Singapore

Singapore's a rather remarkable place. Once a part of Malaysia, it's quite different in outlook and focus. I live with a Singaporean in Sabah, and he's always going on about how Singapore has vanquished poverty and everyone owns a home and everybody's happy and fulfilled - why can't Malaysia do the same? What's wrong with the people? But Singapore has 3.25 million citizens - it's not so easy with Malaysia's 28.3 million. 

And Singapore is tiny. Their army runway is a major highway - the pots of plants in the middle get whisked off, and hey presto, you have a landing strip in case of war. Everything rises upwards, too - people live in towering blocks of miniature flats, laundry hung on long sticks out the window; business addresses are often something like Room 925, 89th Floor, Block H, Blah Business Park.

It's so multicultural too, Chinese Buddhist, Christian, Malay Muslim, Indian Muslim, Hindu, "non-religious" (I'm not sure that's even an option on a Malaysian census form...) Of course, each denomination has its place of worship too, so there are these amazing temple structures everywhere (yes, also soaring into the skies...)

Sri Mariamman Temple, Chinatown

Masjid Sultan, Kampong Glam

Buddha Tooth Relic Temple

The Malay quarter was nearly the only place without soaring towers - just low shophouses converted into bars and stores selling organic bamboo clothing and handmade soaps, and an old cemetery.

Apart from height, my overriding sense of Singapore is of smell - incense, food (and what food - shops are selling Very Lucky Turtle Soup, and Pig Organ Stew). Everywhere I go, the scents change - from marigolds and incense in Little India, to fried food and incense in Chinatown, to car fumes in the City Centre... Actually, surprisingly, the air seems to be fairly clean in Singapore, even in the centre; a guide tells me that the bus we're on runs on natural gas, so perhaps most other cars do too.

Helix bridge, ArtScience Museum

Sometimes the didacticism gets a bit much. I mean, I know we had a Road Safety Track when I was a kid for learning about the roads, but here it's called the Road Safety Adventure Park... Walk on Left, Use Official Crossing, Clean Water: Beat Dengue... it's constant.

So is the sense of wanting to present a good front. On the bus, they go on about what a wonderful place it is: "Yes, this is a beautiful old park. Even though this is prime land, we protect our heritage. On the left is an old temple. I see you're wondering why it hasn't made way for a skyscraper yet. Well, even though this is prime land..."

But while they may be sensitive to heritage, they certainly aren't to the social gap. We pass for ten minutes through an area of obscenely wealthy properties, red Porsches sitting outside icing-cake-pink mansions. It's particularly blatant in space-desperate Singapore. Many of the houses here are smaller than my house in Zimbabwe, and were built decades ago, but because of the space, they're now worth millions of US dollars.

As I leave at the end of the day, I realise how space age Singapore can be, too: we pass through what looks like an abandoned tollbooth, but which is actually a solar-charged congestion charge point, picking up car signals as they whizz by, to add the charge to their monthly account.

All too soon, I am back at the airport for my flight home to Sabah. I'm there on time; my plane isn't: there has been flooding along the Sabahan coast, and the pilot prevented from reaching Kota Kinabalu Airport, so I sit and wait for 4 hours. If you're going to be delayed for four hours, Changi Airport is the place to do it - lots to keep one occupied, and for free. But eventually the plane arrives and I return to Sabah and to little Ranau, and because of the delayed flight, I have to set out for work immediately on arrival and there's no time to mourn the end of my long journey. 

I realise though when considering my next trip that this journey has taken almost four full pages from my passport, and I'm going to need to get a new one about six years early. So not that cheap a trip after all ;)

A stopover

We crossed the border at 4:30pm, and immediately found a taxi outside to take us to Kuala Besut, the estuary town where we would catch a boat to the Perhentian Islands. Our taxi driver called ahead to the ferry operator to let him know we were on our way; between them, they strung us along for almost an hour, suggesting that we would still make it to the jetty in time, but in the end we arrived at 6:30, an hour after the last boat had left.

Thus we found ourselves in Nan Hotel for the night - and the less said about that, the better. Suffice to say, expecting to awake with the sound of the sea in your ears, and instead looking out at 6:30am over a grim little street is not one of life's little pleasures.

Although our neighbours were interesting - it was a soup farm. A roosting spot for swiftlets, from whose nests Bird's Nest Soup is created. Fairly common in Malaysia - in Sabah, it's more likely to be an old cave than a house. In the peninsula, families build a double storey house and, keeping the ground floor to live in, turn the empty upper floor into a dark, safe place for birds. Well, at least safe until the nest is built - often in the haste to harvest these expensive bits of spit and mud, eggs and chicks are simply turned out onto the floor and left to die. Asia can be a hard place.

The following morning, we caught the earliest boat possible to the Perhentian Islands. There are five of them, and they have a more interesting history than present - their name means "Stopover", and they used to be a regular port of call for Chinese and Thai traders.

Now, though, the once numerous turtles are in decline, mainly due to the frequent oil spills from a nearby oil rig, and the supposedly gorgeous beaches are littered with backpackers in tiny bikinis. Actually, I think I would have preferred it if they had been the only occupants - it was the contrast between the nearly naked people and the fully clothed Muslims from the mainland that made it somehow worse. There were women swimming in full burkha, and men in Speedos, and it just didn't work!

Anyway, I think our beaches are better in Sabah.

So we had a halved stay on one of the islands; I went snorkelling a couple of times, and was lucky enough to see three black-tip sharks, which was pretty thrilling, plus a family of clownfish - I couldn't work out why they were so brown until I remembered my diving training: red is one of the first colours to disappear underwater.

The day after arriving, we were back on the boat to the mainland; we stayed overnight in Kota Bharu, the main town, and early the next morning were on our way to the railway station in Wakaf Bharu, for the final train south.

Fruits of the monsoon

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.

An afternoon's work

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.

Spiritual tourism

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.