Sulu sea piracy

Pirates have landed. I'm not kidding: an army of desperate pirates from the Philippines arrived on the east coast of Sabah a few weeks ago, and have proceeded to engage in a number of standoffs with the police and army.

At the beginning, all we in the interior knew of it was colleagues on the east coast having to drive through several police roadblocks a day. But it's descending into gunfights and deaths, and while the town of Lahad Datu has become a ghost town and our colleagues are staying home, we further inland are also now dealing with roadblock after roadblock. Each car must be stopped, and each driver and passenger scrutinised. Suspicious cars are pulled over and papers examined. And god help you if you happen to be Filipino.

Now, the story itself is rather romantic, in the historical sense rather than the love sense. The invaders call themselves the "Army of Sulu" and they are led by the brother of the Sultan of Sulu. A couple of centuries ago, the whole of northern Sabah was given to the Sultan of Sulu by the Sultan of Brunei - because that's what monarchs do, they give each other huge swathes of land and dominion over the people who live there (the Sultan of Brunei also gave most of Sarawak away - to the white rajah, James Brooke. But that's another story.)

Later on, the Sultan of Sulu came to an agreement with the British North Borneo Company, leasing the land in perpetuity on payment of a yearly rent.

So far so good.

Then came the Second World War. Poor little Sabah got bombed twice, once by each side, and then afterwards, the Company bankrupt, it got handed over to the British government. The British government later granted independence to the Straits colonies, which became the Malayan Union, and then, in the 1960s, Sabah, along with Singapore and Sarawak, decided to join Malaya, and form the Federation of Malaysia.

The problem is that the Sultan of Sulu leased the land to the British North Borneo Company, not to the government of Malaysia, and although Malaysia still pays the rent each year, the Army of Sulu is keen to remind everyone that Sabah still belongs to the Sultanate of Sulu - and therefore, in modern terms, to the Philippines.

You see the problem?

An additional issue of course is that it's election year. On the one hand, the government doesn't want to be embarrassed, while on the other hand, it's been mooted that the invasion has been especially engineered in order to allow the government to show Sabahans that they need them - Sabah is currently not a safe win for the ruling party, and we've been seeing a lot of politicians lately, handing out cash to poor families and students and generally showing Sabahans that they're a good bunch, really, why vote us out now?

And while the endless roadblocks are an annoyance, should the Malaysian government not come to some kind of peaceful resolution that will avoid incensing the nearly one million Filipinos in Sabah, we may be looking at more serious disruptions to deal with in the weeks to come.

Difference

When I lived in South Korea, I was often met at the doors of shops with the welcoming statement, "No, no, no big sizes here, go other shop." The crazily tiny and beautiful Korean girls meant that I was seen as huge, although in most Western countries a size 10 might be seen as being just fine, thank you very much.

But all is not lost for my self-esteem in Asia:

The other day, here in Sabah, I walked into a little shop. As I passed the counter at the doorway, there was a sigh, and the shop assistant murmured, "So beautiful, lah." And yes, she was looking at me ;) I checked...

Now this is the kind of place I like to live!

There are two downsides to being the kind of person that draws sighs of admiration from lovely Malaysian girls.

The first is that the commentary doesn't always come from the girls, it's often too blunt, and it's not always wholly complimentary. A headmaster's comment on seeing me for the first time in three weeks recently: "Emily, you are looking so slim and beautiful. Your body looks very good like that. Have you stopped eating? Because last time I saw you, you were getting quite fat." Yes. Cultural norms can be a bit of a shock.

The second, of course, is that often, and I am reluctant to admit this, the admiration isn't of my actual beauty, my perfect skin, my soft, wavy hair, my slender body... none of which are attributes I can honestly boast of. The admiration is of my white skin - the paler the better: the compliments tend to dry out after I've spent a couple of days on the beach.

Many Asians are so locked into a particular ideal of beauty that I have to really search for non-whitening cosmetics - and we're not just talking about face cream here, but even deodorant, which advertises its whitening properties in nice big letters. Because, you know, pale armpits are one of the first thing men want to see.

It's such a shame, when on the other side, us orang putih are trying our very best to darken our skins...

It's a crazy world.

Superlatives in Dubai

Arriving in Dubai in the dark is like I have always imagined it feels to arrive in Las Vegas. It's pitch dark, nothing out there - no snaking highways lit by streetlights in the early hours of the morning, no small towns - then suddenly there is light, a lot of it, and in the middle, the strip of the runway.

By the time I've landed and have negotiated immigration and the tour agency that forgot I was coming, it's light and the city is laid out below me as I travel from the airport to the city centre by sky rail. It feels like a building site, or rather, it is a building site, and the sky rail twists and turns between and under glass and chrome, and past the occasional sand-coloured suburb. There's not far to go though, which feels strange; my knowledge of Dubai as a booming Middle Eastern city, which has come from glossy magazines and documentaries on 7-star hotels, hasn't prepared me for what is actually a very small collection of homes and businesses.

I had planned to leave the city on a tour of oases and seaside villages, but as the tour agency has messed up, I end up spending the whole day in amongst the the excesses and luxuries of the capitalist capital of the world. The excesses can be extreme, and pretty odd when you consider them - why, in a place with rather a lot of available space, would you build tall buildings? Or, in a region with a bit of a lack of water, develop a golf course? People are strange in their pursuit of self-aggrandisement and pleasure.

So I spend my time exploring some of the ways in which Dubai is superlative.

The tallest building in the world.

It's pretty big. It's more than 800 metres high, and the lift, when we stop at the top, actually has the number "124" after the word "Floor". It's kinda cool.

Also, the biggest aquarium in the world...

...with the largest collection of sand tiger sharks in the world...

...and the biggest single panel of glass in the world...

...situated in a shopping mall that contains an entire taxi fleet.

The world's most luxurious shopping malls - even the smaller ones...

...the world's cleanest subway stations...

And, I expect, the world's tallest Model-Of-Burj-Khalifa-Made-Out-Of-Ferrero-Rocher.

It's a pretty remarkable place, really, a strip of hyper-development in the middle of the sands of the desert. Being well-acquainted with the airport, it's interesting to finally get outside and see the city. At least, the malls, although I do sit on the sky rail a lot as well. And the malls are truly something to see. Whatever shop you've got down your street, the Dubai Mall's got a bigger and better one. Really. Nando's. Marks & Spencers. Cold Storage. That Irish pub you've all got nearby. There's even a Bloomingdale's - although at first I don't realise I've seen Rachel's iconic place of work because here, it's in Arabic.

Towards sunset, I get on the train to go to the Creek, which sounds nice and simple and deserty, but when I get to the stop before the one I want, the train stops and everyone is asked to leave the carriages. I hesitantly approach the men at the exits, who laugh and tell me it's been closed for some time, the Creek stop. "Why?" I ask. "Because there's nothing there!" they laugh. I point to the entry in my mini guidebook that has it as a pleasant place to sit by the river and watch the sun go down. "Oh yes!", they laugh, "No! Closed down, no longer, finished, go somewhere else." So I go somewhere else.

I stumble on what appears to be The Creek, anyway; there's an open-air museum on the side, with clay houses and camels and calligraphy exhibitions, and it's rather nice after all the glass and steel to see a bit of raw ground. It's not quite real, though - sort of charmingly clinical. It's a bit like Sun City outside Johannesburg - 100% African, and yet not African at all...

Eventually it's time to get back to the airport for my flight onward to Malaysia. It's been interesting, but I'm looking forward to being able to stand outside for ten minutes without requiring air conditioning as a matter of medical urgency. I never imagined a year ago that I would consider Borneo to have a pleasant temperature, but Dubai's been extreme in more ways than one.