows, circular rainbows, rainbows that finish in your backyard... It goes a long way to making up for those four metres.

The Lower Kinabatangan

2011-09-10T10:36:00.000+08:00

Perhaps the most eye-catching thing about the jungle in north-east Sabah is how little of it is left to catch the eye. On the three-hour drive east from Ranau, the commonest view is one of the oil palm, twenty-year-old dark green hulks, pale and tender babies, a spiky carpet from roadside to horizon. Palm oil is the difference between squalor and wealth for many families - from a single hectare, harvesting twice a month, a farmer can make RM2000 a month with ease, in a region where the average wage - if you're lucky enough to have a paid job - is around RM500. It's easier to condemn the palm oil industry when it doesn't mean the difference for you between bare subsistence and an education for your child.

However. Most of these plantations belong to Big Business, not Little Farmer. They replaced primary jungle with a non-native weed. The palms are a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, and malaria and dengue fever are on the rise. Pygmy elephants, unable to cross the fenced and guarded plantations, are trapped in small pockets of forest. The birds are badly affected - in primary Bornean jungle, you'll find more than 220 species; in secondary forest after cultivation that drops to around 60. Palm oil plantations support ten. Just ten.

Palm oil is in everything you use, from shampoo to lipstick to cooking oil. For the sake of my view, which is far better when it's of jungle, please check the label next time you shop, and buy the product that doesn't contain death and destruction!

Besides, if your lipstick's got palm oil in it, then your beauty regime is killing orangutans, and orangutans are quite simply the most touching creatures I have ever had the privilege to meet.

They're being poisoned, starved, maimed and orphaned in large numbers by the plantations, but if they're lucky, they'll be found and taken home by the Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre. I wasn't originally going to go to the Centre - I'd had visions of a cramped zoo. But what it actually is is 43 sq km of forest, and a team of amazing, loving, foresighted people, who gently coax traumatised orangutans back into an independent life in the forest. Starting in the orphanage, the babies and young adults are fed daily at a series of feeding stations, each one deeper into the forest, each one serving smaller amounts, encouraging the orangutans to forage for the rest of their meals. So far, every orangutan has become independent - some are never seen again, some return now and then, to show off a new baby or say hello to a ranger.

Part of the Centre's income derives from Feeding Station A, which is open to the public. You watch from a separate platform as a ranger brings milk and fruit to a platform in the trees, but the orangutans have little care for the separation, and as I was standing there, a young male came swinging onto the boards, loping so close to me I could have cuddled him.

After the sanctuary, we set off on a 90-minute drive south, to a jetty on the Kinabatangan River, the second-longest river in Malaysia, and one of the best-protected reserves - not that you'd think so to look at it. Even here greed has won over thoughtfulness, and in between ten pockets of secondary growth forest, the palm oil plantations are huge. In some places they start right on the riverbank, but there's positive news - the WWF has wrested back control of a 100-metre corridor between each forest pocket, and in most places has ripped out the palms and replanted indigenous trees, allowing wildlife to move more easily. The farmers are not happy, but they've mostly submitted.

At the jetty, I and my co-travellers board a speedboat to travel 45 minutes upriver to "Uncle Tan's Wildlife Camp."

The website and other travellers have warned that it's the roughest camp on the river, that there's no luxury, that it's extremely basic - in short, that it's no 5-star hotel. But I find it far above my expectations. Yes, the accommodation is a mattress under a mosquito net, and you share a cabin with five other people. There's no bathroom as such, and you wash from buckets of river water in the open air. On the other hand, the buildings are wooden and on stilts; beneath them is moss and water, turtles, fish and monitor lizards, and above is the forest canopy, filled with birds. There's a big eating area with a staff cooperative that sells cold beer (there's no electricity except for a few hours in the evening, but they've got ice). And everything's spotlessly clean, which is a little short of a miracle in Sabah.

And it's beautiful and quiet, and on my first night a spotted civet pauses in its prowl less than a metre from me, watches me for a minute, and then silently slips into the forest.

The guys who work here are passionate about conservation and the forest, and knowledgeable. One is studying birdlife, another patrols the nearest corridor in his free time to make sure farmers are staying away. It's all a world away from the Hyatt, my first experience of Borneo, and all the better for it. We're lucky enough to see four orangutans in the wild, and hornbills, and an owl during his nighttime fishing. Eagles glide overhead, and down on the forest floor, we get to see tiny frogs, and chameleons, and what the ranger insists on calling a trilobite - it certainly looks like the fossils, but aren't trilobites extinct? This place is pretty prehistoric - I wouldn't put a live trilobite past it!

I could have done with a few more days, but had to make do with the two nights of boat rides and jungle trekking on offer, before getting back to the village for work...

Mass Consumption

2011-08-31T08:51:00.000+08:00

Ramadan finished today. At 6am the usual morning call to prayer came, but it was much longer than usual, celebrating the fact that finally today most of the nation was still asleep, and not frantically stuffing the last mouthful in before the sun rose, dreading another day without food. By 7:30, when I was having breakfast, the streets were already filling with children dressed in their finery - beautiful, bright, silken shirts and skirts, and little hats and headscarves.

The whole of Ranau seemed to be on the move. At 11am we joined them, driving to a nearby relative of our host. They were camped out on their verandah, an impressive music system blaring traditional songs, a long table bending to the pressure of a thousand different dishes - steamed coconut rice, satay chicken, beef curry, steamed beans and local spinach, stuffed quails' eggs and pumpkin in coconut cream, tiny pineapple tarts, chocolate peanuts and sweet potato cakes. Chairs were arranged around the edge of the verandah and some small bottoms were moved onto a mat to make space for us in the best seats, right by the cake table. We greeted everyone else in the traditional manner, shaking hands and then lifting the right hand to the heart, murmuring "Selamat Hari Raya" to welcome the end of fasting and wish our hosts a happy holiday. As we sat and munched, there was a continual stream of visitors from around the village - many of them were ancient elders, their skin so lined that their faces seemed to be caving in on themselves, tottering in on their own, often in well-washed, well-worn clothing. No matter how ragged, though, they were greeted with courtesy and respect by the couple whose house it was, who lifted the visitor's trembling hand to their foreheads to show the ultimate respect and then guided them to the food.

Meanwhile, a computer was set up and a couple of karaoke microphones appeared. But when the eldest son took the microphone, it was clear that this was no ordinary cringy karaoke. He sang a traditional Hari Raya song in a deep and soulful voice, and then handed over to his little sister and her cousin - slightly unnerving to watch two slight girls in their modest Muslim clothing singing "her lips, her lips, I could kiss them all day if she'd let me; Her laugh, her laugh, she hates it but I think it's so sexy..." I'm fairly certain they weren't the audience Bruno Mars had in mind, but the pronunciation was almost perfect, and if it's a way into English for them, who am I to judge? The whole family eventually had a go, and many of them outsang the English-speaking singers - if only all karaoke singers were so good...

I read that food purchases rise dramatically during Ramadan, presumably because people are shopping on empty stomachs, and everything looks good, but the biggest and most dramatic rise is just before Hari Raya. I guess it's like Christmas - even down to the fairy lights that decorate houses, and the food hampers sold in supermarkets. Everybody wants to gorge, and impress their guests, and have a good time, and that has an impact on the shopping trolleys...

English in the Village

2011-08-27T08:55:00.000+08:00

I visited my most remote school on Wednesday. Karagasan is right at the end of the road, the last point, stuck out on a beige limb on the map of Sabah. Past here, the road becomes a track wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side, branching off to tiny villages and farms. Most of the students board at the school - 35 girls, 34 boys, all squeezed into two small rooms from Sunday night to Friday afternoon. There's no electricity, apart from a little solar power that's used for the headmaster's office, where there's a single printer and laptop for staff to use, although the classrooms have all been equipped with useless lights and fans.

One of my teachers here tells me "What's the point in teaching these students English?" I can see his point (but only a little!) when I watch his class on animals and their sounds, and only one student has ever seen a horse. Also, the curriculum tells him to teach chicken ("chick chick") and hen ("cluck cluck")... There's also no pig in the curriculum, although most of these Christian children have pigs at home.

The children chant after him "HORSE! COW! HEN!" then it's time to match the animals and their sounds in the workbooks. I wonder around the classroom to have a look, but none of the children seem able to carry out the task. It turns out that only 8 of the 35 students are able to read - and this is Year Two. All eight readers went to preschool, which naturally gives them an advantage, but the other 27 somehow managed to get through the whole of Year One without learning to read. Why? "Because we don't have time to teach them, we have to get through the curriculum." Blaming the government seems to me to be avoiding the point that teachers only teach for around 2 or 3 hours a day, and, on average, spend ten minutes preparing. Surely in the other 4 hours of the teaching day an educator can find a free period or two to teach their students to read?

The highlight of the lesson is singing Old MacDonald Had A Farm - the students get so enthusiastic about belting out this song that we end up doing seven verses!

Elephants in the jungle

2011-08-26T09:46:00.000+08:00

I had a slightly surreal moment this week, when a teacher invited me to break the fast at her home. Her husband works at the school as well, and when I said "I'd love to, but are you sure you have the time to cook with such short notice?" she looked at him and laughed. "She has lots of time in the afternoon," he said. "But when the sun goes down, and there's no electricity, and nothing else to do, that's when she's busy!" "Nothing to do but make more babies!" Su screamed with laughter. The surreality came from her appearance: a floor-length baju kurung (the Malaysian national dress - a long blouse over a skirt) and her hair scraped back under a tight headscarf, she's the Good Muslim Wife epitomised, and yet here she was making jokes about sex in a room full of male colleagues! Then she leaned over to me, patted my knee, and said "Well, Emily isn't married yet, so she has no idea what we're talking about..." and I had to smile and blush and mumble that yes indeed, I had no idea what she was talking about...

The berbuka puasa was, as usual, gluttonous - Su is an excellent cook. All the teachers were there and I got handed several beautiful, fat babies to coo over and practise English with (turns out the Malaysian for "Woodiwoodiwoo!" is "Woodiwoodiwoo!") Su's daughter Ca (you say it Cha) was also present, but extremely shy, and it took a lot to get her looking at me. She brought out her Maths book to practise sums with her mother - Su thought she was pretty poor at Maths, but I felt that getting a 5-year-old to answer 7+8= correctly was pretty impressive...

The next day, I was reading in my room, when a scratching came at the door. I looked up nervously: the day before I'd had to chase a rat out of the kitchen. The scratching came again. Then a corner of the black plastic that's taped to the bottom of the door to keep out scorpions was lifted, and I figured a rat probably wasn't smart enough to evolve fingers, so I opened the door. A nervous face gazed up at me from the floor where she was still clutching the plastic: Ca had come to visit. I sat outside with her on the verandah armed with paper and coloured pencils, and we drew trees and cats, girls and boys, suns and butterflies, and she named each one in careful, round script, a different colour for each letter. I couldn't believe how fast she picked up and remembered each word. To test her, we went for a walk through the campus. I marched ahead and she marched behind. Every now again I'd stop, and every time she would bump into me. I'd point at a tree and say "What's that?" and she'd shout "Tree!" and then we'd carry on. At some point we were joined by a gaggle of giggling girls, and a friendly but slightly slow boy from Year 6, and they all giggled and shouted their way through everything I could possibly point at. I pointed at the jungle and said "Elephant!" And they all shouted it back at me. I looked confused, and said "Elephant?", making a trunk with my arm and pointing into the jungle. They all fell about laughing and denying that elephants lived in their jungle.

The next day, a little girl saw me in the school. She came running up, her arm hanging from her nose, shouting "Elephant! Elephant!"

My job here is done.

Getting the third degree

2011-08-19T12:01:00.001+08:00

The children visited again on my second day. They were getting braver. Although the oldest one (Marlin) still translated for them, there was this amazing change going on. For the first time in their lives, they've got a reason to learn English: they want to speak to me. And so now they're getting together to work out phrases they can ask me. I hear them whispering...

"Old?"
then another contributes... "What you old?"
A third says "No, no, How you old?"

Finally it comes, a tap on the shoulder. "Teacher, how old you are?" They've all pooled their knowledge and worked out how to ask me a question that they wanted to ask, not something they were instructed to ask by a coursebook or teacher. This is learning in action! Similarly they work out how to ask about my likes and dislikes, my marriage status, and my religion. I'm waiting for them to work out numbers, when I'm sure they'll ask for my phone and ID number. Even the boys are starting to venture onto the verandah, although they've yet to brave a question!

The religion one was interesting, though - I'd decided beforehand to be completely upfront about not being a religious person, both with teachers and children. So when they asked me "Teacher, what your religion?" I said "I have no religion - I'm not Christian, I'm not Muslim." There was a silent moment. Then one little girl blurted out "No religion?" I confirmed this distressing fact. Marlin managed to work out "Are you the only one with no religion?", so I explained that outside Malaysia, many people don't have religion, and they seemed to accept that. Everyone in Sabah seems to be Christian or Muslim, and there is very little choice in the matter, so an adult telling them that she chose not to be religious must have been a strange and unsettling moment for them. I almost felt bad, but then they got over it and asked me if I liked durian fruit. So I think it's alright now...

They all run off for dinner at the hostel (all these kids are weekly boarders, which is why they're wandering the school compound.) But later, I'm lying on my bed reading when a tentative knock comes on the front door, and "Teacher?" They've come bearing their workbooks for Year 6, asking for help with an assignment. Apart from Marlin, most of the girls have very little English, and their workbook was ridiculous, asking them to choose between three holiday choices and then justify their decisions. The holidays were all in Peninsular Malaysia and cost more for a night than most of their parents earn in a month. And I'm not even sure how many of them know what a holiday is. Still. I get them talking about it and they work out a short text. I suppose you have to start somewhere, but it seems a little remote from their real lives to be talking about 4-star hotels. The solar power finishes and the lights go out, but Marlin's friend simply brings out a torch and we carry on by torchlight until late into the night, chatting about schoolwork and play time and their favourite foods.

I love this job. I think I'm the luckiest mentor on the whole project to be in such a remote area with such a chance to make a difference to children's lives. The other mentors tend to live a short drive from the schools, in their own houses, separate from the students and teachers once school is over for the day. But me - I get to live on the school compound and engage with the kids all the time. My permanent house is almost as good - right by the school gates.

Then again, ask me in 6 months, when I've had a continuous stream of children coming through my house practising their English on me every day...

Into the wilds... 2...

2011-08-19T11:13:00.001+08:00

I left Ranau early on Monday morning, though not as early as I'd planned. My alarm went off at 4:30, I woke up, thought of the drive out to the village, and promptly turned over to sleep again. I still left when the sun was barely above the horizon, though, and I watched it bloom as I followed the tar road north-east. It took me two hours to drive the 60km to Malinsau School, the nearest of my five assigned schools, where I'll be staying while my house is renovated. I drove through tiny villages, some no more than a gathering of two wooden houses with a water tank between them. Farm chickens ran frantically alongside the car until I pulled a little ahead of them; they realised I wasn't a threat and slowed to a nonchalant stroll. Very small piglets scurried after their mothers waggling their tails with excitement, and children walked in groups on their way to school, the girls dressed in headscarves, long blouses, and skirts.

Malinsau Village is 60km from Ranau and about 30 years away. The electricity lines stop far short. There aren't and never will be any plans for phone lines because mobiles phones reached the area first - but the tower closest to the school was put up just 3 months ago, and the generator that powers it broke last week. The teachers estimate they'll have no signal for at least three weeks until it's repaired. There's no treated water, no rubbish collection, no internet. The road is mostly mud and stone, and some sections are unusable during the rains. Many villagers have never even seen Ranau, because the cost of the "taxis" that ply part of the route is more than they can afford. And Malinsau is civilised compared to the last village in my section...

But the road's edges blend into primary lowland forest in many places, and the rivers are crossed by perilous hanging footbridges and wooden road bridges, and the leaves are alive with birds. I saw monitor lizards and an iridescent kingfisher, and in many places, I was the only car on the road.

My temporary home has a verandah overlooking a clearing in the forest, a flat valley floor where low, stilted, wooden buildings make up Malinsau Primary School, and children roam in gangs, crying "What's the time, Mr. Wolf?" in Bahasa Malay.

The children are fascinated by me, and when I sit on the verandah on my first afternoon reading my Kindle, they don't take long to form a big audience. They push and shove each other and get close enough to me for me to feel their touch on my back, but the minute I turn to look, they shriek and scatter. Some are a little braver. I'm almost about to burst out laughing when a girl - who I think knows I'm about to laugh - finally takes the plunge with "Teacher, what's your name?" She's a beautiful little Dusun girl who looks around 8 but predictably turns out to be 13. One to malnutrition again - none of the town children are as tiny as the kids out here. Through the 13-year-old, the kids ask more and more questions, and even move on to asking me about the Kindle. For a majority of these kids, who've only ever seen a book in the form of a school textbook, the Kindle is alien, and they are fascinated. Another 13-year-old asks if she can borrow it, and although I have to say no, I tell her she can borrow real books from me, and her eyes light up.

All the children seem keen to learn, but the system seems equally determined to beat it out of them. There's a lot of rote learning in English lessons. In one lesson I observed, the teacher wrote out 4 sentences which were completely disconnected from each other and showed no pattern, then she shouted at the children "The!" and the children responded "The!"

"Louder!" she shouted. The children screamed back "THE!"
"Cat!" "CAT!"
"How do you SPELL it?" "KAH! AH! TUH!"
"The cat!" "THE CAT!"

I was getting a headache already. And the worst was that the classrooms were divided by planks of wood that didn't meet, and that did nothing for soundproofing, and the Year 2 class next door were studying Maths, so our "THE CAT IS IN THE BOX!" was competing with their "TEN TIMES TEN IS ONE HUNDRED!"

The teacher spent forty minutes drilling 4 sentences. By the end, the children had their heads on their tables, and I wished I could do the same. Then they all got out their workbooks to write the sentences out. Not a single one could do it.

Score one for the cycle of poverty and illiteracy.

In another class, the young teacher clearly had a strong relationship with his little students, who laughed at everything he said. His commitment was great, but he was up against the Kurikulum, which is designed by well-meaning academics in Kuala Lumpur and has no meaning for the children out here.

I couldn't resist a picture of one of the 7-year-old students at the board, her town-born teacher towering over her.

Coming to grips

2011-08-14T15:08:00.002+08:00

So I'm still becalmed at the homestay in town, but, oh miracle, my 4x4 was finally ready on Friday and I'll be leaving this afternoon (Sunday) for the sticks.

Meanwhile, the homestay is a lovely, welcoming place, owned by a fascinating couple. They're very well-known in the area and every time I tell someone I'm staying with Dr Othman, they lower their eyelids and click approvingly. Dr Othman was an MP for a time, and is still a bit of a father figure for many Sabah politicians. Also, being fairly wealthy, they're the informal lending facility for the area. His wife, Lungkiam (also a Phd) was born into a Dusun Christian family but she converted to Islam when she married. The house is enormous and welcoming and populated by a number of different species - dogs here, unusually, are treated like members of the family; the field out back is controlled by several wild horses and foals, all descended from a rescue horse; the lounge area, which is wall-less and built out of wood, stretches over a river filled with koi. There's even a turtle in the kitchen - but I'm on the case and am hoping to persuade them to release it into the river. A very fat cat moans piteously at sundown, but nobody's ever fooled into thinking he's actually hungry.

But the biggest reason for their most recent fame is a rather sad reason. In the early 1940s, Singapore fell to the Japanese. It happened very quickly - my colleague's father was one of the British army doctors caught up in the invasion. Prisoner-of-war conditions were fairly bad, but they became far worse for some of the men, who were transferred to Borneo in 1942-3. At a camp in Sandakan - around 60 kilometres east of Ranau - they were forced to build a military airfield using nothing but their hands. Then in 1945, they were forcibly marched west to Ranau. Because it was a massive operation - 2700 prisoners were at Sandakan - paths were cut through dense jungle to avoid the Allied planes. The prisoners had been kept in horrendous conditions for 2 or 3 years and they were badly malnourished and diseased; the route of the march is considered very difficult even today, with our modern equipment and technology. The POWs usually had to forage for their food - and sometimes they were helped by local villagers, when the Japanese weren't looking. Of 2700 men, just six survived the marches to Ranau - all Australian - all escapees who were hidden by villagers from the Japanese army, and only three of those survived to testify at war crimes trials the following year. The others - British and Australian - starved to death, died of disease, or were shot just after the Japanese surrender in August 1945. It's a very moving and sad story, and many of the descendants of the marchers come to trek the route every year. And most of them end up sitting on the same chair I'm sitting in as I write this. The exact route of the trek was lost for many years in the jungle, but was recently uncovered by a couple of very determined researchers, who found the site of the Last Camp - on my hosts' land. The site has been confirmed by a number of digs, which turned up cast-off buttons, old tins of fish, belt buckles, Australian army badges, and even an enamel mug. Dr Othman has pledged to keep the land undeveloped, apart from a simple memorial, and regularly leads teams of scientists, historians and researchers to it to investigate further.

On the tables one afternoon, he spreads out some of his finds to document them before they're turned over to the University of Malaysia, the hodge-podge remnants of the lives of the few who survived until Ranau.

But this sad story doesn't colour the homestay, which is a few kilometres from the camp site. Here the river plays backing track to an orchestra of birds, geckos and squirrels, and fruit drips from the trees - mangos and pawpaws, limes, pineapples and rambutan. The noise is incessant - the minute the sun drops below the horizon, the call of the mosque is almost overpowered by the call of the crickets and frogs and geckos.

Ramadan continues, and is now coming to the end of the second week. On Friday, we were invited to one of Fiona's schools, in a small village near Ranau, for the breaking of the fast. We arrived a little late and dusk was approaching fast when we walked into the school's courtyard. Two long tables had been set up, and one of these was full of men, dressed in traditional sarongs mostly and wearing the songkok, a traditional hat. A few children raced each other round the other table, but there were no women in sight! A little nervous, we joined the head of the table and each promptly fell into deep conversation with our neighbours. They were so friendly and so welcoming, and so interested in our programme, that neither of us realised when the radio was turned up for the sundown prayers! We stopped for a local dignitary to chant his own short prayer to which all the men solemnly replied, something similar to the way Christians would murmur "Amen" during a rousing sermon. Then we all took a date from the plates on the table, and broke the day's fast with it. Or at least, the men and children did - of course Fiona and I had been snacking all day long :) After this initial fast-breaking, the men all disappeared for prayers, and while they were out, the women appeared and invited us to help ourselves to platefuls of food. The teachers had prepared the food in a sort of bring-and-share buffet, and although I was limited as a vegetarian, I wasn't complaining - I heaped piles of satay and steamed rice and curried wild greens onto my plate, and by the time my neighbours returned for their own dinner, I was digging in happily.

Unhappily for the Boss, who is a little man in a little job out for all he can get, my neighbour turned out to be his Boss, the District Education Officer, and we got along so well, we've been invited to break the fast next Friday at the District Office in Ranau - where I shall be sure to display my close friendship with the Big Boss...

Other than hobnobbing with the locals (the British Council calls it "relationship-building" and it's actually part of my job! It's a hard life...), we've been viewing a few of the local sights too. Today we went out for a "fish massage" which is a famous attraction in these here parts. You know the trendy salons in the UK that let you stick your feet in a tank for half an hour while little fish nibble all the dead skin off your toes? A pleasantly tingly pedicure? This wasn't like that.

We bought our tickets at a little booth and then walked down to another little booth by the river, where a smiley lady checked them and stamped them. We turned to walk over to where lots of chairs were laid out in rows and where we were obviously meant to sit and wait, but we were the only ones there, and we'd only taken a couple of steps before our numbers were called out over the tannoy - a little unnecessarily, as we were still within whispering distance, but there you go.

When we got down to the river, we realised that this is not your standard London establishment. For one thing, a lot of the fish are very big fish.

Basically - for that is the word for this fish massage, basically, which is why we were intrigued in the first place - a lot of river fish have been trained with the use of fish pellets to gather at a particular bend; you wade in ankle-deep on the sand and the fish swarm expectantly. You have a few fish pellets to give them, which they go crazy over, but in between being fed, they nibble on your feet.

It's pretty tingly. But then the big fish get involved, and this is not tingly. Not tingly at all. The big fish are very big, and their bites hurt. I jumped out a couple of times, but Fiona was braver - until she came out of the water and we saw her ankles.

I think we may have completely put off the Korean ajummas who arrived just as we were taking photos of the damage!

So. When you come to visit, and I suggest "a lovely fish massage", and you happily accept, imagining an afternoon of relaxed pampering at a spa, I shall know who's read this blog to the end...

;)

On the other hand...

2011-08-05T19:40:00.002+08:00

You know that sense of irritation when the moment you give up on a bus and start walking, two turn up and pass you gaily as you walk? Or, more pertinently, you complain of an itch in the throat, but the moment you see a doctor, it goes away? That's a little how I felt today, when my manager came to assess the situation in my cluster and make a decision about whether it should be included in the program, and suddenly all the problems I had on Tuesday magically disappeared. Suddenly, I was able to move into teacher's accommodation at one school temporarily, and equally as suddenly, a little two-storey cottage at the gate of the most central school became available. The Boss was suddenly helpful and understanding. 24-hour power (from the school's solar panels) suddenly became available, and the landlord of my little cottage suddenly understood the need for an inside bathroom. Internet suddenly became a possibility, albeit very slow, expensive internet.

Suddenly my life looked rosier.

It's still a very remote area with very little infrastructure, and it'll take me about 2 hours to reach town (which I plan to visit every weekend initially), but with power, a couple of rainwater tanks, a fridge and some internet, I'm quite excited to get started! I'm just waiting for a 4x4 to be serviced and delivered, and then I'm off. Just look at my new home (bearing in mind that there's still a bit of work to be done!).

It was also great to have a chat with my manager about the programme - it really is such an exciting and positive thing to be involved with, and fits in well with a lot of my ideas about life. We won't be teaching English while we're here, but are "mentors" (120 of us, in Sabah and Sarawak) and will be encouraging teachers to think more deeply about their teaching practice. I like it because, unlike many other programmes I've heard of, we don't go marching in there and say "Right, all of you sit and listen to me tell you about how great the UK education system is, and this is what you've got to do in your classroom, right, now go!" It's very much about observing the Malaysian situation, and then getting teachers to work with their colleagues and their communities to make changes in the school and the classroom that benefit everyone, and which come from the grassroots level. There's a lot of support, but also a lot of autonomy over how we go about this. The big idea is that because the teachers themselves will be considering and deciding on the changes to be made, when we leave in 2013, the effect will continue, with those teachers helping other teachers and continuing to teach reflectively. The information that has already been gathered through observation and qualitative research could power a hundred post-grad theses, and I really wish I was doing a Masters so I could make use of this incredible opportunity!

Into the wilds

2011-08-02T19:48:00.001+08:00

I find myself continually revising my expectations in Malaysia. Last week, when considering the house I wanted to live in, I told my local teachers "two bedrooms, a bathroom, internet and an outside space, please, thank you very much." Then it became "two bedrooms, electricity, and a bathroom." Today it became "Could I please have a toilet? Please?"

We (my colleague Fiona, the language officer, Rapedah, and her boss, and me) left Ranau early this morning in the Boss's 4x4. I know the Boss's name, but his attitude screamed "I'm The Boss!", so Boss he shall remain. We left the little town on good, solid, tarred roads, but they petered out about 15 minutes later and became gravel. Shortly after that, we were driving on an unfinished, immense highway, that seems to be leading to jungle, which is a bit strange. Unfinished, it's a nightmare, because it's simply very slippery gravel, about 100m across. That turned into sand and gravel again, but only very briefly, before it became a mudslide, heading down a steep hill, about one car's width across. Each time we drove through a village, the road became momentarily usable again, but villages carried the deadlier obstacle of animals. Everywhere we went, there were dogs, puppies, pigs and their suckling piglets, cats and kittens, chickens and a few angry roosters. The dogs in particular seemed to be completely unaware of the traffic, lazing in the middle of the road and forcing the Boss to come to a complete standstill while hooting angrily. It's really important not to actually hit any of these animals, as they are vital for the villagers around here, and a dead animal will bring the owner out from under one of the wooden houses, humbly requesting compensation - the most expensive is a dog, which would cost you somewhere in the region of a teacher's monthly wage - about 1000 ringgits, or approximately £207. I was surprised, because quite often dogs are under-appreciated in poorer regions, but here they are still widely used as hunting dogs, which explains the fattened look of village dogs, in contrast to the pretty poor appearance of town dogs.

We were descending from the heights of Ranau into the lowlands. The scenery varied from one stretch of road to the next, but took in farmland, small-scale vegetable gardens, jungle, secondary forest, and deforested wasteland. Sitting in our air-conditioned Landcruiser, we didn't know it at the time but the temperature was rising, and when we got out at my first school - 3 hours after leaving Ranau - it was into a wall of dense heat.

This area is rural. I really mean it. Rural. There's no electricity, no running water, no internet. You can only get a phone signal at certain points, close to the few towers that exist. There are no tarred roads at all. There aren't even any shops - and I'm not talking about having a local Sainsbury's, I mean that the only things you can buy here are, apparently, bottles of vegetable oil and sweets, from roadside stalls (and even they're few and far between). Petrol or diesel comes from big plastic tanks stored at the side of someone's house, and advertised with a hand-painted sign on the roadside, "Petrol, RM3 only-lah". Houses are almost universally wooden and primitively quaint, although I'm not sure I'd live in one (more on that later...) Some of the posher homes have blue Portaloos outside, others have old, wooden outhouses with rusty corrugated iron doors. Still others have nothing at all, presumably relying on the rivers. People - old, young, women, men - hang around on the verandahs, or beneath their stilted houses, children playing catch or swimming or getting dressed for school. Flimsy fishing nets hang from some of the verandahs, hinting of the hidden rivers rushing through the jungle around us. Once or twice we crossed over one of these rivers, on rickety wooden bridges over gushing white water or lazy brown soup.

Because this area is so inaccessible and underdeveloped, so are its schools. My first school provided board and lodging (at the government's expense) for pupils who aren't able to commute every day. Seventy-five students take this option, about half the student body. All seventy-five live in two gender-segregated rooms of approximately 3m². I estimated that there must be two or three to a bed...

The other schools were in various states of repair and disrepair. One had internet, which the Guru Besar (the headteacher) proudly announced before even giving me his name. Another had one of the new computer rooms the government is building all over the country. No computers, electricity or internet, but the room is there, proudly unlocked and opened for special occasions. Each one had children who were fascinated by us, peering out of windows, asking their teachers who we were, very occasionally saying hello to us - although most were too shy. At my last, there was one little girl who was very taken by us, giving a wide smile every time we looked at her. I assumed she was a very small pre-schooler, and couldn't believe it when the teacher told me she was in his Year 1 class, and was seven years old - she looked about four. All the children there were tiny.

The last stop of the day, besides tiny little girls also yielded the prospect of some houses for rent. One was just across from the school, another five minutes away in a village, and the last about 20 minutes drive. Apparently, Sabahan people expect to drive you to outside the house, point it out, and you just say "Yes, please, I'll take it." So my desire to look around and inspect things was met with a confused stare, as if to say, "Choice? You want choice? You greedy foreigner!" I pushed anyway, and got to see inside one of the houses and at least the outdoor, ground floor section of a second (the one in the village.) Here is a picture of the latter's bathroom:

Horror story, right? Or am I just being greedy?

My actual move from Ranau has been postponed, awaiting a visit from my manager...

Breaking Fast

2011-08-01T20:04:00.002+08:00

Today was the first day of Ramadan, which is a little like Lent on steroids. Muslims give up all food and drink (and, like Lent, other things, such as TV or cigarettes) during the day, and only break their fast after sunset - and if they help a less fortunate person to break their fast, then they get double the rewards; charity and humanitarianism is a big part of Ramadan.

What this means for me is that I have to be a lot more sensitive than I usually am and don't, for instance, say things like "I'd die for a bottle of water right now" to my fasting Language Officer half way through our first day of school visits. Life in Malaysia goes on as normal, despite a third of the population suffering hunger pangs, and becoming dehydrated in the humid heat, although I'm told that the night market will be much busier, feeding the devout after sundown prayers.

This morning I accompanied my colleague and Rapedah (our Language Officer - sort of the go-to person for the District Education Office for the project) to my colleague's set of five schools. They varied a lot, from a beautiful little school on the edge of a hill, which taught mostly Muslim children in little wooden classrooms, to a colonial-style concrete block with wide verandahs, where landscaping was a part of the curriculum. We also visited a resource-rich Chinese school - these schools teach in Mandarin, teaching Bahasa Malay as a secondary language, but as children simply attend their nearest schools, only 10% of students were actually Chinese at this particular school. It's a government requirement, however, that one in five of the schools involved in our project are Chinese schools, which is odd, as Chinese schools only form about 5% of government schools in the country. I won't be teaching at one, as there isn't one in my area. It was interesting to see the schools, although they don't give me much indication of my own schools - mine will be far smaller (in one case, just 75 students in the whole school) and will have next-to-nothing in terms of resources. They won't speak either Chinese or Malay at home, but Dusun, a local tribal language which I will need to pick up at least a few words of to get by, but they will learn three languages in school, making them... what... quadri-lingual? :) Amazing!

Back to reality

2011-07-31T19:48:00.044+08:00

What a day! My colleague and I finally checked out of the air-conditioned bubble that is the Hyatt Regency Kinabalu. We were the last two from our induction group left, and our placements are in the same area, so we left together in one of our lease cars, with drivers from the car company.

As we left Kota Kinabalu, Borneo slowly started to creep into being. The leaves got bigger, so did the flowers. Palm trees sprang into fan-tailed splendour and the glass-fronted, 30-storey apartment blocks crumbled away. The trees sprouted butterflies and tender ferns and little, wooden, stilted cottages crowded over streams. The land started to rise and fall and the rises got bigger until suddenly I looked out the window and realised I was looking at Mount Kinabalu. It is a truly staggeringly big mountain, even when viewed from the side of another mountain, as I did. It's half the size of Everest, but going from sea level to 4000m in such a short distance does wonders for the perception. It loomed. I started to rethink my desire to climb it.

When we arrived at our "hotel" we'd been driving for nearly three hours, and this probably had something to do with my reaction. Or not. I don't know. I do feel I was a little justified in reacting in horror. Faced with a long, partially-painted, partially-peeling bungalow, we walked into what appeared to be a reception area - an enormous room with chairs arranged around the edge and a sort of wood-panelled servery - Zimbabweans should bring to mind any official building from the 1970s they like. Three men and women lay in a state of torpor on the chairs and barely looked up as we entered. The rooms looked as if someone had taken a row of concreted public toilets and tacked on a wooden row of bedrooms behind. Literally, you had to walk through a dark, tiled, and very smelly bathroom to get to the dark, carpeted, very smelly bedroom. A ceiling fan pretended to do its job, while an unidentified scuttling occurred in the vicinity of the cupboard, to which one sad door held on for dear life. Fiona gingerly pulled aside a filthy curtain to look outside. The curtain very un-gingerly fell off, letting a completely unwanted stream of light in. We walked out, got in our car, and drove off in search of something, anything, else.

We found it in a little, out-of-the-way village. As I sit on the long balcony outside my room, fat fruit bats are being clichéd and flitting about in the gathering dusk. The call to prayer has just rung out over the valley (and I can't recall hearing the beautiful and haunting sound once in Kota Kinabalu), and the birds are noisily settling down to sleep. We were greeted by the family who owns the homestay with big smiles, and basic but clean rooms. Okay, so a single en-suite room is £20 rather than £10, but you know, sometimes a smile is worth the premium... :)

Pulau Gaya

2011-07-30T22:47:00.001+08:00

So in retrospect, I probably should have read the signs properly, rather than a cursory glance. I'm not sure it would have dissuaded me from the pale blue water entirely, but it may have made me a little more cautious.

We'd caught a rather hair-raising ride on a boat from Kota Kinabalu out to Pulau Gaya island, whose main claim to fame is being the first site of the British North Borneo Company's settlement. The boat stopped off first at the floating village I mentioned before for fuel, poured from a shed beside a house - I'm not sure I would be a particularly relaxed neighbour, knowing that this settlement has been almost completely destroyed by fire twice... Most of the residents of the stilt village are illegal Filipino immigrants and they're scapegoated by the government for pretty much everything, as far as I can tell. Although I'm not sure that it's entirely undeserved - one drug raid left two policemen and one drug dealer dead a couple of years ago. This is the place to go in Sabah if you wanted to find, say, a gun-runner. Or a companion for the night. The boats won't drop you off there, and it's considered an incredibly dangerous place by Kota Kinabalu residents.

Round the corner, though, is another stilt village, but this one is crowned by the gold dome of a mosque: it's populated by local fishermen, and is entirely separate from the Filipino settlement, in stigma, in religious beliefs, and in aesthetics - here, the jetties lead to photogenic, brightly-painted wooden homes on sturdy stilts, and their pride and joy is the secondary school built out over the water, with the rest of the homes.

The main reason these houses are built above the water is that the island itself is national park area. Our boat continues its bumpy ride for another 15 minutes around the side of the island and delivers us to a wooden jetty that extends out from a crescent of sandy beach. We stake a claim on a shady spot beneath a massive tree, which strikes me as leaning on its elbow and gazing out to sea, although we're actually the only people on the beach, so staking a claim is probably slightly unnecessary...

My colleague and I head into the shallow sea and float about a bit, chatting about the program we're about to begin on Monday.

My ankles burst into flame and I reach down to clutch them.

My fingers burst into flame.

See, those signs that I glossed over before were for jellyfish and not an amusing alien-octopus hybrid.

I went almost weeping with pain to the ranger, who so sweetly bound my feet in ammonia-soaked bandages, and, I assume trying to be kind, told me that it was completely out-of-season for jellyfish, and I must have very bad luck, and no I certainly shouldn't go and drag those sweet little children out of the water by their hair, because they almost certainly wouldn't have as bad luck as me.

And nor did they, nor anybody else that day - I was the only person to leave limping on swollen and welted feet...

And the jellyfish wasn't as big as my head, so I feel the sign was a bit of a letdown anyway.

Later on, we were both within about a metre of the table, reading on the beach, when some Korean women nearby started flapping their hands and calling "Ahem, ladies! Ladies! A little monkey is trying to eat you! Ladies!" Well, it wasn't a little monkey, it was a great bloody big monkey, with great bloody big teeth, which it bared at me when I shooed it away, causing great hilarity as I leapt halfway into the water.

I wanted to take a walk deeper into the jungle, but I looked for about 20 minutes and couldn't find a pathway anywhere - the jungle was so densely packed around the clearing that I'd have needed a machete to go off-road. I could hear the wildlife though - a few birds, and definitely some wild pigs at one point - and am looking so forward to getting out on a couple of treks. Orangutans, while arguably the most famous Bornean citizens, aren't the most interesting - pygmy elephants anyone?

Eating out, or, why not to blindly follow others...

2011-07-26T22:34:00.000+08:00

So tonight I made plans to eat out with some colleagues. This fancy hotel we're staying in includes breakfast and lunch, and I make full use of both, but dinner is on us. Fiona (who will be living in Ranau, like me) and I set off obediently following our colleague, but soon regretted it when, after a 15-minute walk in the evening heat (and I mean it, heat - it's great!) we arrived at a seaside boardwalk lined with identikit tourist-filled restaurants, with names like "O'Connell's Irish Pub" and "John O'Groats Restaurant & British Bar". I held my tongue until I saw the menu, which started at 20 ringgits, when I could hold it no more. Fiona and I made our apologies and walked back along the seaside to the slightly less upmarket market, where we sat at a shared table on the edge of the sea wall, and paid 4 ringgits for a steaming plate of vegetable fried rice. We overlooked four houseboats; on the edge of one, an ancient man sat and fished with a wire wrapped around his finger. My rice was cooked with amazing finesse in a wok beside the vinyl-covered table, the young boy flipping the wok right into the fire to give the rice a tasty smoky flavour.

Yes, we couldn't have ice in our drinks, and the dishes were being washed in a bucket of water under the table, and yes, I'm the first to admit that at some point I will crave a taste of Western food, but three days into my stay in Malaysia? Give me the street food every time...

On an unrelated note, I think a little fairy lives in my hotel room. The beds are made and the towels replaced every morning, which is expected. What's not expected is that every other time I go out - for instance, for an hour in the evening to eat dinner - when I come back all my artistically-flung clothing has been collected from its position, neatly folded, and placed on the chair. It's really not on, you know...

Adventuring again...

2011-07-25T19:55:00.000+08:00

Flying into Borneo is like landing in the open pages of a Boy's Own adventure story, especially if you can mentally overlook the beach resorts and apartments blocks that scatter the Kota Kinabalu coastline and focus instead on a couple of miles inland: thick, pristine rainforest, rising in a lush carpet to form the slopes of the mighty Kinabalu mountain, Sabah's roof, in the foothills of which lies the town which will be my home for the next 26 months.

It's taken a 2.5 hour flight to get here from the Malaysian peninsula. Borneo is an island, the third biggest in the world, three times the size of Britain, shared between three countries: Indonesia, the Sultanate of Brunei, and Malaysia. There are two Malaysian states, Sabah and Sarawak, and both are heavily protected by the government, requiring separate visas and customs clearances from the peninsula, even for Malaysian citizens. Even with this protection, though, Borneo is being deforested faster than any other forest in the world, although I'm told this is mostly due to the mass settlement in the southern, Indonesian section, where poor Indonesians, tired of of the crowded, urban lifestyles of Java and Sumatra, are being encouraged by governmental migration programmes. The rainforest is 130 million years old, the oldest in the world (the Amazon is a baby, at 60 million years!) and is home to an incredible amount of flora and fauna, and despite the mass immigration, it's still one of the wildest places on earth, with much of the interior only accessible by boat.

My hotel, which has porters who send me off to my room, arriving shortly afterwards bearing all my luggage on one of those four-postered trolleys I've only ever seen in American movies, has been chosen and paid for by the British Council for a one-week induction, and it makes me feel like an imposter every time I walk in in my shabby jeans. The pool deck overlooks a section of the waterfront and I can sit and watch beautiful houseboats navigate a wide stretch of the South China Sea between islands. On an opposite beach, the house boats are mirrored in more stationary homes, built on stilts over the blue water, laundry hanging from windows, tin roofs, haphazard walkways connecting each home to the next. I imagine there must be a pretty strictly enforced sense of community, as, if you pissed off a neighbour and he decided to cut off your access to his section of walkway, you'd be swimming to work every day. There's not even any evidence of boats...

I am keen to learn at least some Bahasa Malay while I'm here and was relieved to find out that they use the Latin alphabet. All the street signs are in both Malay and Chinese; there's a large ethnically Chinese community here too, and although Chinese would probably be a more globally useful language, those tiny, complex characters set my knees to wobbling. So Malay it is. And even better - from reading street signs, I've noticed they Malayacise a lot of words, like insurans and imigrasi. There are even a few other familiar words - we passed the Gereja Katolik on the way to the hotel - gereja, church, is igreja in Portuguese!

St Anthony's Day

2011-07-09T14:33:00.007+08:00

Saint Anthony, Professor of Miracles, Hammer of Heretics, patron of the poor and oppressed, Finder of Lost Things, saint of the barren and the pregnant. One of the most venerated saints in Christendom. And luckily for me, he was born in Lisbon - because Portugal has this wonderful tradition of allowing cities and towns to have a day off in recognition of local saints, and as Anthony is Lisbon's saint, and Cascais is in Greater Lisbon, I get a long weekend off. It's also Cascais' 647th anniversary of town-ship-ness and the celebrations for the two events have been keeping me awake all week long!

The focus of the party in Lisbon is Alfama, the ancient neighbourhood that clings to the side of pne of Lisbon's seven hills, a careful watch kept over it by the Moorish Saint George's Castle (I know - sounds more English than Portuguese, doesn't it? It was so named after a 14th century king married an English princess and is one more legacy of the longest standing alliance in the world.)

So. Alfama.

It's ancient, really really ancient, and is largely composed of tiny narrow staircases instead of streets. The buildings teeter above, clothed in laundry hung out to dry, and, today, colourful bunting and basil plants; the basil being a symbol of fidelity, couples traditionally give each other little potted plants on St Anthony's Day. The fragrance is everywhere.

Another symbol of Dia do Santo Antonio is the sardine. Why? Because at this time of year, it's in season, it's local, it's plentiful and cheap. Something I love about Portugal: 90% of the fruit and vegetables in the shops are grown in Portugal and are only sold in season, and foreign stuff is clearly marked. Makes it easy to go green. :)

I order a beer at the Miradouro da Graça, one of the best viewpoints in the city - a shaded, cobbled praça in front of a grand stone church, overlooking the castle and downtown Lisbon. Everyone is in a good mood,their voices lubricated and strengthened by cold beer and freshly grilled sardines, and, thanks to the Portuguese love of children, it's a big (drunken) family day out. Actually, I'm starting to understand why so many Portuguese settled in Zimbabwe after their colonies became independent in the 1970s...

Taking one's time

2011-03-21T20:09:00.004+08:00

Life in Portugal mostly moves at a pretty slow pace. This morning I left the school I work at, and just across the road I waved at the lady who works in the papelaria nearby. She was chatting to a friend. I walked up to the supermarket, bought the things I needed to buy, stopped for a coffee. When I got back to the school 25 minutes later, she was still chatting to her friend, laughing away in the unseasonal sunlight, not a care in the world about her untended shop, because she knew if a customer walked in, the shopkeeper next door would hear the bell and give her a shout.

The roadworks are not designed to be completed quickly either. Many of the main roads in Cascais are cobbled, which means that when they need to be repaired or replaced, it involves an enormous pile of granite rock, and about five men with tiny hammers, who chip each cobblestone into the perfect size, then place it with artistic care. Then a man comes along with a giant piece of iron to hammer the stones into the ground. Then a seventh man fills the gaps with sand, and an eighth carefully sweeps up any excess. By the time the eighth man has come along, the first team has moved perhaps a couple of metres down the road. It's painfully slow, albeit with a very pretty result. The pavements are the same, but for the rather eye-watering black-and-white wave effect in Cascais, the process has to involve a big wooden template as well.

All part of the joy of living in southern Europe!

2010-12-17T17:21:00.005+08:00

Grand Bazaar today. I'd like to say we didn't spend our entire day shopping, but, um... We started off with great intentions, but we just seemed to get absorbed by the market, a sprawling labyrinth of vaulted ceilings and archways and water fountains, and nonsensical signs like "New Market (1571)". Shopping there, in our further defence, is not like shopping down your local Tesco. It's an entire way of being, you have to adapt your eyes and your soul; you have to learn that you don't just buy a bowl, you chat to the owner, you discuss your home country, you might even have a cup of tea together, and then you will mutually decide on an agreeable amount to be paid for a little work of art. And, sometimes, you will say goodbye with kisses on both cheeks. I think that we're very lucky, being here at this time of year - the market, which was described in an article I read as being an incredible test of mental and physical strength, and having between 250,000 and 400,000 visitors per day in summer, in winter is almost devoid of tourists and is instead full of headscarved grannies buying tea and linen, and men bearing beautiful silver and glass teacups on engraved trays to the shopkeepers, who drink and smoke together on little stools in front of their shops, and return the cups to the next passing tea-man.

We wander about the streets looking at backgammon boards and pottery. Some streets are completely filled with sellers of intricately metal-worked lamps, which cast a surreal glow over the brick walls and tiled arches. Some streets are named for their artisans, so Jeweller's Street, which runs through the centre, a wide and built-up street with full-on jewellery shops displaying endless gold bracelets, is easily avoided by Robyn and me, who want handmade masterpieces from countryside cottages. A few shopkeepers try to tempt us with rubber jackets and Gucci bags, but the majority of stalls are filled with beautiful ceramics, kilims, antique printing blocks, evil eye pendants, tapestries... I start to wonder if I've brought a big enough suitcase.

We stumble into a pretty, open courtyard with a fountain and trees and a hole-in-the-wall teashop, where we buy two teas served in vase-like glasses. We drink them standing in a corner, watching the endless tea-men scurrying off to all the stalls, and pay 20p each. It might be the best glass of tea I've ever had.

We spend hours and hours in the market, people-watching mostly, in between coffees at tiny cafes that are part antique shop, part art gallery with antique waistcoats serving as chair covers.

I imagine we actually see a very small part of this sprawling market, which apparently spreads its vaulted wings over 5000 shops and 60 lanes, and has sat here in the centre of Istanbul since 1461.

Eventually we head outside again - the weather has changed fom snow and rain to flashes of sunlight from behind low clouds - only to delve into another market - the Egyptian Spice Market - also covered, but spread over just two lanes filled with the strong scents of henna, saffron and tea, paprika and curry, chilli and oregano. It's known as the Egyptian Market because when it was built in the 17th century, most of the spices traded and stored here were imported via Egypt. We have a late lunch of cheese, cucumber and olives and have to fight off the stray cats that are drawn towards us by the enormous pile of meat that came with our "vegetarian" platter. Be not deceived by the "stray" description though - it's not really an apt description of the fat, sleek cats that roam this city.

Misty Istanbul

2010-12-16T17:06:00.003+08:00

I really cannot say this enough: 4am is not a time of day I want to see from the wrong side. Waking up in the absolute stillness of the winter dark, too early for even the factory workers or buses to be stirring is just not a nice experience. As it is also too early for the trains to Lisboa to have started running, I have to catch a taxi to the airport - one blessing of being in Portugal is that the luxury of a comfy, heated taxi is completely affordable. And on the empty pre-dawn motorway, it takes just 20 minutes from my door to the check in desk. Lisboa Airport has been overhauled since I was last here 5 years ago - it's a pine-and-white IKEA dream now. The only two cafes open are Harrods, where I'm permitted to spend 3 times the real-life price for a stingy coffee and a cold pastel de nata.

I grumble, but then remember that my lovely sister and mystical Istanbul are waiting at the end of this journey...

Istanbul has been in the icy grip of some very nasty weather lately; from the plane, I even see snow on the fields of Greece. So it is that, after descending through miles and miles of fog and cloud, my first glimpse of Turkey is of a couple of metres of blue-green sea, a very damp runway, and mist. A lot of mist. Two thin minarets are visible nearby, but otherwise that's all there is - grey mist and damp runway. By the time I clear customs and find my ride to the centre centre, it's all dark anyway, and there's little to do in the shuttle but sleep... and then I meet my driver. He has different ideas. I'm the lone passenger, and he's a very friendly Istanbullu, who chats to me for a very short time, really, not long enough at all, before he says "Kurds. You know them? The Kurdish. Terrible people, we hate them, guns in hands when they little little." Now really, I don't know if this is just me, but I really feel you should get to know somebody a little before revealing your racist tendencies. Apart from his, ahem, antipathy towards his fellow countrymen, though, he's very amusing. Driving one-handed through heavy traffic and torrential rain, he whips out his mobile phone to show me pictures of him and his friends in macho poses in and around Istanbul. "And this is me at Black Sea!" "And me at beach!" "This one I go to Black Sea with friends!" "This one I show my muscle!" "This one when me and friends beat up those dirty Kurds!" and so on. Well, not the last one - but it was close. He drops me at the hotel with his facebook page, email address and phone number scribbled on a piece of paper, just in case.

Anyway, Robyn is waiting at the hostel, and so we go out for dinner and a long chat. We're in a very touristy but pretty area called Sultanahmet; the main street is lined with restaurants fronted with lovely cushiony porches, decorated richly with lamps and fabrics and shisha pipes. Mediterranean food is so delicious - we eat platters of vegetarian mezze and grilled haloumi and spinach with pinenuts and warm flatbread and and and... oh god, I'm about to put on a LOT of weight... :)

Sightseeing

2010-10-26T04:26:00.000+08:00

Belem is a few stops from me on the Lisboa-Cascais railway. At the mouth of the Tagus, it's traditionally the place from which the conquistadors and explorers were seen off, and, mostly, welcomed home to Portugal. It's littered with enormous phallic monuments to people like da Gama and Dias, heroes in their own nation, vandals and homicidal enslavers in other, more southern, nations. One man's meat...

There used to be a little hermitage here, where da Gama spent the night before sailing on his epic journey to India at the end of the 15th century. When he returned, flush with success, the king ordered a vast and impressive monastery to be built on the ruins of the hermitage - Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, arguably the vastest and most impressive monastery in Portugal.

Although the squandering of piles of money on a religious statement is not to my taste, the monastery is admittedly very pretty, and as a bonus, inside are buried, side by side, two of Portugal's notables. One is da Gama, who, as I've said, had a lasting effect on my own home region. The other, more culturally fascinating, is Luís da Camões, the 16th century author and poet, half-blind soldier, traveller, romantic. In a shipwreck off Cambodia, his Chinese lover was drowned, but he managed to swim to shore holding aloft his precious manuscript for one of Portugal's classics - the Lusiads. Scandals ensued after his love affairs with princesses and queens, and he was imprisoned several times for debt and fights. He dropped out of the University of Coimbra - hence the statue I had to pass every day while studying there. Fascinating guy...

Also in Belem, and along the sam colonial lines, is the Monument of Discovery, an enormous structure leaning out over the Tagus, Vasco da Gama leading the conquistadors into regions unknown, spreading Portugal's influence and briefly making it one of the wealthiest empires in the world.

All very impressive.

More interesting, perhaps, is the living, modern city of Lisbon. One of the must-do activities in Lisbon is a ride on the old trams, so Dad and I made our way to a small square where one of the trams begins its perilous ascent to the castle. There was a queue. A long queue. Apparently, everyone else reads Lonely Planet too. The last time I was in Lisbon, it was the depths of winter and the tourists had gone to warmer climes - my friends and I travelled all day on empty trams, chatting to the conductors and hanging off the back rails. One tram came and went, filled to the brim with camera-wielding behatted Europeans; the next came with a twin. Dad and I got on the first one, and managed to nab the last two seats by a window. Luckily for us, this driver decided he wasn't there to be nice, and closed the doors to the other 30 people in the queue; the tram behind us didn't take any passengers at all, but just drove by! Lucky us :)

The No 28 tram wends its way through narrow streets, past Graça and its little olive tree-lined squares, up to the summit where the castle sprawls, and then down again past the teeming alleys of Alfama.

The Castello de São Jorge is another Moorish bequest, as is Alfama, where tiny houses are filled by tight communities - and have been since the time of the Romans. During Moorish times, it constituted the entire city, and it's the only place in Lisbon to survive the great 1755 earthquake.

After a day's wandering, including an unplanned trip out to a mall on the edges of the city for a CD Dad wanted, we were exhausted, and headed back to Cascais for dinner and coffee. I took Dad to Flecha Azul, the friendly cafe next door to my school, where we sat outside enjoying the evening cool. A familiar, older man emerged from the cafe to smoke a cigarette (and by the way, I'm astounded by how well the Portuguese have taken to being told not to smoke indoors - the last time I was here, there were ashtrays outside shops in enclosed malls, and the Portuguese were making full use of them!) The man, who was familiar in the way that many faces are becoming familiar to me in little Cascais, started chatting to us and turned out to be an English retiree who's lived in Portugal for 10 years (although in time-honoured English tradition, he speaks almost no Portuguese!) He was a fascinating find: in Cascais, most retirees are conservative, upper-middle class bridge players, but he was working class and liberal. Finding out we were Zimbabwean, he self-deprecatingly said he knew nothing about it, but then turned out, as so often, to know quite a lot. He told us of a story that did the rounds in the 70s: apparently, when Joshua Nkomo went to England for the first time, it was traditional for the Queen to pick up visiting dignitaries from Victoria Station in her coach, it being just round the corner from the Palace. Feeling slightly awkward, the pair were sitting in the coach making stilted conversation, when one of the horses lifted its tail and noisily let out some air. At which the Queen murmured "Oh, do pardon me!"

"Oh, no problem, your majesty," says our forgiving Nkomo, "I thought it was the horse..."

Oh, British humour!

Visiting

2010-10-25T16:00:00.011+08:00

I want you to turn away from the computer and go to your childhood bookshelf. The one stuffed with all the big fairybooks and broken-spined Grimm's collections. Are you there? Find a fairy tale and open it to the picture of the castle. The one with the princess in the turret and the ogre in the dungeon. Pretty isn't it?

That's where I was on Friday.

On Thursday my Dad arrived from England, which was very exciting, and even more so when my big meeting-up plan worked like a dream, and I didn't have to run around Lisbon desperately looking for him.

The next morning I looked out of my window at the Serra de Sintra and, not seeing any clouds, hustled down to Dad's hotel and onto a bus bound for Sintra Village. Although I can see it from my window, it's still a 40 minute bus ride from Cascais. Perched high in a forested national park, Sintra used to be the big town, and Cascais the fishing village. These days Sintra is the preserve of the rich and famous and daytrippers from Lisbon, and when I say these days, I'm talking about right back to Lord Byron's time; in fact, Byron called it his Glorious Eden and used it in his poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, while Hans Christian Andersen merely considered it the most beautiful place in Portugal. Several English notables ended up here, some for more noble reasons than others, and some of them made their marks in beautiful palaces and landscaped English gardens.

We rode the bus through suburbs and villages, climbing the landscape, until the castle I can see from my bedroom window as a grey sliver in the distance was more looming than slivering, then we got off. Unfortunately a couple of stops early, so we had to walk through the lower town for a short bit, but we fortified ourselves with a Portuguese brunch - coffee and pasteis de nata.

Heading onwards past deep valleys and tiny roadside shrines, we turned a corner and were suddenly in Sintra Vila proper, the National Palace before us, chestnut sellers on the corner. We equipped ourselves with a map and a paper bag of roasted chestnuts, and sat in a deserted corner, a treed courtyard with a bench overlooking the valley. We decided to see the castle, and we decided to walk up to it - I swear Dad had all the information at his disposal when he decided that!

It was a hard work, but we took it slowly. It wound up a steep mountainside for 700m, first through tiny houses (one was lived in by Hans Christian Andersen once) and churches, then through forest. The forest floor was dotted with great big slabs of rock which seemed unnaturally shaped and placed. A couple had definitely been hollowed out a bit - perhaps to supply a suitably uncomfortable place for a hermit to live out his life. Soon we started seeing more definite signs of life with thick defence walls and a ruined church.

The path became wider and more defined.

I climbed an interesting little tower to look down on the ruin, and only realised after scrambling down the narrow steps again that there was a skull-and-bones on the base - it was an ossuary for the bones from the church's crypt.

Finally we reached the main wall of the castle. The Moors conquered Iberia in the 8th century, and their final defeat in Portugal by Christian Portuguese in 1249 coincided with the establishment of Portugal as an independent nation. In Southern Portugal, they left behind some beautiful architecture and buildings, and some important names - Lisbon (Al-Ushbuna), Coimbra (Kulimriyya), Beja (Baja - where I lived as a student), the Algarve (al-Gharb) and the beautiful area we're now exploring - Sintra. The Moorish influence continued long after the last were expelled from Portugal and Spain in the centuries following their defeat. Portuguese people took up their paintbrushes and created some of the most beautiful pieces of pottery I've ever seen, with intricate patterns and convoluted stories. The Moorish Fountain is an early 20th century example in Sintra.

This is no pretty but fundamentally pointless folly, though - it remains a water source for local people to this day. We passed another fountain further up the hill, also built above a natural spring, where groups of older people were cheerfully ignoring the municipal sign restricting them to 2 litres a day, filling five or ten 5-litre bottles each, and loading them back onto their waiting bakkies...

Anyway, as I was saying: we'd just reached the top of the hill, where the Moorish castle sits like a natural eruption of pale stone. Less menacing than it perhaps would have been were the hill still deforested to the base, as I'm sure it would have been once. The forest has taken back its territory, and is thick even inside the walls - fairly useless if you wanted to see your enemies coming from far off! The fort - for that's really what it is - looks remarkably well-preserved for something built more than a thousand years ago, and which has been through a number of wars and nation-shattering earthquakes. And this is because it's not well-preserved, but rather well-renovated. Much of the lower walls and floors, and the amazing cistern have survived from the first occupants, though. Even the outdoor granaries are still there - despite having been converted to rubbish tips by the subsequent Christian occupants.

The view from the crenellated walls is astounding - villages on the coast, half a day's hard ride for 8th century warriors, are clearly visible. Sintra Village is just beneath - although if you bear in mind that we actually walked up to the Village, and only then up to the Castle, I'm pretty sure you're bloody impressed with us right now. If you're not, you should be.

Dotted throughout the forest were dozens of sprawling mansions, every one of them sprouting turrets and lace like a set designer had just learned the Grimm Brothers were coming to see the play tonight and were expecting perfection, thank you very much.

From one of the towers, the fanciful palace on the next hill is clear in its pink and yellow glory - Pena Palace, a 19th century pure embodiment of romanticism built over the ruins of a medieval monastery.

Sadly, after all our effort, we didn't feel up to battling the tourists for a closer glimpse, and when we left, it was straight onto a bus, which teetered its way down the hills to the bus station. And when I say teetered, I actually mean "perilously crashed" - Dad thought it might be a source of pride amongst the bus drivers as to who terrifies more tourists on each shift... From there we caught another bus back to Cascais, along the beautiful western coast.

Bedtime arrived early that night.

Living

2010-09-25T03:49:00.000+08:00

Nice thing about living in a small town: you get to know people. Not just my local cafe owner, but also the guy who wanders about smiling at everyone, his Tourettes manifesting itself in loud moans and groans and the occasional naughty word. Or the ancient fisherman with no front teeth who can't resist babies but never begs from their mothers (only from poor English teachers.) Or the tall dreadlocked Nigerian who wears a different traditional outfit every day and sells real Ray-Bans for €5. Bargain.

Cascais is a tourist town and has been since King Luís II first saw its crescent beaches in 1870 and decided it would be just fine for his annual summer vacation. But its native population (just 35,000) keeps a tight hold on its daily life - the fishermen still weave their nets on a secretive, rocky shore, the housewives still march about the streets chattering as loudly as they can, and the cafe air is still more full of Portuguese than English.

Long may it last.

Walking

2010-09-19T03:13:00.022+08:00

Thought I'd take you on a walk today. This is the walk I take whenever I go into town. Hah - yeah, right! It's actually the route my bus into town takes, because who walks when there's a bus, right? But it is the walk I sometimes take when the weather's not too hot, as it's the quickest way to town, and the most beautiful.

First we're going to walk down the road from my flat towards the sea. This area used to be a part of the protected Sintra green belt. Then, because developers don't like to see a nice bit of land wasted, some fires mysteriously burnt all the indigenous flora, and the land was sold to be turned into hotels. It's a common story in Portugal - in this dry country, it's often easier to burn your rival's olive grove than to compete with his business. When I studied in Coimbra, there'd just been a fire that could be seen from space - the firemen (who are volunteers in Portugal) had given up on fighting it, and had just concentrated on saving the houses on the edge of Coimbra, and so everything beyond was a blackened desert.

But pass the hotels, and the most amazing view opens up to you.

Not the roundabout, obviously, but the sea beyond. At this point, the coast has risen from the beaches of Estoril to become crumbling cliffs and jagged caves, and it continues to rise until it reaches Cabo de Roca, the westernmost point of Europe, a 20-minute drive from here. We turn left towards town.

Lined on one side by blue-green sea, black rocks and the dry, indigenous vegetation, the other side of the road is where exiled royalty came to hang out during the European revolutions and post-WWII. The last Italian king spent his 37-year exile in one of the grand palaces hidden behind high walls, and the Brits are represented by Princess Di, who, like Rei Umberto of Italy, had a road named after her. Following the path towards town takes us into a shallow dip, where walkers are shielded from the traffic by trees. The sound suddenly drops away, as if you'd stuffed your ears with cotton wool, and all that can be heard is the boats on the water if the wind is right, or the plop of a fisherman's line as he casts off from the rocks beneath.

A few steps down the road, the silence is forgotten as Boca do Inferno, the Mouth of Hell, thunders into view. A deep chasm in the cliff, where the sea froths its way through a narrow opening, this is partly famous for being the site of an English occultist magician's faked death in 1930. Aleister Crowley was a rather unpleasant man, and his stay in Portugal after being kicked out of Mussolini's Italy is not widely celebrated by the Catholic-minded Portuguese. His "suicide" was assisted by one of Portugal's best-known poets, Fernando Pessoa, and Boca do Inferno became a bit of a pilgrimage spot for all of a fortnight, before Crowley rocked up again in Berlin.

The day I took these photos the Boca was tame, although still noisy, echoing off the rocks; in the fiery build-up to storms, the plumes of spray can be seen from the town centre.

Onwards from the Boca. Just before a narrow bridge, on the right, is an old manor house, Casa de Santa Maria, a beautiful ramble of shuttered windows and tiny towers, overlooking the marina. It neighbours a lighthouse, typically Portuguese in its blue and white tiles.

From Santa Maria, we cross the bridge to the marina and the castle. From the road, all that's visible over the fortified walls is a couple of cranes and some mysterious iron rods - something is being built or renovated or destroyed inside. Although the castle is owned by the council, it's not often open to the public. A friend tells me that sometimes they use it for classical concerts in the summer, but she's never gone; I'm definitely putting it on my list of things to do when they next plan one.

As we turn round the corner of the sprawling castle, the Baia opens up before us. Little brightly-painted fishing boats bob like apples, contrasting with a few sleek and enormous yachts, anchored just off a small curve of beach.

The fishermen store their equipment on a ledge below the promenade, watched over by a statue known as the Jolly King - a bronze statue of King Carlos the Diplomat, the last "real" king of Portugal, who loved the sea and spent many summers in Cascais. He's caught in the act of gazing over the Baia from a ship deck, telescope in hand.

Turning left at the Jolly King, the promenade drops down to sea level, a palm-lined road popular on weekends, when there's often a festival and Santini's, the venerable purveyors of ice cream to royalty for decades, has a stall by the mermaid statue (which you can just see behind the palm tree).

The road slips down to meet what would perhaps be called the Town Square, were it not so tiny; it contains the Town Hall, decorated with tiled portraits of the saints Pedro and Paulo.

We're two minutes from my school here, and so this is where we'll stop, on the bench where I often sit and have lunch or an ice cream, scoffing at the bright red tourists and envying the browned locals, keeping an eye on the fishermen's boats for them, until they come in the late afternoon with their nets and traps.

It's a hard life...

Paddling

2010-09-08T05:31:00.010+08:00

So I feel a little like I've just hit the ground running. And the ground didn't even slow down with the impact. 10 hours in school on Monday for 2.5 hours of teaching, 11 hours on Tuesday, and I still ended up taking work home with me to plan for my classes on Wednesday. Friday was technically my day off - and that "technically" is placed there strategically so that you may know that "day off" is a theoretical term.

I have some lovely classes - two tiny 5-year-olds who babble at me in Portuguese about everything except the flashcard I'm holding up for them; three 8-year-olds who taught me how to say "maça" because I made it very clear that I didn't know what an apple was really called; a class of retired men who lived through the colonial wars (and the Portuguese colonial wars were devastating) and a revolution, but still listen politely to my thoughts on living in their country, and invite me out for coffee.

There's been a lot of coffee in my life. I need it. Really. There's a great, very simple cafe around the corner from the school where the waiter doesn't patiently listen to my painful Portuguese and then reply in English, but patiently listens to my Portuguese and then pretends he knows what I ordered. Usually he gets it right, but I think he's just got my favourites memorised.

I'm settling into my new place, which is a little flat (in the picture below it's in the middle of the big block, second from top, with an open balcony) just north of the city centre.

I share with Maria, who's a little younger than me but is doing very grown-up things that involve research labs and medical degrees and white coats, and Luisa, who is crazy. In her words. She's pretty awesome, lived in Angola before independence, came home, divorced her husband in Catholic Portugal, and lived to tell the tale sitting beside her well-adjusted daughter in a lounge littered with African statues and paintings. I also share the flat with Nala, who's crazier than Luisa, but can't natter away about it while chain-smoking, because she's a cat.

Once I get the hang of not spending 5 hours planning for an 80-minute class, I promise to tell you stories about Cascais. Just you wait till I get me a life...

Persevering

2010-09-03T04:01:00.009+08:00

Well, I got the social security number. It near about killed me. I got talking to a guy from Angola while sitting outside waiting for my turn (I got there an hour before it opened, and was 48th in the third queue...) and he was very kind; him being the number before me, we went into the office together and he helped to translate when my "Slowly please!" didn't work on the official. It took another two trips to Finanças and one to my new Portuguese bank, but by 4pm I was through. I'm now the proud owner of 8 official pieces of paper which state my right to work here, which amazes me, as every EU citizen has the right to work in any EU nation anyway. But.

At least while waiting for my number to be called, I had time to wander around the area. It's quite amazing. Cascais itself is a popular seaside holiday for tourists from all over Europe; down by the seafront, the shops all sell postcards and green-and-red teatowels, and if you speak to someone in Portuguese, they answer in English. But here, just two (steep) blocks from the centre, it's quiet and traditional, and the voices in the streets are all clearly swallowing their words. Properly Lusophone.

The next day I started a three-day induction at my new school. All the teachers are undertaking some workshops run by the British Council, which is great, and very interesting. The other teachers (1 new, 3 veteran) are very friendly, and, astoundingly, all have British and Irish accents - I'm the only colonial there. The school is in a prime position near the fishermen's marina and in the very centre of town. It's the white building on the right:

Inside, there are 7 brightly-painted classrooms off a central reception.

I start actual classes on Monday with a group of 5 year olds - as terrifying as they are cute, believe me. I've never taught kids as young, but my director is great and will be walking me through it on Monday morning. I gather from the lesson plans that should you be wandering down the road that afternoon, and happen to pause by my open window, you will be able to hear me doing something I never do in front of any sane adult: singing!

Arriving

2010-08-27T03:26:00.006+08:00

Having newly arrived in Portugal, I spent my first night at a celebrated hostel in Lisboa - one of the best in the world, according to certain sources. Amazingly spacious and beautifully done up, and clearly having cost a great deal of money right in the centre of Lisboa, I have to say I felt more at home in my sister's sweet hostel in London, where the staff's personality is there to see on every wall and in every room. The next day I was off on the railway line down the coast to São Pedro do Estoril, a small village just 20 minutes from Lisboa. I'd found a room there online, but, regardless of the enormous pool in the garden, the steep walk to the train station, from where I needed to catch a train to Cascais where I'll be working, was enough to convince me on the first day that unless I wanted to scare small children in the streets with my scarlet complexion and wheezing, I needed to find somewhere to stay in Cascais itself. Unfortunately, Cascais being as popular with wealthy Lisboans as it is with retired Europeans, rent costs twice as much in the centre as anywhere else in the area.

Sometimes life astounds me with its inventive coincidences. On Tuesday I went into Cascais to get some paperwork done. First stop was the Town Hall to get my Certificate of Residency, which I needed to apply for my Social Security Number. Unfortunately, you can't pay for the Certificate without the SS number - a rather strange governmental catch-22. Luckily, the lovely lady behind the computer, while quite underwhelmed by my attempts at Portuguese and urging me to take classes soon, offered to use her own Number for the receipt. First hurdle cleared. Town Hall having taken less time than expected, I decided to go to the Finanças office and walked all the way there up a steep hill, only to remember, at the door, that I didn't have my employment contract, which I'd been told I would need. So back into town I went, searching for an internet cafe in the cobbled streets of the old town, but not a single one was to be found. There's another Finanças office in another nearby town which I'd heard could be faster than the larger Cascais one, so I was about to give up for the day in Cascais when, outside the train station, I noticed a big official looking building advertising its Internet Space. I went inside to find a completely free governmental initiative where I could print my contract. Gotta love Europe. On my way out, I paused to look at an advert for yoga classes on the community noticeboard, and right next to it was a handwritten note offering a room to rent. Not being entirely happy in my current place, I took down the phone number. Back at Finanças, I glanced down the street to see an internet cafe almost next door... The dire warnings of two-hour waits evaporated in the face of a wait barely long enough for me to catch my breath. And guess what? They never even asked for my contract. Typical. That evening, my telephone skills utterly deserting me in my time of need, I texted the woman with the flat and set up an appointment to see it the next day. It's ideal. Cheap, close to town and the school, near a gym and a park, in a spotless apartment with a Portuguese woman, her fascinating English-professor mum and a tiny cat. Where would I be if my Finanças information had been right?!

I'm settled into the room now, and have been to see the director of my school; I have a bank account, a tax contribution number, a certificate of residency, a written income confirmation and a local resident card. Feeling proud. Still to get: my social security number, and a health card, which relies on getting the former. I anticipate the social security application with trepidation - I need to be there by 7am to get into the queue to get a number to get into a queue to see an officer, and then I don't know if he'll see me without having the forms, which are unobtainable without seeing the officer... Portuguese bureaucracy nearly rivals Zimbabwe's! But the sun shines, the sea beckons, and the cafe round the corner from Social Security serves amazing pasteis de nata; I'm already thinking of signing up for another year!

Into the sunset

2010-03-22T23:30:00.009+08:00

My life in South Korea is done, and my sister's wedding is fast approaching in South Africa. My last few days at English Village are a whirlwind of final dinners and goodbyes, and relief that I'm going to miss the latest directive from the "management": African accents are to be replaced in the future with American ones. My American accent is so poor I'm embarrassed to even try in front of my friends for fear of angering them with the imitation. And anyway, which of the thousands of US accents would I choose? Oh, mad Korea.

In my last week, it snows. Yes, in mid-March, it snows. Poor Korea lucked out on the weather front...

Also in my last week, Shabu Lady discovers that I'm leaving and suddenly realises that she loves me! She really does! (Or maybe she's just thankful that she no longer needs to put me on my own table at big Shabu dinners...)

So. Korea. I won't miss people peering into my shopping bags, picking things out so as to have a better look at my groceries. Or the nightmare of having to deal with social and administrative hierarchy. Or the staring on the subway as I stand swaying in my foreign skin. The smell of silkworm pupae sizzling on the street. Having to explain for the hundredth time to an offended Korean just why I don't like the wonderfood that is Kimchi. The food and the wholesale worship of meat, no matter where it comes from. My tiny box they call an apartment. Sharing space with a million other people. Being met at the door of a shop by an assistant shaking her head at me and shouting "No big size! No for you!"

I'm going to miss shabu shabu and the local Indian restaurant, where curry comes with a side of pickles, and the friends that I've made from, truly, all corners of the English-speaking world - at least I now have a place to stay in a thousand different cities. The elderly lady in the shop who holds my hand when she babbles in Korean as if that will help me understand - and her wide smile. Couples' shirts! Someone going 3 blocks out of their way to show me where I need to go. Living two doors down from a cousin, and 4 doors away from my closest friend. Shopping in Seoul!

Korea has been an amazing ride; I can't see myself back here again, but then I have many friends at EV who said exactly the same thing right before they started looking into visas for another year. It's the first place I've ever truly experienced culture shock and that's a good thing. Without culture shock, the world is just one endless high street of McDonalds and Starbucks. In Seoul, the first Starbucks was met with such fierce animosity that it was the first Starbucks ever to translate its sign into another alphabet, Hangeul, as a compromise (it reads Seu-ta-bug-seu Ko-bi, and I love it!)

The other day I found myself thinking of the way that I get upset when people aren't nice to me on my travels; I write in my diary that "people in [insert town name] aren't as friendly as in [other town name]" and feel sad that I haven't had as good a time as I might have. But travel involves meeting people who are going about their lives, having a good day, having a bad day, trying to come to terms with the influx of people from other places, tourists who spend the equivalent of a month's local wages on a room for the night and then demand smiles all the time. The shock of having to adapt to Korea has left me smiling: if Korea, who looks to America as an adoring child looks up to a heroic baseball player, can still be so different to the McDonaldised West, then perhaps there's hope for the rest of the world.

Rediscovering the joy of teaching

2010-02-24T20:03:00.019+08:00

Dongsan High School is with us this week. A Christian specialist school, it's considered among the top five schools in Korea, and every year, they send their freshman students for a week at English Village, before they even start proper school. It's a chance for freshmen to get to know each other, form relationships, do a bit of teambuilding, and compete for the clubs and societies that mark this school as different from the average - which consider clubs as a waste of time that distracts students from their studies...

They are a joy to teach. My first day, I'm so used to herding unruly middle-schoolers, my jaw drops when the students walk out of their hotel ahead of me, in two perfect lines, making their way to our homeroom without even being told. I can stalk at the back, talking to two girls, who tell me "We're very excited about this great opportunity to study with real foreigners." Apart from the pristine language, who ever knew English Village students could be so thrilled about studying English!

The lessons are a pleasure; even the lower-level kids are interested, and the high-level ones actually laugh when the teachers joke with them!

On the Wednesday, we're walking them to the classroom when we pass the school teachers' hotel at the bottom of the road. A teacher is watching TV just inside the open door, and one of the girls lets out a scream of delight. Before long, we've lost them all, a crowd of teenagers cheering and clapping as Kim Yu-Na, the country's top figure-skater, takes first place in the initial round at the Winter Olympics. She's not a singer or a society princess, but Yu-Na is more than a celebrity in Korea - kids here worship those who rise above the crowds to excel in anything. When we complain, the girls reluctantly leave the doorway to get back in line, but our headteacher, who's standing nearby, says that it's ok for them to take a couple of minutes to watch the performance, and the smiles on their faces as they run back to see uplifts me. Later, my coteacher plays the full video of Yu-Na's triumphant piece; she's absolutely perfect, slipping along on the ice as if humans were made to move on two razor thin blades.

Each day, a member of the Overseas Class appears holding a bundle of newspapers for the students and teachers. The Overseas Class is an elite group of students fluent in English. The freshmen actually took a test to be considered for this class while at English Village. Because they couldn't be expected to skip any classes or initiation for the exam, it was written at 11pm - and that didn't even raise an eyebrow from my coteacher, who explained that these children, the cream of the crop, have been raised from birth attending English private lessons and piano classes from 7am until midnight in order to give them the chance of attending such a school as Dongsan. The newspaper is impressive, written at EV, rushed back to the school where it's printed on the private printing press they own, and then driven back to EV the following morning for the students to read over the morning break.

It's a bit of an ego trip for English Village. Their newspaper, commenting on the opening day, calls the teachers "of a high quality, and very handsome and beautiful like princes and princesses."

On the other hand, the headline is "Students Meet Foreigners". Yes. As if we were an exhibit in a zoo. Ahem.

On Friday at lunchtime, I'm with a number of teachers in the pizza restaurant in the Village during the freestyle skating, the second and final round. The Japanese and American contestants are awarded decent scores, but not fantastic. Kim Yu-Na comes on. The restaurant has filled with children, teenagers and parents, and one of my colleagues climbs on a table to turn the volume up on the flat-screen; everyone falls silent, the chefs stop clattering, and we all watch Yu-Na effortlessly break her own record to take the gold, 40 points ahead of her Japanese rival. I can't believe that even the young schoolkids, who haven't been herded in by adults but have hurried in of their own accord in time for her display, are absolutely engrossed in the TV, and when Yu-Na's score is announced - clearly so far ahead as to be unbeatable - the restaurant bursts into tears and applause. It's emotional...

My students compete in a debate they've been preparing for all week. My girls have to compete against boys - until now, they've not been allowed to cohabit classrooms with the opposite gender - Dongsan is strictly Christian. Not sure entirely why it's even co-ed... The boys are also terrified, hiding their fear behind jokes and laughing and formal handshakes. They're more fluent, but my girls have much better grammar. The boys win...

I listen to their hard work, and then later, can't believe it when a head teacher tells me I was actually assigned the lowest level class in the school! These kids weren't fluent, by any means, but they were miles ahead of any of my previous students - even better than some of our Korean teachers! Polite, well-behaved, interested, willing to participate, smart, creative... At the closing ceremony, I eye their foreign English teacher, wondering if he's going to be leaving the job anytime soon - for these kids, I'd return to Korea.

East of Venice

2010-02-22T21:24:00.002+08:00

On the way home to Korea I have an eight-hour layover. This time, however, it's in the daytime - so I get to go into Bangkok on an organised tour. It's just me and another man - a Malaysian scientist - who happens to get to the desk at the same time as me, so we share the guide's price. Our guide is Lek, and he leads us through VIP customs out into the muggy heat of the Thai winter and into a waiting car.

We drive into central Thailand and from an old wooden pier we catch a boat across the river. Unlike the lazy Mekong, this one rolls and waves and chops at the boat as we loll our way across. In the centre there's a steady line of banana leaves, fresh apples and marigolds - offerings from the morning meditation.

On the other side from the pier is Wat Arun. It's more a stupa than a temple, with an almost Islamic influence, white ridges extending up and up until the neck starts to complain about the abuse. Four smaller domed towers stand at each edge.

We start to climb up the narrow, steep stairs - the vertigo isn't too bad as long as I keep my eyes closed. My fingers are white on the railings though. From the second level I look out over central Bangkok, golden temples all around, modern skyscrapers in the middle distance. It's a beautiful city from this vantage point.

From up close, the Islamic influence turns to a more Portuguese-style decoration, perhaps, with blue-and-white pottery set into the walls, and mosaic littering the stupa from ground to heaven.

The statues are most definitely Asian, though.

Little bells hang from the outer towers playing the background music to our climb.

After placing my feet thankfully and firmly back on solid ground, we're led down to the river again. All around the jetty are hundreds of enormous fish, disturbing the surface. Lek says it's not allowed to fish near the temples, which protect all life in their vicinity (I can see this from the fat cats strolling past with an air of superiority). From the jetty we get on a long-tail boat, shorter and sturdier-looking than the Lao ones, and head into the canals.

The Bangkok khlong are ancient waterways right in the centre of the city, edged with teeming life, both animal and human.

Thais live in stilted houses and floating shacks above the water, with farms of water plants in between shops and bars. Temples and schools also back onto the canals, many with their own little jetties.

The houses are obviously poor but very sweet to an onlooker, quaint and wooden with masses of flowers and potted plants overflowing from the verandahs. Some of the families are out eating their dinner amongst the greenery on low tables; some are fishing for their dinner almost from their front rooms. There are lots of fish here too. We pause at a jetty where a heavily tattooed monk - who I'd mistake for Triad were he not in saffron robes and sitting in the lotus position - sits talking to a squatting woman.

A man sells Lek some large bread rolls and we lean over the edge of the boat to feed the fish, which leap and scuffle for the food.

By this time, I'm pretty starving myself so I'm grateful when, back on the bank, Lek suggests a restaurant round the corner that he likes. It's a local place with plastic chairs on the sidewalk, and a man frying vegetables in a wok on the street. When I ask for a Fanta inside, the boy scrubbing the floors looks at me in terror and yells "Farang!" into the back room until a woman (his mother?) appears to take my order. The food is plentiful and delicious. We walk back past Wat Arun, black in the dusk, to our car.

Back at the airport I'm taken by the massive display of Thai royalist adoration across the glass front, adorned with pictures of King Rama IX, the longest reigning current monarch in the world.

Thais love their king, who's seen as semi-divine - "enthroned in a position of revered worship, (he) shall not be violated". Harry's trip here in December coincided with his birthday and the entire city had apparently shut down. All the way into town I was met with displays of affection, the king and queen on flags, statues, monuments...

A bit different from the benign contempt the British queen is held in!

And then it's back to the cold breeze of a Korean morning in February - although it's ten degrees warmer than when I left, my tan is still hidden beneath layers of wool, and I'm looking forward to South Africa - in just three weeks' time!

I'm so grumpy at the airport and in the immigration line, where I wait for 45 minutes for one man to process about 3 visas, while his superiors watch from behind - Korean bureaucracy with minimal actual efficiency. But then I get into a taxi, and the driver practises his English all the way to the Village, showing me photos of his children and explaining how proud he is of the girls in university, and talking about his wife and his love for driving, and I walk through the Village gates with a smile on my face.

Buddhas in repose

2010-02-21T19:34:00.008+08:00

I went to Xiang Khuane, about 25km outside of Vientiane. I thought about catching a tuk-tuk, but in the end was so glad I didn't. It was a fifteenth of the price to walk to the bus station behind the Morning Market and get on a waiting bus. It was a shabby one, full of Lao people travelling to outlying villages. It stopped on the way at the Thai border, then carried on down the Mekong through small villages almost back to back. Through gaps I could see Thailand over the river. I couldn't work out what was bothering me about the scene and I kept glancing back at the wide green river, the hotels and temples on the other side, the fishermen's boats... Then I realised. There was no security. No ten-foot fences, no guardposts protecting men with guns, not even cameras as far as I could see. It was a peaceful river between two friendly nations. Korea has obviously jaded me.

Xiang Khuane is an oddity, the dream of a Lao artist in the 1960s who mixed Hinduism and Buddhism and from the stew in his head created hundreds of concrete statues of gods and Buddhas and fantastically intricate beasts. At the entrance is a huge pumpkin-shaped construction. I've met a Chinese girl on the bus who's also travelling alone. She has no English, but we stick together taking photos of each other and laughing at the impossibly small spaces we have to scramble through. The pumpkin is meant to represent the realms of hell, earth and heaven as you climb. Somehow we get into the centre of earth where dusty statues of soldiers and broken body parts lurk in the gloom. My partner has a torch, thank god, as otherwise I don't think we'd find the stairs upwards. I say stairs, but really they were uneven ridges not wide enough for a foot. We squeeze through a narrow opening into daylight and find ourselves in heaven with a view of the whole park.

Going back down again, we discover actual steps which lead to an outer corridor circling the rooms we stumbled into - but I still think ours was the more interesting route.

The main attraction of the park is a massive reclining Buddha; I'm smaller than his feet!

Some of the statues I'm not entirely sure of, but they're a creative use of concrete - much worthier than Patuxai for instance...

I have a feeling the one above is a god eating the sun, perhaps from Indian mythology, but my shallow knowledge fails me.

When the park is exhausted, and it doesn't take too long, I pay a smiley child for the use of a mosquito-haunted pit latrine and head back on the bus into town. The driver stops on the way to pick up his lunch from his daughter in one of the villages, and we have to pause for the little girl to climb on and give her dad a hug. He smiles apologetically at the Chinese girl and I, the only foreigners, lifting his hands, but I'm not bothered - it's just another perk of being in Laos.

Everywhere in Laos, homes have small shrines in the corner of the gardens, intricate, coloured, or plain wooden mini houses, with steps and chairs and ornate rooves. I'd thought these were a Hindu method of worship but apparently Buddhists use them too. Every morning offerings are left, and it's something I love about Eastern gods. Beside the marigolds (in the sacred orange colours) are laid sweets and lao-lao and cigarettes and beer, as if the gods are just like us in their pursuit of pleasure!

Finally, because all good things must end, my last day arrives. I do some last-minute shopping at Talat Sao, have coffee and a baguette at a French cafe, and sit and read in the garden, waiting to catch a tuk-tuk to the airport. On the way back to the hotel, though, I catch sight of an advert for an English teaching job in the window of a cafe. So who knows, Laos, I may be back...

City life

2010-02-20T13:52:00.004+08:00

An innocent question of mine on the Lonely Planet online forum had unexpectedly sparked off a heated debate over the qualities of Vientiane and Luang Prabang, one camp claiming the beauty of Luang Prabang and the big-city unfriendliness of Vientiane, the other telling me that Luang Prabang isn't "real" Laos, but a Disneyfied theme park, while Vientiane is a charming laidback city. I can now see both sides of the argument; I was still pleasantly surprised by Vientiane, though. With wide boulevards and French restaurants in some parts, other neighbourhoods boast narrow lanes filled with temples, street hawkers and (still French) cafes. The centre is easily walkable in a couple of hours.

At sunset I find myself sitting on the banks of the Mekong, 390km from where I was that morning. The scene has changed dramatically. Vientiane eschews the deep calm banks of the northern town, and instead I'm sitting in a large carpark with my beer, looking over a scene of carnage. Great machines are carving out the wide shore. Mining, perhaps, or building a new road. The carpark I sit in is an expanse of grey dust, a busy road running alongside. It's home to a few makeshift, open-air bar-restaurants and a legion of colourful tables and chairs. From where I sit I can see two temples, gold pillars glinting in the setting sun. It's not a peaceful riverside town, but it does have its own manic charm.

The sun disappears into the haze a finger's width above the Thai shore, and I retreat to my hotel.

After breakfast the next day, I hurry out into the stiff winter cold (it's probably about 25 degrees, but everyone's in jackets) and take a 15-minute walk up a wide street that bisects Vientiane. It's apparently sometimes called the Champs Elysees of the East, but I can't imagine by whom. I guess it's mainly because of what's been built at the far end. At 45m of grim concrete, Patuxai doesn't loom so much as lurk. It's based on the Arc de Triomphe. I think it's the ugliest thing on four legs I've ever seen.

As instructed by the guidebook, I climb up through the 5 floors, dark rooms filled with mass-made, shrink-wrapped souvenirs, to the viewpoint. I look down the Champs Elysees to the Presidential Palace. I look the other way to the Communist headquarters (I presume). I climb a circular staircase to the very top where I look at the graffiti and note that S.K. Was Here. I climb down again.

Hmm. A brutally honest sign at the entrance notes that the monument "from a closer distance appears even less impressive, like a monster of concrete." I have to agree...

Back down the avenue, I come to Talat Sao, the morning market. This is much more interesting, with traditional medicine sellers and silk weavers jostling for space with refrigerator stalls and cellphone stands. Sadly they're in the process of building a Malaysian-funded building next door for the market to move into. Big rooms and well-lit corridors will be on offer. Boooo-ring.... :D

At the end of the road, next to the Palace, is Wat Si Saket, a beautiful Provence-like terracotta-coloured temple set in a courtyard surrounded by what in Christendom would be called cloisters. When Laos was still Lan Xang, the Land of a Million Elephants, Vientiane was razed to the ground by invading Siamese armies, and Wat Si Saket was the only building left standing (some say this is because it was in the Bangkok style.) When the French arrived in the 1900s, they found it derelict and lonely on an empty riverside plain, and it was one of the first buildings to be restored by them during their reconstruction of the city.

Thousands of Buddhas rest in the cloistered silence - big ones sitting on the floor, tiny ones occupying niches up the wall.

The central temple also has arched cubbyholes cut high into the walls with yet more golden statues. A sign from the curator says there are more than ten thousand. Around the outside perimeter there are monks' quarters, old cottages with dragons curled around the stairs. A young novice is brushing his teeth on a balcony. I feel a little like I'm back at the English Village with the roles reversed - so I don't take a photo. The poor monks must feel just like I do, living in a human zoo. Although they do have the comfort of being enlightened. I just eat a lot.

I have breakfast at a shack on the sand by the Mekong. More building works. A woman passes by carting eggs somewhere, but the eggs here are dangerous - in line with the rest of Laotian eating habits, many of them are fertilized duck eggs and unwary travellers are surprised by the little bird inside...

Spiritual tourism

2010-02-18T12:23:00.000+08:00

On my last morning in Luang Prabang I woke up at 6am and walked down to feed the monks. Yes, I know, sounds like a zoo, doesn't it? It's actually a very old tradition. As I walked down towards the temples, women passed me at a trot, long bamboo sticks over their shoulders with baskets at either end. As they slowed next to me, I could see the banana leaf packages inside holding rice, and the women held these out to me, calling "Feed monk? Good karma, lucky. Only 5,000 kip!" I felt a little nervous of pretending to join in on this spiritual journey, but when I got to the main street I saw quite a few tourists kneeling on grass mats among the Lao, so I let a seller persuade me to buy a plate of bananas, and knelt in the dust. The dawn was only just breaking when the first sunrise-coloured robes appeared at the corner. Each monk carried an ornate silver bowl around his neck, and as he moved down the waiting line of devotees he paused long enough for each woman - for they were mostly women - to place a food offering in the bowl.

My bananas weren't as popular as the sweets the next lady offered - at least with the younger monks - but they went quickly enough, and I straightened up to watch the rest of the procession pass by. It was fascinating to see the long line of monks, not looking at the people and especially avoiding any physical contact with women.

Although, once again, I felt like I was taking part in a Disney play specially put on for me, when I left and walked down a side street, all the women offering food were Laotian, and it does strike me as a good way to feed those in the temples while spreading the burden of support over many shoulders. For the monks, it constitutes their only meal of the day, eaten at lunchtime after chores, and often shared with an attached orphanage or school. Some of the women were Hmong and likely to be Christian, so perhaps this is seen as more of a cultural tradition than a religious one.

Anyway. Suitably reassured, I walked down to the food market nearby. The food market is two or three streets, quite narrow, lined in the mornings by sellers from the surrounding province. The narrowness of the lanes does not, however, prevent scooters from entering; add in the surprising amount of live produce, the chatter and the loud bartering and it makes for a noisy experience.

Welcoming though - every time I requested a photograph I was answered with a smile. I felt something bang into my hip once - it was a basket being carried by a grey-haired lady with a deeply lined face. She held up her hands and smiled in apology and as I smiled in return she grasped my arm and patted my face, laughing to the other women.

The food on sale was mostly vegetables, many of which I couldn't recognise, green leaves and flowers, alongside deep purple eggplant and the pink dragonfruit I'd come to recognise in the fruit smoothies I had every morning on the side of the road.

Some of the fishermen's wives were selling balls of river weed from wicker baskets, eaten much like seaweed is elsewhere in Asia; it looks just like the weed I used to drag out of the pond as a kid and dry in strips, and probably tastes much the same, too (as a kid, I was smart enough not to eat these things - as an adult, not so much.)

There were stalls selling dried strips of pale meat - less like biltong than leather straps. The small meat section had anonymous cuts of meat sharing space with such joys of the meat-eater's world as pigs' ears and testicles; hordes of flies were kept away - though only just - by women waving plastic bags tied to sticks. I hurried past. I paused to watch two women squeezing honey from a comb into a bucket.

As I was crouching to photograph the scene, something in the foreground caught my eye, which I'd only heard of till now: two splayed and roasted rats!

Laos is well known among conservationists for its fervent consumption of anything that swims, walks, slithers or flies, regardless of the animal's position on the endangered list. It's why generally I haven't seen much wildlife here, apart from the Rivertime Lodge where the land is protected. Although the authorities are clamping down in an effort to make Laos an eco-friendly county (eco-tourism is big business here), it's still possible to see, in certain markets, monkeys, spiders and snakes sold as meat. The rats I saw were probably just common field rats though. There were also grass snakes and little piles of beetles neatly laid out on mats.

Apparently not too long ago some wildlife experts discovered a species of rat thought to be extinct before they saw it roasted at a market. It hasn't been seen since, either...

I caught the midday plane back to Vientiane, where I was treating myself with a stay at the Vayakorn Inn. All hardwood floors and dark Laotian furniture, it's not a five-star soulless hotel, but it's pure luxury for me after sharing a bathroom with 5 boys for four days! The view from my balcony takes in the magnificently ugly Cultural Hall which was built, clearly, by a big fan of gold kitsch. It's very central, so I take a walk around town as soon as I'm settled in.

Books and the art of kayaking

2010-02-16T21:58:00.000+08:00

On Tuesday, I've booked to go on a two-day trek, spending a night in a Hmong village. On enquiring at the tour office, I find that this has now turned into a one-day trek and kayak due to market forces beyond their control. I'm a little worried about the strength (or lack of it) in my arms, but the guy assures me it's only an hour or so of kayaking, and the river current does most of the work.

Tuesday dawns, and I'm at the tour office bright and early to meet up with the other travellers - a Brit, two Canadians, and three Spanish girls. I'm already wary as the tour company promises a maximum of six on a tour. We set off in the back of a truck, kayaks strapped to the roof. The truck sets us down after 40 minutes at the end of a dusty road - very dusty, as it's the dry cold season season in Laos, though you wouldn't know it from the oppressive heat. From there we walk to a nearby school. I've brought some books in town from Big Brother Mouse, a charity that could have been set up just for me, it's so perfect: they write and publish bilingual children's books which they try to distribute to kids who have sometimes never seen a book before. I've chosen a Lao fairytale, a collection of Aesop's Fables and an English picture dictionary, which all cost me about £3 in total, and now I hand them over to the headmaster, who tells us he's trying to start a library for the use of the whole village. Great! Literacy and a bit of English in one dedicated push.

The trek leads us up over a hill through fields and rubber tree plots, and then down into the luxurious caller where a wide river winds all the way to Luang Prabang. And that's the trek over. Mis-selling? I think so! The kayaks are waiting on the beach; I share with Nicola, a British girl teaching in Thailand. We set off onto the river, which turns out to be so placid and calm that we are in fact doing all the work. We break for lunch half an hour in, but other than that it's three and a half hours of constant paddling. Despite the dull ache in my arms, I find myself enjoying it. We're low on the water looking up at cliffs and mountains and mostly the only sounds are our paddles hitting the water, and the snorts of the water buffalo. As usual there are thousands of butterflies on the shores and a few fishermen beating the water with long sticks to flush the fish into the waiting nets.

There are also lots of semi-submerged bamboo baskets, cleverly disguised with river weed and baited with food. When a fish bites, a trapdoor is released, holding the fish until it can be collected.

Sometimes we pass men panning for gold... The shores are shiny with fools' gold (I assume... unless I made a terrible mistake spending my holiday kayaking instead of collecting my fortune...)

There are rapids to break up the heavy paddling; the first lulls us into a false sense of calm but they get more and more difficult (and proportionately more fun) until we reach one where the Canadians, their centre of gravity slightly askew, Nicola supposes, flip over. From there on, every tumbling stretch of white water plunges them into the wet. Nicola and I, evenly matched in weight, coast over, shrieking with laughter and crying like kids "Again! Again!" We're almost a little jealous of the Canadians cooling off from the heat... until the last one drags them for almost 30 metres, banging them against rocks and leaving them with bruised limbs and small cuts. Luckily it's almost the end though. Nicola and I have visions of easily coasting onto a sandy beach and flinging our oars down in triumph, but we're grounded in the shallow waters and have to climb out and scramble over rocks and pebbles, dragging our kayak behind us.

It's a triumphant ending, nevertheless. Back in town, I fling myself onto my bed for a second and only open my eyes hours later in the dark when my arms ache me awake. That's when I discover the two blisters on the inside of my thumbs from the oars, one open and bleeding. The Laotian Injury List just passed the Balinese one.

The rest of my time I spend walking, endlessly. Luang Prabang is a small town but it's quite easy to while away a few hours without realising in its narrow back streets full of laundry and bougainvillea and boys playing khataw, a kind of mix between football and volleyball.

It's played with a hollow rattan ball, the players seeming to compete with each other for title of most impressive move. Their legs are amazingly strong and they fly through the air executing high kicks. In one game I watched, two players aimed at the net at the same time, grazing each other's thighs and coming perilously close to depriving Laos of future generations. It caused an outburst of raucous laughter among the spectators as the players, pale but smiling, grabbed at their crotches.

Sometimes I see older men playing petanque, the pitch boundary made of bamboo pipes so that the sandy thunk of the boules is often followed by a hollow 'tok!' as they hit the bamboo. I told one man that we play the same game at home in my family and was rewarded with a surprised smile and an invitation to join in their game. As my family knows, I'm no expert, but the two other players were very kind to me and applauded my weak attempts!

My wanderings were punctuated with cups of thick dark coffee in a thousand different cafes where I sat and wrote and watched the streetlife pass by.

It was in one of these cafes in a back street shaded by frangipanis that I met Martin, a German man working as an engineer in China, who spent a few years in the Limpopo valley, and lived in a commune in East Berlin as a university student. He was interested in my childhood in Zimbabwe, as I was in his experiences of communist Germany so we walked and talked together for a while. We crossed yet another rickety bamboo bridge to the opposite bank, paying 20p towards its upkeep to an elderly woman spinning thread in a hut.

On the other side we found the village empty, the occupants presumably enjoying a siesta in the midday heat, so we slipped down a path littered with the bones of old boats to the banks of the Mekong, where a hut, perched directly above the meeting of the Nam Khan and the Mekong, offered fresh coconuts and cold beers.

As we sat there discussing the similar confluence of communism and capitalism across Asia, an old man dressed in his underpants and an open shirt, his wide smile betraying toothless gums, climbed up from where he'd been washing to offer us a boat to the bars on the far bank. But I was flushed from the heat, and tired, so I decided to mimic the villagers and head back to the hostel for a siesta in the hammock. The blisters on my thumbs from holding the oars the previous day had split so I needed to tend to them and my various other injuries as well. I really don't know how I've turned into such a clumsy traveller - no one else I know ever returns from holiays as battered and bruised as I do.

Refreshed, I went at sunset to meet Martin and Nicola for drinks at a bar where the evening's entertainment was a catwalk to showcase traditional clothing from some of the 40-odd Laotian tribes. The variety that has developed in such a small country is amazing - I'm always a little embarrassed when people ask about the traditional clothes of Britain or Zimbabwe - neither show anything near the imagination Asians put into the way they dress.

Fairyland And Its Inhabitants

2010-02-15T20:11:00.000+08:00

Early on Sunday morning I packed my bags and left Rivertime for the airport. On the 40-minute drive, Joy told me of his great happiness at entering the army in two months' time. So very different to South Korea where most men would do anything to get out of serving... With Lunar New Year and Valentine's Day falling on the same weekend this year, the streets were awash with red - lanterns for the new year, teddies and roses for the lovers, everything sold together from tiny stalls on the roadside. There was one particularly blessed woman somewhere in Vientiane, whose boyfriend sat in a tuk-tuk in front of our car, red and white balloons billowing out the back and completely obscuring the door. Even the dress code matched the event, with a red t-shirt or dress atop every scooter. I was rather glad to leave the American-style commercialism behind at the airport gates!

I quickly cleared check-in and went through to the waiting lounge, a grid of hard plastic chairs looking out to the runway where a plane was waiting. Not, surely, my plane, for I was flying the national airline on their busiest route, and this was a teensy tiny propellor plane.

With a lovely flower on its tail, yes, but still teensy, nonetheless. I sat and waited, but no other flights were announced and no other plane showed up, and the pilots walked through, pushing the unlocked doors open to the tarmac, and then a sweet lady in her silk uniform told us we could now board. So we all did, walking across the tarmac to get to the 5-step ladder. Which of course I have done before at other small airports. I have, however, never had to duck to get in through an aeroplane door... My window seat was right in the middle, right under the wing, and next to the wheels.

I started to understand why other travellers were wary of flying Lao Airlines, but in the end it was a perfectly pleasant, very short flight over valleys and mountains and bright red dirt roads. As we descended into Luang Prabang, the Mekong stretched and yawned beneath us, curling around the little town, gold temples reflecting the morning sunlight into my eyes. Luang Prabang used to be a distant colonial outpost for French officials who, for one reason or another, never wanted to go home again. In my 40-minute flight I leapt over a month's travelling. It used to take longer to get from Bangkok to Luang Prabang than to go from Bangkok to France by ship! Perhaps as a result of this unimaginable distance, the officials who settled here eventually turned it into a beautiful village in the French style, with shuttered two-storey cottages lining a narrow street, and a boulevard running above the Mekong with space for a cafe table or two.

The town mostly fills the peninsular space between the Mekong and the Nam Khan, a river that joins the Mekong here. On the 15-minute tuk-tuk ride to my hostel, I started to see the chaotic Asian traffic I missed in the Vientiane countryside. There are scooters and tuk-tuks everywhere, although it's still far from the stereotypical Vietnamese streetscene. I was barely at the hostel long enough to dump my bag on my bed, and then I was off to the main street, Th Sisavangvong, named after the king at the time of independence from France. Lovely.

Of course, it has the usual ebullience of Asia, but the allure of the town is in the bougainvillea creeping over the carved wooden balconies, and the open-fronted cafes. Asia shows her motherhood in the street food sellers - I buy a coconut dumpling straight away from a man who says he has 7 children to feed, although at least in the drawing on his cart they all have very smiley faces - the friendliness of the people - the dumpling seller chats to me for 5 minutes then makes me another one because he sees the sticky smile on my face, then tries to refuse to let me pay my 10p - the brightly coloured tuk-tuks everywhere - often with movie scenes painted on the sides.

Of course, because this is the 21st century, all the houses and cottages are now massage spas and restaurants, tour agencies and money changers. This is a town where people feel comfortable leaning over from their table to contribute to your private conversation, as if because we're all tourists we're the same, and should help each other out with tips and warning tales. Every Lao person is seemingly in the tourist industry, from men guiding the tours, to women giving foot massages and selling silks, to the children selling trinkets when they're not at school. At least the kids do go to school - when I tried to fob off one persistent ten-year-old with "maybe tomorrow", she retorted "Tomorrow school, every child learning learning. You buy now."

I did "buy now" in the end...

I retreated to my room for a late afternoon siesta but I'm back at 5:30 for the night market, a sea of silk and silver that shuts down Th Sisavangvong.

I eat street food, which in this fairytale land means a vegetarian baguette and a fruit smoothie, and wander about talking to sellers and deciding what I would buy if I were a millionaire. I pass the boat pier where a rotund man sporting an improbably moustache suggests I might like to take a boat to the other side of the river, "with your boyfriend" he says. I tell him I have no boyfriend. He and a nearby tuk-tuk driver laugh and shake their heads at the shame of being an elderly spinster. "That pity," the boatman says, "but don't worry, for today, I can be boyfriend." I laugh with the two of them, politely decline, and move on.

On Monday I walked down to the Mekong, still bleary-eyed with sleep, which was interrupted repeatedly by the person in the dorm above mine shifting position in his (I presume) sleep. Not a well-soundproofed room - but then, it is almost eighty years old. I've booked a space on a boat down the river so I patiently wait on the benches at the ticket office (a glorified shed under some lovely old trees on the riverbank) until my ticket number is called.

I scramble down the steep steps and wobble my way onto a boat, where before the five other passengers can say hello, I nearly knock myself out on a low beam, adding a bump on the head to an infected scrape on a toe on my list of Laotian injuries. Not as impressive as the Balinese list yet, but it's early days... The boat is a traditional long boat. Low and narrow, both ends sit out of the water. It's steered from the front, though the engine sits towards the back, in front of a living space. Only six passengers are accommodated on each boat; the rest of the area is taken up by the family whose home this is. I could see that being awkward, but I'd luckily been assigned a lovely young couple, the wife nursing a cheerful baby boy, and it felt less like an intrusion than a homestay.

At the other end of the two-hour journey were the Pak Ou caves: the lower one, Tham Ting, a gaping black cavity in the limestone cliff, reached by crude, whitewashed steps.

Our boat driver moored at the far end of a line of boats; we climbed over three other boats to reach a wide bamboo raft which acts as jetty and leads to the foot of the steps where a $2 entrance fee must be paid.

The cave had religious significance for the people living in the valley long before the Lao arrived here from China. The religion changed, the significance remained, and then Buddhism arrived. Inside, the cave rises from the mouth, creating a kind of amphitheatre in which we the visitors become the actors on a stage. The audience, silent, but each with their own unique expression, is thousands upon thousands of Buddha statues. They sit and watch, some in the meditation pose, or Calling for Rain. Some with their hands extended, open-palmed, exhorting listeners to Stop Arguing, a rare pose for a Buddha. A few lack heads or arms or bodies: these have been brought here and left, as if it were a Buddha graveyard for unwanted icons. Many, though, were crafted by royal sculptors for kings.

They sit on rocks and in cracks right up to the ceiling of the cave, gold, bronze, wooden and painted.

I venture up a path on the side of the mountain to the second, higher cave. All the way up there are ragged children who wave tiny, meticulously made bamboo cages. Inside tiny songbirds flutter their wings, waiting for Buddhists to buy them for a dollar and release them, thereby purchasing extra credit in the ladder of good karma. I wonder if you wouldn't gain just as much karma by not buying them, thereby discouraging their capture in the first place. I am taking a photo of the view over the river when a boy thrusts a cage at me and cries "photo!" So I take one, and show it to him. He smiles, but then babbles in Lao and another child translates: "He say, you take photo, you pay him. Only one dollar. You pay." Whoever told me Lao weren't as mercenary as their Asian neighbours had their tongue firmly in their cheek.

On the return journey, our boat pauses at Ban Xang Hai, a village famous for its lao-lao - rice whisky. We get off the boat onto a jetty, 500m of death-defying rickety bamboo poles crossing the exposed Mekong mud. In the village we're invited to try the lao-lao, which tastes like wine laced with vodka, and watch it being fermented, which is very exciting. Like watching grass grow. The pots remind me of the clay containers used for fermenting kimchi in Korea.

The boat trip itself is perhaps the most interesting aspect of an interesting day. There are fishermen in bamboo hats casting fine nets from their low boats, and women cultivating lettuce and cucumbers on the banks. Now and then a village passes into view, connected to the shore by ladders or sometimes mud steps, the grass-roofed huts poking out of thick vegetation.

During the Vietnam War, the US waged a "secret war" in Laos, training Hmong fighters for illegal skirmishes along the Vietnamese border. When the Vietnamese started importing arms along a trail that led through north-eastern Laos (the Ho Chi Minh Trail of legend), America carpet bombed the "neutral" country, increasing support locally for the communists, both Lao and Vietnamese. With the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I can't help feeling the Americans will never learn their lesson. Floating peacefully down the river I watch the thick forest lining the banks and imagine how terrifying it must have been to have had to travel in the 1970s - with the CIA, the Viet Minh and the local communist army, the Pathet Lao all operating in the area, I can't imagine feeling less safe.

That afternoon I spent wandering the peninsula and drinking thick Lao coffee at street stalls. In amongst the hundreds of tourists, ordinary Lao went about their business unobtrusively. I started to see beyond the play put on for tourists. Though I've generally found the people here to be far less friendly and open than down near Vientiane (too much contact with pushy Westerners perhaps?), once I start sitting and smiling at people, I can see their hospitality and willingness to talk resurface.

Everywhere I look, the saffron and yellow robes and shaved heads of the monks brighten the day. They wander the streets, their faded golden bags slung over their shoulders, talking to each other and buying fruit. The novices are as young as 7 or 8, taken to the temples by parents desperate to ensure them education and a daily meal (just one though - the monks eat only at lunchtime, I'm told). Sometimes a truck or tuk-tuk passes, filled to the brim with the orange robes.

Observing the North

2010-02-07T17:48:00.024+08:00

Having only two weekends left in Korea has focused my attention somewhat. I've realised how many things I haven't yet done and how little time I have left to do them in. In an effort to reduce the list a bit, Harry and I headed down the road to Odusan Observatory this weekend.

It's terrible that I haven't been before, as it really is just a five minute drive from English Village, past our local shops and love motels, across the highway. It's so close that from the top of the observatory, we can see our Hollywood-style sign beyond the village.

Odusan was built to promote the idea of reunification of the two Koreas, an idea popular in the media and with politicians, but often scoffed at by southerners more concerned with whether the economy would suffer if combined with the poor North. The observatory looks over the confluence of two rivers, gazing towards North Korea.

The main attraction is an observation deck with bright orange binoculars through which it's possible to make out the Propaganda Village on the other side of the river. Unfortunately, the binoculars were too low even for my short frame, so poor Harry really struggled...

The Propaganda Village was built by the North Koreans for the purpose of showing South Koreans what they were missing out on. It boasts high-rise apartment buildings and enormous signs beseeching southerners to cross over to paradise. There used to be loudspeakers blaring propaganda as well, matched by loudspeakers on the southern side, until the governments agreed to remove them all for the sake of sanity. Unfortunately, the government forgot (or was unable) to fill the village with people. The buildings are grey concrete, and the glass-less windows stare blankly over fields and unused schools. North Koreans are apparently brought in every day to work the rice paddies, and at dusk, they're driven back to their real homes. The buildings visible to us on this slightly hazy day included mansions with such glorious names as "The Anti-South Media Propaganda Base", "Kim Il-Sung Historical Monument Hall" and "People's Cultural Assembly Hall". Small figures worked in the fields, burning rubbish and preparing for spring planting. I made out what seemed to be a primary school, but the courtyard was empty of children and the swings lonely.

The river is currently full of ice floating out to sea. A couple of weeks ago it was almost completely frozen over, so it's getting better, but it's still hard to imagine the lives of the people we could see. I recently read a book by a teenager who escaped over the border with China, and his tales of famine and desperation were ringing in my head as I turned my binoculars on the farmers. Without heating or even fuel for a fire, many of the people in North Korea have difficulty in even surviving the winter - returning to my toasty room, I vowed not to complain of the cold again...

The exhibition centre is nicely done. There's no judgement - or at least, there isn't in the small amount of English commentary available. The glass cases full of North Korean products seem to show that life, although permanently stuck in the 1950s, is actually quite similar to the rest of Asia. The little area done up as a regular room might be shows a poor but clean space, with a TV and food on the low table. The only sign that this is not a room in just any third world country is the pictures on the wall: placed high up so that nothing else is above them, the Two Kims gaze benevolently over the scene.

The display cases show an amazing array of North Korean products, like adder liquor, with a perfectly preserved adder reaching up towards the cap. The money is well designed, with all the reverse sides showing heroic citizens, stoically looking to the future in a heroic manner, as befits the heroic members of an outcast society.

It's stunning how many products are produced. Although I knew of the ideal of self-sufficiency (or "juche"), I didn't realise just how self-sufficient the country is. The clothing is a bit dated, the toys are largely military, the packaging has none of the appeal of Western equivalents (and is that such a bad thing?) but it's all there.

Even guitar strings are available to the workers of DPRK, and should they require a little relaxation at the end of the day, there's "revolutionary opera" - oh how I wish I could listen to that...

The Kims are everywhere. Wearing a badge with one or the other's face on it is compulsory for all North Koreans above a certain age, and in Life In Paradise, the teenage author tells of how all the children fought to have the latest editions, which were, naturally, more expensive, and therefore worn only by the wealthiest. The personality cult is fascinating and I can't help but wonder where Mugabe failed in this - he'd certainly love to have the absolute power that Kim Jong-Il has. Even during the famine, North Koreans were expected to, and did, go and offer food at the base of one of the Kims' enormous statues that are built on hills in every city. The food is left to go to waste as an offering on their birthdays and other holidays.

Perhaps one of the saddest points for me was the Hometown Searching Centre. Although this is not necessarily the closest South Koreans can get, it's one of the places that families separated by the war come to burn offerings to ancestors on important days, ancestors who are buried across the border and are inaccessible to their descendants, and to look across the water and wonder about their living relatives who were caught on the other side at the ceasefire. This centre allows South Koreans to search for information about their homes they left so long ago.

Odusan's a fascinating place, full of heartache and suffering, but also of hope, in the walls filled with inter-Korean communication and co-operation. All those people, separated by simple ideology - really, what's the point?

In which our heroine goes down the river

2010-01-06T19:34:00.010+08:00

On Boxing Day, we were invited onto a boat by Sandra and Ian, Kevin's parents. They have a lovely speedboat which we launched into the river close to their house. The river is very wide, winding north alongside the coast, between banks of tea trees and eucalyptus. Unfortunately, because of the recent fires, the banks were full of rather sad charred trunks, some areas still smoking. Further up the vegetation started getting green again, though, and we stopped briefly by some unspoilt mangroves to haul up a crab pot which had been left there earlier in the week. Kind of like a lobster pot, seeing the two crabs caught in it frantically claw their way away from the entrance and Ian's hand made me once again vow to give up all forms of meat. Anyone who saw their little eyes searching for an escape would never again claim that some animals have no fear or pain. Luckily, one was a female and the other a juvenile, so both were released back into the river. We continued on up the river and into a wide and very choppy lake.

On the far side of the lake, the bottom suddenly became very shallow and we had to manoeuvre our way between sandbanks to reach the entrance to the network of rivers beyond. Safely past the banks Lisa spotted a ray, languidly making his way along, occasionally scuffling at the sand, hunting, perhaps, or trying to hide himself.

Further up the river, the waters became a deep red, apparently from the tea trees along the banks. Swimming in it reminded me of swimming in Silvermine Dam in Cape Town - MUCH warmer though! It was so warm it was necessary to kick down deep to disturb the cooler waters!

It was a lovely spot to have a picnic lunch, so we did.

Coming back to the shallow lake we passed the sandbanks again, this time covered with little groups of pelicans, clacking their beaks at each other and eyeing us in case we tried anything silly. And it would be silly - those birds are much bigger than Finding Nemo makes them look...

In which our heroine goes wild... sort of...

2009-12-31T14:40:00.015+08:00

With our schedule tight for the rest of my stay and no more koalas in plain sight, Lisa and I decided to head to Australia Zoo down near Maroochydore on Tuesday. We caught the free shuttle bus from a park just across the river from Lisa's house and immediately regretted our eco-friendly decision not to take the car. This about turn was brought on by the tiny feet jammed into the back of my seat, the owner of which was meanwhile competing with her sister to see who could cry for mummy loudest. They were joined by several more en-route. Oh what fun we all had! Luckily the hour-long journey passed quickly, as it tends to do when you're having a good time, and we were soon turning onto Steve Irwin Way. I'm sure most will remember the grief following his death in 2006; the hero-worship continues today in Australia. Steve Irwin Way begins at a monument showing Steve wrestling a crocodile; the monument's obscured slightly by a digger waiting to start work on widening the 2-lane highway to accommodate all the cars and tour buses.

The zoo is absolutely enormous - 70 acres in total. It's only the third I've been to in my life - the vaguely distressing Joburg Zoo in my preteens, and London Zoo on a blue-skied summer's day, my first in London, being the other two.

Pictures of the Irwins are everywhere. Statues abound. Even the mannequins in the designer clothing store are modelled on the kids, Bindi and Robert. Enormous billboards announce Bindi's summer concerts and her cutesy, heart-embellished signature adorns everything from pillars to pony rides. No wonder she's such a confident young girl, this kid is a walking brandname. Occasionally it feels like the whole Zoo is just there to promote her.

Now, we all know that Australians are... well, they're a bit different. They talk funny for a start. And the whole sports thing, the way their teams lazily win every game they try their hand at, even if it's not normally played in Aus. They're always 5 shades darker than us because they spend all their time on perfect sandy beaches under perfect blue skies. They're a bit smug, really. And did I mention they talk funny? Anyway. Aussies are different. And Nature didn't stop there, with the humans. No, she did it to the animals too. Australia, even Noosa, with its lovely, neat streets and expensive yachts, has a bit of a prehistoric vibe going on. Everything's bigger here, a bit more primal. The light is brighter, the sounds are more raucous. It doesn't even follow the rules the rest of us stick to - here, mammals can lay eggs. Some nurture foetuses outside the body. And come on, seriously - the echidna? Who thought that one up? Sometimes I feel like all the Australians are snickering at us behind their hands. Some of these animals can't possibly be more than a prank. Take dingos for instance. Really, they're just yellow dogs from the shelter they stick in an enclosure then spread malicious baby-stealing rumours about so we'll come spend our $55 to see them!

My favourite place was the kangaroo enclosure where red and grey kangaroos and little wallabies roam about among the trees and green lawns. We bought "roo food" from a vending machine, and had whiskery noses snuffling at our palms in no time at all.

It was very chilled, sitting amongst the munching animals under the gumtrees! We even saw a few joeys in pouches. In fact it seemed to be baby season - several koalas were also cuddling sweet mini-koalas.

The cassowary was also amazing - its feathers are long and soft, and the bony protruding headpiece makes it look, well... prehistoric...

I'm not sure how, but Lisa and I completely forgot to check our schedules and therefore missed Bindi and her Big Summer Tour in the Crocoseum! Ahem... But missing Bindi's perfectly choreographed display had its upside: Lisa and I were able to wander through the kangaroo enclosures in almost total isolation while everyone else clapped and cheered in the auditorium. It was great. I couldn't resist conforming to one Great Australian Cliche though. Lisa and I queued up for ages with all the other tourists to hold a sleepy-eyed koala. He was very cute! When I finally took my place in front of the potted palm, the keeper showed me how to cup my hands at my waist, then she deposited this adorable, cuddly marsupial in them, at which point he hooked his long claws over my shoulder and into the bare skin. Luckily the keeper interpreted my grimace fairly quickly and rearranged him into a position to suit us both. He was very sleepy, laying his head on my arm and sinking his bulk onto my body like a supportive branch. So sweet!

Koalas held: 1
Prehistoric birds: 5
Monuments to the Irwin family: 18

In which our heroine goes shopping

2009-12-31T14:27:00.016+08:00

On Saturday, with Lisa back at work, I spent the whole day lounging on the verandah in my pyjamas with several cups of tea, watching the visitors to the bird bath. There were a lot of them I couldn't identify. Some I could guess, like a shy dove, although he differed from African doves with his black mohawk and speckled shoulders. Wader-like loners popped in, princesses on their long limbs, taking flight at the least provocation, unlike the others, to whom I might as well have been a statue for all the attention they gave me.

The most regular were completely unrecognisable to my untrained eye; wearing way too much blue eyeshadow, the honeyeaters arrived in small flocks, trilling to each other as they played in the water.

Other unfamiliar birds were easier to name: bright white cockatoos with a spray of yellow feathers on their heads, hanging upside down from palm fronds, screeching merrily at each other and me. Another parrot - the Rainbow Lorikeet - also made frequent, gaudy appearances - green, yellow, red - as though they were pictures in a very neat child's paint-by-numbers book. They always rocked up in pairs, the better to enforce their clear status as the undisputed mafia thugs of the birdbath, viciously attacking meeker supplicants with maximum noise and a great deal of wing action.

At dusk the songs of all the birds, thugs and princesses alike, combined in the park before Lisa's verandah to make a sweet bedtime lullaby, flocks whirling overhead until they'd found a suitable site for the night. It was a very peaceful end to the day.

On the Sunday we drove to a mall to do some clothes shopping. Every single pair of jeans I own has recently sprouted unsightly tears and holes and I needed some replacements. It was a bit of a surreal experience really. Just imagine: nobody stared. Nobody shouted "Big size here!" at me. I didn't get ushered out a single shop by an anorexic salesgirl, anxious that I shouldn't sully her store's good name. And oh! Oh! The pleasure in being allowed, nay, invited to try things on before purchasing... I left with my ego intact and my wallet light!

Plus, on the way back, Lisa stopped alongside a golf course, and I got to see my first kangaroos, lazily lolling on the grass as golfers whacked balls over their heads...

That evening I cooked a roast chicken. What pleasure to be able to eat free range again, and to know that the veggies came from down the road instead of across the seas. We ate outside on the verandah by candlelight, birds cooing in the trees, mozzies gnawing on our toes... heaven...

Koalas: 0
Kangaroos: 6
Lifers: 10. 11. No, wait... 12...

In which our heroine finds a Koala...

2009-12-30T10:56:00.015+08:00

Who knew? Aussies really do say "g'day mate" and "no worries!" in real life! It took me 18 hours to get from English Village to Brisbane International Airport, via a garlic-flavoured taxi (and when I say garlic-flavoured, I mean I may actually have been put off the stuff for life...), a luxurious bus to the airport and a cramped night on a Korean Air flight - the first long-haul plane I've been on in at least 5 years that doesn't have individual TV screens. With a one-hour delay in Seoul, I'd already missed the airport shuttle in Brisbane, and it didn't get any better when I saw the queue for customs, which doubled back on itself four times before even reaching the official zigzag queue area. Every single person had their luggage opened and checked, and sniffed by a sniffer dog... An hour and a half after landing I finally got out into the tiny Arrivals hall. Another hour and a half later the shuttle driver arrived - the coastal highway had been blocked into Brisbane by a major accident. I shared the minibus up north with a family of four, the son an obnoxious 10-year-old with a mouth dirtier than mine, who started asking "How much further Dad?" as we left the airport gate.

But when the driver pointed out Lisa's house and I saw my sister jumping and waving in a frenzy... well, the journey here wasn't so bad!

Lisa had to go back to work for the afternoon but when she got home at 5, we went out to do some shopping. We took the scenic route around town with Lisa pointing out all the lovely things that surround her new home. Noosa's really pretty with an estuary breaking up the town into a collection of suburban islands.

We drove into the national park's carpark to make a U-turn, but when we saw a car leaving, Lisa got so excited about a space being available we just had to stop and take a walk.

That part of the park ran alongside the coast with a wooden deck path curving through the teatrees. We left the path once to clamber down the rocks to a curve of white sand, the grains so fine they squeaked underfoot. Just then Lisa spotted some people further down the path pointing up into the trees. I laughed, remembering my statement earlier that day that I expected koalas, kangaroos and wallabies in abundance, please, if she would be so kind. When we reached the group and looked up into the trees, I couldn't hide my surprise at my unusual luck. This is someone who spent 3 days in a tiger sanctuary in India without spotting a single stripy cat. And now there, far above me, nibbling on eucalyptus leaves, was not just a koala, but a mummy koala, with a baby clinging to her furry front. As she cautiously stepped along the branch, clutching twigs and stuffing her mouth with leaves, we could see the little round ears and flat nose of the baby as he, three paws firmly buried in his mum's fur, reached out for the leaves she pulled closer to him. It was so sweet to watch!

A fellow spectator told us there was another one a few trees away so we went to look, but he was less interesting, being fast asleep and wedged into the crook of a tree, and we quickly returned to ooh and aah at the mother and baby.

Shopping that evening was a joy everyone should experience at least once in their lives. Litchies! Smoked salmon! And who knew how exciting Cheerios could be! Korean supermarkets are fine, but a tingle went down my spine at the cereals aisle...

Koalas: 3
Kangaroos: 0
Highways named "Bruce": 1

Seoul Therapy

2009-12-13T10:41:00.016+08:00

Seoul is a fascinating city. Each part, each suburb, is devoted to a particular need. Myeongdong has designer clothes, Chungmuro is the place for analogue cameras, Itaewon is the centre for foreigners where you can find Western groceries and the Hard Rock Cafe. Each place has its own flavour, unique in the Seoul sprawl. There are few chain stores - Starbucks and the local Kimbap Heaven make appearances in most suburbs, but mostly it is as far from the dull English high street as you can get. I'd never realised how bland British towns have become until I saw Seoul.

At first it takes some getting used to. It's impossible to go to a mall and pick up everything you need from camera film to clothes to sewing needles. Your day must be carefully planned with a comprehensive shopping list and a subway map to hand. However it's started to become second nature for me - I know where I can find everything, and in each place there's an unimaginable range of whatever it is you desire - if one shop asks too high a price, you turn around and there's another for you to try.

On Saturday, I needed wool. Yes, I have indeed started to knit! My room is filled with half-finished hats and scarves and notes for future patterns to try out. Unfortunately, the huge shopping area close to Paju doesn't contain a single haberdashery or fabric store, so when I run out of wool, it means a day in Seoul. Wool is sold in the Dongdaemun area, in a squat grey building devoted to all things crafty.

The entrance area is filled with tailors' shops, the shiny grey suit material adored by Korean businessmen filling shelves from floor to ceiling. Keep going and you come to the buttons and lace. I've been here once before with a friend, but it's impossible to really know this place, and even though the last time I memorised the route to the wool section, I still inexplicably find myself suddenly staring down corridors of fur and rabbit tails. Turning a corner only takes me to the sewing section where men hunch over sewing machines in their tiny stalls, the walls made of threads and fabric. The clack clack of the machines follows me as I search for some stairs - the only thing I'm sure of is that the yarn section is in the basement, so I need to go down. I finally find some, but they lead me not to the piles of wool I'm hoping for, but some kind of upholstery section. I keep thinking I'm getting close, seeing wool down at the end of the tunnel, but it turns out to be threads or crochet supplies, and I can't find the familiar stalls I shopped at last time. Suddenly, I turn around, and there it is: the stall that sells expensive but irresistable yarns, handmade in Southern Asia. My mind mentally rearranges itself and I understand exactly where I am. Shopping can commence.

It's quite difficult to shop because, despite being fairly first-world-ish in general, Koreans like to haggle. I struggle to haggle. So shopkeepers either love me for accepting the first offer, or hate me for just walking off without even asking for a discount. At least I now know the numbers so I can ask "Olmayo?" ("how much?") and understand the response. And occasionally I drum up the courage to complain in a whiney voice "Bisayo!" - it's too much! Usually the shopkeepers are so amused at my Korean that they drop the price by a couple of thousand Won, which makes me ever so proud. Sometimes they call to their friends busily knitting in the back, presumably saying "Will you listen to this rich foreigner, thinks she can haggle! With me! The cheek!", after which they turn to me, and laugh until I apologise and skulk off down the narrow alley...

My second-favourite stall is owned by a gentleman who is eating his lunch when I arrive. He jumps up to help me match a piece of wool from an unfinished project. The last time I was here with Andrea, we were trying to use Korean numbers, but he, being Korean and therefore naturally over-helpful, decided to use Western numbers. Unfortunately, his mind was ahead of him and he started spouting Spanish at us... Interesting to meet someone here who's learned Spanish - high school language classes usually consist of English, Japanese and Chinese. This time he smiles at me and goes straight into English.

Cheerfully laden with shopping bags, I leave the building, stopping at my favourite fruit stall in the whole of Korea, where you pick your bowl of naartjies and interrupt the seller, who's always playing a checkers-like game with a friend round the side. Judging by the exhortations not to push and to "line nicely", it's also pretty popular with everybody else who passes by.

Meanwhile, Korea has been getting pretty damn cold lately, and nowhere more so than little old Paju, lying in the middle of a wind channel that apparently directs Siberian winds south. The ponds are iced over and it snows every few days, although nothing's settling yet. Unfortunately, English Village is designed for maximum discomfort, so all those drainage-free areas that in summer became dams to be crossed only in wellies, are now scary ice patches in winter. We wake up most mornings to thick fog.

Yes, that is the sun in the photo on the right... Apparently this is still the run-up to Real Winter - I'm grateful for my Australian Christmas, but dreading, absolutely dreading, coming back to bone-chilling weather...

Winter Wonderland

2009-12-09T07:31:00.008+08:00

Movie stars, cute kids and a tonne of polystyrene. It's Christmas in the English Village...

A week ago, the Villagers awoke to the sounds of yet another film crew creating a set. It took all day, but by evening, Main Street had been transformed. Our tram had been pulled out on its tracks - and by pulled out, I mean it was hooked up to a car and towed on wheels. This is because it was built without brakes. Or, according to another rumour, Korean engineers built the tracks, and foreign engineers built the tram, and neither side told the other side what specifications to build to, so they don't fit together. Either way, our tram does not work. But it certainly looked awfully pretty sitting there in front of the pub, atop a beautifully white road - courtesy not of the November weather, but some cleverly placed white sheets and a dusting of polystyrene snow, artistically blown about by a clever man with a blower thing.

Lights had been draped over all the store fronts and the tram decked with holly and red ribbons and other Decemberish adornments. I had to leave to teach my evening military lesson, so I ducked down the back route, now blocked by an enormous van serving kimchi and coffee to the starved and frozen crew.

When I returned at 9pm, a crowd of teachers and students from our adult programs had taken up position behind a gauntlet of luminous lights, enormous cameras and a sound machine set to repeat, playing the Xmas jingle of a major electronics megastore. The stars of the Korean hit movie Kwasok Scandle (or Speed Scandal) were obliging the director with 5 seconds of dance, again, and again, and again... The youngest cast member - only about 5 years old, extremely cute under a mop of curly hair, and currently to be seen on every single talk show, game show and advert on TV - swung his legs from his perch on the tram, while the main star smiled delightfully at every request to start from the top.

Meanwhile, from my own perch on some side steps, I could see and talk to the extras - three little families, strong father, mother in miniskirt, perfect child in designer clothes - whose job it was to walk back and forth across the road and be shouted at by a guy in a beret with a megaphone.

As for me, I got bored after half an hour and went home to bed. The lights and music continued until 4am. Mmm, this showbiz thing - it's not for everyone you know...

When Relationships Go Bad

2009-12-09T07:13:00.004+08:00

In Korea, the done thing when dating is to publicly announce your love for each other not with rings or hand-holding or sonnets in restaurants, but by wearing the same clothes.

No, not them! Did I say similar? I said the same.

Like this:

Yes, that's right, lads - Korean women dress their men. Not so attractive now, eh?

The alltime rock n' roll favourite at English Village was a new family - mum dad and baby - all kitted out in white from head to toe. The baby even had a cap to match the parents', although his had to be tied to his chin with a ribbon!

I was recently confirmed in my growing suspicions by Cait's discovery of, yes, a Couples Store in Seoul, where everything comes in both women's and men's sizes, and often toddler size too... My day was just made so much better...

Mountain 2 - Korean Edition

2009-10-20T11:08:00.014+08:00

As everybody knows, once the world was not as it is today. Animals could speak, and mountains could walk. The world was still being moulded out of fire and water.

In the east, a beautiful mountain range was being built. It was called Geumgangsan, the Diamond Mountains, and it was to be the loveliest and most revered of all Korean mountains. Representatives came from all the cities in Korea to be a part of it. Ulsan, a city on the south-east coast, decided to send a rocky mountain north to Geumgangsan, but this mountain, having so far to travel, arrived too late: he discovered the range was already filled with twelve thousand peaks. Weeping with grief and shame, he turned round to make the journey home again. One night, as he was looking for a place to sleep, he found an enchanting valley. Bewitched by its beauty, he lay down to rest, and, looking about him in wonder, he fell asleep, never to awake again. His name is Ulsanbawi - Rock of Ulsan - and today he sleeps in the Seorak valley, an 873-metre granite outcrop, skirted by deciduous forest and quiet streams.

On Friday, Harry and I packed up the car and drove to Seoraksan for a weekend, picking up Brynley on the way from his home in Seoul. This time I intended to actually climb a mountain, as I missed the chance on my volunteering weekend!

Autumn leaves are a BIG deal in Korea. The place to see them is Seoraksan, and funnily enough, this weekend was the weekend, according to news reports, so we were ready for a communal climbing experience with half of Korea. We arrived around midnight and went searching for a hotel to rest our weary heads at. We found a surprising number open and their managers awake, and chose one called "The Honeymoon House". Contrary to our expectations, it was a pleasant, clean little hotel, with a fireplace in the lounge, and a fake windmill on the side - reminded me a little of a Vumba-style hotel.

In the morning, we woke to pouring rain and a rather dismal sky. Luckily, we took a while to get ready and have breakfast, and by the time we drove to the park's entrance, the clouds had cleared and it was a lovely, sunny day, if a bit cooler than an African sunny day. Perfect for climbing. We'd agreed to hike a shorter route than Harry might have wanted. It was listed as a 1.5 hour walk from the entrance and we felt this was entirely achievable by Brynley and me. The first part of the walk, as expected, was shared with the multitudes, and we squeezed our way up a wide path cleared of debris and with stone steps and wooden bridges set in place over difficult parts. Very Korean. It was a path with diversions too, as we passed a temple - Sinheungsa - possibly the oldest Zen temple in the world - and then two well-established restaurants, full of climbers taking a break to drink and eat. Hawkers squatted on the side of the path selling sticky peanut brittle and toffee suckers. About an hour up we came to a little hermitage where a monk once lived in a sandy-floored cave. It must have been something magical in the days when a thousand tourists weren't poking about and taking photographs. The mouth of the cave overlooked a wide vista of trees and mountains and very little else, and it would have been very remote in the days when the closest settlement, apart from the temple, was at the coast. We pushed on further, up a decked path lined with rubber which took us over the older, simpler path (closed to repair erosion) and toward the top. We shared this part with the multitudes too - in fact, there was no part where a large group of elderly Koreans was not having a nice picnic on the edge of a rock... We told Harry to stride on ahead and he didn't argue much as he disappeared round a corner. Finally Brynley and I made it to the top.

Well, what we thought was the top.

See, the forest part finished and then the rocky crags started, and I, in my naivete, reckoned the forest edge would mark the end of our hike.

Unfortunately, Koreans are not people for giving up that easy, and a set of stairs had been erected straight up the mountain face.

It was so windy at this point that I needed a helping hand up the rocks to the base of, terror of terrors, 400m of steep stairs...

We did make it to the top, with just a couple of breaks, and with the egging on of a couple of hundred friendly Koreans ("keep fighting! Go on!").

The summit was a tiny crag edged by railings - an absolutely essential aspect, as the wind was so violent, I was terrified of getting blown off.

Amazingly, there was a guy with an urn and some paper cups selling coffee to climbers! Right on the top of a mountain! I don't even know how he gets those supplies up there - and oh my, that means he climbs up and down every single day! At least his office has a good view ;)

We made our way back down again, battling the wind - I mostly gripped banisters with both hands and did a kind of sideways shuffle down the most exposed bits to avoid being blown off the mountain entirely. By the time we reached the temple the sun was dipping below the mountains and we decided to make our way home.

On the way we went past the enormous Buddha again and I couldn't resist a sneaky photo of him meditating in the sunset glow.

The minute we got back to the hotel, Harry and Brynley collapsed across the bed and fell into a deep sleep, while I had an hour-long bath - a luxury unheard of since I left South Africa - and then read my book downstairs in the Vumba-style lounge. Later we went for dinner at a little restaurant nearby. This was the beginning of the night:

I unfortunately can't show you the end of the night. I was fast asleep when the pair of them drunkenly bumbled into the room, waking me up - I was too busy laughing at the sight of them to be cross :)

The next morning, I packed them into the car, drinking coffee and complaining of how early it was (it was nearly 11am...), and we drove down the coast to the highway back to Seoul. On the way, however, we spotted a Salmon Festival on the banks of a river, so we detoured for some delicious, if sacrilegious, deep-fried salmon and ginger.

Sated, we walked down to the riverbank where hundreds of tourists and Koreans were gathered, their trousers rolled up to knee height, and their shoes abandoned.

I wondered what it was all about but before the fleeting thought had time to fleet, a whistle was blown, and the hordes went screaming and splashing into the waters to commit the most wholesale massacre of innocent animals I have ever seen. Children that came up to my knees grabbed enormous salmon by the tails, flinging them onto the rocks with gleeful abandon and demanding applause from the gathered adults, while the "grown-ups" in the group stuffed two or even three writhing fish into plastic bags or specially prepared cooler boxes. I'm sure it was a lot of fun, but I prefer my fish filleted and clingwrapped, thanks very much. It very nearly made me turn completely vegetarian watching such rampant killing...

Our journey back to the west was pretty event-less, and we delivered Brynley home safe and sound, arriving back at our own home by 7pm, refreshed by the weekend and ready for another week of work.

(Not quite so refreshed the next day, as muscles in my legs I didn't know I had woke up to call a cheery "hello"; I spent my first week on the Adult Program hobbling around English Village, unable to take a step without fiery pain...)