The 30-Something Backpacker

#1 BOOK #2 I N D I A ,

C H I N A ,

B U R M A

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A U S T R A L A S I A

An independent traveller’s journey of understanding of the world and its people

CO N O R BR OPH Y

THE 30-SOMETHING BACKPACKER TE X T & PHOTOGR APHY COPYRIGHT 2008 © CONOR BROPHY

A D V E R T I S I N G

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Designed by Frédéric Cérène www.fredfred-design.com

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TABLE OF CONTENTS In d i a

page 3

S IN GAPOR E

pa ge 6 3

H O N G KONG

page 7 9

chi n a

page 9 5

b u r m a

pa ge 1 2 9

a u s t ralasi a - A u stralia - New Z ealan d , C ook Is land & Sa n Dieg o

pa ge 1 7 7 pa ge 2 0 3

C O NCLUSI ON

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“if there is one lasting memory of all my travels around the world, it is of the clothes that the women wore in India� > INDIA

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CHINA PAKISTAN

From London Delhi Agra

Jaipur

Orchha

Udaipur

Rajkot Bhavnagar

Sanchi Indore

Khajuraho

Bhopal

Palitana

INDIA Mumbai

To Singapore

NEPAL Varanasi

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India

Sent: Friday, May 19, 2006 12:12 AM _______

D

uring my trip around the world I ended up travelling every few days, mainly by bus and train, with journey times of between four and twelve hours. This meant that I got a certain feel for distances and subtle changes in landscape and culture.

However, air travel throws that completely out of the water and each time I took an international flight, which was normally every few months, it just brought home to me the power of air travel. I know it’s an obvious observation to make but it really struck me when I landed in Delhi airport, only eight hours after leaving London, and I travelled in a taxi to the centre of the city. It made me realize just how quickly you can be transported from one culture and climate to a complete different one.

A friend from college is from India. His parents used to work in the Indian embassy in Dublin and they were waiting for me at the airport. As you know by now I nearly always take up any offer of staying with locals in a new country and I was so glad to have the offer in India.

You see, you do get very nervous at times when you go to a new country, especially if that country has a reputation for being dangerous or one where tourists are subject to a lot of hassle. You are definitely on edge as you feel at such a disadvantage and so exposed. Because of that you naturally become defensive and suspicious. I remember when I left the plane in

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Cuba and went up to an English guy, who I had heard talking behind me, to ask if he wanted to share a taxi into the centre of Havana. He brushed me off as if I was a tout, dismissing me with his hand! Even though I had an Irish accent, we were just off the plane and we hadn’t even picked up our bags yet!

I did understand his reaction to a certain extent (to a certain extent!) so I went up to him again and I explained who I was and that I had been on his plane. He apologised but you could see just how tense he was.

However, I have found that you do acclimatize very quickly in a new country. It only takes a few days, at most, but it is stressful beforehand.

So I was delighted to have some locals waiting for me at the airport.

However Delhi airport was surprisingly relaxed because I believe most international flights arrive at night. We picked up a taxi outside using the pre-paid taxi booth. You tell the booth where are you going and they charge you a fixed rate. You pay the booth and they give you a slip of paper which you hand over to the driver when you arrive at your destination. The driver then uses the slip, back at base, to obtain his money.

So you can’t be ripped off. These booths are available at most tourist transport hotspots around the country.

The first thing that struck me in India was the smell. It smelt.

Not particularly badly or strongly but compared to London there was definitely a smell there. However it was something I got used to in a few days – as I say you do acclimatise quickly.

I stayed with the Tewaris initially for three nights and then one more night after I had returned back from Jaipar, before I went to Varanasi. The route I took in India was as follows:

Scene from the City Palace, Jaipur

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Below & top right: The Tewaris and their flat in New Delhi

Scene from a rickshaw Scene from a bus

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I flew into Delhi on the 20th of November. I stayed there for three nights after which I caught the train to Agra (two nights) and then Jaipur (three nights), before returning back on the bus to Delhi for one night. Then I caught the overnight train to Varanasi where I stayed one night before catching a flight to Khajuraho where I stayed for two nights. I went to Orchha for two nights, then Bhopal for two nights, visiting nearby Sanchi on a day trip. Then I took a morning bus to Indore where I caught the overnight sleeper bus to Udaipur, where I stayed for two nights. Then I took another overnight bus to Rajkot where I caught a local bus to Junagadh. I spent two nights

I can still picture Hitesh’s mother saying to me in her soft Indian accent, with a slight wave of her head, “Chapati?”. there and then I caught a bus to the crossroads town of Sihor where I picked up a short local bus (35 km) to Palitana (two nights). From Palitana I went up to Bhavnagar to catch a flight to Mumbai where I spent two nights before flying out to Singapore in the early hours of the 19th December. As with the Eastern European write-up I am getting exhausted just typing this out.

It was great to stay in the house in New Delhi for a number of reasons. First of all it was so good to get local knowledge on everything from the general prices of goods and services, to how to get around and what to see and do. I had no route mapped out before I arrived in India and I worked out a general route in Delhi by reading the guidebook and getting advice from Hitesh’s parents. It was so good to be back in a

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country where English was widely spoken. Secondly I ate gorgeous home-cooked Indian food. It was such a contrast to the food from the Middle East which is generally quite dry. At every meal there was a curry meat dish, vegetable dish, salad and chapati. I had goat for the first time. It is very popular in India - it is called mutton on menus and it tastes very like lamb but maybe even more tender. I can still picture Hitesh’s mother saying to me in her soft Indian accent, with a slight wave of her head, “Chapati?”. It was spicy food but not too spicy - I think she toned it down for my benefit. However, even for breakfast the omelette was spicy.

The food was one of the highlights of India and it was a pleasant surprise as I didn’t think it would be as good. However, come to think of it, as I am Irish, any food which uses potatoes as one of its key ingredients must be fantastic! I stuck to vegetarian food in general as it is safer and easier to find as most restaurants are vegetarian, but I did eat meat if I was in a good restaurant with a good reputation. I ate some fabulous food. In the hotel I stayed at in Jaipur I ate in their restaurant every night. It had a small gorgeous and freshly prepared buffet. In Jenagaragh I went to this all you eat Thali place (veg only). Legions of waiters kept coming around with the different dishes and they kept filling up the metal bowls of food on my tray as required. It was wonderful tasty food and I got used to eating with my right hand. Like South Americans the Indian people are always washing their hands, before and after every meal, at home and in a restaurant. Hitesh’s father used to say to me after finishing my meal, “now you can wash you hands”. It is bad protocol not to. I had the occasional craving for a freshly cut sandwich but it was never that bad.

I had no major problems with my stomach. I was careful but not paranoid and I tried most foods but I never ate from street vendors. That, coupled with the fact my stomach must be

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The main problem they said that India is now facing is overpopulation. The country is bulging at the seams and the iNfrastructure is creaking under the strain. thrown off the Internet. In Jaipur, for example, there were powercuts at the same time in the morning each day for two hours.

fairly strong at this stage, I think got me through. However I did meet a lot of people in India who did have some issues, so you do need to be careful. I met one Israeli girl in Burma who spent months in India. India is full of Israelis. She ate everything in the cheapest places (as Israelis do) and ended up visiting hospital. She had four things wrong with her but the one that sticks in my mind is that she had a type of fungus growing in her stomach.

Hitesh’s parents lived in Dublin for four and a half years.They understood the Irish culture perfectly, so it was interesting talking to them about India and its politics. For example, they said that India had definitely improved over the last number of years. I think I remember them saying that certain foods had been rationed until fairly recently. The main problem they said that India is now facing is over-population. The country is bulging at the seams and the infrastructure is creaking under the strain. Throughout my time in India there were power cuts and I kept missing the end of films on television or I was

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It is one thing to read stuff in a book about certain aspects of a culture, but it’s another thing to experience it first hand or to talk to people directly about it there, in their own environment. For example, Hitesh’s arranged marriage. I have cut out this bit in the email I have sent to Hitesh but it is too interesting to leave out and the distribution list here is small. I don’t feel too guilty. But if you ever meet Hitesh you didn’t hear this from me :-) I was quizzing Hitesh the last time I met him in Ireland about his marriage. He was slightly evasive as he knows that nothing in Dublin is sacred from a slagging, even if it is part of his culture. However, his parents were only too willing to discuss it, at length, as it is nothing peculiar in India, with arranged marriages still being the norm. Basically the procedure for finding Hitesh a wife was as follows. The family put an advertisement in the paper. This is nothing unusual in India with the papers, and now the Internet, being full of such advertisements. Hitesh wanted someone who was an equal to his education. He has a doctorate in Computer Science and he is a world expert on all the trendy wi-fi stuff and has already published a book. So I believe the advertisement outlined the kind of person he was

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Above & bottom right: New Delihi

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looking for (his wife has a doctorate in cancer research).

His mother also kept talking about Hitesh’s wife’s height.

“She’s a good height” she kept saying. For some reason this was very important. It seemed to be second in importance only to her intelligence and education. I asked the father if he got many replies. He said that he received between 300-400 letters with photographs and 300-400 telephone calls. Hitesh must be a good catch! I am not sure of the exact order of meetings but I think Hitesh’s family met her family first, then they met the daughter. Then they set up a meeting with Hitesh which included all family members and then Hitesh and the girl had two meetings together on their own. They were both happy and so the marriage was arranged. That was it! The couple seemed to have the final say, it was not forced upon them, but in truth Hitesh did not know her that well either. I used to work with a girl from Pakistan in Dublin who was not married and she told me one day, laughing and smiling, about all the men that her family had set her up with. In the end it was always her decision to go ahead or not, and she refused many men for different reasons, but she knew that she was definitely going to get married at some point. It was a certainty in her culture. I was telling Hitesh’s mother of my travel plans saying I was eventually heading back to Dublin and, as if she was finishing my sentence, as a statement and not as question, she said “...and then you will get married.”

Hitesh’s mother, being a mother, showed me every one of Hitesh’s numerous wedding photographs. He had the traditional dress and hat on and he looked about as comfortable as I would in the same situation. Hitesh has lived all his adult life in Dublin and he has that certain down-to-earth Dublin bluntness.

There is a world famous camel market, which is held once a year in Puska, and which is meant to be a mesmerizing cul-

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tural experience. Excited, I asked Hitesh would it be worth going to? His reply was, almost dismissively, “if you’ve seen one camel you’ve seen all camels”.

He mentioned that his wife wants to move back to India. I said to him, why, does she miss the deep Indian culture and her extended family? He goes “yeah …. that and the home help!”. Hitesh’s parent’s apartment was nothing flash but they had a woman coming in every day to do the cleaning. God, she was hard working. When I said hello to her for the first time, as she was bent over the sink, she looked up and with a slight wave of the head gave the most enchanting, slightly embarrassed, Indian smile. From what I could see, women seem to do most of the hard physical labour in India, from working in the fields to carrying bricks around. It also seems to follow fairly traditional roles for the sexes even in middle class families.

Delhi had some surprisingly good attractions. I took a day trip around the main sights and one of the places we visited was the Indian Baha’i Temple. Another reason why travelling is so good it that certain things suddenly fit into place. I met a girl in London once, a flatmate of a friend, who was telling me about a religion that she was involved with, which includes all other religions. I looked up the website and the holy writing says, “There is one God; mankind is one; the foundations of religion are one.”

“Ye are all fruits of one tree and the leaves of one branch. Deal ye one with another with the utmost love and harmony, with friendliness and fellowship”.

All things to all people! She said a lot of the members of the religion in London were Iranian. Walking around the Temple I found out that the founder of the religion was Iranian – hence the Iranian interest. She also told me there was a new place of worship that had just opened in Ireland.

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I took a train from Delhi to Agra which houses the amazing Taj Mahal. On the train out of Delhi I was looking at truly awful scenes with horrendous rubbish and people shitting everywhere. Then all of a sudden it changed. Suddenly there were cultivated fields, in which small groups of men and women were working, with the women wearing the most beautiful, beautiful clothes. It changed in an instant from urban hell to a magical, nearly spiritual place.

And the women’s clothes, oh my God.

It changed in an instant from urban hell to a magical, nearly spiritual place.

I took notes and wrote up most of my account of India when I was travelling in the country but I am putting this together now back in Dublin. After being nearly a year and a half off work, if there is one lasting memory of all my travels around the world, it is of the clothes that the women wore in India.

Even day it was a joy to leave the confines of the hotel (bracing myself for what was ahead), to see the colours being presented in front of me. Before I went I thought that perhaps some women in rural areas would wear the traditional Indian dress but I found out that it was, in fact, the norm. The only exception being, maybe, right in the centre of Mumbai. I also didn’t realize the different colours and designs that the clothes could come in. Every outfit was different. It seemed to me that the more rural the area the deeper the colours. I especially loved the deep pastel primary colours. I was on a bus one time and passed by a woman carrying an earthen container on top of her head, the colour of the container being a deep pastel colour and the woman’s clothes were in three distinctive pas-

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Taj Mahal

tel colours. It was fantastic. The scene is still so vivid in my memory. When I sent out my photographs of India the main comment received was just how colourful the place was. As in parts of Central America, the women in India seemed to be so comfortable and relaxed in their clothes compared to many of the women I see in western countries.

The colours of India

I was kind of surprised that India is still predominantly a rural country. It does not have the same migration to the cities like in, for example, Latin America. I met a German women there who was on her fifth visit to India, her last time being ten years previously. I asked her if the country had changed much.

She said there was more traffic and more people and now there were Internet cafes but apart from that, not really. You cannot say the same about many countries in the world. So

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India is a true cultural experience. This is especially impressive when you consider the country is a democracy and there isn’t a brutal dictatorship shielding the country from the outside world (as in Burma).

After Agra I went to Jaipur which was one of the highlights of the trip. I loved Jaipur. I stayed in a really nice place and I chartered a rickshaw for two days to drive me around.

One of the more surreal moments in Jaipur was when I was heading back to my hotel at dusk. The rickshaws are open on both sides so you feel you are at one with the road, but they have a roof so you can’t see above. It was rush hour and I saw, out to my left side, the legs of an animal but they were too long to be a donkey’s, so I stuck my head out of the rickshaw and looked up and I saw a hump. I said to myself it can’t be. Now the rickshaw was darting in and out of traffic so I had to keep shifting from side-to-side in order to get a proper view. Eventually I was able to see looming out of the dusk, the majestic, aloof, austere head of a camel stoically pulling a cart down the road, totally oblivious to the mayhem that was going on around it. Then the rickshaw sped off and the scene was enveloped; it was like something out of a video game. That night I actually doubted what I saw, it was so surreal, until I read the introduction for Jaipur in the guidebook which perfectly captures the atmosphere of the place.

It reads: “Camel carts follow a stately pace through streets jampacked with cars, cows, rickshaws, snuffling pigs, motorcycles and death-defying pedestrians. Street children beg outside jewellery shops, palatial hotels and the worlds only meringue-shaped cinema. Candyfloss-bright turbans blaze a trail through the streets and fluttering saris catch the eye like butterflies.”

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The City Palace, Jaipur

After Jaipur I took the bus back to Delhi. It was my first experience of taking a bus in India.

OH MY GOD! If you have been reading my travel musings you will remember my account of the lunatic bus drivers in Central America and how, despite the danger, I enjoyed the buzz and the cultural experience of the trips.

However, I did not enjoy bus travel in India, for a number of reasons. First of all, the non-deluxe buses, even by Central

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Jaipur

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The City Palace, Jaipur

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Playing cards in the street. The guy at the bottom right of the picture, with his back to the camera, was the taxi driver I chartered for 2 days.

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There were many terrifying moments when seeing the predicament unfolding in front of me; I just could not work out how the driver was going to get out of it safely.

On a local bus

American standards, were too tightly packed and an endurance test over a number of hours. The five hours it took from Bhopal to Indore was a struggle because I could not move my legs at all. Secondly, bus travel was very dangerous, probably the worst of any transport I have ever taken before. There were many terrifying moments when seeing the predicament unfolding in front of me; I just could not work out how the driver was going to get out of it safely. After the event I could admire the skill of the driver for avoiding a total disaster but it was far too close for comfort to be in any way enjoyable.

I also couldn’t believe at times the total lack of concern on the faces of the locals as I looked around, trying to find some sort of recognition of the imminent death that we all had just managed to avoid. Nearly every time a bus went to pass out another vehicle there was some sort of danger present. You could never trust what the vehicle in front of you was going to do next. On the back of most of the large vehicles in India there are the English words “Horn Please�, which seemed to translate into the fact that you must beep the horn long

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before you even reach the vehicle. The most annoying thing was the horn itself. First of all it was not a normal horn. From what I could see it was a separate system altogether because there was a box with a row of buttons that sat on top of the dashboard. The sound was like a screeching and because they hit it so far in advance of actually coming level, keeping their fingers pressed on it the whole time, it was just like a constant wailing. Even with ear plugs, it drove me nuts. As a general observation the noise levels in India were horrendous, especially in the cities.

On some of the local buses for short journeys it was a bit more relaxed and interesting. Everyone sits everywhere, with people, sometimes children, actually sitting on the ledge behind and to the side of the driver.

The sleeper buses were not too bad. They were normal buses, with some standard seats but they had also been fitted out to have sleeper compartments. Three seats were removed and replaced with two sleeper compartments, one on top of the other. They were quite comfortable. I got one from Indore to Udaipur which had pretty good compartments, and one from Udaipur to Ahmedabad, which had much smaller narrower compartments. I slept OK on and off. They seemed to use a slightly different low-level horn in consideration of the sleep-

The ticket from my first bus journey in India. I like the words at the top of the ticket “Happy Journey�. Happy Journey my arse!

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ing passengers. I remember waking up at about three in the morning on my first sleeper bus trip and the bus was packed all along the aisles. It was very different to when we had left the terminal. All transport, apart from the odd local service, or unless you paid for a delux bus, was always packed. It was never three quarters full, never! When I saw an auto-rickshaw or lorry or bus carrying just locals, the people were literally hanging out of the sides.

In Delhi I spent one more night with Hitesh’s parents and then I took the overnight train to Varanasi. I booked all the train tickets at the main train station in Delhi.

Some of the train stations WERE amazing places. They WERE humanity in action I found the train service in India to be very good. It was reliable, you could book in advance, and there was plenty of space in the sleeper from Delhi to Varanasi.

Some of the train stations were amazing places. They were humanity in action. I can still picture the locals at dusk with a hue around their amazingly colourful clothes waiting for their trains, with many squatting down in large groups on the platforms. The second class unreserved seating was scary though.

It was just for locals, a tourist would be mad to take it. It was something out of Schindler’s List with people crammed into the carriages. I watched a train arriving and there was a mad rush to get on, with people not being let off first. I watched an old women struggling to get out as men pushed themselves on oblivious to the difficulties she was having. Behind her was a

man with a child who had exactly the same problem. In the guidebook it says that every year people die in the crush in train stations and I could see why. I was watching a normal train on a normal day in India and it looked incredibly dodgy.

I could see how things could get out of hand very quickly.

When I booked my train tickets in Delhi it was my first encounter with Indian bureaucracy.

There is a special foreigner reservation centre at the New Delhi Train station and when I entered the centre my heart dropped.

Picture this.

There were two circular sets of sofas with a queue of people standing down the middle between them. You joined this queue and when you reached the top you joined the first circular set of sofas that had a free seat and you sat down.

On the other end, people would drop off as they were being dealt with by the staff. So every few minutes, depending on the speed at which the people were being dealt with, you had

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bag was manually searched. Then, when the plane was ready and our tickets and passports had been checked and we left the terminal building, there was a makeshift desk set up beside the plane for a final check of the passengers and their bags, with yet another stamp on the boarding card. Dios Mio!

Boarding card from the Varanasi to Khajuaho flight. You can see the two stamps on the boarding card and the squiggle of a signature which represents the three different checks that took place on my hand luggage.

to get up and move along a seat. Each set of sofas were completely separate so, for example, when one of the staff on my side went for lunch, the rate at which people were being dealt with, dropped by half. So I would have been better joining the other side. The waiting room was crying out for some basic form of ticketing system. It was so obvious as soon as you entered the room. But everyone seemed to be busy doing their own individual job without thinking beyond their particular role. Maybe that’s unfair, but that’s what it seemed to me. In fairness, when I did get served the woman was very good and helpful and the whole process was pretty smooth. The reservations were made and my name was always waiting for me on a computer printout on the side of the train.

Another example of bureaucracy was when I caught an internal flight. On the flight from Varanasi to Khajuaho I have never seen so many checks on hand luggage. There were nineteen staff in the hand baggage area alone and there were only two flights. After the x-ray machine they wanted to check my bag manually. When they did that, there was another stamp on my boarding card and I had to sign an entry in a book to say my

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In Khajuraho I went to one of the temple sites with two Spanish guys I hooked up with for a few days. I asked the ticketseller what time the place closed. He said 6 so we had an hour, which was just enough time for a quick run around. At 5:15 they started to ask people to leave. We explained that we had just arrived and that we had been told that we could stay until 6. They told us to read the board which stated that the site closed at sunset. I said that may be the case but we were told something different. I asked whether it was possible to get a refund or to come back the following day. He said no, the ticket was only valid for that day. I said I know that but you are the manager just let us in! The manager then informed us, with a slight wave of his head, that the man who gave us the incorrect information “will be punished”. We said we don’t want him punished we just want to see the site! We started arguing until it dawned on us that we could be there until the next millennium but because the ticket was stamped for that day and because the board said until sunset, there was nothing going to be done for us. In fairness, he was not rude but there was certainly no thinking outside the box.

Changing money was also a bit of an endurance test. For example, we had to fill out a form and write the numbers of the notes on the form. This was a first in any country I have been to.

However, to be honest, the bureaucracy was generally more amusing than frustrating. As an English girl once said to me, in defence of India, it was the British that gave the Indian people the bureaucracy in the first place.

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Out and about with the Spanish guys

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Orchha

Watching television

So I went to Varanasi. It is one of the most sacred sites for the Hindu people in India where pilgrims wash away all their sins in the Ganges. I have met people who stayed there for quite a long time and loved it, and I got up early the next day to take a rowing boat ride along the river when the light was perfect and there were interesting scenes, but overall I didn’t like the place. It was dirty, really small, with annoyingly tight streets and people hassling you all the time. When I was in Europe looking at the magnificent temples, cathedrals and religious paintings, I couldn’t help thinking that if there isn’t a God then a huge amount of wasted effort has taken place. Similarly, in Varanasi, if you didn’t believe, it was hard not to be repelled by the absolutely stinking septic water of the Ganges where the pilgrims wash their clothes, which children unbelievably swim in, and in which people dip their families’ remains.

So I didn’t stay long and with the two Spanish guys we took an internal flight to Khajuraho. You’ll see that internal flights become more and more part of my travels as I started to dread taking overnight transport.

Varanasi was bombed by Muslim terrorists on the 7th March this year. I remember it well because it was my birthday. Twenty people were killed, with a hundred people injured. It was terrible.

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Khajuraho is famous for its Kamasutra in stone and it was an interesting place but it was very touristy and therefore there was lots of hassle.

Then onto Orchha which was great. Orchha is a small really interesting town which was generally free of touts and I experienced some very peaceful moments around some of the sites.

When you have quiet moments like that in India it can be a very special place and I remember coming out of a site, where there were no other tourists, and seeing some of the locals wearing turbans sitting down looking over the town. It was a very peaceful and culturally rich moment.

I caught the overnight bus to Udaipur and I saw the famous

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James Bond Octopussy hotel on Lake Pichola

View from the penthouse in the Hotel Udai Niwas in Udaipur

James Bond Octopussy hotel which is perched in the middle of Lake Pichola. I stayed in the backpacker hotel, Hotel Udai Niwas, in the most expensive room (the penthouse). It is normally 1000 Rupees but they gave it me me for 700 Rupees, so it cost me about 14 Euro a night. It had a really nice decor and there were wrap-around windows which gave panoramic views of the city. What a bargain! I just hung around the room all day and read a book. Sometimes you do need to take days out like that.

pees in Jaipur (30 Euro). It was a beautiful place with a pool, lovely rooms, and was located in a nice quiet area. As you can see, I did not exactly rough it. India is a good place for a splurge because you do not need to spend much money in order to get excellent quality accommodation and service. If you were roughing it you could go for months in India without spending hardly any money.

The overnight train sleeper between Delhi and Varanasi (2 tier AC cabin) cost 1250 Ruppees (25 Euro). A second class reserved seat cost 85 Ruppees between Fdelhi and Agra – less than 2 Euro. So it’s all very cheap. I had difficulty spending money there.

India was very cheap. I hardly spent any money. Some of the prices were as follows (the exchange rate was about 50 Rupees to a Euro): An hour and a half ride in a bus was about 20-25 Ruppees (50 Cents). An unlimited Thali meal (vegetarian) was anywhere between 45 to 75 Rupees (about 1 Euro) and a litre bottle of mineral water was 14 Ruppees (30 Cents).

For accommodation: The cheapest I paid was 200 Ruppees (4 Euro) which came with a bathroom and satellite TV but was basic and in a small town. The most expensive was 1500 Rup-

The last week of my trip was in the Gujarat region and I am so glad I went there. Again, the guidebook was very accurate.

In its introduction to the region it said “Best of all, the lack of foreign visitors means you are more likely to encounter straight-forward friendliness here, and shopkeepers who favour a chat over the hard sell (especially welcome if you’re

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arriving from neighbouring Rajasthan).”

And it was welcome. I had come from Rajasthan and generally the people in the Gujarat region were wonderful and it was so good to get off the tourist treadmill. Rajasthan sees by far the most tourists in India.

I think it’s a good time to talk about the touts in India and on my travels in general.

Generally, considering the poverty and the difficulties that some of the countries are experiencing, the hassle factor really was not that bad and in many ways it was understandable. It was very rarely intimidating, just at times annoying. In Khajuraho, because it was a small place and there were lots of tourists, there were people hassling you all the time. I remember the Spanish guys coming into the hotel room exclaiming “Que pesado!” which translates to how heavy/difficult it is, after they had been descended upon as soon as they’d stepped outside the hotel.

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Some rickshaw drivers would follow you down the road and continually ask you if you needed a lift. It can be very difficult to absorb the country or the scenery when you are required to give a response all the time. As I say it’s not that bad but depending on your mood it can get to you. For example, I came out of a restaurant after an evening meal in Khajuraho relaxed and happy and then a rickshaw driver started to hassle me and follow me down the road. It pissed me off and completely ruined my mood. After a few days of that, you can suddenly get annoyed and I started saying to particularly persistent touts “Please, go away!”. It might sound rude but honestly even a saint would be tested. In touristy areas I adopted a kind of a non-committal vacant look on my face and I responded to any offer with a slight wave of my head but saying clearly ‘No’, without making eye contact. When I got to Burma, where the hassle factor is very low, I was at the end of my travels and I just couldn’t take it any more. I would not enter in a conversation with anyone that I thought was a tout. I became an expert at identifying them. It was like a sixth sense.

because it was a small place and there were lots of tourists, there were people hassling you all the time To show you what a pain in the hole travelling can sometimes be, I will talk about arriving at Mumbai (Bombay) airport. It was like going from India heaven in Bhavnagar, which is in the Gujarat region, to India hell. Mumbai domestic airport was like what I expected Delhi international airport to be like. As soon as I exited, there were people offering accommodation or trying to entice me into taxis. I had read in the guide book

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that there was a taxi stand but it was not immediately obvious where it was.

Mumbai airport is a complete dump. Since I left India I keep reading in Time magazine and the Economist about India and how bad the infrastructure is, and they always mention the dilapidated airports.

There were people all around me. When you are on your own it is quite intimidating because you are at such a disadvantage as you don’t know where to go and who to trust. I asked a security guard where the taxi stand was and instead of just pointing me in the right direction, he brought me to an area across the road, which I found out later was completely the wrong place. There were cars but it definitely was not a taxi stand. It didn’t seem right and then he put out his hand looking for a tip which just got me angry and frustrated. A guy said he was a taxi driver and pulled out some ID but you can never trust ID. However, I put my bag into the boot and got into the car. Then another guy got into the passenger seat and immediately I started in Dublin blunt mode, “why is there another person in the car!”. Normally the guidebooks say to be very wary of anyone else getting into a private taxi apart from the driver. Many times in India, after agreeing a fare, the driver would let some locals into my rickshaw which I didn’t mind. I didn’t begrudge him the extra money or the locals a cheap or free ride, but in a big city like Bombay, at a major airport, on my own, being hassled by people as soon as I left the terminal, I was suspicious and uncomfortable. The driver said that it was his boss and that he was giving me a prepaid ticket. I knew there were no prepaid taxis at the domestic airport, as the guidebook had said so. Then the “boss” presented 150 Rupees change asking if I had a 500 Rupees note. Now no one in India had change and it was always a big problem.

He did not even wait to see if I had the correct money in the first place so I thought that maybe he was giving me some

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dodgy notes. I gave him the exact amount and I took the slip.

The guidebook said the fare should be about 300 Rupees, so 350 Rupees seemed fair enough. Then they started touting money change facilities as I had been looking for a booth in the airport. This was more than just a taxi service and I said that only when I got to the hotel, with hotel staff, would I change money. I was becoming really irate as I was feeling so uncomfortable which in turn I could see was pissing them off. Then the “boss” wanted to exchange one of the notes I had given him as it was torn. I didn’t remember it as being

He let me go on for a while but at the first opportunity, as soon as I drew breath, he shouted “Get out of my taxi!”. torn and again I was suspicious that it was a scam to give me dodgy notes. So I challenged him and he really got pissed off. I saw this and I started saying bluntly “Listen I am sorry if I am being so suspicious and so blunt but when you are new to a city you have to be careful …” and so on. I am sure he didn’t understand half of what I was saying but at this stage I was in full Dublin flow.

I did the same once in Indore, with a rickshaw driver. He wasn’t the worst I had in India (he brought me to a place that I could easily have walked to and he overcharged me in the process) but it was a culmination of having many minor problems in the city that day and it just got on top of me. I remember the look on his face when I was having a go. It was a combination of “what the hell are you ranting about” and “fucken shutup!”.

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The guy at Bombay airport was looking at me in exactly the same manner. He let me go on for a while but at the first opportunity, as soon as I drew breath, he shouted “Get out of my taxi!”.

To be honest I don’t really blame him. So I got my money back and took my rucksack and went back to the main area of the airport still taxi-less and still with not a clue where to go.

I walked to the other end of the airport and I saw the official taxi rank stand, with a policeman organising the queue as stated in the guidebook.

Looking back at the situation the other guys were probably just trying to provide an unofficial minicab service on the side.

They were probably honest and just trying to do some business. You do try to be an ambassador for other travellers and for your country when you travel and the last thing you want to do is to affect people’s perception of tourists or piss the locals off, and I did felt guilty all the way into Bombay. However, to be honest, I feel less guilty now I have written all of this up and I have reflected on it properly. I blame the airport authorities for the shambles of a setup that they have.

You do have to be careful when you are travelling on your own. So far my instincts have proved OK and (touch wood) I have never had any serious problems.

There was an Australian girl killed a couple of years ago when she took a taxi from Delhi airport when she first arrived in the country. When I subsequently took the official taxi in Bombay a policeman took down the taxi number, my name and destination so that there would be a record of me and the journey.

I presume it is in case of any problems and probably because of what happened to the girl. So I would not have had that safeguard by taking the other unofficial taxi.

However, that is not the end of the story. The new taxi was

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driven by this young very quiet guy. I told him the hotel and its location. I asked him if he knew the place and he motioned that it would be OK (i.e. he hadn’t a clue). What then followed was the taxi drive from hell. The guidebook said that during the day the drive could take as long as 1.5 hours. It took nearly 2.5 hours. The guy hadn’t a bog’s notion of where he was going. He kept getting out and asking people where the hotel was, getting back in and getting lost again. I don’t think he was deliberately trying to extend the trip but he was just clueless. Anyway, eventually we got there. He pointed to the hotel which was about ten metres further down the road.

I said OK, we have gone this far, and we have spent 2.5 hours getting here, we can go another ten metres - but he was encouraging me to get out and walk. I understood why when I asked him how much I owed. 750 Rupees!

ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKEN CHANCE! NO HOPE AND FUCKEN BOB HOPE!

What then followed was the taxi drive from hell.

I told him to take me to the hotel door and we would discuss the price with the receptionist who I knew spoke English. He was reluctant but I insisted. So up we went. I explained what happened to the receptionist and I asked him to negotiate a fair price for me. After much debate he said to give the driver 350 Rupees. The negotiations were quite funny. The young driver was pleading his case and the old receptionist kept completely dismissing his protests with a relaxed wave of his head saying “No” and telling me to give him 350. This happened a number of times; quick shake of the head “No” and to me “350”. I gave him 400 Rupees because, to be honest, with the

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He pointed to the hotel which was about ten metres further down the road. I said OK, we have gone this far, and we have spent 2.5 hours getting here, we can go another ten metres distance he went it could have been 750 Rupees.

How stressful was all that.

A simple trip from the airport into town.

I had a shave, a shower, put on clean clothes and I got some comfort food in McDonalds, which is not my food of choice but I was hungry and I needed a place where there was going to be a no hassle interaction. Although, I couldn’t get a Big Mac because cows are sacred in India (dohhhh).

The next day I wrote up most of the above and I went to get something to eat. I met a really friendly German couple in the restaurant who had the India lonely planet guide book on their table and I could tell that they were eager to talk to somebody.

They were in what can only be described as India shock.

They had arrived in Delhi only two days previously. They had intended to spend at least five days in Rajasthan but they had so many problems in Delhi they booked a flight two days later to Mumbai, because they just couldn’t take any more. There is no point telling their whole story here but briefly; they did not take a prepaid taxi from the airport and they ended up staying in some other accommodation in a really dodgy area, and they were followed around all the time by what they described as the local mafia. Every time they went down to the reception they could see the receptionist making a phone call and five minutes

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later the boys would arrive trying to flog them some expensive tours. The German girl said that they lied all the time and that she would in no way feel comfortable arriving into New Delhi airport on her own. I met quite a few independent women travellers in India and they did not seem to be having too much hassle, but I do think you definitely need to be up for it.

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The problem is that when you are travelling you are constantly feeling guilty or ripped off.

Touts are one step below IT contract agency staff (who set the standard for amoral scumbags) and one step above estate agents. I always remember in Istanbul this tout had just started with the line that he had a friend working in Ireland, and then he suddenly got spooked by something. He didn’t even make an excuse or say anything in apology, he just walked away. That’s how much regard they have for you.

lem is that when you are travelling you are constantly feeling guilty or ripped off. Guilty, because you thought a person was looking for something from you, or had ulterior motives in striking up a conversation, but in the end they were just being friendly and helpful (which a lot of people are). Ripped off, because you had trusted someone and they had fleeced you. However, in India the first suspicions I had nearly always proved to be correct. What got to me at times was that I would get to the stage where I was feeling guilty that I had suspected someone of ulterior motives, and I was just about to trust them and engage with them openly, only to be then hit with some demand. For example, when I was with the two Spanish guys a young Indian guy came up to us and asked if he could practice his Spanish. He was smart, intelligent, had good Spanish and he spent the day with us. He talked about how he liked the Spanish and that they were a nice friendly people (believably so). In the evening, I didn’t go out but the guys came back to the hotel late-on, bursting through the door saying “Todo igual” (“they are all the same”) because the guy in the end wanted stuff from them. During the day we went to a school for young children. I had read in the guide book that there was a scam where you give money to help the school and the teachers pocket it for themselves, which is pretty low.

They even had kids saying the alphabet to you and things like that. They had the mandatory book where other tourists had written down how good the school was. I can’t be 100% sure it was a scam but I think it was.

Cuba was also bad but if anything India was worse. The prob-

In the end, unless it was a situation where I knew the person

There must be a tout world conference or something because it amazing how similar touts can be all over the globe. Normally they first engage you by asking you what country you

They were in what can only be described as India shock. are from and then they proceed to tell you that they know someone from that country. So they build up some sort of relationship and take it from there. Generally they want to bring you to a shop or flog you something. There were also the letters from happy customers. When they found out where you were from, they would rifle though a notebook locating someone from Ireland who supposedly had written down what great and trustworthy people they were. The exact same interaction occurred in so many different countries.

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could definitely not be there on purpose (e.g. sitting beside someone on a bus) I avoided entering into a conversation and I got away as quickly as possible. This is completely the opposite of why I like to travel and my desire to interact with the locals in order to better understand their lives, but it was getting to me. Even in a restaurant, which had been recommended in the guidebook, when I was leaving they asked me in a friendly manner where I was from. I didn’t expect any issues in a restaurant and I engaged them openly only to be subsequently hit with a letter from an Irish friend of theirs, saying what good guys they were. It was kind of depressing.

I became pretty good at bargaining. Once I had a feel for the prices I would aim to get what I thought was a fair price, which was normally a bit more than what the locals paid, but not too much that it would make tourists more of a target in the future. In general I didn’t get wound up. There is no point. Also, I did not try and fleece anyone. They are poor people and it would be wrong to extract every last Rupee from a transaction. If, at first, I was asked for a ridiculous price I would immediately go elsewhere as taking the piss is taking the piss. If the price was a bit much, I would negotiate a little and then leave it at that. After travelling around the country for a while the prices became relative, and I did have to remind myself at times that I was bargaining over pennies.

Sometimes I felt guilty as I thought I had negotiated too much.

That is, I had screwed the price down to an unreasonable level and because the vendors were poor and desperate to make a sale, they went ahead anyway. Although, to be honest, they are the masters at bargaining, we are but the virgins. But can you see what I mean when I say you are constantly feeling guilty or ripped off.

I had one slightly dodgy moment.

In the guide books for many countries, especially for Latin

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America countries, they talk about distraction scams. That is, suddenly a substance appears on your clothes which is pointed out by some locals which help you clean it off. They rob you in the confusion. I had not read about it in the India guidebook but I am 90% sure that’s what happened to me in Indore. I was looking for a restaurant and I suddenly felt this wet sensation on the back of my trousers. I looked down and there was a whole load of crap (not literally) on my legs, like liquid cake. Just as I had realized, a young kid appeared out of nowhere, pointing it out. I didn’t hang about.

I walked quickly up the road very aware of my surroundings until I felt safe and then I started the rub the crap off as best I could.

However, in Indore, I was just at the stage when I was really getting pissed off and annoyed and I did not feel 100% comfortable on my own in the city, when a young medical student came up to me, unprompted, to offer his help. He advised me not to get ripped off when taking an auto-rickshaw, and he actually walked me to the agency where I was to pick up a bus.

He didn’t like Indore, neither did I. He was a very nice guy. I was asking him about the main issues facing India at the moment and he said they were, in the following descending order, over-population, pollution and the economy.

Indore and Bhopal were such dumps. The walk from the train station to the hotel in Bhopal was a nightmare. The room in the hotel faced the nosiest road in the world and the noise level was the same whether the window was open or not. The noise levels in India could be horrendous. You see these places in the guidebook as places to pass through, so you assume that they are small, but both cities had a population of 1.5 million, which is nearly the size of Dublin.

However, having said all of that, India was not a dangerous place. I never really felt threatened and you nearly expect

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She was obviously disabled in some way and very poor.

However, what sticks in my mind was the incredible smile she had on her face. volume, probably because he was carrying a tourist. Two kids came over looking for money and the three of us started bouncing up and down to the beat of the music. They were nice kids and smart, really smart. You could see the intelligence and alertness in their eyes. As a rule I don’t give money to beggars but I was really tempted in India as my heart sometimes went out to the people.

more issues considering how poor some of the people are.

Central America was a lot worse.

Touts were the main problem but you would also have beggars coming up to you. They were very different though and I genuinely felt sympathy for them. As poverty is such an entrenched part of life for so many people in India there was no attitude from the beggars. That is their life, that’s what they do. I was once in a techno-rickshaw in Delhi. The young driver had large speakers in the back and he pumped up the

In Indore, I was waiting for a night bus at a terminal that was situated beside a busy roundabout. I saw a 20ish old woman sitting down on her heels on a rickety wooden platt cart, the ones that have four small wheels. She was being pulled by a piece of string through this death trap of a roundabout by her family or friends. She was obviously disabled in some way and very poor. However, what sticks in my mind was the incredible smile she had on her face. I can still clearly picture it now.

Another image which has stayed with me is from the train journey I took from Delhi to Agra. The compartment was pretty busy but during the trip I saw the large dark expressive face of a man looking up at me from the floor. Again I think he was on a trolley. As he was so low down it appeared as if his face was part of the compartment floor.

A friend travelled in India the year before and he said that he could not get over the poverty in the country. For the last week of his travels he camped up in a nice hotel, until it was time to

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Kids looking for money outside the “techno rickshaw� in Delhi

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the fact, that it’s not much of a life selling postcards for pennies to uninterested tourists. I felt guilty that I was getting annoyed with the hassle and maybe I was not being fair enough to the people. So you see what I mean, in many poorer countries you are constantly bouncing between feeling guilty, and annoyed or frustrated.

Before arriving in the Gujarat region I would have said it was difficult for me to give an opinion about the people in India because I was only interacting with people who were, in one way or another, involved with tourism. But as soon as I got off the bus I felt the atmosphere was different. The area is a bit off the beaten track, it does not see many tourists and is relatively prosperous. The reason why I decided to go there was because the German tourist I mentioned before, the woman who was on her fifth visit to India, raved about the temples of Shatrashtra in Palitana. The Gujarat region proved to be very friendly and hassle free, with warm smiles everywhere and none of the tension that I experienced in, for example, Bhopal.

Kids around me in Sihor

go. In my case, the poverty didn’t get to me in the same way.

Maybe it’s because I have travelled in poor countries before.

I remember in Khajuraho I once escaped the hassle by relaxing in a café. Through the window I saw a local man who had some postcards in his hand. A lot of people in India come up to you selling postcards. He was looking around the area probably searching for tourists. He was calm and relaxed and I could see that the man was intelligent. At that point I had a real pang of empathy towards him and a deep realisation of

CB Although I found out much later back in London that there is a different type of tension in the region.

When I went to Sihor to pick up a connecting bus a whole load of kids gathered around me, asking me questions. When a new bus would arrive more kids would pile out and come over to see what was happening. At one stage there was quite a large group of friendly children and teenagers around me.

In Palitana there were hardly any tourists in the town and all the locals were looking at me when I was eating in the Thali restaurant. I got used to answering the same questions in India: my name, my country, if I was married (I am now married or I am about to get married), my job, my education and how much I earned every month. I told people I earned just enough to pay the bills. I learnt that one in Iran.

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Shatrashtra

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Above, below & bottom left: On the way up and down the 3572 steps

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I visited Shatrashtra, near Palitana, which is one of Jainism’s holiest pilgrimage sites. You have to go up 3572 steps to reach the site but it was worth it as it was truly spectacular. There were some friendly pilgrims who talked to me on the way up.

When I returned back down I got into a rickshaw to take me back to the hotel. We came across a procession. Some locals beckoned me out of the rickshaw and invited me to take photographs. One old pilgrim who had a long white beard sticks in my mind. He came up to greet me and he was just so warm clasping my hand between his two hands, shaking it excitedly, looking at me intensely with his gentle smiling face.

There is something very special about rural towns in India. Even if there are no tourist sites they are still immensely interesting places.

There is something very special about rural towns in India.

The colours, the culture, the people. Even if there are no tourist sites they are still immensely interesting places. I met a traveller who lived in one small village for a month and the highlight for her, was hearing the enchanting singing of the women as they were working in the fields.

Gujarat is on the border with Pakistan and there is a large Muslim population there, and I heard for the first time since I left the Middle East, the atmospheric call to prayer.

CB Over a year later I was in an Indian restaurant in London with a friend of mine. We got talking to our waiter, who was a middle-aged Indian man. I mentioned that I had been to

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his country and that I loved the Gujarat region. He remarked about the tensions in the area between Muslims and Hindus.

I looked it up on the Internet. In the Gujarat region, in 2002, there was a series of incidents of reciprocal violence between Hindus and Muslims. The official estimates of the death toll are that 760 Muslims and 254 Hindus died, 223 are missing and 2,548 were injured. However there are human rights groups which believe that the casualties were a lot higher.

It was a great end to the trip. I travelled to Bhavnagar where I picked up an internal flight to Mumbai.

Although I had so much hassle going from the airport to the centre of Mumbai, I still really liked Mumbai. I found the people to be relaxed, confident and friendly. I stayed in the Fort area and I just bummed around for two days. Mumbai could be a really good place if you have the time, the energy, and a bit of local knowledge. I had none of these things, but I did enjoy just wandering the streets. There was also very little

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Procession near Shatrashtra

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Procession near Shatrashtra

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Wedding season in India

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hassle. I got talking to a businessman on the flight to Mumbai and I asked him what the differences were between Bombay and Delhi. He said Delhi was all show where people went to places to be seen. He said that Bombay had more extremes but that it was a more down-to-earth place. In the short time that I was there I would agree with him, and I preferred it to Delhi.

He said, in Bombay if you have money, you don’t show it. He also complained about the fact that only 45% of the people pay tax in Mumbai, although he said the advantage was that there was a lot of cheap home help.

I went to see King Kong in the cinema in Mumbai. Just before the film started the Indian flag appeared on the screen and the people stood up immediately, as fast as the Irish do, for the national anthem. The film only broke down the once.

You do see some amazing characters in India. My favourite were the shepherds I saw on the trip from Bhopal to Indore.

They were dressed head to toe in white, topped off with blood red turbans and they were holding a staff. They also had the most interesting weather worn faces. It was like something out of mythical times. In India these types of images present themselves to you all the time.

I was in India during the wedding season. In Agra I saw three wedding processions over the same evening. The wedding party manoeuvre down a normal street with people on the fringes holding lanterns up, with the wedding guests dancing inside. There is music blasted out by a sound system, the electricity originating from a makeshift generator in an open top pick-up truck following along behind, with fireworks being thrown up into the air. I’ll include the photographs, it’s easier than explaining. When I was observing one procession some of the locals invited me into their group to dance. I politely declined by putting my right hand across my chest as I had

learnt in the Middle East.

I glimpsed another wedding party during the day passing by on the bus and once again the women’s clothes were the highlight (did I mention about the women’s clothes). The colours were transfixing in such bright sunshine. The bride wore a ring through her nose which was connected by other rings to her earring. I saw in parts of India hand and arm paintings with brown intricate designs. The kind of stuff that is trendy in other parts of the world but it was so good to see where it all originated from and where it is part of the culture.

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Throughout my time in India I was constantly surprised at seeing well-nourished docile cows meandering around the streets at will.

At one of the weddings in Agra I saw the father of the bride clatter the head of a young cyclist who had accidentally bumped into the wedding party, when he was trying to manoeuvre around them on the busy road. You would not get away with that in Ireland. There does seem to be a kind of social hierarchy in India. I think it’s partly to do with the caste system. In the really nice hotel I stayed at in Jaipur the older couple who owned it, who were very nice, did give the impression that they were higher members of the community. I saw the wife stomping out of the hotel grounds to protest at the noise outside, which really was not that bad, and exclaiming slightly arrogantly that the people must be more considerate.

I felt like saying, “listen, leave them alone, it is their wedding day for God’s sake!”

At times India could be tense. On a bus I was on there was an argument between the driver and some people outside the bus, and when the bus pulled away there were guys jumping up

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and throwing digs in at the driver through the window. When I arrived at Bhopal a rickshaw driver came up to me to see if I needed a lift, and when other drivers came up afterwards trying to get my business, there was a lot of intense pushing and shoving going on. I saw some vendors fighting at a car window when there was encroaching by some other vendors.

There were quite a few unpleasant scenes like that. Also in Indore there was not a nice atmosphere around the place. People were struggling and you could feel it.

Crossing the road was difficult in India. The drivers were more aggressive and did not passively manoeuvre around you as they did, for example, in Iran.

Things you never see at home: you could write a book on this in India. Just looking out a rickshaw was always fascinating.

Throughout my time in India I was constantly surprised at seeing well-nourished docile cows meandering around the streets at will. In Bhavnagar, at the end of my trip at the bus station, a huge cow suddenly faced me in the pedestrian area near the ticket office, wandering along. In Mumbai a woman had a cow tied up with a supply of leaves all around her. Locals would come up and give her money in return for some leaves.

They would feed the cow and then touch it and say a prayer.

I saw monkeys patrolling the tops of buildings. I was in a street side restaurant in Orchha and suddenly I saw through a gap in the tarpaulin, a monkey’s face looking furtively about.

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was just a patch on the ground where a barber would be stationed. I once asked permission to take a photograph of a barber but he refused. I love some of the photographs I took in India but I missed some amazing ones, because I did not want to impose myself on people’s lives by sticking a camera in their faces. I don’t really have much of a brass neck. India has got to be one of the best places in the world to take photographs.

Street scene Mumbai

I saw an Indian actress on television and she was talking about the obsession that many Indian women have with wanting fairer skin.

He leaned over and took an apple which caught the attention of the owner. The monkey took fright, dropped the apple and fled just like a child thief in those old Arabia films. In Udaipur, in my penthouse suite, I watched for about an hour, a group of monkeys jumping between the trees and the buildings of the city. I believe in some places the monkeys can be dangerous, and an Austrian guy told me that in the north of the country, a monkey was purposely throwing rocks at him.

Another one of my favourite scenes were the roadside barbers.

You would see a customer lathered up on a chair on the side of the road with a barber working around him. Sometimes it

As in Jordan, there were a lot of young locals that would come up to you and ask if they could take a photograph with you. I finally understood that it was because they do not see many foreigners where they live - I think. So, from then on, I would nearly beckon them over. I saw some women being understandably wary when a group of men approached them asking them the same question, but I think the men in general were fine.

Incidentally, like in Iran and in other poor or repressed countries, you get the trendy young locals that are more Western than the Westerners. There was also a bit of that in India. I saw an Indian actress on television and she was talking about the obsession that many Indian women have with wanting fairer skin.

I never made it down to the technological areas of India which were further south. However when I tried to book an IT course in Ireland from India, I found out the course administrator for Ireland, with whom I was dealing with, was actually based in Bangalore. I even ended up sending her some of my India photos. However, I had the feeling that the infrastructure in India does not really match the economic aspirations of the country, and I think China may be the emerging power in the region. I’ll talk about that in my China write-up.

Sport in India is cricket. Indians are cricket mad. I saw make-

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shift cricket games all over the country. On television there was a lot of coverage of cricket games, and there was also long boring discussion programmes on every subtle aspect of the game, like they have about football in Europe.

I had some pre-conceived ideas about India before I went there. I thought I would see lots of cockroaches and maybe the odd rat but I didn’t see one. As I explained above, the hassle factor was not that bad although at times it did get to me.

Delhi was not as polluted as I thought. Legislation introduced in 2001 made it compulsory for public transport in the city to

In the guide book it says that most tourists bounce between loving and hating India. I didn’t like it at times but I never hated it and India can be the most fascinating and magical country in the world. convert from diesel to compressed natural gas. I was wondering what the big drum was in the back of the taxi I took from Delhi airport. In parts the place could be surprising clean, although in other places it was shockingly dirty.

In the guide book it says that most tourists bounce between loving and hating India. I didn’t like it at times but I never hated it and India can be the most fascinating and magical country in the world. I think I am lucky that I finished the trip on a high with my visit to the Gujarat region and Mumbai.

However, a month was long enough for me. I was not desperate to go, but on the other hand I did not mind leaving when

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I did either. For some reason I did not sleep well in India. Initially I thought it was because of the jet lag after going from Jordan to Dublin to India in a week, or it was the malaria tablets and their side-affects, but I had problems sleeping the whole time I was there. Maybe it was because of the number of overnight trips I took in India, or it was simply due to the fact that the year of travelling was finally beginning to catch up on me.

There are not many countries that I have visited that I would want to visit again but India does have a certain pull. It was definitely one of the highlights of all my travelling and I am so glad that I went there.

On the 19th December I flew out of Mumbai airport to Singapore.

Conor CB I had an argument when I got back to London with a friend of mine who spent three months in India, and by the end of it he was traumatised. He has travelled a lot and he said it was the only country that he has been to where he did not like the people.

I liked the people. Any person that I met in India by accident, as in, they were definitely not a tout, I found them to be interested and friendly. I made the point to Alex that it is a poor country and you have to accept that you will have some hassle, but he was having none of it. He said that in Bolivia, which is a poorer country than India, the people were wonderful. The debate stuck in my mind because he was very opinionated and having a right go, which is unusual in England. Although the fact that he has a Columbian mother and an Irish step-father may explain this.

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Seven years ago when I first went travelling I met a guy from Cork who backpacked around Pakistan and then India. He was one of those hard-core Irish backpacker types, quiet but had absolutely no fear and who had been everywhere. He really did not like India after Pakistan. He said in Pakistan the people were genuine and helpful and the opposite of trying to rip you off, so it was a shock to the system when he entered India. I also keep hearing second hand reports about women being verbally abused or groped in India, although I personally have met no woman directly who has had those sorts of problems.

Many years ago I read some advice about India, which said that once the country starts to get on top of you, you must get out of the country immediately, otherwise you will end up hating the place. I think that’s what happened to Alex. This advice coupled with the observation of an English guy I met in Singapore in 1998, who said that one month in India was enough, determined the length of time I stayed there. I also made sure I was going to Singapore directly afterwards for a rest-bite.

You might say that you should not have to adjust to any country to such a degree, but there are always going to be downsides to a country which is such an interesting assault on the senses. Anyway, nobody is under any illusion about what India is like. You agree to the hassle when you sign the contract to go there.

My advice is to maybe try Pakistan instead. If not, and you want the full richness of experience that India has to offer, then sign the contract, book the flight, and dive in.

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CHINA Hong Kong

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THAILAND

MALAYSIA From India Singapore

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Singapore

Sent: Monday, May 22, 2006 3:55 PM _______

I

arrived in Singapore at 08:15 from Mumbai. I got no sleep on the plane because I was listening to music on the great entertainment system they have on Singapore Airlines. After some of the long bus journeys I had to endure in India the amount of leg space in the plane seemed luxurious.

SINGAPORE If there is one thing I missed on my year off it was listening to music. I didn’t bring any music player with me and it was such a thrill to have such a large selection of songs available on the plane.

I had intended to sleep as soon as I arrived in Singapore but the room wasn’t ready in the hostel, so I walked around the streets for a few hours, dazed and confused.

I had been to Singapore once before eight years previously when I first went travelling. I travelled through Thailand, Laos, Malaysia before arriving in Singapore. It blew me away.

Even compared to many European countries Singapore is very modern, efficient and advanced, but compared to Laos it is a completely different universe. I’ll never forget it. I walked around in a pleasant dreamlike state for the whole time I was there. It was like I was taking valium. I can’t stress how weird the sensation was and how pleasant the feeling was. I think a lot of it is to do with the humidity which gives the place a slightly surreal feel. I also remember the pleasant shock of seeing women’s legs again after having travelled through the very conservative Muslim area of Eastern Malaysia.

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Singapore is like comfort food, a guilty pleasure. You just bounce from mall to mall, shopping and eating good food.

The first time I was there I met an English guy who had just arrived over after having spent two months in India. He said it was probably one month too long, but it always stuck in my mind that all he talked about was his experiences in India. I think it was then that I said to myself that I have to visit the country. He said that he loved the anonymity of Singapore after India.

In many ways Singapore is God’s gift to Asian travellers. I purposefully organised a few days there after India because it is a total India antidote. Everything that is difficult in India is easy in Singapore. Everything that annoys you in India does not annoy you in Singapore. I will talk about the differences later on in this email. Of course, the downside is that it does not have the same cultural depth. I only took a handful of photos in Singapore compared to the five films I took in India.

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Overall I spent quite a bit of time in Singapore especially when you consider how small the place is. As my round-the-world ticket included Singapore airlines as one of the alliance partners, all the flights in Asia went through Singapore. So I was there two separate times and I spent about twelve days there in total. I stayed in the Catholic-run Waterloo hostel which is right in Singapore’s colonial district. Although it was a hostel I got my own room for $55 a night which is about 27 Euro. 1 Singapore dollar is worth about 50 Cents.

Singapore is kind of looked down upon by hard core backpackers for a number of reasons. One, because it is the definition of a modern city that is devoid of any culture (or so people claim). Two, because it is a dictatorship; a benign dictatorship but a dictatorship nonetheless with Singapore being completely in the image and likeness of the dictator’s vision (Lee Kuan Yew). Three, because it is so boring and conservative due to the stringent laws.

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I love it!

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I love the lack of people on the streets (in the colonial area anyway).

I love being able to do business easily and safely.

And above all, I love love love the food. It’s the best thing about Singapore.

The points are valid points, but I have finally come to the conclusion that I love it. God forgive me but‌

Just reading the above list brings it home to be that I must be getting old.

I love the lack of pollution.

I love that you don’t have to bargain for anything.

I love the lack of congestion and traffic jams.

I love the fact that no one beeps their horn.

I love the lack of policemen and security guards.

I love that there is little or no corruption (stiff penalties apply) and you can trust people.

I love that every street is clearly signposted.

I love that everyone speaks English.

I love the amazing public transport system which is fast, efficient, and cheap.

I love that it is totally safe to walk around the streets at any time of night. Singapore is one of the safest cities in the world.

I love the humid climate which is perfect T-shirt and eating out weather.

I love that it is safe to drink the tap water.

I love that you can brush your teeth without using bottled water.

I love that you can use credit cards safely everywhere.

I love the lightning fast Internet.

I love that there are no power cuts.

I love the free unvandalised and spotlessly clean toilets all over the city.

I love the lack of chewing gum on the streets.

I love the lack of hassle.

I love the fact you do not have to be careful about what you eat.

The food is great in Singapore. It has all the best Asian food from around the region plus, if you desire it, food from around the world at whatever budget you can afford, with excellent hygiene standards. Believe me, after India and Burma, a high standard of hygiene is something that you do not take for granted.

They have old and new hawker food stalls in food courts.

There was a very modern 24hr food court near where I stayed.

In this place there were about ten different types of mainly Asian food in their own side-by-side stalls, but there was also Western food and other niches such as fresh fruit. A plate of food (e.g. noodles with meat and vegetables) came in normally three different sized portions at $3.50 $4.50 and $5:50 respectively. So you could try a few different dishes if you wanted. I loved having fresh fruit for breakfast every morning. If you desired more involved dishes, you could go to a proper sit down restaurant. I looked forward to every meal and it was the highlight of my time there. The only downside was that having a drink in a restaurant was extremely expensive and I paid about $13-$16 for a pint of beer. Prohibitive taxes are applied.

Every mall in Singapore, and sometimes Singapore does only feel like it is a collection of malls, had a food court in the basement. They were always packed as all socializing happens around food. The more I travelled the more I realized that

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Hawker food stall. The food in Singapore is wonderful.

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I think it is right to feel a bit guilty about liking Singapore too much because it is a dictatorship, even if it is a benign dictatorship

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of my colleagues in London, who is English, but grew up in Singapore, said there can even be government spies in bars listening to what people are saying.

The taxi driver also said he had to work long hours to make a reasonable wage. He said that’s what the government wants; just work, don’t think.

SINGAPORE food is the normal social outlet in both rich and poor countries. It’s very different to Ireland.

To be honest though, I think it is right to feel a bit guilty about liking Singapore too much, because it is a dictatorship, even if it is a benign dictatorship. I remember I took a taxi to the airport the first time I visited, and the taxi-driver was taking about the pros and cons of living in Singapore. He said it was very safe, very clean, with lots of work, but the downside was the loss of some personal freedom. For example, he said that when the authorities bring in new regulations related to taxis, you can’t argue, you just have to accept them and move on. I found this quite shocking and such a contrast to the whore that was the taxi driver union in Ireland prior to deregulation. I also saw a video when I was there on how they stamped out gang violence on the island. They did whatever was necessary, step-by-step, to eradicate it. Education in schools, involving the families of the gang members, corporal punishment, long sentencing, and finally internment. It could only happen in a dictatorship. The parliamentary system resembles a democracy but the media are puppets of the ruling government. They give a lot of coverage to the government’s views but only passing reference to the opposition’s. If any of the opposition stands out of line, he or she is sued until bankruptcy. There is a widely held belief that if any businessman criticises the government they will not be promoted. One

Since then they have actually introduced a law which prohibits taxi drivers from talking about politics to their customers.

Normally the strictness of the place doesn’t inhibit you. As I say, there are advantages because of it. However, sometimes you get a feel for the rigidity of the society. I was queuing up for an attraction on Sentosa island with just two other tourists, and when they were opening the doors we stepped over the wire line to be nearer the entrance, as there was no one else in the queue. The young guy letting us in, started to have a right go at us about who gave us permission to step over the line. It was ridiculous.

I read an obituary in the Economist of Devan Nair who was one of the founders of Singapore and who later fell out with the main guy Lee Kuan Yew. Nair claimed that Lee once said, after he had lost a by-election to the leader of the rival workers party, that he would crush his rival, and “make him crawl on his bended knees and beg for mercy”.

So you see what I mean. When I was there, there was an Australian citizen (originally from Thailand) who was executed for drug smuggling. You are considered a drug smuggler in Singapore purely by the amount of drugs you have in your possession. He was only convicted two years previously.

There is no waiting on death row for fifteen years like in the States.

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The following extract is from a reply to this email that I received from Gosia Kaszubska, an Australian girl that I met in Romania and who moved to Cork for a year with her boyfriend. I mentioned her before in my Eastern European writeup. She is a journalist.

CB

“Interesting the slight guilt you feel about loving Singapore so much. I know what you mean, there’s so much that works, but then you just can’t get away from the fact it’s a dictatorship. That Aussie guy who you mentioned being executed while you were there (or before, I can’t remember), that was of course huge news in Australia. Thing is, he wasn’t even coming into Singapore. He was just in transit there, but they caught him there and there’s no maneuvering round their laws - they catch you with drugs, you’re fucked. And the saddest thing was he was actually smuggling the drugs to pay off debts his brother had racked up. Basically, he was the good son, with all the good grades and stable life and everything else.

And his brother was the drug-addict fuck-up. Well, that was his lawyers story, but it seemed to be true.

I would put Singapore along with Cuba, as countries that are set up as social experiments. both are possible only because of the strong authoritarian dictatorial governmentS.

SINGAPORE One of the last big stories I did in Australia before we left was tracking down the brother of this guy (his case was up for appeal to the Singapore High Court at the time). So when that poor young guy was coming up for execution, I followed the case quite closely from over here. And I tell you, when I got online the day after it happened and saw for the first time the picture of his body, covered in a white sheet, being loaded into a van outside Changi Prison, I was really affected by it. Just the knowledge that this had been a real person, who had made a huge mistake, but was until a few hours ago vibrantly alive, until someone put a noose round his neck and killed him. ….

Anyway, I do digress, but that tiny line in your email struck a little chord!”

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I would put Singapore along with Cuba, as countries that are set up as social experiments. That is, the whole country, politics and day-to-day life is part of that social experiment. Both are fascinating in their own way and both are possible only because of the strong authoritarian dictatorial governments.

Of course there are advantages. For example the traffic system. It’s the world model for city-based traffic systems. Only the very rich can afford to buy a car and even then they have a congestion charge to contend with. However, to compensate, the authorities have put in place a world class public transportation system. There is a web page which shows you how to get from one place to another using public transport. It told me to get off at bus stop number 1048 and there it was, bus stop number 1048 right beside the place I was going. It asked whether I wanted to go the most direct route but have a longer walk to the bus stop, or take the nearest bus stop but then I would have to change, and so on.

You can buy a property but it is only through a 99 year lease, the property is still officially owned by the government. It is one way the government makes a lot of money and provides housing for everyone. So every aspect of your life is strictly controlled by the government. But it works.

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Singapore’s fabulous public transport system

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Chinese New Year

On the cable car on the way over to Sentosa island

I never saw a policeman on the beat. It takes a no tolerance approach to crime so if you commit a crime once, you feel the full force of the dictatorship/law and you do not do it again.

I thought it was interesting that in the new version of the guidebook, which was just released when I was there, it talked about the local’s preoccupation with keeping the prosperity going and their fear that things could suddenly change for the worse. It’s a bit like Ireland’s preoccupation at the moment.

It was such a good place to organise stuff and do business. On two occasions I shipped a whole load of stuff back to Ireland from Singapore. You can trust the postal service and there is online tracking of your parcels. I tried to ship some stuff via courier from Burma and it was nearly impossible due to the government regulations. I would have shipped some stuff from India but I did not trust the Indian postal system 100%. In fact, I spent a fortune in Singapore because it was so easy and so safe to get things done. I nearly spent more there in five

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days than I spent in a month in India and again I felt guilty that, considering the amount of money I was spending in Singapore, I had been arguing with the locals over pennies in India.

In India, I went into a shop and I asked if they sold disposable contact lenses. They didn’t, and as soon as they realized they

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Asian dance in a courtyard near the hotel. There was more culture than there is in Ireland at times.

After sorting myself out and getting supplies for the rest of my travels, I went to the usual tourist attractions of museums and art galleries and Sentosa island (which is a kind of amusement park that has a cable car going across to it).

Then I flew out of the fabulous Singapore airport on the 22nd December heading for Hong Kong.

SINGAPORE I never saw a policeman on the beat. It takes a no tolerance approach to crime so if you commit a crime once, you feel the full force of the dictatorship/ law and you do not do it again.

Conor

were not going to make a sale, that was the end of any useful interaction. They would never, for example, tell you of another shop that may have been able to help. In Singapore, I went into a shop about contact lenses. They immediately told me of an offer of six boxes for the price of five. So I said I would buy six, if I could leave half of the boxes in the shop to be picked up a month or two later when I returned. No problem! As it was Singapore, I knew I could trust the package to be there six weeks later, which it was. If you are ripped off by a shop you can complain to the authorities and they will bring a case against the shop within hours.

There were also some cultural moments in Singapore. The second time I was there it was Chinese New Year and I saw some of the traditional Chinese dragons going between the shops performing their ritual dance. I also saw some traditional

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with Singapore airport coming second. The Airport Express Line into the centre of the city was incredible, connecting up to the fabulous Metro system. I stayed in the Hong Kong hostel in Causeway Bay on Hong Kong island. It cost about $240 Hong Kong dollars a night which is about 24 Euro (1 Euro = approx 10HK dollars). This got me a very small single room with a shared bathroom but it was really clean and in an excellent location. One interesting advertisement stood out on the metro. There was a moving image that you could see through the carriage window, which was a clever collection of still photographs blended together because of the speed of the train. The recorded posh English accent on the metro stood out and implicitly made reference to its colonial past.

HONG KONG & MACAU Hong Kong and Macau

Sent: Monday, May 22, 2006 4:15 PM _______

I had not really considered Hong Kong much when I was booking my travels. It was really just a gateway into mainland China. Before I arrived I knew very little about the city. However I booked four nights accommodation there because it was over the Christmas period, and I thought it may be difficult to travel at that time. In the end I actually stayed an extra night and I am so glad I visited the place because it proved to be one of my favourite cities during my travels.

I was initially surprised at just how modern and efficient it all was. The airport is amazing. In passenger surveys it has won the Best International Airport award for the last five years,

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It [Hong Kong] has taken the best of British organisation and professionalism and mixed it successfully with the hardworking ethic of the Chinese.

Another interesting aspect of the metro system, which will probably become the standard for the rest of the world, were the free Internet terminals in the major stations. When using the terminals you had to stand, and there was a fifteen minute time limit so you couldn’t camp out there, but it was enough time to do what you wanted to do and move on. In fact there was free Internet all over the city.

Hong Kong is very similar to Singapore in the sense that everything is pristinely presented and organised. It is clean and safe and the city is well geared up for tourism, with streets properly signposted and lots of information and maps to help out the visitor. It’s also geared up for serious shopping and the

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Shop signs in Hong Kong

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magazine. It would not have been allowed in Singapore! I am tempted to copy a few of the pieces here but I don’t want you losing your jobs. In a way that is what makes Hong Kong so interesting. It is not a dictatorship but yet they have constructed such a modern, vibrant, safe, efficient, and culturally interesting city without having an iron fist guiding it all. It has taken the best of British organisation and professionalism and mixed it successfully with the hard-working ethic of the Chinese.

HONG KONG & MACAU The Hong Kong couple that showed me around their city

shops were open from 11 in the morning to 9:30 at night. The main differences I found were that the city appears to be a lot busier than Singapore, with the architecture a lot higher and more impressive. Some of the views of the bay with the modern architecture wrapped around it were breathtaking. It also has more character than Singapore, with, for example, all the shop signs hanging over the centre of the street desperately trying to get your attention. It is not a dictatorship and it was amusing to read some of the hard hitting non-PC (crude but funny) columns such as savagelove by Dan Savage in the free HK

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It’s a strange place at times. You hear Chinese (Cantonese) everywhere but when you talk to people in English they nearly always understand you, with some locals talking English in a strong Chinese accent. Christmas is a three day holiday in Hong Kong but not on mainland China. The Christmas Eve celebrations were large with fireworks across the harbour and thousands of people cramming the streets and restaurants.

However, there wasn’t much drinking. I went to an Irish pub and it was quiet with only a few expats. I met a Welsh guy there who was teaching English in South Korea. There was a very nice safe atmosphere everywhere. Like in Singapore, there were people singing Christmas carols in some of the malls and in the streets. Christmas day is a holiday with banks and most businesses closed, but all the shops, museums, and restaurants were open and there were lots of people around. On Christmas Day I went to the Museum of Chinese Art and I had the Christmas menu in Pizza Express (turkey pizza, mmmm).

According to the local free magazine the percentage of Hong Kong people who plan to buy Christmas presents is 46% but I believe it is getting more and more popular with the young.

There is a website called www.hospitalityclub.org. I think it was set up by a German, and a German girl in India gave me the web address. It is a way for travellers to hook up with locals.

I got in touch with a young couple from Hong Kong and with their young child they showed me around the city. They were a

Christmas Eve celebrations

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Sometimes, when I was travelling, I felt like I was walking through the news or just one step behind it.

HONG KONG & MACAU China; he told me not to trust anyone.

I went to most of the main tourist attractions. I went to see the Tian Tan Buddha statue in Lantau which is the world’s largest seated bronze Buddha; I took the peak tram to the peak tower, and I went on an incredibly well sign-posted walk around the mountain with spectacular views of Hong Kong below.

I went on the “biggest escalator in the world”. However, it is a bit of a misleading title. It’s a combination of many small individual outdoor escalators. All the escalators go in a down direction before 11 and then they all switch to an up direction for the rest of the day.

The “biggest escalator in the world”

nice couple. I went with them on the ferry to the Kowloon area and we walked along the promenade where there were statues of famous Hong Kong actors, with the biggest crowd being around the statue of Bruce Lee. We also went to some of the local neighbourhoods where I saw a traditional fortune teller, and I ate good Chinese food in a restaurant near their flat.

Interestingly, my host said that he would say he was from Hong Kong instead of saying he was Chinese, even though his father was from the mainland. He got me a bit paranoid about

Sometimes, when I was travelling, I felt like I was walking through the news or just one step behind it. For example, in Hong Kong the week before I arrived, there had been riots against the World Trade Organisation meeting that took place there. The main agitators were South Korea farmers and the riots had attracted worldwide news coverage.

I had also read about the call for democracy from the citizens of Hong Kong and the recent rejection of the Bejing compromise by the Hong Kong delegates.

The people of Hong Kong want democracy and on December 4th there was a large pro-democracy march through the city. It’s a strange kind of government there at the moment.

Although Hong Kong is allowed to retain its free-market

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economy as well as its social and legal systems for 50 years, it is still not a democracy.

It is best if I quote from the Economist. I subscribe to it now.

news and politics, especially the Economist. One of the great things about travelling is that it does give you an interest in, and to certain extent an understanding of, the world. So I was desperate to read about the places that I had been to and places that I was going to. There were some great articles on Iran for example in Newsweek. I like the Economist though. I thought by the name it would be just about economic issues but its not.

HONG KONG & MACAU “Unlike the other large protests since 2003, which were fuelled partly by grievances over the economy and dislike of Mr Tsang’s predecessor, Tung Chee-hwa, this latest demonstration appeared more focused on demands for political reform. It was aimed at pressing for a timetable for the introduction of fully democratic elections for the post of chief executive and for the territory’s quasi-parliament, the Legislative Council. At present the chief executive is chosen by an 800-strong election committee whose members are largely sympathetic to China’s views. Only half of the 60 legislators are chosen by direct elections. A majority almost invariably sides with the government. But the votes of the 25 pro-democracy legislators will be critical on December 21st, when the council is due to vote on a package of limited political reforms proposed by the government. Any change in electoral procedure requires approval by at least two-thirds of the council’s members. The pro-democracy camp has threatened to vote against the measures unless a timetable is announced for the introduction of universal suffrage.”

By the way, how good is the Internet. I am writing this up and if I have forgotten anything, or want to remind myself of any fact or to get more information on a subject, I simply switch windows and use the Internet. It’s an incredible tool.

So the vote happened the day before I arrived and the big news was that the vote went against the reforms. The prodemocracy camp had their way.

I used to devour TIME magazine, Newsweek and the Economist when I was travelling because they are all excellent for world

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Its goal as printed in its first edition in 1843 is to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress”.

It has definitely got a free market bias which it clearly admits to, but even then it does not seem to have an agenda – for example, it doesn’t believe that just a free market approach is the best way to solve the issues with respect to the health service in the States.

I don’t support all the stances it takes but I do admire it for its very honest, down-to-earth opinions and its in-depth analysis of the issues. It tells you things as they are without the crap. An example of this was in an article they had about the American army’s gung-ho approach in the Middle-East, and their lack of their tact on how to deal with the situation there.

A snippet from that article is as follows: ’Changing an army’s approach takes time. The warrior spirit, as Americans call their propensity for macho soldiering, or killing people, is deep in their military culture. In Afghanistan’s violent Helmand province, an American special forces captain - with broad experience of counter-insurgency - analysed his Taliban enemies thus: “They’re cowards. Why don’t they step up and fight like men?” Apparently, he had not considered how he might fight if he had no armour, no radio, an ancient rifle and the sure knowledge that if he fought like a

G The largest seated Buddha in the world. You can just about see the outline of the Buddha at the top of the stairs. I was too lazy to go up and have a look.

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man, he would be obliterated in minutes.’

The No.1 best selling book in Hong Kong at the time was “Not Quite the Diplomat” by Chris Patten. Chris Patten was the governor of Hong Kong when the British handed it back to China. He’s a moderate Tory and very pro-Europe. I bought the book and it was a great read because he talks a lot about Eastern Europe, Turkey, and the enlargement of the EU, issues which I had come across in my Eastern European trip. He also talks a lot about the emerging economic super-powers of India and China, which I was in the middle of visiting.

I am not a nervous traveller but it’s not exactly what you want to hear. I was on my way to the worldwide centre for pandemics, with a new one on its way

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Hong Kong tram

But anyway, getting back to me feeling like I was walking through the news; probably the biggest news item in the world at that time was bird flu, and in Hong Kong I saw notices and warnings about the virus around the city. Hong Kong was badly affected by the SARS crisis (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in 2003 when nearly 300 people were killed in Hong Kong alone.

other recent epidemics and pandemics in the world, with most of them originating from the Guangdong province in Southern China. The SARS infection originated there, the current bird flu infection originated there, and the Asian flu, which killed 70,000 people in the 50’s, originated there.

Guess where I was going to go to next!

I am not a nervous traveller but it’s not exactly what you want to hear. I was on my way to the worldwide centre for pandemics, with a new one on its way.

A number of people in China had already died from bird flu.

I watched a scary television programme on my little TV in the hotel room, about bird flu and the potential for it to mutate to a human transmittable form, and the worldwide pandemic that would result (a pandemic is an epidemic that spreads worldwide). Then the programme proceeded to talk about the

As I said in my Cuba write-up, the week before you head off travelling is awful. You are considering all the potential risks.

When you get there it is never that bad because all the potential problems never occur at once, and you just deal with them individually as they happen.

When you hear bad reports about a place you expect the

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mood of the place to reflect the bad publicity, but it very rarely does because at the end of the day people have to get on with their lives, make a living, and look after their families. For example, Guatemala had a hell of a lot of issues but I felt the family I stayed with there, at times, just ignored them all. If you were to dwell on the problems of the country all the time I think it would drive anyone nuts.

I sometimes think the reason why people are so miserable in Europe, is because things are relatively not that bad, and they can actually consider the issues and carry them around with them.

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an hour long ferry ride from Hong Kong. It’s a strange sort of place. There are Chinese and Portuguese signs everywhere because it was a Portuguese colony and it only reverted back to Chinese sovereignty in 1999. It has the same status that Hong Kong now has, with partial autonomy for the next 50 years.

You can use Hong Kong dollars nearly everywhere in Macau (although not in the library when paying for the Internet as I found out) as the Hong Kong dollar and the Macau pataca are pegged together.

It is not as polished a place as Hong Kong, or Singapore, and when it rained it had a slightly Irish miserable feel to it.

However, it was different and it is an interesting “fusion of Mediterranean and Asian peoples, lifestyles, temperaments, architecture and food”. A lot of people from Hong Kong, and now China, go there for the gambling and casinos.

HONG KONG & MACAU On the 29th January I received an email from the couple who showed me around Hong Kong wishing me a Happy Chinese New Year, and incidentally, on the 20th March, I also received a message from my Iranian friend Golara, for Persian New Year.

CB This year I also received an email from the Hong Kong couple with photographs of their newborn child.

When I left Hong Kong it was a bit of a difficult break. I had that experience a few times on my travels. Normally when I really liked a place and I stayed there for a number of days, there was a slight sadness when leaving it. I had just got to the point where I felt comfortable and knew my way around.

It was as if I was planning to stay there for a while and then suddenly I was leaving, never to return. Hong Kong was one of those places and I had mixed emotions when leaving.

Hong Kong could suffer a bit from the Chinese lack of service.

The “Wha u wan” type of approach but a lot of people there were also very nice and at times they came up to me and asked if they could help.

After Hong Kong I went to Macau for two nights. Macau is

CB This week (first week in September 2007) Macau opened the world’s largest casino, with capacity for 15,000 gamblers.

Considering how small the country is (the population of Macau is just 500,000), that its’ currency is pegged with Hong Kong’s currency, and its proximity to China and Hong Kong, it didn’t seem right that the officials gave me a visa for my short stay, and went to the hassle of stamping my passport in and out.

There was a great shower in the hotel in Macau. No matter where you are in the world and what place you stay in, you always appreciate a good shower.

On the 29th December I took a bus to the border with China and I walked across.

Conor

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Ferry ticket to Macau from Hong Kong

Macau street scenes - All photos

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“When China awakens, the world will tremble.�

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Longsheng Guilin

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Guangzhou Hong Kong

Children in Ruili, near the Burmese border

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China

Sent: Friday, June 2, 2006 10:56 PM _______

I never had any desire to visit China

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never had any desire to visit China. Eight years ago when I first went travelling I met quite a few people in Thailand who had travelled down from China, and it got a very mixed response, with some people saying bluntly that they did not like China or the Chinese. Even in Burma this year I met a well travelled older Austrian guy, who went to China just after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and he said that after a month in the place he had to get out. He hated it, and his attitude was that he would leave China to the Chinese. An Irish guy I met in Spain seven years ago, and who travelled all over China, said that the authorities were all like little Napoleons, there was rampant overcharging of tourists and, at times, the language barrier was nearly insurmountable. I talked to a guy who currently teaches English to Chinese students in Dublin and he does not warm to the people either. He finds them very quick to criticise the Irish culture but they get all defensive and irate when any aspect of the Chinese culture is criticised. It sounds like an element of brainwashing by the state and a certain small-mindedness on their part. So it just did not appeal.

However, slowly but surely I became interested.

I read a book called “Wild Swans – Three daughters of China” which is an account of the lives of three generations of

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women, from the same Chinese family, right up until modern times. It’s an amazing book and I had a lot more sympathy for the Chinese when I read it, and I felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t been more charitable considering what a horrendous time the people had gone through in the last century. The book is actually banned in China – the government do not like to hear any negative views of the country and its government – which could account for why the people are so sensitive when you criticise them. I met a Chinese guide in Hong Kong who was bringing a group from the UK around China for ten days. As her English was perfect I was quizzing her about the country but I did notice that when I asked her for her opinions about the bad things happening in China, she was reluctant to give her views.

I also started to hear different views about the people. I met an American girl in El Salvador who recently lived in Beijing for a year and she thought that the people in Beijing were wonderful (note: not just nice, but wonderful). I met a French girl in Krakow who had just come from spending two and a half months travelling around the country. She was a great talker and she gave me a real interest in China. She said you have to take into account that the culture is completely different but once you do that, she said that she also liked the people, or at least she didn’t dislike them.

China was becoming more and more prominent in the news and world politics. The current government was beginning to loosen the shackles and allow businesses to flourish and it was being talked about as the next world superpower.

The French girl bore this out and it was her opinion that China, in ten years time, would rule the world. With that, I thought I have to visit the country and I investigated the possible routes in. Hong Kong became the ideal starting point, as

100 Traditional Chinese dance in Guangzhou

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it fitted in nicely with my round-the-world plane ticket, and southern China would avoid the worst excesses of the winter.

It’s a huge country and I only spent two and a half weeks there, travelling mainly around south-western China. There is no way you can do a country justice like that. So I knew I was only going to get a glimpse of what the place was like. However, I did meet a few foreigners who were living and working there and I have been reading up about China, so hopefully I have some sort of understanding about the country.

The French girl bore this out and it was her opinion that China, in ten years time, would rule the world.

The route was as follows: I stayed in Guangzhou for two nights. I then flew to Guilin and stayed there for three nights. In Guilin I left my large backpack in the hotel and I visited Yangshuo for two nights, Longsheng for one night, and I stayed one night in Ping’an near the rice terraces. Then I went back to Guilin for one night and then I flew to Kunming for three nights. I took a bus (five hours) to Dali where I stayed for three nights. Then I took another bus to Ruili (ten hours) where I stayed for two nights.

From Ruili I walked across the border into Burma.

Have you spotted anything? That’s right, in two and half weeks of travelling I took two internal flights. How lazy is that! It wasn’t that cheap either costing 930 Yuan from Guilin to Kunming, which is about 93 Euro. At that stage of my trip there was something about overnight transport which

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I have come to the conclusion that I can no longer call myself a backpacker; it would be an insult to backpackers in general and hard-core backpackers in particular. made my skin crawl and a feeling of dread came over me. I have come to the conclusion that I can no longer call myself a backpacker; it would be an insult to backpackers in general and hard-core backpackers in particular. At best I am an independent traveller. Also you should see some of the places I stayed in! I think throughout the whole trip, in total, I actually shared a dormitory room for about four weeks. A few days in Mexico, Panama City, Madrid, Eastern Europe, Iran and New Zealand, that’s it. Even in Australia I did not share a room once and in the Cook Islands I had a family sized apartment which, at a push, could sleep six. Only in expensive countries did I not have my own shower and even that is not valid in all cases. In Australia I had my own on-suite shower for two weeks.

I did not cook once all year.

I went one better with cooking food. Maybe I am a good cook; the fact is I don’t know because I did not cook once all year – not once! I used to smile to myself as I watched the quiet but intense young ones pottering around the hostel kitchens cooking their meals. Peasants ! :-) That’s terrible I know, but it’s one advantage of travelling when you are older and do not have a student loan hanging over you. Compared to Ireland and the UK everywhere was cheap.

scene from the park in Guangzhou

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Scenes from the park in Guangzhou - all photos

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My first impressions of China was how modern it all was.

Guangzhou, for example, I thought would be like a city in India, with a general madness having pockets of modernity and slums, but it wasn’t the case. In many ways it was like a Western city. The city has an incredibly modern metro system and airport. I had just come from Hong Kong which has one of the best airports in the world and I was still impressed by Guangzhou airport’s size and its space-age design. I had expected the cities on the east coast to be modern (e.g. Beijing, Shanghai) but I did not expect the cities in Southern China to be the same. At times you could be fooled into thinking you were in the US, something which was never the case in India.

There was also a surprising amount of global fast-food joints in the cities. KFC was everywhere and I even saw a WalMart in Kunming. I was also surprised at seeing the “sex body oil” for men and women in the hotel room in Guilin.

I watched a Chinese produced programme, on the English language channel, about the problem of childhood obesity in the major cities of China, especially Beijing. I could have been in any Western country watching exactly the same programme.

I went to the park in Guangzhou. It was beautifully presented and it was more like an amusement park because it was so well preserved and managed, with cleaners constantly patrolling the park. There were lots of Chinese figures and dragons and it was very pleasant to stroll around. However, like most sizeable parks I visited in China, you had to pay to get in. It was 5 Yuan, about 50 Cents.

Some of the roads were incredible. The road to Ruili was excellent, comparable with any feat of engineering anywhere in the world. I was especially impressed by the tunnels through the mountains. In fact, in China, there was construction everywhere. As it is an authoritarian government it can construct what it wants, where it wants, when it wants.

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However, there are problems. I keep reading about protests against the government over land rights and villagers being displaced.

From the Irish Times: “Popular protests in China have reached huge proportions in recent years, with 87,000 separate incidents reported in 2005 compared to 8,700 in 1993 and 32,000 in 1999. Most of them are protests against local corruption, land confiscations and arbitrary action by officials and companies caught up in the industrial and social transformation of the country under way since the early 1980s.

This is the other side of the frenetic economic growth which has created a new middle class of perhaps 150 million people, the uprooting of some 200 million from the Chinese countryside and stark inequalities between them and the 800 million still on the land.

It is a reminder of how audacious the political gamble taken by the communist leadership was in creating a market-based society where the pace of growth must continue to outstrip the rate of unrest if there are to be more winners than losers.”

The article finishes with “These are interesting times in the biggest communist country in the world.”

However, I think the last sentence is misleading because it is about as communist as Ireland is. For example, I saw brand new cars being advertised on a stage with women dancing around them. In Yangshuo, a popular tourist destination for the Chinese, there was a table set up in the middle of the street with a large banner behind it advertising new apartment blocks in the area. Similar to what you would see in Western

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with its increased visibility to the outside world the normal brutal stamping down of any resistance by the government will become more and more difficult.

The commercial side of China. Selling apartment blocks in Yangshuo.

countries. Compare that to Cuba, where no one actually owns their own home, which represents the proper communist model. Incidentally I read “The Communist Manifesto” when I was in the Cook Islands. I thought it would be a considered balanced outline of Karl Marx’s vision for the ideal social setup of the world, but it is, in reality, a rabble rousing rant.

Marx wrote it in his late 20’s, with the intended audience being a bunch of Communist activists that he had arranged to meet in London. When reading it, you can tell he was running out of time before the meeting, because the writing at the end of this really small book is rushed.

In Cuba, you cannot own or buy a home, you are given it by the government. Marx talks about that ethos of non-ownership in his book. In Cuba, if you want to trade-up to a better home the only option is to exchange your home with another person’s, and to give a lump sum of money to that person, in order to reflect the difference in the quality and size of the dwellings. I know that because Sean, the Irish guy I met there,

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was in the process of doing just that. I talked to a guide who was showing me around the outskirts of Yangshou in China.

She said that you can buy your own home, but if you couldn’t afford to buy, the government would supply rented accommodation, but you still had to pay rent. I naively asked what would happen if you did not pay up and I could see that she was surprised at the question. She said that if you didn’t pay, the government would be around every day. You do not mess with the Chinese government. However, she did mention that life was a lot better in China now as there was more work and because the government was allowing people to set up their own businesses.

I think Lonely Planet’s comment on Chinese politics is the most accurate that I have read: “While China’s official doctrine is communist, its leaders continue on in a totalitarian manner, all the while pushing modernisation through capitalism”.

The people have the freedom to do business and deal with the outside world but it is still an authoritarian regime with censorship and large restrictions on what people can say and do. I think it will be very difficult to manage that in the future.

It might be possible in a small country like Singapore but not in a country with 1.3 billion people. Also, with its increased visibility to the outside world the normal brutal stamping down of any resistance by the government will become more

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I had heard before that the Chinese government blockED the BBC news website, so as a test, every time I went to use the Internet, I tried to access the site.

Shop promotion

“Just try logging on to the BBC News website from an internet cafe in China. You can’t. The same goes for websites for The New York Times, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a host of others which could hardly be described as pornographic or “dangerous”.

and more difficult. The Olympics will be an interesting time because if there are any protests against the government, with the world’s eyes upon them, the Chinese government will not be able to crush them as before.

China probably has the most sophisticated internet monitoring and censorship system in the world. In the last few years it has spent tens of millions of dollars building what has come to be known as the “Great Firewall of China”. In the past, whole websites were blocked. Today the system can block out individual parts of websites.”

An example of Chinese censorship is the Internet. I had heard before that the Chinese government blocked the BBC news website, so as a test, every time I went to use the Internet, I tried to access the site. Everywhere I went and every time I tried, it was blocked. It did not come up as “THE CHINESE GOVERNEMENT HAS BANNED THE WEBSITE”. It was a kind of vague “page could not be found” error that you frequently see, so the Chinese government were not advertising the fact that they were enforcing censorship. As soon as I crossed the Burmese border it worked fine.

From the BBC website on Internet censorship in China (interestingly it also talks about Internet censorship in Cuba):

That is true because although I could not get access to the news part of the BBC website, I could still access other parts of the website and listen to streamed online BBC radio programmes. That’s the great thing about travelling – you read about these things but it really comes home to you when you experience them first hand.

I read a really good article on Internet censorship in China in the Economist. According to human-rights activists, there are, wait for it, 30,000 online monitors of the Internet in China.

When I was there they did not block online email such as

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HOTMAIL and YAHOO as they did in Burma. However, I have just read recently that they have now blocked them also.

Of course the government never comments on any website that it blocks but it was reported that lots of people were having difficulties.

The article also said that “China’s leaders have stepped up their efforts in recent months to control not only the internet but other media too. A handful of outspoken newspapers have been closed and their editors sacked”.

You never know, if China awakens, the Chinese government may tremble just as much as the rest of the world.

I think that’s what makes the country so interesting, to see whether the government can achieve its goal of giving people enough freedom to prosper but not enough so they starting thinking outside the box and challenging the government’s policies. You never know, if China awakens, the Chinese government may tremble just as much as the rest of the world.

Some of the Internet cafes were amazing places. They were huge cavernous rooms with what appeared to be hundreds of people playing mainly computer games. There was never a powercut like in India and it was all so well organised and modern.

China has now more Internet-users than any country but America and over half of them have broadband.

Also, “the spread of mobile telephony has been no less spectacular. At the end of last year China had 393m mobile-phone

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Really nice border patrol guy at the Chinese–Burma border, getting a picture taken of the Jordanian stamp on my passport.

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accounts, nearly 200m more than at the end of the 2002 and more than any other country”.

Compared to the description of the authorities from the guy from Cork, I found them in general to be fine and I didn’t have any problems. I even had some off duty Chinese army officers asking me if they could pose with me to take a photograph, similar to what happened to me in India and the Middle East.

The authorities also seem to have developed a sense of humour. Chris Patten recalls in his book that when one of the heads of the Chinese government visited him in his office, and there were pictures of his daughters on the wall, the Chinese official remarked on how can a man so ugly have such beautiful daughters. My God it is nearly Dublin humour!

One time they annoyed me though. I was wandering the streets in Dali and I came across a military statue. I was just walking around it and suddenly an army guy started shouting in my direction and motioning me to get away. He was very aggressive. It really annoyed me. Of course you can’t argue back as the military are all powerful and any resistance is not tolerated. Its moments like that you get a feel for the basic freedoms you have in Ireland. It’s something you do take for granted.

On the flip side the Chinese border patrol guy at the Burmese border was one of the nicest border guards I have met anywhere. He was so friendly and polite. He was flicking through my passport and he came across the visa for Jordan, which he hadn’t seen before. He asked me if he could photograph it for future reference. I said no problem, so he got a girl to take the picture and then he wished me well and told me to come back soon. How nice!

Posing with the army in a park

I was also surprised that the language barrier was not as big an obstacle as I thought it would be. All the new road signs, signs in the airports and at tourist sites were bi-lingual, and in touristy areas you were usually able, without too much of a problem, to find someone who spoke English. It was no worse and sometimes better than Eastern Europe.

The French girl mentioned that the way the numbers are represented in China is not the number of fingers you show.

For example, the number ten is represented by two fingers interlocking. I remember she told me this and I had seen the little picture in the phrasebook. I brought three phrasebooks, two Mandarin and one Cantonese – how paranoid is that!

Then when I was asking the price on a bus once, the woman said the number in Chinese and saw my bemused look and then she interlocked her fingers and something twigged (I remember that!). It was such a buzz to see it in a real life interaction.

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The Dragon’s Backbone Rice Terraces near Lonsheng

Occasionally you would have people coming up to you to practice their English. One woman who was studying English in university started talking to me in a park. She was with her husband and child, and I asked her did she have just the one child. She said yes and that she would only be having one child as to have another child would cost a lot of money. I think she was referring to the penalties applied by the government in order to enforce their one child policy. She said that a lot of people wanted to have a child the previous year because it was the year of the monkey, which is associated with intelligence. She jokingly said that people were working out the maths to have a child during that time.

I talked to another guide in Yangshuo who explained that in the countryside the rules were slightly different. If a family had a daughter as their first child they were allowed to have one more child, but that was it.

I had heard before that the people in the Southwest were some of the nicest people in the country and many people had smiles

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on their faces, which is different to the traditional dour image. People were very rarely dismissive, rude or could not be bothered. For example, when asking directions in Kunming to the Burmese consulate, people were friendly and eager to help.

In other places some locals actually brought me to the place I was looking for. The country has a complex culture and history and sometimes I nearly felt that depth of culture when I was interacting with the people. You can nearly tell the people have been through a lot. The horrendous ‘Cultural Revolution’ took place between 1967-1976, so it’s not that long ago.

It’s an emerging country and with the relative stability the country has had in recent times, I met some really lovely younger Chinese people. The young staff at the reception in the Golden Elephant hotel were great. I also had some really nice interactions with some young stall owners. Then again some were just miserable and po-faced. So it was a real mix of encounters but it was never that bad. I heard some people complaining, in more off the beaten areas, of locals rudely shouting “hello” at them all the time and laughing, but I think

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The country has a complex culture and history and sometimes I nearly felt that depth of culture when I was interacting with the people. You can nearly tell the people have been through a lot. that’s just because many places have been sheltered from the outside world for so long.

One of my favourite pictures of China is the one I took of a group of kids that I met when I was cycling around the outskirts of Ruili. They were coming back from school and they were so friendly, saying “hello” and then all shouting “goodbye” when I headed off. They were lovely kids and it is hard not to warm to a people when you have an encounter like that. In rural areas you never knew what the reaction would be. Sometimes I would say or wave hello and the person would just stare back, or sometimes a warm smile would burst upon their face.

I went to the Dragon’s Backbone Rice Terraces near Lonsheng and the people in the area were great. I had hooked up with an Italian girl and when we arrived at the rice terraces it was absolutely Baltic cold. I haven’t been so cold in years. My toes were freezing inside my hiking boots. Generally the weather was crap when I was in China. We went looking for a place that had some form of heating. We found this place with no other tourists in it. It was run by the loveliest young Chinese couple who were so nice and helpful. We took the place because they had a small electric heater which we wrapped

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112 The Dragon’s Backbone Rice Terraces near Lonsheng

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ourselves around. The Italian girl was living in Shanghai and was looking at developing tours for the Chinese who wanted to visit Italy. I mentioned to her, did she think that the couple in the hostel would provide food because I was dreading the thought of stepping outside the building. As she had been living in the country for a while, she said, nearly dismissively, that of course they would. If there is money to be made, the Chinese will organise it. She was right because the couple produced a small menu and we ate in the room downstairs, with the heater underneath the table between us. We had bamboo chicken, which is chicken cooked in a bamboo shoot. The chicken was nice and fresh as we had seen it running around earlier, but it was a bit off-putting picking the claws and other bits of pieces out of the mix in order to get at something you could actually eat. The couple were on the sofa poised above a coal stove in order to try and warm up. Then they headed off and we settled down and watched the “The Living Daylights” DVD. It was a great night. It could have been the worse night ever but it was so culturally interesting and so funny being so cold and dealing with such nice people.

When the Chinese were good they were very good but when they were bad they were awful. I think a lot of the dislike of the Chinese can be put down to cultural differences. For example, the spitting everywhere.

Oh my God! Picture this.

I was having breakfast at quite a nice hotel in Kunming. I had got the lift down with two nouveau rich, 30ish, Chinese men, who were shouting into their mobile phones which were plastered to their ears, with their girlfriends in tow.

The disgusting thing about the spitting in China is not just the act itself, it is the loud throat wrenching phlegm gather-

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Although sometimes you wouldn’t know it, spitting is actually looked down upon in China.

As she had been living in the country for a while, she said, nearly dismissively, that of course they would [provide food]. If there is money to be made, the Chinese will organise it. ing beforehand; which is probably worse. As I was taking a spoon of my cornflakes I heard that notorious pre-cursor to spitting. I stopped in my tracks thinking how could this be happening in the middle of a posh hotel. There was nowhere to spit as there were carpets everywhere. But as I looked up, I saw the guys leaning over and spitting loudly into the freestanding ashtray in the middle of the restaurant. It was just disgusting, and they kept doing it throughout the meal. I had to leave.

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With Susanna and the couple running the guest house in the rice terraces, when it was absolutely Baltic cold.

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Guilin

Guilin

The French girl told me that once in Beijing she saw, and heard, a really well dressed Chinese businesswoman gathering a spit together, but when the woman realized that she was being watched, out of embarrassment, she took a big gulp and swallowed it. Although sometimes you wouldn’t know it, spitting is actually looked down upon in China. Then when the French girl continued up the road, slightly out of view of the Chinese woman, she heard an almighty spit behind her.

I did find the Chinese to be a very intense people. They eat intensely... they gamble intensely... and they are incredibly hard working.

Susanna, the Italian girl, had a laptop so we went to buy a DVD in order to have something to watch that evening. I had seen music and DVD shops on the main street in Guilin, which is quite a touristy town.

We went in and everything in the shop, and I mean everything, was counterfeit. The only difference in price between the items was the quality of the counterfeit packaging. A box cost more than a paper insert. All the packaging was of excellent quality, with raised lettering and perfect pictures.

The DVD was 8 Yuan which is about 80 Cents. They even

had “King Kong” with all the high quality packaging and yet the film was not even out of the cinema. We bought “Corpse Bride” and at the end of the film, during the credits, it suddenly switched to different credits for a different film. They must keep over-writing the CDs. This shop was a major shop on the main street. I read an article talking about the Chinese threat to the Indian outsourcing industry, and it said that one of the factors that was holding China back, was fears about the piracy of intellectual property, which is more rampant in China than in India.

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Chinese food

It was interesting talking to Susanna because she had been living in China for a few months and she was working directly with the Chinese.

She said that she liked her Chinese colleagues but she did not have that much in common with them. Their idea of a night out was to go to a Karaoke and they just did different things to her. In many ways she couldn’t figure the people out. She said that she found that sometimes her colleagues did not think and they just did whatever they were told. At times they said YES to authority when they should have been saying NO. This is probably because of the authoritarian rule.

She said the place and the people were 24hrs – always thinking and doing.

I did find the Chinese to be a very intense people. They eat intensely, normally in a big circle around a table sharing food, they gamble intensely (the Chinese are big gamblers; I saw card games being played out on the streets all over SouthWest-

ern China), and they are incredibly hard working. I’ll never forget leaving the rice terraces in the early morning and there were builders hiking up the mountain with large slabs on their backs. There were also carpenters working on a trunk of wood, all with an intensity that I haven’t seen in other countries. Even in shops when there were no customers, a lot of the shop assistants would be knitting. They seemed to be always doing something and keeping active. Susanna said the rate of change happening in Shanghai was incredible and she couldn’t believe how quickly some of the buildings were going up. Like the French girl, she also believed that China would rule the world in ten years time.

Susanna found it very important to build up a relationship with her colleagues because it made it much easier to get things done. By default the Chinese do not trust people. In an editorial I read on the anniversary of the Cultural Revolution it said, “an entire generation learned to trust no one, with consequences that mark China today”.

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It was also kind of annoying at times how the Chinese did not miss any opportunity to extract money out of a tourism opportunity.

For example, in Guilin, there was a charge for every possible tourist attraction, including, of course, walking around a park and some of the attractions did not hold up to the prices they were charging. Even getting into the area of the rice terraces described above, cost 50Y. At the end of the day it was just an area to walk around.

Longsheng

I found an element of that when staying in Chinese hotels.

Unlike every other country I visited during my year off, in China, you always had to pay an extra amount, in advance, on top of the room rate in order to cover the hotel for any possible damages. So, for example, for a 300Y room for two nights I had to pay a deposit of 800Y. To unblock my telephone in the hotel in Guangzhou I had to pay 200Y, about 20 Euro, which is probably the most money I could have spent if I was making phone calls for the whole time I was there.

When I would check out of a hotel the receptionist would always put a call up to the floor, before handing back the deposit, for someone to go in and check my room. Everything was labelled, dated and signed with receipts being provided.

It was not overly bureaucratic like in India but they made bloody sure that they were definitely not going to lose out on any business transaction. They are good business people. You do get the service you pay for but there is not a lot of trust around.

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I paid between 70 to 300 Yuan for a mid-range room in China. It was the weirdest negotiations when you were bargaining over the price of a room. When you went into a place there was always a board at reception which outlined

It was the weirdest negotiations when you were bargaining over the price of a room. the prices of the rooms. However, when you asked how much the rooms were, they always gave you a lower price, totally ignoring what was on the board, and then you would negotiate from there. For example, on the board in the hotel in Longsheng it said 120 Yuan, but when I asked the price they said 100. I asked if there was any discount going and they came back immediately with 80. I tried 60 and we settled on 70. None of this was hard bargaining. When I said 60 she said with a slight pause “No” and you could tell there was point in pushing it any further. When I said 70, there was another slight pause, and then “OK”. But it was not the debate you have in other countries – it was simply acceptable or not. It was a good room, with a television, a comfortable

Chinese politics is fascinating and that is why I enjoyed the country, but as a tourist destination, if I had to pick between China and India, India wins hands down. bed and a bathroom with hot water. I watched the Premiership football. Like a lot of Asian countries the locals are big football fans.

One of the best tourist attractions I saw in China was the Seven Star Cave in Guilin which was filled with the most spectacular stalactites and stalagmites with bright coloured lights showing you the way. I was amazed how well presented it all was, with excellent paths around the caves. Never in India would an attraction be that well designed and implemented, or in Ireland for that matter. I know I keep comparing China to India but, in my mind, before I had visited, I had put the two countries at similar stages of development. They were very different. I was surprised to learn just how much richer China was in comparison to India. India’s GDP (I hate that measure but its all I have) according to Lonely Planet is US$487 per capita. In China it is US$5000 per capita. I am really surprised at the figures because India has been so long at the forefront of the outsourcing of IT skills and I expected it to have a head-start over China. Normally you hear of China only with respect to manufacturing and China’s profile has only really been raised over the last few years.

Initially, I also found it strange, in both India and China, that the vast majority of people at the tourist sites were locals. At the Taj Mahal for example, most of the people there were In-

Tai Chi in a park

dian tourists. At the caves in Guilin, most of the tourists were Chinese. You forget the huge populations in these countries with limited opportunities for foreign travel.

Chinese politics is fascinating and that is why I enjoyed the country, but as a tourist destination, if I had to pick between China and India, India wins hands down. I found India to be a much more culturally interesting place.

However, you do still see some interesting scenes in China. In

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Right & bottom left photos: Green transport in China

Kunming

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parks I saw people doing Tai Chi and I saw people singing. I saw others walking backwards, as I believe they do in South Korea, and all over the country I saw people playing Chinese board games and cards. I once saw a motorbike which had at least three dead and skinned dogs on the back. I met a young American in Guilin who had been living there for two years teaching English. He said dog was expensive but it tasted fantastic.

the population of India is due to overtake China’s in the next 40 years. The current population of the world in 6.5 billion, amazingly up from only 2.5 billion in 1950.

I read in the English language paper an interesting story: “Huge worm removed from mum’s head: A parasitic worm measuring 21 centimetres long was recently pulled out of the head of a 36-year-old woman at a hospital in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province.

The woman surnamed Xu, who comes from Shaoguan in the north of the province, went to Guangzhou Sanjiu Hospital with a headache at the start of the week.

Xu told doctors she swallowed six live frogs after giving birth four years ago.”

Although I believe overcrowding is a big problem in the main cities in China, in general, in the countryside and smaller cities it did not seem to be nearly as over-crowded as India. It is one advantage of the hugely controversial one-child policy. There was space pressure everywhere I went to in India. I do not know what the solution is but India will need to take some

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radical steps in order to get its population under control.

The population of China stands at 1.3 billion. The population of India is 1.1 billion but due to the one child policy of China and the large families still prevalent in India, the population of India is due to overtake China’s in the next 40 years. The current population of the world is 6.5 billion, amazingly up from only 2.5 billion in 1950. So one in every there people on the planet lives in China or India, and that was another reason why I wanted to visit the two countries. In many ways the lives of the people there represent more of a norm, on a world basis, than the lives of the people in Europe, or in a tiny insignificant country like Ireland.

You do not see the same poverty or homelessness as you see in India. There was very little begging and the only annoying touts I came across were pimps in Guilin. There is a big problem with prostitution in China. You would often get a phone call in the evening in a cheap hotel. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying but somehow I knew what they were offering.

I do find it a bit depressing though, that what China, or any developing country is striving for is based around the Western model of cars and a huge increase in energy consumption, with barely a glance at the environmental impact. Already, seven of the ten most polluted cities in the world are in China.

It is a dubious world model which is already having problems in the West due to its dependence on oil; of which the emergence of China and India will only exacerbate. Western countries must take a lot of the blame for adopting and promoting this world model over the last fifty years, and I do agree it is a bit rich for them now to start criticising China over its environmental stance, when Western countries have been gorging themselves on the world’s resources for half a century. However, you would hope that an emerging country like China

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the huge population, two, because of the country’s nearly total lack of regard for environmental issues, and three, because of the authoritarian government and the lack of democracy.

Dali

I don’t think you can overestimate the impact on the world that China will have in the future. would learn from the mistakes of the past. It seems that just as the Western world is awakening to the consequences of its actions, the country with the largest population in the world, and who may become the next world superpower, is going to repeat the same mistakes. And this is at one of the most precarious and important times in the world’s history. It is a depressing and scary prospect.

I have also been reading about the large investment by Chinese businesses in energy companies in Africa and the huge expansion of power stations that is going to take place in China over the next ten years. I don’t think you can overestimate the impact on the world that China will have in the future.

However, I am scared by it for three reasons. One, because of

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However, having said all of that, in the large towns and cities, every major road still had a separate sealed-off area for bicycles and scooters which a lot of people still used, and the noise levels of the places I visited did not come close to the noise levels that were present in India. Generally the cities and countryside did not have much litter and there were cleaners everywhere. One of the expats I met there said that the heating systems in the apartments were crap. They were set at a very low level and you have to get used to putting on more clothes when you entered the apartment than what you had on when you were outside. So I think the locals are used to conserving energy and not having a large energy footprint. However, if this approach changes the resulting increase in energy consumption by China will be huge.

I flew to Kunming which I really liked. It had a nice chilled out atmosphere. I stayed in a hotel which was more like a complex which provided every possible tourism service under one roof.

I am telling you the Chinese are good business people!

I took a bus to Dali where I stayed for three days.

Then I took a long bus journey to Ruili which is on the border with Burma. There was beautiful countryside on the trip, with gorgeous, patchwork quilt farms, with great views down the mountains. That and the trip to Longsheng were my favourite journeys. There were no other tourists on the bus to Ruili and I saw only one other tourist in town. No English was spoken anywhere. I had to use the guidebook and point to words and to point to food to select what I wanted to eat.

I had beans, pork and fried rice with a coke. It cost 14 Juan

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Dali images

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Toilets with a lack of privacy. Thankfully these were not the norm in the places I visited.

which is about 1.4 Euro - dirt cheap!

I found Ruili to be a really relaxed place with all the locals sitting in circles on the wide paths in the evening, eating and talking. Ruili is a border town and it had a terrible reputation before for drugs and prostitution, as a lot of border towns do. However, the Chinese cleaned it up and executed all the drug smugglers. When I was there it was surprisingly well organised, modern, spacious and safe. It was a huge transformation. Between the authoritarian government and the newly found wealth, that’s how quickly things can change in China.

In China as a whole there wasn’t rampant over-charging. You had to negotiate but it was no more difficult than in other countries. The guidebooks also talk about the lack of personal space. Compared to India it was not that bad and the horror stories about the toilets never really materialised, but maybe I am now a hard-core backpacker in that respect.

In Dublin, before I went to Asia, I researched the option of

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crossing the border into Burma from China. The guidebooks talked about the possibility but it was all very vague. They did not seem 100% sure themselves and Burma is such a volatile country, that the situation can change very quickly. I went onto online forums and read postings from people who had been in the area recently and they said it was possible, but I did not see one posting from anyone who had actually taken the route. So the whole time I was in India, Singapore, Hong Kong and China I wasn’t sure that the route I was taking was in fact feasible. I knew Burma was an incredibly difficult country to enter overland. The Chinese-Burma crossing was the only overland route into the country that did not require you to take an internal flight, and it was only possible to go one way, from China to Burma. There were two other overland routes into Burma, both from Thailand, but to go any distance in the country, you had to fly over restricted areas. Most people cross the border from Thailand to go on day trips or to renew their Thai visas. Also, on all the border crossings you had to cross on foot. There were no bus or rail services going

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“Tour� that the Dutch guy and I took to enter Burma overland, along with the immigration stamps we got when crossing the border.

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in Ruili. I arranged to meet the guide at the border crossing.

The guide told me that he only brings over one or two small groups each week, so it is not exactly a busy tourist route. The young guide was wearing the traditional longyi (saronglike wraparound ‘skirts’) and I immediately warmed to his gentle smiling manner. So, with one other Dutch backpacker, after taking some last photographs in China, the three of us walked across the border into Burma.

Conor At the Burmese border with the Dutch guy

into Burma from neighbouring countries.

I don’t know what I would have done if the route was no longer available because I had a flight waiting for me out of Yangon, the capital of Burma. I think I would have travelled back to Kunming and have tried to catch a flight from there to Yangon. Luckily it wasn’t necessary. The official Burmese government line is that you have to take a tour from the Chinese border. A tour is just a euphemism for an escort. It cost $150, an absolute fortune, and I am sure a flight from Kuming to Yangon would not have cost much more. However, I wanted to see some of the towns on the overland route between Kunming and Mandalay. I also thought it would be interesting to pass through a restricted area in Burma, an area from which tourists are normally strictly prohibited (hence the escort). I had to pay for this ‘tour’ with a specific agency in Kunming, and in Kunming I also obtained my Burmese visa and all the cash I needed for the trip.

The tour agency gave me a number to ring when I arrived

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INDIA

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Mu-se Shwebo Maymyo Sagaing

Lashio Hsipaw Mandalay

BURMA

Yangon

THAILAND

To Singapore

Monks in the Ma Soae Yein Nu Kyaung monastery in Mandalay. The monks were all up until the early hours of the morning praying.

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Burma

Sent: Tuesday, June 6, 2006 2:53 PM _______

Another reason why I do not consider myself a backpacker anymore, more an independent traveller, is because I can no longer bear encountering the stupidity of youth

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nother reason why I do not consider myself a backpacker anymore, more an independent traveller, is because I can no longer bear encountering the stupidity of youth or just some of the dopes you meet on your travels. It sounds condescending but here’s a good example.

After we crossed the border into Burma, the three of us, plus a driver, piled into a taxi for the four hour trip from Muse to Lashio. It is a restricted area which is normally strictly offlimits to tourists because there is fighting between rebels and government forces. The guide took our passports and said he would give them back to us when we reached Lashio. He did not want us wandering off. So it was foot to the floor all the way with not a speed limit in sight.

With me was a young Dutch guy, aged 24, who was also going overland into Burma. He was a nice guy and intelligent but initially he had a bit of that Central European rigidity and youthful arrogance. I bumped into him a few times during my

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time in Burma, and after a bit of Dublin slagging, he warmed up considerably. Anyway, before we headed off, the guide said that if we wanted to take any pictures we were just to tell him and he would stop the car, but he told us not to take any pictures of the checkpoints.

The guide was the only person I got talking to about politics during my time in Burma. He was a really nice man, a very warm person and he kept smiling and joking. It’s amazing the resilience the people can have. In his opinion the country was a lot better off under British rule, in comparison to the current situation. Burma obtained independence from Britain in 1948 and since then has generally lurched from one crisis to another. It is now ruled by Generals in a military junta. He explained that to become a General costs a lot of money but when they obtain the position, they can, through corruption and terrorising the people, make enough money to retire in just 1-2 years. It’s a horrendous regime and I read in the Irish Times a few days ago, about the Burmese army’s current brutal offensive against ethnic Karen villagers in eastern Burma.

So four hours later we arrived at the second checkpoint, close to Lashio, the place where we were going to be dropped off.

Out of the corner of his mouth, the guide whispers that one of the Generals was sitting down over to our right. I looked casually around and there he was, little Napoleon himself, a dour face in military uniform. Now remember this is one of the most repressive regimes in the world which, for example, killed over 3,000 of its own people for having peaceful democracy demonstrations in 1988. So the car was stopped while the paperwork was being worked through and I saw the Dutch guy fumbling around in his bag. I didn’t get too concerned because I thought that even a fucken idiot would know you do not take pictures of the Generals. Two seconds later he had the window rolled down, with the camera zoom-

Nullum augait at incidunt prat, vulla faci erostin etummod olendre min ut adiamet landrem eugiamet lam quis dolor.

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ing in on the General who was only about three metres away.

The relaxed, diffident guide suddenly shouts “What are you doing!” to which even the Dutch guy got the message and he slowly lowered his camera, but even then with a slightly arrogant unapologetic air. Unbelievable. I had been in the country for four hours and I had visions of being interrogated in some concentration camp in the middle of the fucken jungle.

I met this flaky German guy in Panama City in Central America. He was a nice guy but again he drove me nuts over a few days. He was all over the place. He was the kind of guy who

this is one of the most repressive regimes in the world which, for example, killed over 3,000 of its own people for having peaceful democracy demonstrations in 1988 could not walk in a straight line before he would start talking to someone, which is a nice attitude to have but when you are trying to get somewhere it was bloody annoying. Anyway, he was in the process of organising to go back to Germany early, cutting his trip short. I asked why.

“There was this girl back in Germany.”

“Your girlfriend?”

“No, not my girlfriend but she has been on my mind.”

“Does she even know you are heading back?”

“No.” Now this guy had a major trip planned around Latin America and he was spending a fortune trying to get back to Germany early (months earlier). The flight was out of South America

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and he had started in Mexico. So I met him in Panama City (after he had been rushing down through the whole of Central America) as he was trying to figure out how to get to Columbia safely and from there down to Ecuador.

He was in such a rush, he wasn’t enjoying the places he was passing through and he was spending a lot of money on changing the return date of the flight. I tried to explain to him that he might not have an opportunity to travel like this again in his life. Trust me I said, I am a lot older than you and I know, from experience, that you need to take the opportunities when you can.

Especially as, for all he knows, this girl could already be shacked up with someone else.

I tried to state the bleedin obvious: “Why don’t you just ring her?”

We even got talking about this to a woman in the hostel.

Women, being the emotional creatures that they are, I thought might have a different perspective on his dilemma and be a bit more sympathetic to the innocent romance of what he was doing, but this girl actually had a bit of sense and she told him to stay travelling. Fucken dope.

The guide’s family were farmers. He explained that the area we were travelling through from the Chinese border used to be a big poppy growing area, but that the government was actually clamping down on it. I can’t remember why exactly, I think it was because of pressure from the Chinese government as it is a major trading route between the two countries, and the Chinese do not want drugs getting through. The guide said that the farmers in the area were pissed off because it is a profitable crop and very easy to cultivate. He said you just have to scatter the seeds around and it grows. The route is also a big smuggling route into China and on the way down we passed by a large group of motorbike smugglers.

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Burma is totally different to China.

Burmese food

Burma is totally different to China. It was one of those border crossings where you walk twenty metres into the country and the whole feel of the place is completely different. As much as China is modern, Burma is under-developed.

Burma is the largest country by geographical area in mainland Southeast Asia and has a population of 52 million. However, it has by far the lowest number of tourists in Southeast Asia, ever lower than Laos. Only 202,000 tourists visited Burma in 2004, the majority of them being nationals of other Asian countries. In comparison, Thailand has over six million tourists a year. The ruling military junta changed the name of the country to Myanmar in 1989 but most people still refer to the country as Burma.

On the “tour” down to Lashio we had our first experience of Burmese food and Burmese friendliness. We stopped at a restaurant and ate lunch. In Burmese restaurants there were normally lots of different pots of food. You would choose what you wanted and little dishes of the food would be placed on

your table. It was wonderful tasty food but I normally had the main meal at lunchtime because I did not trust the food lounging about all day in the pots. I did have some minor problems with my stomach when I was in Burma.

The food cost a couple of Euro, with the change being handed over with the girl’s right hand, with her left hand touching her right elbow. Everyone was so friendly in the restaurant and interested. That was also a difference to China. In Burma I met a guy who travelled extensively around China and he remarked that in China, you could be in a place where no tourists had been for months, or even years, and still the locals would have no interest in who you were and where you came from. Even though I spent a limited time in China, what he was saying did make sense.

In Lashio we took a bus to Hsipaw where we stayed in “Mr Charles Guest House”. When we arrived we had such a warm welcome, with all the staff coming out to greet us. I got my own room, including a private bathroom which cost about $6-8 a night with hot water. To get my clothes washed cost 1900 Kyat, which is about $1.80. It’s so easy and cheap in poor countries to get services organised.

Hsipaw was a nice relaxed place and one of the most enjoyable walks I took all year was the walk to the nearby waterfall. It was an amazing rural scene with people working the land, friendly locals smiling (everyone smiles back in Burma), kids shouting “bye-bye” and waving frantically. Most people, including the children, have the thanakha (powered bark) on their faces which is used as make-up, sun protection and skincare, all rolled into one. Some women nearly look like Geisha

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Scenes on the walk to the waterfall near Hsipaw

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Scenes aroung Hsipaw – all photos

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Scenes around Hsipaw

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The locals enjoying a hot spring

girls they have so much on but most have only a thick band on both cheeks. The majority of the men wear the traditional sarong.

It is a totally safe country for tourists. You find that in a lot of places. The country can have the most brutal dictatorship but it means that other forms of crime are very low. I tried asking the receptionist in the hotel was it safe to wander around alone but I had to give up because she just couldn’t understand the question and why I was asking it.

One of the advantages of coming into a country from a different route is that you spend more time in areas that most other tourists either don’t visit or visit briefly. Most tourists fly into the capital Yangon which is in the south of the country.

As I came in from the north, I spent most of my time in that region. It’s a really interesting part of the country with some fabulous places to visit but there were hardly any tourists, even by Burmese standards.

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School children near the hotel I stayed in

Mandalay street scene

After Hsipaw I took a shared taxi to Mandalay, where I based myself for most of my time in Burma. The taxi cost 10,000 Kyat for the front seat and 9,000 Kyat for a back seat and I was informed the night before that there was only the middle seat left in the back i.e. the worst seat. So it was pretty well organised.

hotel would normally put the generator on early evening but outside that time you were at the mercy of the power supply.

I used to know that the power had returned when the fan would gently come to life in my room. My torch was a lifesaver in Burma. When you travel for so long, at some stage, every item in your backpack becomes useful.

Mandalay is the second city of Burma but it is very different to Yangon. It is a lot smaller, a lot quieter and laid back with a lot less traffic and more of a rural town feel. The guide book says “Some visitors love it; some could live without it”.

I was of the former, I absolutely loved it. I stayed in the really nice Royal City Hotel which cost about $14 a night including breakfast.

In Burma there were no ATMs and you couldn’t use credit cards or travellers cheques. Iran and Burma were the only two countries I visited where I could not get cash out of an ATM. I was even able to use the ATMs in Cuba (as my card was not issued by an American bank). So when I was in Kunming in China, I made sure that I took out enough US Dollars to last me for the whole time in Burma.

Like most hotels and a lot of restaurants in Burma the hotel had its own electricity generator. The infrastructure is so bad in Burma it cannot be relied upon. It was lot worse than even India, with power cuts happening throughout the day. The

The Internet was also a struggle in Burma. It was incredibly slow and censored, with all the Internet email systems being blocked (HOTMAIL, Yahoo etc.). However where there’s a will! I used a proxy sever to connect to HOTMAIL. What that

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means is that you connect to a website which is not blocked (e.g. www.indianproxy.com) which in turn connects you to the banned website. It worked on and off but it was incredibly slow and frustrating to use and I only connected to it to check for any emergencies.

One of the most enjoyable days I had in Asia (19/01/06) was when I rented out a bicycle from the hotel (1500 Kyat) and I cycled around Mandalay for the day. What a wonderful relaxing place. Most people were on bicycles or low-speed motorbikes, with only the odd car. Nobody was in a rush and it was easy to intermingle with everyone cycling. Any mistakes I made were only met with smiles. It was such a fantastic way to see the city.

There were: women chanting out their wares which were perched on top of their heads; locals and children shouting hello; nuns with shaven heads wearing incredible pink gowns going between shops looking for offerings; monks with their amazing blood red robes roaming the streets; sweet sellers banging gongs on their small floats to try and attract children.

The roads were all signposted which makes a big difference when you are new to a place, and the city was very flat, a perfect place for cycling. There were no touts and there was no hassle. When people came up to talk to me, or to offer help, I did not have to be suspicious and I could engage with them fully.

I visited the Mahamuni Paya which was great. It’s one of Myanmar’s famous Buddhist sites, with the paya’s fame coming from the Muhamuni Buddha image, which devout followers have covered in a thick layer of gold leaf.

A monk showed me around looking for a tip. That was as

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Followers putting gold leaf on the Muhamuni Buddha image

Mahamuni Paya in Mandalay

hardcore as the touts got. I noticed in any negotiation you had in Burma, the people never argued. It’s just not in their culture to be pushy.

Before I went to the Paya I was deeply immersed in my guidebook trying to figure out how to get there. A monk came over to me to ask if he could help and then he offered to show me the way to the Paya. I gave him a backer on my bike, with him giving me directions. We arranged to meet later on at the wooden monastery “Shwe In Bin Kyang”.

When I arrived he was there with two other monks and they showed me around.

The area we were in was a monk’s district, with hundreds of robed monks walking to and from smaller monasteries. Man-

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Sweet seller in Mandalay

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Procession of nuns near “Shwe In Bin Kyang”

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The monks that showed me around the wooden monastery “Shwe In Bin Kyang�

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The Ma Soae Yein Nu Kyaung monastery

dalay is home to 60% of Myanmar’s monks.

I even saw the most amazing procession of nuns.

After the Shre, two of the monks left and I got talking to the remaining monk. He offered to show me around his monastery which was just across the bridge. It was called Ma Soae Yein Nu Kyaung. For some reason I was a bit reluctant to go but I am so glad I went, because it was a fascinating and beautiful place.

One of the best cultural scenes I saw all year, was a roomful of monks sleeping and dosing. My host explained that they were up until the early hours of the morning praying.

A monk in the monastery said that I looked like Peter Crouch.

I got that a few times on my trip, even in Yangon somebody shouted that up at me. For non-football fans out there, Peter Crouch plays for Liverpool and England. You might think that it’s nice to be compared to a fit handsome football player.

However the reality is that he’s the gangliest, ugliest git in the

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Premiership. Such is life.

That evening I hiked up Mandalay Hill which had lots of interesting shrines. On the way up, monks asked if they could they join me so that they could practice their English.

As in India, Burma was a fabulous place to take photographs with so many interesting scenes and images presenting themselves all the time. Again if I had a brass neck some of the photographs I could have captured… the ones that got away.

A lot of people really did not like their photograph being taken (e.g. the nuns) and even children would run away with shrieks of laughter when a camera appeared.

The photography on my travels was a surprise. I did a bit of photography when I was a teenager, so I had some previous interest, but I found that it became quite an important part of the trip. Of course, the fact that I was in some of the most visually interesting places in the world did help. The camera I

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Huge statue on Mandalay Hill

used was the Olympus Stylus which is basically a good pointand-shoot. It is very small and you can fit it in your pocket and it is weather proof with a study compact design. There are no gimmicks, no zoom, so the quality of the pictures was surprisingly good. This was as long as I got the films developed in a reputable place. I made the mistake before of getting some pictures developed in Belize. The results were terrible as the chemicals the shop used were crap. It’s obvious but you need a good camera, a good film, and good developing. The camera is very well known amongst camera shops and professionals and it seemed to have nearly a cult following. Previously I had met a Canadian guy in South America who was a professional photographer and his fun camera was the one I had. I bought a replacement in Australia because my own camera was a bit battered and bruised after the year travelling. I couldn’t be-

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lieve how cheap it was. It cost only about 60 Euro, about half the previous price I paid. The manufacturers must be selling them off. The shop assistant said that she would sell a few digital cameras a day but only one film camera every couple of weeks. I think that signals the death knell for film cameras.

She also loved my camera and she told me that some of her friends, who were professional photographers, had one.

I decided not to bring a digital camera with me because I did not want to carry anything of any value. I did not want to draw attention to myself as being a rich tourist. There was nothing in my backpack that I would have minded losing or being stolen. I even left my 70 Euro watch at home and I brought a 10 Euro one instead. At that time the equivalent quality digital camera cost significantly more, and even then,

The photography on my travels was a surprise.. it became quite an important part of the trip digital cameras still have the problem of not be able to capture fast moving images. In my opinion the flash never works very well and I believe film still has a significant edge in colour definition; and colours are everything in Asia. Digital cameras are also real boy’s toys and you can see people, normally men, spending all of their time playing with the camera and taking too many photos, instead of just relaxing and enjoying the scene. It can also make you a bit lazy, instead of thinking carefully about each shot.

Considering my camera is a point-and-shoot, the quality of

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Sagaing - all photos

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U Beins bridge in Amarapura

Football match near boat to Mingun

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The Israeli girl that I talk about in the next section and the Dutch guy I entered the country with.

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the pictures was really very good. The camera has no zoom which means there is less glass between the image and the film, and more light can get in, which gives you a better depth of field and allows you to use a higher definition film. The only downside is, is that the camera has a fairly wide angle lens so to take pictures of people I had to get up very close, which understandably a lot of people didn’t like. However, because it has a wide angle lens the pictures of people have real depth, their faces are not plastered against the background, as with zoom lenses. So you see, I do know a little bit about it!

of course there is the tasty local food but because of its location there was also a wide selection of Indian and Chinese food.

At the beginning of my trip I just took the odd photograph, whenever I could be bothered.

However, when I arrived in India I was in full flow.

I began to “see” photographs. Even if I say so myself, I developed an instinct for what would make a good photograph and I enjoyed the challenge of trying to capture the scene. Photographs started to present themselves to me.

I had a strange occurrence. I was walking along a wall on a derelict site and nearby there was a village with some people looking over. I waved hello but then they started, what looked like, to beckon me over. I wasn’t sure because maybe the hand signals are different in Burma. So I turned and walked away but a crowd from the village came up over the wall and headed towards me. I walked towards the driver who could speak the language and who would be better able to judge the situation. The group came skipping over, nearly jogging, all smiles with a mother wanting to show me her baby (the poor child wasn’t too impressed). The baby was an albino baby. I didn’t understand why she wanted to show me; maybe because I was white skinned and her baby was also white skinned. I don’t know. It was very strange.

So I always carried the camera with me. It was small enough to fit comfortably in my pocket and I could take it out in an instant. The size of the camera did not intimidate people and most of my subjects seem to be fairly relaxed in the pictures.

However, that is as far as my interest went. If I had been on a photography trip or if I had slightly more dedication to the art, I would have got my arse out of bed early in the morning, or hung around later in the evening when the light was perfect. But I didn’t, and consequently a lot of my pictures are washed-out.

However, I can’t wait until my house has been properly decorated and I can place all my favourite photographs blown-up on the walls.

I ate well in Mandalay. There is a good mix of food in Burma;

After spending a few days in Mandalay, I took some day trips out of the city.

I first of all went to Sagaing to see the temples and the religious sites. I got a pick-up bus there but I chartered a taxi for half a day to bring me around the main sites (2500 Khat).

I went to U Beins bridge in Amarapura, which is the world’s longest teak bridge and I enjoyed the spectacular sunset there.

I met the Dutch guy and two Israelis. It was good to meet them. They were having a laugh with the locals which was nice. We got a bit lost on the way back and a local with a torch helped us out.

The following day I went to Mingun. It was a pleasant boat trip down and in Mingun there were some interesting ancient

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ting tired at that stage, very tired.

Mingun

sites. I bought a picture. The vendor asked for 150 US$ and I think I paid 85 Euro for it. The guide book says that you should normally bargain down to about half the asking price.

In my time in Burma, out of respect for the people, I didn’t negotiate too hard as I knew the locals would use the money a lot better than I would. If I thought the price was anyway fair I didn’t even bargain. Overcharging was not a problem in Burma. There are too few tourists and they are a decent people.

I left my large rucksack in the hotel in Mandalay and I went on a fascinating three day loop from Mandalay to Shwebo, from Shwebo to Monywa, and then back to Mandalay. It was really off the beaten track stuff, maybe the most off the beaten track route I took during the year off. What a country to do it in! As I said earlier, if I had flown into Yangon I probably would not have gone on that loop and I talked to nobody else who had done the same. I felt so free not having to lump my large rucksack around and the trip seemed so easy. I was get-

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I tried to follow the advice of the guidebook with respect to the political situation. I didn’t avoid spending money and I tried to spread out my spending among as many different shops as possible, in as many different locations as possible, so that the local people would benefit directly from my visit.

The guidebook suggests going off the beaten track and allowing people to talk to you about their lives. This is so that you can learn about their difficulties and can understand better the horrendous dictatorship they live under, so that the reality of their situation is not covered up and hidden. So that’s what I tried to do.

However, if there is one disappointment I have of my time in Burma, it is that I only got talking to one person about the political situation. If you didn’t know what was going on there you could be forgiven for thinking that it many ways Burma has an idyllic rural lifestyle, with a very rich culture and a happy smiling people who haven’t a care in the world.

Even this week (9th September 2007) there have been articles in TIME magazine and the Economist about recent unrest and protests in the country. Here are a few extracts: CB

“Recent protests against rising fuel and food prices were put down brutally. Several thousand vigilantes, armed with wooden batons, attacked protesters in Yangon, leaving them badly beaten. The authorities have arrested hundreds of people for organising or taking part in small protests that have taken place all over Myanmar in the past few weeks” “Now daily life in this nation of 53 million has become so desperate that an impoverished populace may feel that it has little choice but to take to the streets again.”

Mingun

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Shwebo - all photos

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Petrol station on way to Halin

On the way to Halin

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The bus trip to Shwebo was terrific. There was hardly any traffic with idyllic farms and scenery. Shwebo does not have many tourists and just walking through the market attracted a lot of attention. I stayed in Zin Wai Lar Guest House which was an absolute dump but I managed to sleep ok. However the following day I arranged to go to Halin, which was 26 kilometres away. It was only accessible by motorbike taxi (6000K). I was the pillion passenger on a hard metal seat with only a towel saving my arse and boy was I glad it was there.

I was unlucky to have an overweight, miserable as sin, Chinese driver and we bobbled all the way along. It was hardly a road, more a path and we had to travel very slowly in order to avoid being thrown off. Hardly any tourists ever go to Halin and I was introduced to a monk who said that I was only the third foreigner he had ever met. He was learning English and he had a large range of English text books in his possession.

On the way there, everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at me. There were pots of water at intervals along the route and there were little tables where you could buy jugs of petrol. It was a very rural setting in the village with mainly oxen pulling carts around. Once again, there were friendly smiling locals. The men are the opposite of macho. They have no arrogance and they are very diffident and respectful.

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When I got back to Shwebo, I grabbed something quick to eat in the restaurant beside where the bus was due. Like in the restaurant I went to the night before, the service was very attentive, with the staff always keeping an eye on me. I suppose I was something different. I tried to swat some flies and a minute later the owner diffidently, even nervously, put a fly swatter on my table. The night before, the staff came over and actually joined in with me, swatting the flies.

I got the late bus to Monywa. After leaving Monywa the pick-up stopped at a flour mill and was filled with sacks of flour. A guy came up to talk to me and he asked me to take a photograph of him and his child. There was a group of women working with the flour and I asked if I could take a photograph of them. He politely said no, as I believe they do not like you taking pictures of their wives. I could not put my feet down because of the sacks and because the pick-up truck was packed I had to scrunch my legs up in front of me. It was incredibly uncomfortable but there wasn’t a moan from the locals. However, after a while a few people got off so I could put my legs lengthways along the bench and absorb the culture and scenery around me.

A guy from the archaeological department asked me what I was interested in seeing and he arranged for a motorbike and guide to take me around. I was asked to pay 1500K for the drive and I also made a contribution of 2000K to the village.

I stayed in a really nice place in Monywa called the “Shwe Taung Tarn Hotel and Restaurant”. I chartered a motorbike taxi for the following day. It was a converted motorbike which had a two-seater rickshaw chasse on top. It cost 8000K.

CB

When I do the math now it is so cheap, a couple of pounds Sterling. I feel guilty.

It was another great day in Burma. Nearly every day was a great day in Burma.

The scenery was beautiful and unspoilt. They had hot springs with water flowing out at exactly 52 degrees. There was an area where the women washed themselves and their clothes.

Thanboddhay Paya was incredible. Have a look at the photographs to see what I mean. There were 582,357 Buddha images.

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The trips around Monywa were amazing. There was hardly any traffic and nobody was in a rush with a really relaxed Asian culture. The locals were wearing traditional clothes, there was an idyllic rural landscape with some beautiful scenes and amazing characters. Everywhere I looked I saw smiling friendly faces, with people both young and old waving at me.

I remember sitting there thinking that as a travel experience it really does not get much better than this.

They are one of the friendliest people that I have met anywhere.

Goods transport in Burma

their humour, smiles and persona were some of the lasting memories I have from my travels.

I just hope I can bring some of that attitude into my own life.

There was also a huge 90m reclining Buddha which I went to have a look at and then to the enormous white Aung Setkya Paya. You can go up inside to the top to see the view of the truly amazing 8000 (and counting) Buddhas in the sprawling Bodhi Tataung. People don’t seem to get this picture for some reason and how spectacular it was. Maybe you had to be there. There were hardly any tourists for such amazing sites.

In the afternoon we travelled out to the village Kyaukka which is famed for its lacquerware. Once again, hardly any tourists head out there and the looks in the locals’ faces reflected that.

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The next day I went to the bus station to pick up a bus to Mandalay. It was a quite large, slightly chaotic bus station.

The station was also used to transport goods and there was a large bus being filled with sacks. Articulated lorries do not exist in Burma, or at least I did not see any.

I was waiting there for a while and I bought some oranges from one of the women who was selling goods. I could see she was embarrassed to be dealing with a foreigner but she was all smiles. Like in a lot of Asian countries, in Burma there were women at bus stops selling goods which were in baskets perched on top of their heads.

I had to wait a while before my bus departed so I was sitting outside, observing the vendors. Generally they were quite young women but there was a mix of ages. They were so comfortable, so alert, so good humoured and the way they interacted with each other was startling. When things were a bit quiet, they would turn from the buses and with a straight back sit down, and at the same time rest their baskets on the table, talking, smiling, and laughing with their colleagues – whom, if you think of it, are in many ways their competitors. They live in a brutal regime, they must earn pennies for what they do, it is not an easy life, but their humour, smiles and persona were

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Thanboddhay Paya

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city. Every three or four days you need to spend the whole day researching where you are going to go to next and how to get there and get supplies. Sometimes it feels like that all you do is organise stuff.

Thanboddhay Paya

It is tiring travelling and at times stressful. some of the lasting memories I have from my travels. I just hope I can bring some of that attitude into my own life.

From Mandalay I caught the long overnight bus to Yangon.

This was the last overnight bus, but not the last overnight flight, I was going to take on my year off.

I did not go to Bagan, which a lot of people said was good but not amazing, and I did not go to Inle Lake which everybody said was excellent. So in the end I spent only two weeks in Burma. I would love to have seen more of the country and I had a fantastic time there with so many great days and great experiences, but I was tired. It is tiring travelling and at times stressful. Every day you have to organise a roof over your head and at least two meals. Every couple of days you need to organise transport and get your orientation in a new town or

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In some places it can be difficult to relax, and you can get a lot of hassle which can wear you down. I was explaining to the Irish guy I met in Iran, who was a traveller, that I was heading to India after the Middle East, and the first thing he said to me was “Are you not exhausted?” Don’t get me wrong, travelling is a great life experience, but it is tiring and I was shattered when I arrived in Yangon. I don’t regret leaving Burma when I did. During all my travels, I have never regretted NOT going to any place, no matter how good people said it was. There is only so much you can do.

Yangon was a lot busier than the rest of the country but it was still relatively quiet compared to most other Asian cities.

I went to the major tourist attraction Shwedagon Paya which was stunning. Just look at the photographs. I also bought a lot of handicrafts, which I shipped back to Ireland from Singapore. I would have loved to have shipped back the stuff from Burma and to have given the locals the business, but due to government regulations it was nearly impossible. When I was bargaining for the handicrafts you could tell that not many tourists visit Burma because the initial prices they were suggesting were so reasonable.

Yangon had a nice buzz to it and it was more upbeat than the rest of the country. There was a little bit of tout hassle but nothing compared to India. However, I was tired, and I got away from any tout as quickly as I could. I just couldn’t hack it any more.

In my original round the word ticket I was due to go to the

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Village Kyaukka

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Philippines (via Singapore) after Burma. However I was running out of time and energy and although I would have loved to have seen the country, the thought of arriving at Manila airport was more than I could bear. The round the world ticket I had was great. It cost 2100 Euro for all the flights including tax but the best thing about it was its flexibility. I went into see Mandalay airlines, which is a partner of Singapore airlines, and they changed the flights around so I would fly direct to Australia after Singapore and then I changed all the subsequent dates for the remaining flights. During my trip I changed the dates of the flights twice. It cost about US$35 each time. I changed the actual route once which cost about US$60.

I was also looking forward to coming off the malaria tablets.

You are meant to continue taking the tablets for four weeks after coming out of a malaria area, so I continued with them for a couple of weeks when I was in Australia. Incidentally, an Irish backpacker, who was only 24, died from malaria a few days ago (it is the 4/6/06 today). He died in a Bangkok hospital but had contracted malaria in the Burmese jungle, which is a bit scary. There were not too many details in the paper but it did mention that he had been taking the appropriate medicine on his travels.

I was taking the notorious Larium tablets. A small minority of people go completely AWOL when taking them and you cannot take them if you are in any way depressed, have high anxiety or any psychiatric disorder. However, a lot of people have minor symptoms such as vivid dreams/nightmares, which I had. Nothing I couldn’t handle, but the nightmares were very vivid and I could often remember exactly what I had been dreaming. I took note of one such occurrence.

I was going up in a lift in a skyscraper. I noticed that the lift was slowing down ever so slightly. There was a slight decelera-

tion, but it was not like it was coming to an abrupt stop, or as if it had reached the floor. But it kept slowing down which was giving me slight cause for concern, but nothing that I would express to the other passengers. It just felt like something was not quite right, but it was not yet a situation that was overly worrying me, just a slight difference to the normal journey.

However it kept slowing down and just before we reached the destination floor it came to a standstill, just before we were safe and we could have disembarked. Then the lift started to slowly descend. Now I was beginning to be alarmed. There was a floor further below which I had in my mind as being a place of safety, a floor that it was possible to get out on, a marker that beyond which the situation was getting out of control. However the lift had just enough speed to make disembarking at that floor dangerous. It passed by the floor and continued on for a few seconds.

Then the lift suddenly dropped. It went hurtling towards the

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ground at full speed. I was then fully alert and aware that this was a life threatening situation. However I clearly knew in my mind that there would be an emergency brake system that would intervene in a situation like this. It would kick in and abruptly, maybe violently, bring the lift to a stop, but at least we would survive. So, although I was panicking, I had this thought in the back of my mind, that there was still hope. I knew the system could kick in even at a very low level. However the lift kept dropping, building up more and more speed, and then, just at the point where I knew there was no hope, and I knew there was nothing that could be done to avoid catastrophe and me dying, we were going too fast and we were too near the bottom, I regained consciousness – which is more accurate than saying I woke up because the transition between having the nightmare and waking up was at times barely noticeable, almost seamless. The whole event was crystal clear in my mind and I wrote it down in my notebook. Similar dreams/nightmares to the above could happen three or four times a night. They could also be very intense, such as family arguments, the ones that can get really under your skin.

However, normally, I used to fall asleep soon afterwards.

On the 30th Jan I caught a flight to Singapore from the Yangon International Airport. The airport was about as big and as modern as Knock airport. For a country of 52 million people I couldn’t believe how small it was. I arrived in Singapore and I stayed in the Waterloo Hostel, the same place that I had stayed in before. I went out for a walk and when passing a newsagent I noticed the front cover of TIME magazine. There was a picture of a General on it with the headline “BANKROLLING BURMA – A flood by Asian companies is helping a vicious military regime cling to power. Is democracy now a vanishing dream?”.

I wrote down my experiences in Burma in a notebook because

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it was too difficult to take notes in an Internet café. The power could cut out at any time and it was nearly impossible to email myself what I had written. So it was interesting comparing my notes and observations with the article. Some of the points in the article reflected my experiences. For example, from TIME magazine: ‘A stroll across the Chinese border into northern Burma shows just how little the Burmese benefit from the trade between the two countries. While Gong’s Ruili is a modern metropolis of wide streets, incessant construction and per capita income five times higher then the surrounding district, the Burmese town of Muse directly across the border is mostly a jumble of huts, made of bamboo, thatch and tin sheets’, ‘The junta controls the two Internet service providers, but enterprising Burmese use proxy servers to access and anonymously surf banned websites, as well as to safely send and receive international e-mails.’, ‘many have been forced to become smugglers, who slip motorcycle convoys laden with computer parts and Hollywood DVDs through the jungle between border posts’ ‘The drug problem is so severe in the border areas around Ruili that, says Major Gong, Chinese officials employ 1,000 people to round up addicts and force then into rehabilitation “farms”’ The article also talks about the ‘chronic power cuts’.

I really wanted to visit Burma but I was aware of the request by the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi that tourists stay away from the country. She is the democratically elected leader of the government but has been under house arrest for ten out of the last sixteen years. In the Lonely Planet guide book

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it had a section on whether you should go or not, detailing the arguments both for and against. There are also good arguments for going. I really wanted to see the country because I heard it had such a pure Asian culture, preserved because of the people’s pride and because of the country’s isolation.

The country will change if it ever achieves democracy. I also wanted to understand more of the political situation there, although disappointingly, I didn’t really achieve that particular goal.

To be honest my conscience was not 100% clear when I entered the country, but I did, as I explained earlier, make a conscious effort to follow the Lonely Planet guidelines on how “to maximise the positive effects of a visit among the general populace, while minimising any financial support of the government”.

In the guidebook one of the arguments that is given for visiting the country is that the vast majority of locals want you to go.

This is reflected in the TIME article which says: ‘Burma’s democracy movement insists that the populace stands behind sanctions, but it’s hard to find much support among ordinary Burmese. “We want pressure from the international community, but we don’t want sanctions,” says a Rangoonbased Burmese journalist. “Our people are very, very poor.”

Burma is an incredibly interesting country with some of the friendliest people I have met anywhere. My heart goes out to the people and I wish them all the very best for the future.

After spending a few days in Singapore, I flew to Perth in Australia.

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Military junta propaganda

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AUSTRALIA

Perth

Melbourne

NEW ZEALAND

Rottnest Channel Swim

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Australia

Sent: Friday, June 16, 2006 12:38 PM _______

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have always liked the Aussies. Generally I find them a friendly bunch who are very approachable and up-beat.

They are also one of my favourite hard-core backpackers because although, at times, they can only talk shite about women and beer (total shite), they are not whingers and if they have a bad travel experience then just laugh it off and get on with it. They never seem to let anything fester and drag them down. I also like their bluntness and slagging humour which reminds me of Dublin. I will talk in more detail about my fellow travellers in my next write-up.

However, for me, there’s something about Australia that doesn’t quite ring true. For example, everyone claims to hate John Howard but yet the people have voted him in for the last ten years. They are a proud nationalistic people but they can’t even vote in an Aussie as their head of state. They are a peace loving, tolerant, and green nation, but yet they are shoulder to shoulder with Bush in both Iraq and in their rejection of the Kyoto agreement.

I also have my reservations about their form of nationalism.

I was there for the Commonwealth Games in 1998 and I could not believe how painful the Aussies were with respect to their sporting achievements. They were as bad as the Americans.

The whole focus of the media coverage was purely on the Australian competitors. If an Aussie was not in an event, it was as if the event was not important. Sometimes they would barely

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I have always liked the Aussies.

However, for me, there’s something about Australia that doesn’t quite ring true. mention who had won the race as they were too busy talking about how their competitors did. There wasn’t any sense of having any interest in other countries, or any kind of goodwill to other nations and their respective achievements. It was all very very introspective.

In Sydney I remember an English girl having a go at some of her Aussie friends over the same issue and saying just how biased the media was in its coverage of the events. I totally agreed with her. They would have this horrible, miserly, selfcentred review of their medal tally at the end of the night and

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given the opportunity of breaking free and moving forward as a proud independent nation, they bottled it!

you do not have the same young European set commemorating their dead. It just seemed a bit strange and kind of clutching for a sense of identity and for something to be proud of. It reminded me of the overly emotional and nationalistic American culture.

I’ll never forget when I went out with a French friend of mine to an Aussie pub in London for Australia Day. We asked one of the Aussies there what exactly they were celebrating on that day. He told us and I wasn’t sure if Helene had understood fully. It was a noisy pub, people were pissed and Helene hadn’t been that long in the UK, so although her English was good, she was still getting used to the different accents. However, when the guy left, Helene looked at me incredulous and said “They are celebrating becoming a colony!”. We do not even celebrate independence in Ireland and that’s after 800 years of British rule!

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AUSTRAL encourage people to send the team, wait for it, hero faxes!

In my opinion it was a kind of a false nationalism. It wasn’t just a healthy pride, it was nearly a superiority. In fairness the Aussies are very good losers, even though they hate losing, which does go a long way to forgiving their behaviour, but it still does not make up for it totally. I remember screaming for England to beat them in the hockey, something I am not naturally prone to do, in order just to shut the Aussies up!

I always find it strange the emphasis the Aussies put on Gallipoli in Turkey. A lot of Aussies died out there and they are pissed off because they were hung out to dry by the British, but I kept meeting young Aussies on my travels who were in Europe on a kind of pilgrimage. It was 1915 for God’s sake!

Most of their parents were not even born then. If you think of the casualties in Europe over the First and Second World Wars

I remember talking about the Bali bombing with an Australian girl on my travels. I said it was terrible. I then mentioned that I had been to Madrid where there was also a horrendous massacre. She said something unbelievable like she didn’t know much about the smaller bombs. Smaller bombs! Nearly exactly the same number of people were killed in Madrid as in Bali. She had absolutely no interest in knowing about what happened there and she didn’t want to listen to anything I had to say. All she was interested in was wallowing her own country’s tragedy.

Then, the contradiction comes when you consider that this supposedly highly nationalistic, proud people, actually voted against becoming a republic in the referendum in 1999.

Given the opportunity of breaking free and moving forward as a proud independent nation, they bottled it! I followed the referendum closely and I understood all the arguments against becoming a republic. All of them were bollox, apart from the one where they had concerns about the way the Presidential candidates were selected. However, in my opinion, people were just looking for an excuse to reject the proposal. Anyone I heard who put forward the argument about the Presidential candidate selection process, said that even if it was changed to a more agreeable model, they still wouldn’t vote for a Republic.

Some of the arguments were unbelievable. “We have a proud Anglo-Saxon heritage.” So! You are either your own nation or not. Many people in Australia have a proud Irish heritage but

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I am not saying you have Paddy’s Day as Australia’s national holiday!

So the Aussies are content to accept as their Head of State, the Queen, an unelected woman, who lives on the other side of the world and who has absolutely nothing to do with their country or current history, instead of promoting some proud Aussie who represents the best about their culture. I can’t understand why they don’t find it embarrassing. So you see what I mean, it all does not quite wash.

Then there is John Howard. He has been in the job for ten years by taking a strong, but fair (I think) and consistent stance on economic and immigration issues. There is nothing wrong with that. You could blame the Labour Party for not getting its act together in order to provide a viable alternative.

Kim Beazley seems a nice guy and everything, but if he has failed twice before to beat John Howard, electing him once more as leader of the Labour Party does not bode well for toppling the Liberals at the next elections.

There was an interview with John Howard in TIME magazine: ‘Never a fan of the ambiguous word “multiculturalism,” he also rejects the idea that Australia could build a federation of cultures. “There’s no such thing as a nation without a dominant culture,” he says.

“We have a dominant Anglo-Saxon culture. It’s our language, our literature, our institutions ... You can be part of the mainstream culture and still have a place in your life and your heart for your home country.”’

I saw a letter in a later edition of TIME about a reader’s response to the interview. For the life of me I cannot find it. I even subscribed to the magazine to search online but still no

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joy. It was great. It was short and to the point. Basically she said something like “did I hear John Howard right? Did he actually say that we have a dominant Anglo-Saxon culture?”

She was having a go at him for not making any reference at all to the culture that existed before the white Europeans arrived.

Then, of course, there is the Iraq war. There is no point discussing the issues here because everyone knows them. We can all see the consequences of the war.

I have heard through reliable sources that there are definitely two sides to the arguments over Aboriginal issues in Australia, and that some of the laws have gone too far in favour of the aboriginals, for example, over land rights. I personally don’t know enough about the issues to make that judgement.

But even if that is the case, Howard does not come across as a man who would exactly embrace the aboriginal people, or try and come to some sort of general understanding with them and kind of draw a line under the issues and move the

However, if there is one issue that I know a lot about, where Howard has absolutely no defence, it is to do with his rejection of the Kyoto agreement.

I have always admired the Aussies with respect to the importance they put on environmental issues. How they preserve their amazing natural environment, their emphasis on recycling, their waste management and their pristine beaches. But the weasel Howard, when faced with one of most important environmental issues in the world’s history, chose to reject the

country forward.

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Kyoto agreement and jump into bed with America and that idiot Bush. Even Tony Blair had the moral courage to take the correct action. I bought a magazine in Australia called the “Nation Reviewed”. I do not know if it is well known in Australian or well respected but I did like one article it had on the environment. It talked about the so called “Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate”.

problem of global poverty. He conveniently forgot that it is the Europeans who supported Kyoto are the most generous foreign aid donors in the world, and its American and Australian opponents who are members of the group of developed countries who give the least”

“The local politics surrounding last month’s conference captures, in microcosm, the dismal situation Australian politics has now reached. Even though the Asia-Pacific Partnership is unofficially a US-sponsored attempt to wound Kyoto, with regard to global warming our only hope, the Australian public was given no opportunity to grasp the seriousness of what was at stake. The Murdoch press enthusiastically backed the conference. Its masthead, the Australian, published two astonishingly sloppy editorials, whose bottom line was the suggestion that claims about global warming were little more than the propaganda of the anti-capitalist extreme greens. One piece by Clive Hamilton provided ‘balance’. No fewer than five articles or opinion pieces supported the Australian’s party line.”

Also if I am being honest I have been left disappointed sometimes with the people.

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Now a lot of countries, including my own, have not been keeping their commitments to the Kyoto agreement but at least they accept that there is a problem. If people keep denying that there is anything wrong in the first place, there is absolutely no hope whatsoever.

“While the IPCC thinks that by 2050 a 60% decrease in emissions is vital if the Earth is to be saved, the total fulfilment of the Asian Partnership’s plans will give us a 100% increase instead” ”In his low-note speech, John Howard, with stunning hypocrisy, criticised Kyoto supporters for their indifference to the

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This man has been in power for ten years. Considering all of the above, you would have thought that the people would have, at some stage, given someone else a chance.

Also if I am being honest, I have been left disappointed sometimes with the people. Nothing particularly bad but just disappointing. However, it hasn’t been a one-off, and it hasn’t been just to me. So I think it may be fair to make a generalisation.

The Aussies can talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. They are your best mate in the pub, getting pissed up, having a laugh saying to give them a ring, but then when you actually do ring them, you suddenly get this type of English reserve and vagueness, as if they nearly resent your phone call because they have been put at a slight disadvantage. The moment has gone and the reality does not seem to match the words they were spouting in the pub.

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This character, who is very well known in the area, I saw many times around Cottesloe.

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I have also had invitations to stay with Aussies that I’ve met.

However, on occasion, I have found that when I was looking at my options, and when I tested the water about staying, the full invitation never materialised. It has happened a number of times. Again, I sometimes feel the invitation was all a bit of talk with no real substance behind it. My attitude is, if you are not going to carry through an invitation then don’t make the offer in the first place!

AUSTRAL Once again, not really badness, but just disappointing.

Ocean Beach Hotel

Also, although I like the upbeat aspect of the Australian psyche and personality, the downside is that there seems to be very little debate in the culture. It can all be very cosy. The attitude of we are all best mates, and you’re a great guy, is fine, but sometimes it can take a lot of effort to get over that and to have an honest, down-to-earth conversation. I don’t like the joyless, uninteresting, ‘hey bro’, half embrace bollox that young Aussies can come out with, or the boring heightened conversation between professional Aussie males, trying to prove their worth and subtly outdo each other, by talking up their technical knowledge or business prowess.

just saying that in case all the Aussies on this distribution list lynch me.

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Maybe I am being unfair. Maybe it is just a cultural difference.

I have had a minor go a few times at Australian friends and I have been surprised how genuinely apologetic they have been, as if they didn’t realise the grievance I had.

I got talking to a Kiwi tour guide in New Zealand. He lived in Australia for a while and he said the people could be very hospitable. However, he also said that in some of the smaller towns the Australians could be the most unbelievable racist bigots. Although, every culture does suffer to a certain extent from that.

However, during the three weeks I spent in Australia, as a generalisation, I thought the people were great! And I am not

My route was as follows. I spent two weeks in Cottesloe which is on the coast between Perth and Freemantle. Then I spent five days in Melbourne. That’s it. During three weeks in one of the largest countries in the world, my longest journey on land was equivalent to taking a trip on the DART from Howth to Dublin city centre. You can tell I was tired.

In Singapore I met a girl from Finland who had spent two months in the Ocean Beach Backpacker’s hostel in Cottesloe.

She said the place had a great location and was ideal for chilling out and relaxing. She also said that she much preferred Western Australia to Eastern Australia and that she preferred Melbourne to Sydney. That was kind of what I had heard.

I booked the hostel in advance and I paid AS$360, which is about 210 Euro, for a double room with private bathroom for one week. It was a small room but it was clean and per-

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fect for what I wanted. Then, after a few days, I booked the room for another week. The reason why the hostel was so good was evident as soon as you stepped outside. I had heard about Australian beaches before, and the Finnish girl had raved about the beach to me in Singapore, but even then I was amazed at what I saw when I arrived in Perth. If you were God himself and you had free reign to design your ideal beach you could not do any better than the stretch of beach going along the coast of Cottesloe. The hostel was about 50 metres from the beach. You just had to cross a road and you were there. It had an amazing location and I would go back there tomorrow for a holiday.

but this place was good with nice fresh fish. After having gone there most days during the two weeks, on my last day the girl in the shop said “you must really love this place”. After eating, I would go for a walk along the coast taking in the atmosphere and enjoying the beautiful sunset.

Along the coast, there were people doing exercises on communal exercise benches, people power walking, canoeists in the sea, the odd surfer, boogie boarders, picnics; and dusk was accompanied by the noisy atmospheric sound of colourful squawking parrots that were stationed in the nearby trees.

It was also great to do some proper exercise again because it can be quite an unhealthy existence travelling and it’s easy to become very unfit. I met an American girl in Bulgaria who had travelled for a long time and she said that she had definitely aged over her time travelling. I think that’s true for me also.

People are actually guessing my real age now which was never the case before. Travelling is definitely worth it but there are some minor consequences.

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AUSTRAL If you were God himself and you had free reign to design your ideal beach you could not do any better than the stretch of beach going along the coast of Cottesloe.

My average day was as follows. I would get up and step outside the hostel to see what the wind conditions were like. If it wasn’t too windy I would take my snorkelling gear with me and go down for a morning swim/snorkel. I would then go back to the hostel for a shower, after which I would read and relax. In the afternoon I would go for another swim. Normally the wind would have picked up by then and I would enjoy playing about in the waves. I would then go back for another shower and head out to a good fish and chip shop down the road. There wasn’t that many cheap eats available in the area

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In fact Cottesloe was one of those places that was difficult to leave. After having been there for two weeks, I had a certain attachment to the area and, even now, I get nostalgic thinking about the beach and the beautiful sunsets.

Cottesloe beach had lovely clean water, just cold enough to be refreshing but not cold enough that it was like an endurance test to get into. The sand was great, the long beach was never over-crowded and, unlike Ireland, the people had a bit of pride in their country and did not drop litter everywhere.

I met a Mexican girl in Nicaragua who lived in Melbourne for a year and she said she wouldn’t like to live in Australia long-term, because she thinks the country lacks something and there is not that much to it, which is similar to what an Irish guy said to me in Burma. But to be honest, if you like an outdoor lifestyle, who cares! The quality of life makes up for it.

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Ocean Beach Hotel bar facing the beach

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192 Cottesloe Beach Sunset

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Rottnest Island

Rottnest Channel Swim

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I tried to read the papers when I was there. It’s amazing but in every developed country in the world it’s the same issue, house prices. I think Australia talks about house prices (in the media at least) even more than Ireland does. It was everywhere.

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dentally, he was my age and he had based himself in Xela in order to properly master the Spanish language. He did mention to me though, that he also spent a lot of time on his own.

So after the two weeks in Perth, I was so brain-dead, it was a struggle to have a conversation.

AUSTRAL You think you would be super sociable at the end of a long trip like this but if anything I became more introverted.

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I hardly talked to anyone for two weeks. The hostel was very young and it was kindergarten time every night in the communal area. I was tired and I could not bear having the same conversation about where I had been travelling. I remember a hard-core backpacker telling me this years ago, and, at the time, I thought it sounded condescending and superior, but I certainly don’t mean it that way.

You think you would be super sociable at the end of a long trip like this but if anything I became more introverted. I spent quite a lot of time on my own (happily) because the alternative didn’t really appeal. A lot of it is to do with my age and the length of time I was travelling. When you travel for so long you go through certain mood swings, like you do in any year of your life, and sometimes you need to relax and do your own thing. There were a lot of group situations which I didn’t like. I think many young group gatherings can pamper to male arrogance too much and the conversations can become very negative and dishonest.

I am fairly quiet anyway but during the year off I had hardly a late night out or got drunk. The only time that sticks in my mind was in Xela in Guatemala with that Scottish guy. Inci-

I had planned to go to Ningaloo Reef on the west coast to do some diving, but it was quite a distance away, about a one and a half hour flight. It would have cost a lot of money to go there and the diving would have been expensive. Also, it was off-season to see the whale sharks which were the main attraction of the area. The fact that I had a fantastic completely free beach right beside me, persuaded me to stay where I was.

When I was in Cottesloe it was boiling hot and it made everything seem so difficult to organise. One of the locals told me that the summer had been pretty poor up to that point but when I was there the temperature hit 36 degrees during the day (HoooAhhh).

In the hostel I took note of the fact that there was a snowfall of 26.9 inches in New York, the biggest snowfall since records began in 1869. The Winter Olympics had also just started.

As I have said before, the weather can make such a difference to the culture of a country. I’ll never forget the first time I went travelling. I suddenly realized the reason why people wore sandals compared to normal shoes.

I went to the centre of Perth a couple of times. It was OK. I am not a big fan of Australian cities. I didn’t really like the centre of Sydney either. There are just a lot of skyscrapers that are not that pretty or well organised. I know they do not have the benefit of central European historical architecture but the planning laws do seem to be a bit lax. Also I didn’t like the majority of pubs in Australia as they lacked char-

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acter. I found them very male oriented and mainly just big barns of places.

It was a shock to see the aborigines in the centre of Perth.

They’re such a distinctive looking race and they really stood out against everyone else. Suddenly they appeared, stereotypically drunk, loitering around the parks and streets. I do not know whose fault it is but they really did seem so far away from any part of the mainstream Australian culture.

be upbeat and friendly. People generally warm to any effort that you make and respond to you in the same manner, which encourages you even further. I’ll never forget seeing Jimmy Stynes, who is from Dublin but is an Aussie rules footballing star, on the telly from Australia. He was talking about the upcoming Dublin Gaelic football match that was being played in Croke Park that day. He was standing in glorious sunshine, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, with a big smile on his face and he was talking enthusiastically about the game. That’s what Australia gives you and allows you to be. Give him two weeks back in Dublin! Shit weather alongside the down to earth bluntness of Dubliners would take the shine off a bit. Or compare that to London. Try being upbeat and friendly to someone you don’t know on the Tube and see what happens. You may get a friendly response but there is also a high possibility of

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AUSTRAL It was a shock to see the aborigines in the centre of Perth.

I liked Freemantle. It has a bit of history to it and I loved the Maritime Museum, with the highlight being the tour of the amazing 90-metre long submarine next to it. The tour was given by a guy who served in it for fifteen years. I also went to the fabulous Rottnest Island. I hired a bike and cycled around the island and I went swimming and snorkelling.

I got up early one morning in the hostel to see the start of the Rottnest Channel Swim. It was such an Aussie outdoor cultural event. There were lots of families with a nice relaxed friendly atmosphere. The swim is from Cottesloe beach all the way to Rottnest Island. It’s a long race and there were very bad weather conditions with the winner taking five hours to get there. The longest time it took a solo swimmer was 11 hours 45 minutes – my God! One aspect that I really liked about the Australian culture was how upbeat it could be. Due to the weather, due to the fact that it is still a relatively new country, you are encouraged to

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One aspect that I really liked about the Australian culture was how upbeat it could be.

people looking at you as if you are a complete lunatic, therefore discouraging you the next time.

So it nearly the inverse of London. As much as Australia encourages you to be outgoing and friendly, London encourages you to be reserved and quiet. Now that’s not quite fair to London, and is a very big city, but you see what I am getting at.

Even after a couple of weeks I kind of enjoyed interacting with the locals because they would, in general, respond to any friendly effort I was making.

I went into a shop once near the coast and there was a sandwich counter and the young guy serving behind it was bent over reading a book. He didn’t see me come in but I said

L 196 Scene in St. Kilda, Melbourne.

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A Federation Square in Melbourne - All photos

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Perth to Melbourne when I was in Singapore. It only cost AS$200 for a three hour flight. Very cheap really. However, in general, Australia wasn’t that cheap. I believe prices have gone up a lot there recently. Once again I think it all comes down to house prices. A pint on Rottnest Island cost me AS$9 which is nearly 5 Euro 50. How expensive is that! Also the food wasn’t that cheap either. I was a bit disappointed with the food in Perth. I was expecting world-class cuisine, cheap and fresh and good quality but it wasn’t really the case. I am sure that it’s there but I think you may have to search it out a bit.

It was also quite friendly around Cottesloe with many people in their gardens saying hello. I am sorry to say that it doesn’t happen as much in Dublin in my area. I read in the paper about people complaining that people were not saying ‘Gday’ as often as before to strangers they meet on the street, so it’s similar to the debate that is currently taking place in Ireland.

At least both countries are concerned about the changes that are happening.

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AUSTRAL “How’s it going?”. He looked back startled and said “Good mate!” and went to help me. Straight back at me, friendly and up-beat.

Some of the nicest people I met were older Australians. They were so good-humoured pleasant friendly people. I was sitting beside a group of four pensioners on the boat to Rottnest Island and their gentle humour and banter was infectious.

I found people in general to be very helpful and the service in the shops was excellent. So overall I thought the people were great!

My round the world ticket did not include any internal flights in Australia so I booked a cheap Qantas flight from

In Melbourne I stayed in St. Kilda. Dodgy bohemian St. Kilda.

There was generally quite a nice buzz around the place with some really good food options. Also, I am glad I stayed outside the city centre because I think you get more of a feel for real local life, and taking public transport in any city it always interesting. However, in St. Kilda you did have to be aware of what was going on around you. At times the atmosphere was edgy, nearly tense. Every time I took the tram there was some sort of weirdo causing hassle.

Some drunk was bad mouthing the Chinese driver to the other passengers on one of the trams, but one guy went back at him saying that there are good and bad drivers, whether they are Chinese or not. No arrogance, just made his point, which was nice to hear.

I stayed in a single room in the lovely Olembia Guesthouse which was a kind of boutique hotel/hostel. It cost 50AS$ a night. I had a hot water tap in the basin in the room which is something which always distinguishes first world countries from the developing world.

I went to the Botanic Gardens, all the Art Gallerys (in which I loved the aboriginal art), the Melbourne Museum and the

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Queen Victoria Market, all of which were excellent. There was a Latin American Film festival on when I was there and I went to a lot of the shows as I am interested in the region.

Some of the films weren’t great really, with the best being Edificio Master. The blurb reads: “For seven days, a cinema crew filmed the daily life of the residents of the Master, a building located in Copacabana, a block away from the beach. This is a 12-story building, with 23 studio apartments per floor, a total of 276 apartments where some 500 people live. Thirty-seven of those people tell their own stories: some are content, others, disillusioned, betrayed, hopeful, sincere, abandoned, happy, successful, serious, friendly, sad, unemployed, acclaimed, forgotten, talented, misfits, resentful, in love.”

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AUSTRAL The weather was a challenge in Melbourne. It changed so quickly and took in such extremes ranging from 33 degrees one day to 23 degrees the next.

So that was Australia. I need to go back and see the country properly because it is a truly unique country in the world. To be honest I would go back just to experience once again that beach in Cottesloe.

On the 28th Feb I flew to Wellington in New Zealand.

Conor

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Glen & Gosia’s Emails What follows are Glen and Gosia’s responses to this email.

They are an Aussie couple that I met in Romania and they lived in Cork for a year. I have mentioned them before. I like the contrast in their writing styles. @

From: Gosia Kaszubska

Received: 16 June 2006 14:24:08 oh dear conor... i know you would distinguish this anyway but please don’t forget that there is a huge chunk of angry howard-hating, monarchy-loathing people there in oz! unfortunately, to our great shame and embarrassment, we are just not the majority at the moment. and it fucking stings, knowing that people will judge us normal aussies by the fuckwits that are in power... which is understandable but oh so very painful!! it must be even worse for poor old normal americans, being blasted as they travel around europe and wherever else just because people hear the accent and assume they must back dubya bush...

Gosia and Glen

plus, i must say to our credit that victoria (mine and glenn’s home state) was the ONLY state to vote for the republic. and that i spent the night before the referendum arguing with this idiot moron (who i was actually trying to pick up... oh, how bad my taste was at uni) who was saying all the usual shitty pro-monarchy arguments and i was telling him he was falling for spin and he HAD to vote yes... aaaugh, i’m getting all angry again remembering that tragic fucking day when australia showed its horrifying conservatism, once again, and kept the bloody queen as the head of our country. the horror... the horror...

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so yes, there is a big group of people there that DO find it INCREDIBLY embarrassing. unfortunately there is a bigger group of people that actually couldn’t give a rats arse about politics in any way, who wouldn’t even actually know what the hell the constitution’s about, what our various levels of government are about etc etc. and i think that is something to do with the weather and the lifestyle, everyone’s so laid back and easy going, having to vote for whatever is just a chore every few years and in the meantime, they don’t really think that much about it. and they’re the ones that are of course so wonderfully easy to manipulate...

of pretention there but you’re less likely to get $200 t-shirts than south of the yarra. when you went to the galleries, i’m sure you would have wandered round federation square... well, just picture that place packed with about 10,000 melbournians in the freezing cold at 2am on sunday, cos apparently that’s going to be the place to watch the brazil-australia game. i’m kind of jealous not to be there for it.

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AUSTRAL but mate, this is bad, we ran away to ireland to escape exactly these frustrating, maddening things about our country (we banned politics talk at our house in melbourne because we would all just vehemently agree with each other about how angry we were), so i shall end that rant now!! anyway, glad you did have some good experiences, despite the politics! oh, and what you say about gallipoli is right, there is a clinging to that, because really white australia is so very young, that these things do get clung to. it’s also incredibly typically aussie that we cling to a disastrous moment in our history, rather than a victorious one... but then ireland has its easter uprising, poland has its warsaw uprising, guess that’s not just an aussie thing.

where you stayed in melbourne is actually one of the key suburbs in the catchment area for the hospital glenn worked at. and as you saw, there are lots of mad, drug-fucked people in st kilda. they were kept pretty damn busy in the psych ward, i can assure you! thing is, that nasty kind of edge is what keeps st kilda from becoming completely yuppified, though it’s heading that way very much. did you get out to the north side of the river at all? brunswick st and the like? there’s still a bit

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oh, and on the sporting thing, yes yes yes... we are horrendously nationalistic in that quite pathetic american way. most definitely. and i was so damn glad to be away from melbourne when they had the commonwealth games this year - all that crowing by the papers about our “heroes” when for christ’s sake, the achievement really means nothing!! anyway, i’m ranting again... i should leave it off until we come crash your house in july! but be warned, any talk of politics will be banned (like your karaoke ban!) because it will only piss us all off and there’s no point in that.

how’s things otherwise? you sorted for a job? and you found some burly men to do some work around your place yet? anyway, hope all’s grand, i have to go now and eat cake because a workmate is leaving. ah, the hardships of life eh! talk to you soon, take care, gosia x ----------

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Received: 20 June 2006 08:57:42 well, conor, you’ve got alot of things right there alright. goddammit. much of what you’ve written are the things that i can’t stand about being associated with the country and our despicable government and lazy, indifferent, ambivalent population. one of the reasons we left really oh well. i do love our country though. sigh be seein you in dublin soon eh? nice one gm

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Whangarei Whangarei

Auckland Auckland

From Melbourne (Australia)

Abel Tasman National Park Abel Tasman National Park Nelson

Franz Josef Franz Josef

Cook Islands

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NEW ZEALAND NEW ZEALAND

Wellington Nelson Picton Wellington Picton Kaikoura Kaikoura (Swimming with Dolphins) Christchurch Christchurch

Queenstown Queenstown Dunedin Dunedin

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New Zealand, Cook Islands & San Diego

AUSTRAL I

didn’t send out any emails with respect to the above locations. I finished the Australia write-up in Dublin and then I started to study and look for work. However, when I was in New Zealand, I bought a notepad and wrote down my experiences and opinions and that is what I am using now to write this section up.

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I arrived in Wellington late on Wednesday night and I spent the night in a hostel. Then I stayed with Tracey, a friend from London, for three nights. One of the nights I went out for a meal with her and her friends and I can remember the guy sitting beside me looking at me strangely, because I was struggling so much to string a simple sentence together. It was so difficult to have a normal conversation after having been brain dead for the previous three weeks in Australia.

Before I arrived in New Zealand, Tracey suggested that I use a hop-on and hop-off bus service to see the South Island. Some hard-core backpackers might look down upon this, and initially I did hesitate slightly, but it was the best piece of advice I had in New Zealand. I took the “Magic Bus” to explore the South Island. The way it works is that you pay for a pass (NZ$430), which is valid for a year, and the bus goes on a loop around the South Island taking in all the major attractions. You can only travel in one direction but it’s up to you how long you stay in each of the locations.

The bus driver also rings ahead and books accommodation

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From the Magic Bus

it’s the only country I have been to where the greenness of the grass comes close to what you see on the west coast of Ireland and activities for you and the bus picks you up and drops you off at your preferred hostel. It was so easy. There was one miserable, rough-as-hell rude woman bus driver, but some of the other bus drivers were just hilarious and a very entertaining part of the trip.

In the hostel in Wellington I met a couple of Taiwanese girls who, when they heard I was from Ireland, said to me “What are you doing here?” They had been to Ireland and they said that that it was the same as New Zealand with sheep, cows and rolling hills. New Zealand did resemble Ireland and it’s

Abel Tasman National Park, New Zealand

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Waves coming in over the ferry on the trip to the South Island from Wellington

It’s a strange place New Zealand. I had the same feeling in New Zealand as I had in Jordan in the Middle East. I found it hard to figure the place out and to come to some sort of conclusion or understanding about the country. It’s as if the landscape is the defining aspect of the country, with the people being secondary. It could be really quiet in the South Island.

A lot of shops would close at 1:30p.m. on a Saturday. Many times I would look around a small town and there would be nothing, no people, no cars - with a very subdued atmosphere.

In Kaikoura, I used to go for a walk in the evening and there would hardly be a car on the road. Christchurch, the largest city on the South Island, was completely dead on a Sunday evening.

AUSTRAL The South Island subdued atmosphere

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the only country I have been to where the greenness of the grass comes close to what you see on the west coast of Ireland.

Also, like Ireland, the weather could be crap, and for the first week I was there it was pretty awful. The ferry going across from Wellington to the South Island was delayed because of storms and when it did take off it was like the vomit comet.

There were five metre high waves coming right over the boat and the staff were giving lectures on how to avoid being sick.

They were handing out ice-cubes to suck on, which is supposedly a good cure for sea-sickness.

It was strange to be on the other side of the world and yet experience a country with a similar landscape to Ireland. Sometimes though, I would see the odd difference which would remind me where I was. For example, I saw some kids running around a playground and they all had hats on to protect them from the sun. New Zealand has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world. I think it’s because of its proximity to a large thinning of the ozone layer.

New Zealand is a very sparsely populated country and 30% of the land is national park, so it is very well preserved. This is of course completely different to Ireland, which is a much smaller country and yet only 1.5% of the land is national park, and the remaining land has absolutely no planning laws to protect it (sorry I couldn’t resist that). The people were friendly and approachable, like the Aussies, but I found them to be quieter and a bit more down to earth and relaxed. I think this may be due to the sweeping landscape and the changeable weather. It’s very hard to be upbeat all the time if it’s overcast and it has been raining for two months.

In London I was talking to an Aussie colleague about all the poisonous creatures in Australia and I asked him if New Zealand had any dangerous animals. He goes “Yeah, the Maoris!”

What a people! They were such a shock to see on the streets of Wellington. They are such a distinctive race with amazing faces. I went to a photography exhibition by Ans Westra in Christchurch (I think it was Christchurch) and there was a wonderful photograph of a Maori kid laughing and he had the most fabulous jet black hair that was standing straight up like

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Abel Tasman National Park

Tracey

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AUSTRAL Swimming with dolphins in Kaikoura

a cartoon character. The Maoris appear to be integrated well into New Zealand society, in marked contrast to the Aborigines I saw in Australia.

So what can you say about New Zealand that hasn’t been said before. It’s a beautiful country, well preserved, and a great place for outdoor sports. The key city for outdoor activities is Queenstown. You could tell this by the number of people limping around the town. I went river surfing there. Basically you lie yourself on a small piece of foam and throw yourself down some rapids. Great fun but I whacked my leg off a rock at the end of the run and I joined the walking wounded, limping around the town.

I didn’t go skydiving. I should have really. I met a lot of people who did though and many of them had similar stories. Tracey had gone skydiving before, and she told me that when she was in the plane on the ascent, she thought she was miles up as she couldn’t see the ground below. She asked her guide if they

were nearly there. The guide told her that they were only at 6000 feet and they had another 6000 feet to climb. Shit!

Then some of the sky divers jumped out at 9000 feet. The two heights you could jump out at were 9000 and 12000 feet. Tracey had imagined that she would be able to watch the divers descend and maybe give them a wave on the way down.

However, the reality was that the hatch opened, the divers jumped out and (whoooosssssh) a split second later they had disappeared. Then Tracey had another 3000 terrifying feet to reflect on what had gone on before her.

The best outdoor activity I went on was swimming with dolphins in Kaikoura. The boat went out into the open sea looking for dolphins and then we jumped in. There was strictly no feeding allowed, so it was up to the dolphins, if they were interested enough, to come and see us. I heard them before I saw them, and then suddenly three appeared darting below me. It was quite a shock and there was a sharp intake of breadth, but

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it was just amazing. From someone who has done a lot of diving, it was something special. I have seen dolphins before but never this many, this active, and so close.

the evening, as you might expect in a hostel. That night in the communal area it was just me and Tracey, sharing a bottle of wine with a couple of other tourists.

I would love to do some of the fabulous walks in New Zealand. However, I did not have the proper hiking gear with me, so the only walking I did was a weekend walk with Tracey, on a well trod path in the Abel Tasman National Park. The park is a short flight from Wellington. It was very enjoyable, if a bit busy.

As hostels are so prevalent in New Zealand, and so key to the tourist industry, many of the local activities could be arranged from the hostels. For example, I went horse riding in Lake Tekapo, and the company did a pick-up from the hostel to bring us to the stables. On a general note, hostels can also be very useful in countries where you don’t speak the language.

For example, in Romania they were invaluable for obtaining information, especially as there weren’t any state run tourist centres.

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AUSTRAL There were lots of Irish around New Zealand, as always. One time on the “magic bus” there was eight of us ranging in ages from 25ish to one woman who was in her late 50’s (at least).

She remarked on how clean the country was, which was true.

There were Irish pubs everywhere, and the Kiwis did seem to like the Irish. Not that other countries don’t like the Irish, but compared to other countries I have been to, they seemed to be interested in talking to you and interacting with you, just because you were Irish.

Sometimes it’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t travelled before just how nice some of the hostels can be and how good the service can be. In the hostel in Lake Tekapo, I stayed in a four bed dorm with two bunk beds. The room was custom made for the purpose. There were comfortable beds, clean sheets, swipe cards for the doors, and really good showers. There was a big open plan kitchen and a television room and everything was spotlessly clean. I don’t think I went to a dirty hostel in New Zealand.

In the hostel I stayed in with Tracey in Nelson, there was a nice patio where you could sit outside and read. There was a very relaxed atmosphere and there were even some families with children staying there. There was no raucous drinking in

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I had the feeling that New Zealand wasn’t the most politically correct country in the world. I was in a bar in Queenstown and one of my companions pointed out the picture on the cigarette machine. Taking up the whole front of the machine, was a picture of Freddy Mercury in full concert pose, and across this image, in large bold letters, were the words, “Fag Machine!”.

I changed my flights to go to Whangarei to dive at the Poor Knights Islands. As I mentioned before, the round the world ticket I had was great. It was not only possible to change the dates of the flights for a small fee but it was also possible to make minor changes to the routes of the flights for a slightly larger fee.

I stayed in a great guesthouse there with a lovely Kiwi couple who looked like Del and Angie from EastEnders. I arrived late and was about to head out the door to look for something to eat and they appeared with some of their dinner so I didn’t have to traipse into town.

I had a couple of interesting dive buddies for the two days I

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Poor Knight’s Island

above & right : Reunion in San Diego

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They can be very friendly Americans. Sometimes I don’t think they get the credit they deserve.

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At the end of my trip I stayed in San Diego for ten days with Big Bad Dom, a friend from college. Another friend from Dublin also lives there with his wife and two kids. The three of us shared a flat in London during the summer of 1990 when we were students. So it was a kind of mini-reunion. I did hardly anything in San Diego. I was exhausted and it was so good to have my own room with en-suite bathroom and all the boys’ toys you could wish for – Dom even had his music system piped into the bathrooms. Every day when he came back home from work, I think Dom was surprised to see that I hadn’t moved an inch from the sofa.

My American dive buddy and his tumultuous family life

went diving. One was a Dubliner who lived in Sydney and was a head hunter. He made a fortune and loved Sydney. Surprisingly, he said there were not that many long-term Irish in Sydney, it was more Irish that were passing through or were there for only a year or so.

The other guy was a very nice American who lived in New Zealand. It was his birthday treat to go on a dive. I bought him a birthday drink afterwards and he invited me back to his home for some food and a drink. That’s Americans for you, they can be very hospitable, and will invite you into their

San Diego is great. It has a wonderful quality of life with great weather, lots to do, friendly people and a fantastic beach.

They can be very friendly Americans. Sometimes I don’t think they get the credit they deserve. I read a recent description of them in a guidebook as being one of the most approachable people in the world, and I would agree with that. Americans will always talk to you. I love sitting beside Americans at an event because you know if you make an effort to strike up a conversation, they will always respond in a friendly open manner. I met an older American woman in the hostel in Madrid (when I say older she was not a student, maybe in her late 40’s) and she was complaining about the unhelpfulness of the people in the Spanish accommodations. She said that in America it would be a lot more helpful and friendly; and she is right, it would be! The service is very good in America, if

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San Diego – All photos

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practical. I know all of this is an obvious observation to make on American society, but it really struck me as it wasn’t that long since I had visited Burma, where every mode of transport, everywhere, was always packed to the gills.

San Diego is right beside Mexico which was evident when I visited Universal Studios, where the vast majority of people there were Mexican or Japanese.

AUSTRAL Compare America to this

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at times a little soulless. I sometimes feel it’s a bit like acting, with everyone playing their respective roles. But the service is still good and it’s better than having bad service. I also loved the fact that when I said “Thank You” to a waiter/waitress in San Diego they always replied back with the words “You’re Welcome”.

In San Diego the traffic wasn’t that bad and the people were upbeat and optimistic. I liked it. There are not many places that I could see myself living in, but San Diego was definitely appealing. My friend’s accommodations were very high spec and comfortable and they did enjoy a high quality of life.

One of the things that I noticed in America was that everything was BIG; the sizes of the goods in the shops, the vehicles on the road. The excess of American society did strike me and I had a game with myself to identify a pickup truck, of which there were many, which actually had some goods in the back.

To own one seemed more of a status symbol than anything

Another thing that struck me about America was how nostalgic the television could be, especially for such a young country.

I watched a golf tournament and they kept referring to previous momentous moments in the tournament’s history, with emotional music and simplistic comparisons. Also, everyone on television seemed to be crying all the time.

The American I met in New Zealand - what a lifestyle he had.

He worked for six months in the States and then he lived work-free for six months in New Zealand. He had a lovely home and he lived beside a fabulous beach, where we went for a walk to let his two kids run around. He said the neighbours were mainly farmers and were very friendly and very hardworking. He absolutely loved it.

Maybe it is a good time to talk about my fellow backpackers.

Sitting here in London, nearly a year and a half after finishing my travels, it’s difficult to make generalisations and I am struggling to come up with any major conclusions.

Generally backpackers tend to be a fairly friendly bunch, especially in remote or out of the way places. You just don’t get away with an attitude when you are a backpacker and a fellow backpacker comes up to you and says hello.

It’s hard to make generalisations, but it does stick in my mind

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they are in large groups, and they are away from the confines of Israel and military life. I kind of liked their bluntness and at times their honest conversation but in general I kept my distance. I have loads of stories I could tell to explain why, but I think the following simple story sums it up well.

I met an Israeli girl in Burma, who was great. She was friendly,

Israeli backpackers have a terrible reputation.

Cook Island traditional dance

Generally backpackers tend to be a fairly friendly bunch..

You just don’t get away with an attitude when you are a backpacker and a fellow backpacker comes up to you and says hello that the rigidity of the Central Europeans (for example the Germans and the Dutch) used to get to me a bit, especially when you consider how young many of these people were.

You would expect them to have a bit more life about them and not to be as serious or uneasy.

Israeli backpackers have a terrible reputation. It seems to be traditional in Israel to go travelling after finishing the mandatory military service. It’s a bad combination. They are young,

interesting, and we had a good chat/debate about Middle Eastern politics. She had a very natural warm and open manner, and her personality reminded me of my Granny’s (I love my Granny). Then one evening, after I had spent the day with her and the Dutch guy that I had entered the country with, I went for a meal with a well-travelled Austrian guy. He started talking about the Israeli girl, unprompted. He had taken a rickshaw with her the day before and he said the way she bargained over the fare with the driver was just embarrassing. She was trying to screw every single last penny out of the transaction. Another Israeli I met in Burma, who again was a very nice guy (and he was actually moaning about many of the Israelis that he had met in Thailand) said to me that bargaining was like a war.

A war!

What’s all that about? As I have explained before I did have my moments bargaining over pennies, as prices become relative and no one likes to be ripped off. However, as I have also described, I would at times feel guilty and based on that guilt I would try and change my behaviour in future interactions, and always, no matter what the circumstance, I endeavoured to be fair and respectful to the locals.

However, guilt, self doubt, or humility are traits that I have never witnessed in an Israeli backpacker, so to avoid having

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In a restaurant on the island I received, as change, a $5 coin.

I flicked it over and there was a picture of Her Majesty. I couldn’t believe it. We were on the other side of the world to the UK, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the British monarchy was on the local currency. The mind-numbing arrogance of the British can do my head in, but I suppose, to a certain extent, it is understandable, when you consider the historical impact the country has had on the rest of the world.

Back home in Dublin

those embarrassing moments with the locals, and not to be associated with the Israelis, I kept my distance.

I met some very nice young Americans. Again they were so easy to talk to and very approachable. On my travels over the years I have had some long conversations with Americans, which has been good, but looking back I do feel that I was lot more interested in their lives and culture then they were interested in mine. Americans like talking about themselves. But I did enjoy the conversations.

After New Zealand I spent a week in the Cook Islands. What a wonderful idyllic place. Apart from the beaches and the weather, I think what makes the Cook Islands so special is the strong local culture. I stayed on the main island Raratonga and I rented a flat (that slept six), as I could not even consider a hostel. For the week, I read and swam and horsed about on a rented scooter. I did not have the energy to go and explore the other islands.

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One night in the Cook Islands I went to the cinema and I came out at about 10:45 and I headed back to the flat. There was hardly any traffic on the road. It was really dark as parts of the road were not lit up and you could clearly see the stars.

I was wearing sandals, tea-shirt and shorts with no helmet.

I had a great sense of contentment. I remember having this feeling two other times during my travels. One, when I was watching daily life going on around me, as I was drinking a few glasses of beer at an outdoor café in Mostar in Bosnia.

The second time was when I was in Bucharest, and I returned back to the hostel shattered tired, after being to a classical music concert in the city. I proceeded to watch, on my own, slouching in the student union type television room, Spiderman 2. Don’t ask me why this gave me a feeling of contentment, but it did.

After the Cook Islands I flew to Los Angeles and rented a car to make it down to San Diego where I bummed off Dom for ten days. Then I caught a flight to London and I arrived back in Dublin on the 11th April 2006, which signalled the end of my travels. It was nearly exactly fifteen months after I had flown to Cuba in January 2005.

Dublin

I have well and truly lost all sense of religion

Conclusion

was travelling for most of the time on my own. I used to read a lot and I was being provided with so much food for thought because of my travel experiences.

There are a few general conclusions about the world and its people that I have come up with, which I will share briefly with you now. So get ready for some profound statements.

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t’s a very selfish activity travelling. Not only do you spend all your time thinking about yourself, but you are also away from any sort of normal responsibility. It’s a lot different to even being off work and doing nothing at home, because at home you do still have certain responsibilities such

It’s a very selfish activity travelling as paying the bills or keeping in touch with parents or siblings.

Also, as I did not prepare food once when I was away, I did not even have to go shopping for food or to spend time cooking. So it’s a very unreal state to be in. You are definitely occupied because you have to eat at least twice a day and organise a roof over your head, all in unfamiliar surroundings, but even this can be done at your own pace. Many days if I was tired or I didn’t fancy doing anything, I would just sit in my room and read and relax.

So it was a good opportunity for me to think, especially as I

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The first one is that I have well and truly lost all sense of religion. I wasn’t particularly religious beforehand but I am now much more prepared to challenge religious views. I have been exposed to all the main religions of the world, and I have been reading up on the topic in a very open-minded manner (in my opinion), and everything leads me to the conclusion that there is no God. You might think that travelling would have the opposite effect on you. That you would be overcome by an amazing spiritual experience in some remote part of the world, that would suddenly make sense of life; but this did not happen to me. In many regards this trip has been a way of challenging certain perceptions of people and places that I, or the world, has. To do this you need to be open-minded and use your intelligence, and one of the results of challenging my own views, and thinking honestly about certain topics, has resulted in religion making less and less sense to me.

I nearly feel guilty rejecting religion for a number of reasons.

For one, it is part of my culture, my childhood, and many of the traditions of my country.

against all common sense, just hardens my views. I sometimes find it amazing that the majority of the people in the world today can follow a religion, when there is not a shred of evidence that God exists. Everything that we have learnt about our planet our origins and our universe go against any notion of religion.

I am not scared of religion as many English people are. I was brought up with it, I understand it and I do agree with much of what Jesus taught. Jesus was a very impressive man, in many ways 2000 years ahead of his time. He had a lot of progressive and interesting views. I think as a way of living your life you go do a lot worse than follow Jesus’ word.

I sometimes find it amazing that the majority of the people in the world today can follow a religion, when there is not a shred of evidence that God exists.

Many of the most culturally rich moments of my trip have been associated with religion, such as the amazing Semana Santa (Holy Week) processions I saw in Central America, the churches overflowing in Poland in Eastern Europe, the atmospheric call to prayer in the Middle East, the incredible scenes of pilgrims bathing in the holy waters of the Ganges in India, the spectacle and serenity of Buddhist monks and nuns in Burma; but it still doesn’t mean that there is a God. And the fact that many of the religions are mutually exclusive and they all exist by this notion of faith, which is just blind allegiance

I also don’t subscribe to the view that religion is the root of all evil. I believe that if there was never any religion in the world, there would still have been wars and conflicts (look at the atheist states of China and Albania in the last century). I do agree it is another way of segregating people but man has already developed enough ways of doing that himself.

Also religion has done a lot of good around the world and it does guide billions of people to lead a generally good way of life. So my views are not based on a fear or loathing of religion, but more on a matter of common sense.

I worry though about the dumbing-down of religion. The religions that are gaining popularity in the world today (such as evangelical Protestantism in Latin America) are more black and white than they were before. They are more comforting because they are more absolute.

There is less possibility of debate or doubt and anything which is too simplistic and not open to argument, I become wary of. An absolute certainty doesn’t encourage understanding and tolerance and the challenging of people’s viewpoints. I

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also feel that the way an extreme interpretation of religion is being promoted around the world, whether it be Muslim or Christian fundamentalism, is taking away from a true sense of liberty; which ties in with another lesson I have learnt from my travels.

I will no longer take for granted my freedom or living in a democracy. This may sound like a very worthy and weighty thing to say, but after having travelled around Iran, China, and Burma I do not take this for granted. I especially value the type of freedom we have in Ireland, even compared to other democracies such as America and Britain. When I am in America I always feel like I have broken a law as soon as I have left a building. I find the laws and the way that they are enforced, quite oppressive, and the Bush government has been scandalous in its adoption of a quasi-dictatorship stance for its foreign policy, and what it’s doing in the name of “national security”. Even Britain has become more of a Big Brother society than I am comfortable with. I do not like the surveillance culture that has become omnipresent in the UK and I do not like Britain’s stifling political correctness, which thankfully the Irish have, kicking and screaming, managed to avoid. It will be a long time yet before a Dubliner is afraid to give his honest viewpoint, at the risk of offending somebody.

I am now very sensitive to the constant contradictions that religion throws up. Just last week I heard Benazir Bhutto saying that Allah had protected her from the suicide bombers that confronted her on her return to Pakistan. As you will have read I have a lot of time and respect for Benazir Bhutto, if only for her bravery, but if Allah had gone out of his way to protect her, why did he forsake the 150 poor unfortunate souls that died around her?

I am glad that I have admitted honestly to myself now, at my

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age, that I don’t believe in God and that I can ponder on what life’s all about for the rest of my conscious days.

Another conclusion that I have come to based on my travel experiences is that I believe people are basically good. I have always believed this and everything I have experienced has supported this view. Even from the point of view of liking people, which at the end of the day is not important, I can honestly say there wasn’t a country that I visited, in which I genuinely disliked the people.

Another conclusion that I have come to based on my travel experiences is that I believe people are basically good.

A friend of mine said to me that she believes the world is fucked up and I agree with her, it is. The current world model is not working, but I don’t believe it is do with any deep rooted fundamental badness in people. It’s more to do with over-population, globalisation, science, and people taking the easy option and at times selfish attitudes, but mainly selfish with respect to individuals making a living and looking after their families.

Its kind of annoys me as well that the Economist spouts all these platitudes about the free market but does not challenge enough the current world model which is obviously not working.

I am not sure what the solution is, but I think it needs a top down approach, driven by a grassroots desire for change,

alongside a strong shift in people’s priorities and expectations.

It’s another one of the reasons why I like the EU and its model of government. It deals with issues that are important to the continent as a whole, such as environmental issues, but is not bogged down by the individual countries’ vested interests.

I think it’s also difficult to avoid developing a deeper interest in green issues when you travel. In every country I used to read the environmental sections of the guidebooks, and it was generally a depressing story. The world is in the shits environmentally and the situation is getting worse.

However, I am not totally pessimistic about the current world order. I do believe there are many positive signs that the world’s people are developing more of a conscience. The fact that the world is a lot smaller has made people more open to helping other people in the world today. There is more of an affinity and more of an understanding. It’s a positive aspect of globalisation. Look at the recent Burma crisis and the worldwide interest generated. Compare that to what happened in 1998 when similar internal protests occurred and the world wasn’t interested, which allowed the military junta to go on and massacre 3000 of its own people. Look at the world’s reaction to the Tsunami, and the agreement by the world’s richest countries to write-off the debt owned by many poorer countries. I welcome the religious groups in America becoming more environmentally aware and taking a healthy interest in what’s happening in Darfur. The two richest men in the world (both American) are giving away most of their money to charity. There is a lot of good stuff going on. Whether is offsetting the bad stuff sufficiently I’ll let you decide for yourself, but for me, I think the current environmental concerns are so serious that I am pessimistic about the long term future. There is too high a possibility that the planet is currently experiencing, widespread lasting and irreversible damage.

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Worst of, Best of List

ost impressive architecture: Wall around Dubrovnik M (Croatia). ost off the beaten track route: Three day loop from ManM dalay in the north of Burma. est Cities: Vienna(Austria), Istanbul(Turkey) B and Hong Kong (China).

Worst Cities: Indore (India), Bhopal (India).

Most hospitable people: Iranians.

Most approachable people: Americans, they’re great!

Best food: Singapore, India and Turkey.

Most smiling warm people: Burmese.

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est individual meal: Lobster meal I had in a private house B in Cuba, cooked by a qualified chef.

Region with the warmest people: Middle East.

est ice-cream: Vienna (Austria) and Eastern Europe B in general.

est experience of meeting someone in a foreign country: B Sean in Trinidad (Cuba); Golara in Iran.

Best public transport system: Turkey, Singapore.

Worst argument: Fight in scooter hire shop in Turkey.

Best airport: Hong Kong, Singapore.

Country where my heart goes out to the people: Burma.

Worst airport: Stansted, I fucken hate it!

Best clothes: India.

I ndividual warmest moment: Being kissed by a young guy in Eastern Turkey; Pilgrim shaking my hand near Shatrashtra in the Gujarat region of India.

Best coastal water: Croatia.

Best music: Cuba.

Most interesting coastal towns: Croatia.

Worst song: Gasolina (that fucken song!)

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ost impressive historic architectural site: Petra (Jordan), M Turkey (in general).

Best beach: Cottesloe (Australia). est landscape: Cuba (both urban and rural landscape); B Wadi Rum desert and Petra in Jordan; New Zealand (rural landscape). ost cultural experience: Semana Santa (Holy Week) M procession in Guatemala; wedding scene in Iran; football match in Guatemala; Rottnest channel swim in Australia. ichest culture: Monks and nuns in Burma; India in general R (amazing considering it is a democracy).

Best accommodation: “Casa del Mundo” in Guatemala. ost comfortable accommodation: “Chez Dom” in San M Diego (America).

Best lifts: Vienna. ost interesting conversation: M In the hostel in Zagreb (Croatia) talking to the girl about air raid sirens going off in the mid-nineties, and talking to a guy staying there, about the recent Yugoslavian war. ost moving location: Bosnia. Seeing the effects of the reM cent war and the exhibition on the Srebrenica massacre.

Best places for photography: Cuba, India and Burma.

Worst cultural trait: Spitting in China.

Most Hassle: India. ost enjoyable experience: Ballet I saw in Budapest; diving M in Nicaragua; live music in Cuba; swimming with dolphins in New Zealand; playing amongst the waves in the sea in Cottesloe (Australia). osiest Place: India. The nosiest noise being those fucken N horns on the buses.

Best classical event: Opera in Vienna; ballet in Budapest.

Best art gallery: Museum of national art in Havana, Cuba. est accommodation (in general): India. Spend a little B money and you can stay in fabulous places.

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Most (pleasantly) surprising place: Hong Kong. heapest country: India – I just could not spend money C there. ost expensive country: M In Latin America - Cuba (by far); In Eastern Europe (not including Austria) - Croatia; In Middle East - Turkey; In Asia - Singapore.

Most beautiful women: Eastern Europe.

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W

hen I started to look for work after my travels, I was offered my old job back in London. As I had been off work for so long, I came back to London for a three month contract and I have been here now for rural nearlyscene: a yearNorthern and a half.

However I am moving Most Burma, Northern Romania. back to Dublin soon (honestly).

I have been working pretty solid during that time, taking only a few days’ holidays - it’s only right and proper after having so much time off work. It has been easy (if sometimes a bit boring) because there is a routine and there is not the stress associated with travelling. However, the stability has given me the opportunity to embark on a project like this.

Fred has done a fantastic job on the graphic design of this book. The book is so easy to read and to absorb the photos. It’s a professional standard comparable to any similar book you will see on travelling. The difference is that there was no researcher, no photographer, no support. It was me, my backpack and a point and shoot camera, deciding every second day where I was going to go next. As you can imagine the book is very personal to me because I went through all these experiences, I took all these photographs. It’s a fabulous record of my trip and my thoughts at the time, and dare I say, it is, in some ways, a record of the world in 2005/2006. I think the book will continue to be of interest to me in years to come.

Would I go on an extended trip like this again? No, I wouldn’t. This was truly a once in a lifetime experience.

The interest is still there but my age is now working against me. The thought of an overnight bus in India…

I believe this trip and the process of producing this book has given me food for thought for the rest of my life, and maybe even a certain understanding of the world and its people; and for me at least, I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

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Overall lasting memory of my trip: ost exciting experience: Swimming with dolphins in New M Zealand.

Most enjoyable journey: Chicken buses in Central America.

Most dangerous country: Guatemala (sadly).

S afest country (for travellers): Burma, Iran, Cuba (by far the safest country in Central America), Vienna (Austria), Singapore.

S ingle worst experience: Bus from Barocoa to Havana in Cuba (28 hours); bus breakdown outside Esfahan (Iran); one day I spent in Antigua, Guatemala.

Most interesting country: Cuba.

Best diving: Cuba, Corn Islands (Nicaragua).

Most adventurous travellers: Irish. orst individual transport journey: 28 hour bus journey W from Baracoa to Havana in Cuba (it was horrible); taxi trip from Mumbai airport to the city centre. orst weather: China (freezing); at the start of my trip in W New Zealand. ost dangerous transport: Buses in India. They make the M Guatemalan chicken buses look safe.

The epic scenes, the characters, and the colours of India.

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