We continue our trip through Turkey with a visit to Kapadokya (Anglicised to Cappadocia for some reason). This is an amazing region slap bang in the middle of Turkey where there were a few little volcanic eruptions 10 million years back that deposited a layer of ash about 100m thick. So what you might say. Well the useful thing about this is that this ash has consolidated into a soft stone (similar to limestone) that is easily worked even with stone tools. So imagine you are a hardworking Hititte 3-4000 years ago with a growing family and lots of marauding animals and people to guard yourself against. Do you build yourself a house of straw, a house of sticks or maybe a house of bricks? Not with the wolf at the door you don't. What you do do is make yourself a cave. This approach has continued through to the present day with every hillside, valley and ravine around Goreme looking somewhat moth-eaten. Myriad chambers have been constructed for people, pigeons (artificial nesting holes in cliffs - they were farmed for their shit!) and popes. There are 36 hidden underground cities dating back up to 3-4000 years, some capable of holding thousands of people with huge stone (Indiana Jones) wheels that roll across passages to block them off against invaders. There are huge numbers of houses and hotels carved out of rock, with the useful side effect of being cool in summer and warm in winter. And there are churches dating back to a particularly prolific period about 800-1000 years ago when every Saint needed a place to call his own. The stone continues to erode and frequent earthquakes are also a problem so they don't last forever, but a home that lasts a few hundred years ain't bad and there are still massive numbers of ruins in various states of repair to be seen.
The other feature this area is famous for is "Fairy chimneys" with lumps of hard bassalt on top of the ash layer protecting the ash from erosion and leaving hard knobs on top of tall ash-rock spires, some over 40m high with many hollowed out for houses. Fairy chimneys be damned, from the above description it should be obvious to all that they have far more in common with phalluses than fairies, but "valley of the penises" might not have the touristic pulling power they were looking for.
After a few days we took off for Nemrut mountain in the east of Turkey near Syria, Iraq, Iran and Armenia. This description is not entirely accurate as there are 3 Nemrut mountains in the region, all claiming to be the home ground of local lad King Nemrut (Nimrod in English) who had a good hard try at killing off the founder of Judaism, (from whence came Christianity and Islam); namely one Mr Prophet Abraham who lived roughly 3500-4000 years ago. Anyway a 12 hour ride in a minibus then up at 4am to hike to the top of the 2200m mountain (actually only the last 200m) to watch the sun rise over the tomb of Antioch. For those of you unfamiliar with the bible you might know him as the original owner of the holy hand-grenade in Monty-Python's Holy Grail. Anyway three unexcavated tombs are hidden under a 50m mound of small rocks that form the peak of this mountain, they are known to exist only from recent seismic surveying. There are two terraces with large statues of the relevant kings and a couple of Greek gods to both the the east and west of this tomb and at the time they would host occasional ceremonies and get-togethers for important personages. All in all very impressive when you realise just how remote this site is, many days travel to get to it without vehicles - think about trying to build something atop Mt Hutt in Canterbury, or Mt Ruapehu in the North Island of New Zealand or hosting a garden party in these locations and you get the general idea.
We moved on to Sanliurfa, birthplace of Abraham, and as such one of the only places in the world that is a common religious site to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Though there were only Muslims in evidence in this atypically alcohol free city. You can visit the cave where he is said to have been born and hidden for seven years at the base of the cliff where King Nimrod lived (Nimrod killed off all of Abraham's potential playmates due to an unfavourable prophecy about being replaced by Abraham that came to pass anyway). The cave was weird, partitioned into womens and mens halves with basically no cave wall showing and taps to take holy water home from, it is accessed off the courtyard to a huge mosque built by the Saudis a few years ago. Nearby is a large pool (think 2-3 olympic swimming pools sat end to end) of very well fed Carp said to have been miraculously created when Nimrod attempted to Barbeque Abraham.
Last stop on this 1500km 3 day tour was Harran an ancient city that Abraham moved to before heading south, bits of this walled city date back 4000 years (and a town at least 7000 years ago), it was the centre of empires and well looked after by successive conquerers, a truely impressive sight - until the Mongols showed up about 800 years back and kicked the crap out of the place. Not much left now but a large crumbling castle and ruined walls that were once tall and imposing, I was impressed with how high the city is above the surrounding plain. In my mind that 5-10 metres of extra height over an area of about a square kilometer has come predominantly via the bowels of humans and animals over a several thousand year period.
Now we are off to Olympos by overnight bus, we've had a great time on this part of our trip. More sight seeing less drinking. One other curiousity: In Turkey the hawkers are continually trying to start conversations with us. Standard approach is: Where are you from? Whats your name? Now buy my crap at extortionate prices. If you don't respond after the first question then they guess at your country. From this we have learnt that we are in fact from Holland, not New Zealand as previously thought. Who knew? This hasn't happened just once, but more like 10-15 times in a week.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Fallen Empires and Individuals; Istanbul, Gallipoli and Troy
After our extended stay in Asia we have finally found our way to Europe and being rather budget little birdies (Kiwis) we are obviously sticking to the cheaper regions. With a desire to see a few ancient bits we have come to Turkey. First stop Istanbul:
After trialing the "no lonely planet guidebook" approach in Malaysia, we have determined that it sucks and it is much easier to get around with a little bit of local information in your pocket, otherwise you waste all of your holiday time trying to figure out A) where you are, and B) how to get out of A). So with a first night booked in Istanbul we made our #1 priority to obtain said book. Fortunately we found one in the book exchange at our hostel in Sultan-ahmet (main tourist area) and Jane's light fingers (not really) saw to the rest.
Turkey is a real jewel for the traveller in that it has a long history of being a fabulously wealthy and developed country, but has been laid low by the decline and fall of the Ottoman empire 80 years ago so that it is now a relatively cheap place to travel to with lots of amazing stuff to look at. Our hostel in Sultanahmet was situated about 200m from Hagia Sophia (Saint Sophia), a huge Cathedral built in just 6 years 1500 years ago when the Roman empire had relocated to Constantinople (Istanbul) in what was then Byzantia. With an immense domed roof (60m tall and 35m diameter) that has survived earthquakes, schisms, Crusaders and Muslamicists as well as a fair number of clergy just dying to be struck down by an appropriate act of God it is an incredible piece of work. Matched in some ways by the equally big but spring-chickenesque 400 year old Blue Mosque next door, and somewhat remarkably by the huge basilica cistern - a 1500 year old underground water storage tank just 100m from these two previous monuments and more than a hectare in area it lay hidden and forgotten for a thousand years without collapsing, now filled with a little water, massıve carp and Italian tourists.
We hung out in Istanbul for a few days while booking a tour for the rest of Turkey, filling in the rest of our time with a number of wholesome activities (given that drinking is so expensive here) including: A boat cruise up the Bosphorus (channel linking the Agean sea via the Dardenales channel and the inland Marmara sea to the Black sea). The Bosphorus is just 650m wide at narrowest and 35km long and has had tremendous strategic importance ever since trade began 5000 years ago separating Europe from Asia. It has remained one of the places to hang out and be seen for the despotic conquerer/empire builder on the move. We stopped to climb to the Yoros castle overlooking the Black sea entrance, pretty run down now 700 years after its heyday, a little rock climbıng required to get up on it. We were a lıttle chuffed to see this same castle being used in a turgid and incomprehensible soap-opera on the bus a few days later.
We also spent half a day at the Topkati palace in Sultanahmet, this was the home of the Ottoman rulers for hundreds and hundreds of years and is a huge shambles of walls and buildings now turned into a museum that houses some fascinating stuff, be it jewelry, weaponry (A 2m long greatsword!) or kitchens. The one catch is that in the bad old days was that to gain entrance to most of this stuff (particularly the harem) one could not be in possession of ones knob. That's right, shoes at the door and no dick's allowed. Actually even Turkish women were generally out of luck in getting in as it was illegal to turn a Turkish women into one of the Sultan's play-things, there being prohibitions in the Koran against enslaving or shagging muslim women, not that that extends to dirty infidels taken as slaves of course.
There was a further half a day wandering around the huge grand bazaar - many hectares of old streets and roads that have been roofed over for centuries and now houses huge numbers of shops selling clothing, jewelery and other sorts of useless crap that makes women all weak-kneed. However all hope was not lost, as just over the Golden Horn (an inlet off the Bosphorus) 1km away was a massive area of engineering shops selling huge varieties of male oriented stuff, including an underground mall full of gun shops that sold flick knives and automatic weapons. Not something you see every day in our ever-so civilized countries ('Merica excepted).
That's about it for Istanbul, we headed off for our tour of Turkey. First stop Gallipoli, very knowledgable guide from Anzac House, good tour, but personally pretty depressing. I won't try to be glib or sarcastıc about it. It was a popular war fought mainly by volunteers (on the English side at least) who wanted to see the world and had their heads filled with Jingoistıc crap that made it OK to kill the other guy (a view they generally lost very quickly when presented wıth the realities of war). But I fınd the sentiments espoused by the memorials hollow. Glory? Remembered Forever? Gave their lives for freedom? I see no glory in their deaths, we don't remember the names of the dead as much as their brothers who lived to a ripe old age, and it is hard to justify fighting for freedom in this campaign (Turkey only joined with Germany because Britain and Russia had decided that they were going to break up and take control of the Ottoman Empire post WW1). We won't be so willing to fight wars for money or land again will we? (OK so that was a little sarcastıc).
The saddest thing about Gallipoli, of which the world remains generally ignorant, is that it may be one of the main causes of the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide in which the Turks and Kurds massacred 1-1.5 million Ethnic Armenians living in Turkey that the Turks decided in this time of strife (as their Ottoman Empire was dying), were potentially dangerous (Christian) sympathisers with the British. To that end Gallipolli's 120,000 armed and mainly volunteer soldiers killed is an insignificant sideshow to the greater tragedy it may have created.
There are many parallels between this Gallipoli conflict and the campaign some 3500 years earlier and 20km south on the other side of the Dardenales (narrow strait leading from the Agean to the Black sea) as the Greeks took on Troy. Similar heroics and heros (the Turkish leader who rose through the ranks at Gallipoli and saw off the Brits was Ataturk - father of modern Turkey. Just quietly he was born in Greece, though with the residual enmity between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus the Turks won't mention it), the same strategic goal (forget Helen's 1000-ship launchıng face, it was the entrance to the Dardenales, important because square rig sailing craft could only enter the Dardenales when winds were favorable), and of course same bloody body count. There are now monuments to the fallen on both sides of the Dardenales; near Troy there are two man made hills that have stood as monuments to the Greek victors for 3000 years, will Gallipoli's endure?
We stayed the night in Cannukale, a great seaside town near the narrowest point of the Dardenales and more strategically relevant in the last 2000 years since sailing techniques improved, and went on a tour of Troy a few kilometers away. Troy is a fascinating place; a slowly expanding city rebuilt about 10 times between 5500 years ago and 2000 years ago as it recovered from various cataclysms and wars, before it lost strategic relevance and was covered in dirt and lost for a Millenium. There is amazing detail to be seen in the small portions that have been excavated. Rough unhewn sloping stone walls in the 5000 year old bronze age era, tidy masonry from 3000 year old Homerıc era iron age tools, details and features that align with descriptions in Homer's Illiad. Standıng at the spot where King Priam likely watched Archilles kill his son Hector, Wow. No they haven't found a horse, but they have the mock-up from the 2004 movie on the waterfront in Cannukale, besides which the horse is generally thought to have been a seige engine for knocking over the tall vertical mud brick walls that sat atop the cruder sloping stone foundation walls of Troy. So much for legends and warnings about greeks bearing gifts, it's a good bet the guys in Troy saw that one coming. Troy is a real treasure and deserves a look in at least once in a lifetime.
Next stop: (after an 18hr bus ride!) Cappadocia.
After trialing the "no lonely planet guidebook" approach in Malaysia, we have determined that it sucks and it is much easier to get around with a little bit of local information in your pocket, otherwise you waste all of your holiday time trying to figure out A) where you are, and B) how to get out of A). So with a first night booked in Istanbul we made our #1 priority to obtain said book. Fortunately we found one in the book exchange at our hostel in Sultan-ahmet (main tourist area) and Jane's light fingers (not really) saw to the rest.
Turkey is a real jewel for the traveller in that it has a long history of being a fabulously wealthy and developed country, but has been laid low by the decline and fall of the Ottoman empire 80 years ago so that it is now a relatively cheap place to travel to with lots of amazing stuff to look at. Our hostel in Sultanahmet was situated about 200m from Hagia Sophia (Saint Sophia), a huge Cathedral built in just 6 years 1500 years ago when the Roman empire had relocated to Constantinople (Istanbul) in what was then Byzantia. With an immense domed roof (60m tall and 35m diameter) that has survived earthquakes, schisms, Crusaders and Muslamicists as well as a fair number of clergy just dying to be struck down by an appropriate act of God it is an incredible piece of work. Matched in some ways by the equally big but spring-chickenesque 400 year old Blue Mosque next door, and somewhat remarkably by the huge basilica cistern - a 1500 year old underground water storage tank just 100m from these two previous monuments and more than a hectare in area it lay hidden and forgotten for a thousand years without collapsing, now filled with a little water, massıve carp and Italian tourists.
We hung out in Istanbul for a few days while booking a tour for the rest of Turkey, filling in the rest of our time with a number of wholesome activities (given that drinking is so expensive here) including: A boat cruise up the Bosphorus (channel linking the Agean sea via the Dardenales channel and the inland Marmara sea to the Black sea). The Bosphorus is just 650m wide at narrowest and 35km long and has had tremendous strategic importance ever since trade began 5000 years ago separating Europe from Asia. It has remained one of the places to hang out and be seen for the despotic conquerer/empire builder on the move. We stopped to climb to the Yoros castle overlooking the Black sea entrance, pretty run down now 700 years after its heyday, a little rock climbıng required to get up on it. We were a lıttle chuffed to see this same castle being used in a turgid and incomprehensible soap-opera on the bus a few days later.
We also spent half a day at the Topkati palace in Sultanahmet, this was the home of the Ottoman rulers for hundreds and hundreds of years and is a huge shambles of walls and buildings now turned into a museum that houses some fascinating stuff, be it jewelry, weaponry (A 2m long greatsword!) or kitchens. The one catch is that in the bad old days was that to gain entrance to most of this stuff (particularly the harem) one could not be in possession of ones knob. That's right, shoes at the door and no dick's allowed. Actually even Turkish women were generally out of luck in getting in as it was illegal to turn a Turkish women into one of the Sultan's play-things, there being prohibitions in the Koran against enslaving or shagging muslim women, not that that extends to dirty infidels taken as slaves of course.
There was a further half a day wandering around the huge grand bazaar - many hectares of old streets and roads that have been roofed over for centuries and now houses huge numbers of shops selling clothing, jewelery and other sorts of useless crap that makes women all weak-kneed. However all hope was not lost, as just over the Golden Horn (an inlet off the Bosphorus) 1km away was a massive area of engineering shops selling huge varieties of male oriented stuff, including an underground mall full of gun shops that sold flick knives and automatic weapons. Not something you see every day in our ever-so civilized countries ('Merica excepted).
That's about it for Istanbul, we headed off for our tour of Turkey. First stop Gallipoli, very knowledgable guide from Anzac House, good tour, but personally pretty depressing. I won't try to be glib or sarcastıc about it. It was a popular war fought mainly by volunteers (on the English side at least) who wanted to see the world and had their heads filled with Jingoistıc crap that made it OK to kill the other guy (a view they generally lost very quickly when presented wıth the realities of war). But I fınd the sentiments espoused by the memorials hollow. Glory? Remembered Forever? Gave their lives for freedom? I see no glory in their deaths, we don't remember the names of the dead as much as their brothers who lived to a ripe old age, and it is hard to justify fighting for freedom in this campaign (Turkey only joined with Germany because Britain and Russia had decided that they were going to break up and take control of the Ottoman Empire post WW1). We won't be so willing to fight wars for money or land again will we? (OK so that was a little sarcastıc).
The saddest thing about Gallipoli, of which the world remains generally ignorant, is that it may be one of the main causes of the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide in which the Turks and Kurds massacred 1-1.5 million Ethnic Armenians living in Turkey that the Turks decided in this time of strife (as their Ottoman Empire was dying), were potentially dangerous (Christian) sympathisers with the British. To that end Gallipolli's 120,000 armed and mainly volunteer soldiers killed is an insignificant sideshow to the greater tragedy it may have created.
There are many parallels between this Gallipoli conflict and the campaign some 3500 years earlier and 20km south on the other side of the Dardenales (narrow strait leading from the Agean to the Black sea) as the Greeks took on Troy. Similar heroics and heros (the Turkish leader who rose through the ranks at Gallipoli and saw off the Brits was Ataturk - father of modern Turkey. Just quietly he was born in Greece, though with the residual enmity between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus the Turks won't mention it), the same strategic goal (forget Helen's 1000-ship launchıng face, it was the entrance to the Dardenales, important because square rig sailing craft could only enter the Dardenales when winds were favorable), and of course same bloody body count. There are now monuments to the fallen on both sides of the Dardenales; near Troy there are two man made hills that have stood as monuments to the Greek victors for 3000 years, will Gallipoli's endure?
We stayed the night in Cannukale, a great seaside town near the narrowest point of the Dardenales and more strategically relevant in the last 2000 years since sailing techniques improved, and went on a tour of Troy a few kilometers away. Troy is a fascinating place; a slowly expanding city rebuilt about 10 times between 5500 years ago and 2000 years ago as it recovered from various cataclysms and wars, before it lost strategic relevance and was covered in dirt and lost for a Millenium. There is amazing detail to be seen in the small portions that have been excavated. Rough unhewn sloping stone walls in the 5000 year old bronze age era, tidy masonry from 3000 year old Homerıc era iron age tools, details and features that align with descriptions in Homer's Illiad. Standıng at the spot where King Priam likely watched Archilles kill his son Hector, Wow. No they haven't found a horse, but they have the mock-up from the 2004 movie on the waterfront in Cannukale, besides which the horse is generally thought to have been a seige engine for knocking over the tall vertical mud brick walls that sat atop the cruder sloping stone foundation walls of Troy. So much for legends and warnings about greeks bearing gifts, it's a good bet the guys in Troy saw that one coming. Troy is a real treasure and deserves a look in at least once in a lifetime.
Next stop: (after an 18hr bus ride!) Cappadocia.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Malaysian Getaway
It is late summer and there large numbers of thermal refugees from Arabia holidaying in Malaysia and Indonesia to escape the 50 degree temperatures at home. As a result we were stuck for a few days in Penang, an Island about the size of lake Taupo with a population of half a million people and lots of manufacturing industry connected by bridge to the malaysian peninsula. Really not much more to say about the place, if holidaying don't bother.
We travelled on to Langkawi on the recommendation of a couple that we met in Vietnam. Langkawi is a beautiful group of forest covered hilly islands off the south of the Malay penisula near the Thai border, the biggest of which is about 30km across. Langkawi has a lot going for it; relatively sparsely populated (for Malaysia) with fantastic beaches, and it is a Duty Free Zone so alcohol is actually cheap (a minor miracle for a Muslim country). Development has been patchy with economic burps leading to the odd old half finished building and some boarded up businesses - in the way you might see in a slightly economically depressed area of a city or town. Langkawi (and Malaysia) is favoured with an incredibly benign climate where it is never too hot or cold, there is never strong wind and the worst extreme you have to build for is heavy rain, so there are a lot of open air cafes and restaurants that are nothing more than roofs on poles.
We got a cheap bungalow (NZ$11 per night) on Cenang beach , a huge long strip of beachfront resorts, shops, and cafes on the north west of the island. The couple running the place were a helpful if slightly disorganised (of which more later) couple, an ex Iranian Colonel from the Shah's days and his Japanese wife, both in their 60's.
Hiring a car was cheap - about NZ$25 for the day including fuel so we travelled around for a day, seeing some of the sights. The cable car was very scary, suspending us 100-200m above the forest canopy as we went to the highest point on the island, but very nice architecture and engineering. We also went to the seven pools where we swam in catchpools at the top of a big waterfall, the most pleasently cool we managed to be in four days on langkawi.
Going out at night was trickier than for other countries. Due to the predominantly muslim population a lot of places exclude alcohol entirely and westeners tended to cluster strongly in the few that do sell booze. Arabs and others are scattered in twos and threes through the other 100 restaurants and cafes, but even so most places are open till 2-3 in the morning every day of the week. We thought we had just not found the night spots and spent an hour and a half walking back and forth along the entire strip one night looking for where everyone was, eventually realising it just wasn't that sort of place unlike everywhere else we have been in Asia. This reconnaisance yeilded just three bars, of which one was right next door (Debbie's run by a Malaysian women with one arm and an Irish husband). But it also saw us walking along a dark road at 1am in the morning after a few drinks not paying too much attention to where we were going when I noticed a wiggly outline on the road a metre or two in front, did a double take and realised it was a snake. Jane and I both jumped, but the snake wasn't moving and neither were it's two friends a few metres away, we didn't stop to check but we think they may have been someone's dinner dropped on the road - catering-screwup rather than close-encounter (sort of dissapointing not seeing a snake after 4 months in Asia).
After four days it was time to check out, go to the airport and fly to Kuala Lumpur, hungover after meeting a couple of Brits the night before and drinking flaming lambourghini's (Just say no kids) we got to the motel checkout 40 minutes before we needed to check-in at the airport to be told that the wife with the keys to the security box and our passports had gone out somewhere without her cellphone. Husband jumps in car to go and find her (but without telling us when he would be back). We wait till 10 minutes before we have to check in but no-one had come back, unable to contact either of them we took the next step: We broke into their house, kicking down the front door, searching around, kicking down their bedroom door, then using a pry-bar to break into the security cabinet. Gear retrieved we then jumped in a taxi and hightailed it to the airport, jumping queues to get checked in in time and going directly to the gate in the hopes of avoiding any consequences. Not quite a clean getaway though, the Japanese lady owner somehow managed to get though to the gate without a boarding pass, and confronted us. She just looked totally shocked and hurt, saying that her house had been broken into three times in the last year now, and that her kitten had died this morning (believe it or not I patted it while lifting the matress it was sitting on looking for the box). But despite feeling bad we stuck to our guns and wouldn't give here any more money than the $20 token payment for damages that we had left. Pretty worried when Jane was asked to identify herself to the flight attendents before takeoff - thought we were about to get dragged off by the police, but turned out to be just a problem with our boarding passes, quickly fixed.
Kuala Lumpur was a lovely step into comfort after the last month of budget accommodation. Staying with my cousin Richard and his lovely new wife (of ten days) Joelle, in a delicsiously air conditioned apartment we were treated to a couple of great nights out at his new restaurant and bar "Twenty One" in the heart of the city. Richard has been in this game learning the craft for 15 years but this is the first place that he has owned personally (with his partner) and it is going brilliantly, but a very full-on life: up at 11am in bed at 5am, and having to be a convivial host and manager 340 days a year. To relieve stress he has a number of outlets, the latest of which (after being told to sell his motorbike) is a ridiculously big remote controlled "Monster" truck, with 5hp and capable of about 140km/hr. We headed out at 4am in the morning to a nearby motorway to play with this baby. Thankfully the video camera we've been carrying survived the little prang we had when doing some onboard video.
While Richard was off working Joelle took us to Batu (Stone) Cave inside Kuala Lumpur, this is a massive cave probably 40m wide and 100m high and 150m deep, used as a Budhist temple with a 20m Golden Budda statue out front. It is a truly spectacular natural formation complete with monkeys that climb the surounding cliffs and challenge people for food. Every year there is a religious ceremony in which thousands of the faithful gather as devotees pierce their faces with steel rods, and their bodies with hooks in penance.
Impressions of malaysia have been great, wonderfully helpful (taxi drivers were just fantastic) and friendly people, good food (mix of enthnicities, 10% Indian, 30% Chinese and 60% Muslim). Don't get hassled to buy stuff all the time like you do in other parts of Asia, and infrastructure all works. Kuala Lumpur is really almost a modern western city, pretty, lots of greenery, and cheap. Easy to have a good life here with a really good three bedroom apartment close to the city centre costing NZ$70 per week (unfurnished).
Next stop: Istanbul.
We travelled on to Langkawi on the recommendation of a couple that we met in Vietnam. Langkawi is a beautiful group of forest covered hilly islands off the south of the Malay penisula near the Thai border, the biggest of which is about 30km across. Langkawi has a lot going for it; relatively sparsely populated (for Malaysia) with fantastic beaches, and it is a Duty Free Zone so alcohol is actually cheap (a minor miracle for a Muslim country). Development has been patchy with economic burps leading to the odd old half finished building and some boarded up businesses - in the way you might see in a slightly economically depressed area of a city or town. Langkawi (and Malaysia) is favoured with an incredibly benign climate where it is never too hot or cold, there is never strong wind and the worst extreme you have to build for is heavy rain, so there are a lot of open air cafes and restaurants that are nothing more than roofs on poles.
We got a cheap bungalow (NZ$11 per night) on Cenang beach , a huge long strip of beachfront resorts, shops, and cafes on the north west of the island. The couple running the place were a helpful if slightly disorganised (of which more later) couple, an ex Iranian Colonel from the Shah's days and his Japanese wife, both in their 60's.
Hiring a car was cheap - about NZ$25 for the day including fuel so we travelled around for a day, seeing some of the sights. The cable car was very scary, suspending us 100-200m above the forest canopy as we went to the highest point on the island, but very nice architecture and engineering. We also went to the seven pools where we swam in catchpools at the top of a big waterfall, the most pleasently cool we managed to be in four days on langkawi.
Going out at night was trickier than for other countries. Due to the predominantly muslim population a lot of places exclude alcohol entirely and westeners tended to cluster strongly in the few that do sell booze. Arabs and others are scattered in twos and threes through the other 100 restaurants and cafes, but even so most places are open till 2-3 in the morning every day of the week. We thought we had just not found the night spots and spent an hour and a half walking back and forth along the entire strip one night looking for where everyone was, eventually realising it just wasn't that sort of place unlike everywhere else we have been in Asia. This reconnaisance yeilded just three bars, of which one was right next door (Debbie's run by a Malaysian women with one arm and an Irish husband). But it also saw us walking along a dark road at 1am in the morning after a few drinks not paying too much attention to where we were going when I noticed a wiggly outline on the road a metre or two in front, did a double take and realised it was a snake. Jane and I both jumped, but the snake wasn't moving and neither were it's two friends a few metres away, we didn't stop to check but we think they may have been someone's dinner dropped on the road - catering-screwup rather than close-encounter (sort of dissapointing not seeing a snake after 4 months in Asia).
After four days it was time to check out, go to the airport and fly to Kuala Lumpur, hungover after meeting a couple of Brits the night before and drinking flaming lambourghini's (Just say no kids) we got to the motel checkout 40 minutes before we needed to check-in at the airport to be told that the wife with the keys to the security box and our passports had gone out somewhere without her cellphone. Husband jumps in car to go and find her (but without telling us when he would be back). We wait till 10 minutes before we have to check in but no-one had come back, unable to contact either of them we took the next step: We broke into their house, kicking down the front door, searching around, kicking down their bedroom door, then using a pry-bar to break into the security cabinet. Gear retrieved we then jumped in a taxi and hightailed it to the airport, jumping queues to get checked in in time and going directly to the gate in the hopes of avoiding any consequences. Not quite a clean getaway though, the Japanese lady owner somehow managed to get though to the gate without a boarding pass, and confronted us. She just looked totally shocked and hurt, saying that her house had been broken into three times in the last year now, and that her kitten had died this morning (believe it or not I patted it while lifting the matress it was sitting on looking for the box). But despite feeling bad we stuck to our guns and wouldn't give here any more money than the $20 token payment for damages that we had left. Pretty worried when Jane was asked to identify herself to the flight attendents before takeoff - thought we were about to get dragged off by the police, but turned out to be just a problem with our boarding passes, quickly fixed.
Kuala Lumpur was a lovely step into comfort after the last month of budget accommodation. Staying with my cousin Richard and his lovely new wife (of ten days) Joelle, in a delicsiously air conditioned apartment we were treated to a couple of great nights out at his new restaurant and bar "Twenty One" in the heart of the city. Richard has been in this game learning the craft for 15 years but this is the first place that he has owned personally (with his partner) and it is going brilliantly, but a very full-on life: up at 11am in bed at 5am, and having to be a convivial host and manager 340 days a year. To relieve stress he has a number of outlets, the latest of which (after being told to sell his motorbike) is a ridiculously big remote controlled "Monster" truck, with 5hp and capable of about 140km/hr. We headed out at 4am in the morning to a nearby motorway to play with this baby. Thankfully the video camera we've been carrying survived the little prang we had when doing some onboard video.
While Richard was off working Joelle took us to Batu (Stone) Cave inside Kuala Lumpur, this is a massive cave probably 40m wide and 100m high and 150m deep, used as a Budhist temple with a 20m Golden Budda statue out front. It is a truly spectacular natural formation complete with monkeys that climb the surounding cliffs and challenge people for food. Every year there is a religious ceremony in which thousands of the faithful gather as devotees pierce their faces with steel rods, and their bodies with hooks in penance.
Impressions of malaysia have been great, wonderfully helpful (taxi drivers were just fantastic) and friendly people, good food (mix of enthnicities, 10% Indian, 30% Chinese and 60% Muslim). Don't get hassled to buy stuff all the time like you do in other parts of Asia, and infrastructure all works. Kuala Lumpur is really almost a modern western city, pretty, lots of greenery, and cheap. Easy to have a good life here with a really good three bedroom apartment close to the city centre costing NZ$70 per week (unfurnished).
Next stop: Istanbul.
Friday, August 03, 2007
Thailand to the Islands
Our travels have continued with a trip through Thailand. We flew into Bangkok and spent the obligatory day in Kaosan Road. After three months in Asia the big cities are no longer very interesting to us and we could not even muster the enthusiasm to go out and look into some of the more specialist night time entertainments that Bangkok has to offer. But on the plus side Thailand is not as hot as Vietnam or China were, so we are far more comfortable.
After 20 years of heavy tourism development Thailand is no longer a really cheap country, being instead merely quite cheap when compared to NZ and certainly more expensive than any of the other places we have been on our trip. Our universal yardstick is beer prices and by this measure Thailand is about 50% of NZ prices (Vietnam 5-10%, China 10%, Nepal 10%).
After a day in Bangkok we traveled down to Koh Tao (ie Tao Island) off the south east coast of Thailand. This is a 20 square km island with a relatively small town Sai Ree strung out along a a beautiful beach about 1.5km long with tons of restaurants, cafes, bars and reasonably cheap accomodation. You can walk everywhere or hire a quad-bike or motorbike if you are a lazy bastard. We spent an hour walking around looking for accommodation and eventually got a nice self contained bungalow 50m from the beach with en suite and veranda for NZ$16 per night. Koh Tao is rated as one of the best places in the world for diving, and it is the primary focus of the whole island, this, on top of the more tolerable temperatures out in the Gulf of Thailand, was one of the big motivators for our going there. There is a huge population of European tourists and dive instructors (like ski instructors but better tans and less use of terms of personal address like "dude" and "bro") that keep the beach bars and restaurants full at night, and it feels very safe, friendly and relaxed after the frantic bustle of some of the cities we have been to.
Highlights of Koh Tao include walking to a secluded bay on the far side of the island (40 minutes) where we went snorkeling in amongst the beautiful coral and rocks. And of course diving, though unfortunately we went with a group that included a dopey pair of Dutch boys who sucked through their air twice as fast as we did and so cut one of our two dives down to 25minutes rather than the expected 50, however we still saw massive schools of fish as well as decent sized reef sharks and moray eels etc. Some of the beach bars have lounging mats (built in head rests) on the sand only a meter or two from the water's edge, and we really enjoyed a night we spent at Lotus Bar watching their very talented performers spinning fire-sticks and burning pois around. Win for me too as Jane accidentally stole someone else's jandals (Thongs for you foreign types) and they turned out to be far too big for her, and about right for me.
Koh Phangan was the the next stop as we Island hopped our way south. The main reason for going here was the "full moon party" - a monthly party on a short beach at the southern tip of the island that plays host to 30,000 people or more and goes all night. Trouble is that it is difficult to find accomodation for a few nights either side, with some places insisting that you book for at least 5 days during this period. As a result we got a bungalow on the beach 25km away at the very far end of the island down a long and very rough dirt road 30 minutes walk from the main road. To combat this isolation we hired motorbikes for $6 a day, but Jane found it very tough going trying to drive up and down the deeply rutted and rocky hill road to our bungalow. There were a few spills, and may have been some words spoken and possibly a dummy spit or two, as well as a reasonably big burn and cut on her leg. But all credit she managed to get the job done having only ridden for a few hours in her life, and we met one lad who hurt himself worse on our road.
We were a little dubious about the party ourselves, but we reconnoitered the day before swimming and sunbathing at the beach and on the night it turned out to be a lot of fun. Buckets 'o vodka and mixers are the standard cheap drink ($10 per litre), and there are 30-40 beach bars pumping out different forms of entertainment, from fire poi and fire-sticks to different sorts of music and dancing, fire limbo competitions and huge numbers of vendors selling food, clothing and other adornments including body paint (you even see the odd naked painted person wandering about). If you get tired, you just lie down and sleep on the beach, and at the end of the night large numbers of land and water taxis exist to get you home. The gulf of Thailand is generally very calm (similar to a large NZ lakes) 25-30deg water, so you can swim day or night and even small boats are quite safe. We finally got home at 5:30am, and had to be up at 9:30 to catch our ferry to Koh Samui.
Koh Samui was the last Island and the biggest and definitely most charmless of the three we went to. Not much to note about it though there were some nice beach bars and restaurants at Chaweng (People who remember the movie "Wayne's World" may like to say that name to themselves a few times) and on the first night we did go to watch the kick-boxing (Muay-Thai) generally reckoned as the most lethal form of fighting after wrestling. It was a little bizarre in that it turned out that half the fights were children (10 year old or thereabouts) and they were fighting for substantial amounts of money. But still fun to watch.
On our first night Jane got approached on the street by a cheery little European guy to do a free scratch-and-win competition, where it turns out we had won a great prize! Either a laptop, a weeks accommodation at a resort or a video camera. And all we had to do to collect was attend a 90 minute presentation tomorrow! Welcome to the exciting world of timeshare sales. We did attend, had our free breakfast and endured the 3 and a half hour pitch (whilst repeatedly asking how much, how much, how much to no response), to find out that we had indeed won the weeks accommodation (not surprised at this), with a number of catches, not least of which is that we or whoever else used it would have to endure another similar pitch. Lesson learnt, but if anyone wants our prize they are welcome to have it, it was a nice 5-star place in Koh Samui with swanky AC bungalows with kitchens and en-suites. For the morbidly curious the deal was $US7000 upfront + US$252 per year for a weeks stay at this place or one of 10 other similar places in Thailand and another $100 to stay at one of several thousand other places around the world through a company called MCI. Not totally stupid but working out that US$7000 in the bank gives you about NZ$500 per year (more if you're paying it against a mortgage) it really isn't that cheap, call it NZ$1000 for the first weeks accommodation in places outside of Thailand and about $500 for subsequent weeks.
We hired a motorbike visited some beaches and a waterfall but after that we were all done with Thailand, almost. On our final night we went out and had a few drinks, generally avoiding ladyboys and coming home at 1am Jane fell asleep like the dead, but about an hour later there was an enormous ruckus as some deranged English speaker was charging around the hotel breaking stuff, throwing things out of windows, saying some very loud and uncomplimentary things about women and Thai's in general and trying to kick down several peoples doors, I was wondering whether I should get up and do something about it when several Thai voices joined the fray and there were a number of bangs and thumps before it all went quiet. Jane of course slept through it all.
We caught a plane from Koh Samui to Penang in Malaysia, the final country in our Asian Tour. Fun at check-in as they inform us that there is a 15kg checked baggage limit per person (20kg is standard international flight IATA limit) and we hastily move heavy items to our day-packs and put on boots and heavy clothes (in 30 deg+ high humidity), I am sure they are quite aware just how ridiculous it is to be doing no more than moving weight around the plane and adding to our discomfort in this manner for no benefit to the airline.
So now we are sitting in Penang an island on the south west coast of the Malay peninsula that extends down from Thailand waiting two days for a place on the ferry to Langkawi - apparently the ferry is booked out by all the Arabs fleeing hot weather in the gulf, they come to Malaysia in mid summer to escape it!
After 20 years of heavy tourism development Thailand is no longer a really cheap country, being instead merely quite cheap when compared to NZ and certainly more expensive than any of the other places we have been on our trip. Our universal yardstick is beer prices and by this measure Thailand is about 50% of NZ prices (Vietnam 5-10%, China 10%, Nepal 10%).
After a day in Bangkok we traveled down to Koh Tao (ie Tao Island) off the south east coast of Thailand. This is a 20 square km island with a relatively small town Sai Ree strung out along a a beautiful beach about 1.5km long with tons of restaurants, cafes, bars and reasonably cheap accomodation. You can walk everywhere or hire a quad-bike or motorbike if you are a lazy bastard. We spent an hour walking around looking for accommodation and eventually got a nice self contained bungalow 50m from the beach with en suite and veranda for NZ$16 per night. Koh Tao is rated as one of the best places in the world for diving, and it is the primary focus of the whole island, this, on top of the more tolerable temperatures out in the Gulf of Thailand, was one of the big motivators for our going there. There is a huge population of European tourists and dive instructors (like ski instructors but better tans and less use of terms of personal address like "dude" and "bro") that keep the beach bars and restaurants full at night, and it feels very safe, friendly and relaxed after the frantic bustle of some of the cities we have been to.
Highlights of Koh Tao include walking to a secluded bay on the far side of the island (40 minutes) where we went snorkeling in amongst the beautiful coral and rocks. And of course diving, though unfortunately we went with a group that included a dopey pair of Dutch boys who sucked through their air twice as fast as we did and so cut one of our two dives down to 25minutes rather than the expected 50, however we still saw massive schools of fish as well as decent sized reef sharks and moray eels etc. Some of the beach bars have lounging mats (built in head rests) on the sand only a meter or two from the water's edge, and we really enjoyed a night we spent at Lotus Bar watching their very talented performers spinning fire-sticks and burning pois around. Win for me too as Jane accidentally stole someone else's jandals (Thongs for you foreign types) and they turned out to be far too big for her, and about right for me.
Koh Phangan was the the next stop as we Island hopped our way south. The main reason for going here was the "full moon party" - a monthly party on a short beach at the southern tip of the island that plays host to 30,000 people or more and goes all night. Trouble is that it is difficult to find accomodation for a few nights either side, with some places insisting that you book for at least 5 days during this period. As a result we got a bungalow on the beach 25km away at the very far end of the island down a long and very rough dirt road 30 minutes walk from the main road. To combat this isolation we hired motorbikes for $6 a day, but Jane found it very tough going trying to drive up and down the deeply rutted and rocky hill road to our bungalow. There were a few spills, and may have been some words spoken and possibly a dummy spit or two, as well as a reasonably big burn and cut on her leg. But all credit she managed to get the job done having only ridden for a few hours in her life, and we met one lad who hurt himself worse on our road.
We were a little dubious about the party ourselves, but we reconnoitered the day before swimming and sunbathing at the beach and on the night it turned out to be a lot of fun. Buckets 'o vodka and mixers are the standard cheap drink ($10 per litre), and there are 30-40 beach bars pumping out different forms of entertainment, from fire poi and fire-sticks to different sorts of music and dancing, fire limbo competitions and huge numbers of vendors selling food, clothing and other adornments including body paint (you even see the odd naked painted person wandering about). If you get tired, you just lie down and sleep on the beach, and at the end of the night large numbers of land and water taxis exist to get you home. The gulf of Thailand is generally very calm (similar to a large NZ lakes) 25-30deg water, so you can swim day or night and even small boats are quite safe. We finally got home at 5:30am, and had to be up at 9:30 to catch our ferry to Koh Samui.
Koh Samui was the last Island and the biggest and definitely most charmless of the three we went to. Not much to note about it though there were some nice beach bars and restaurants at Chaweng (People who remember the movie "Wayne's World" may like to say that name to themselves a few times) and on the first night we did go to watch the kick-boxing (Muay-Thai) generally reckoned as the most lethal form of fighting after wrestling. It was a little bizarre in that it turned out that half the fights were children (10 year old or thereabouts) and they were fighting for substantial amounts of money. But still fun to watch.
On our first night Jane got approached on the street by a cheery little European guy to do a free scratch-and-win competition, where it turns out we had won a great prize! Either a laptop, a weeks accommodation at a resort or a video camera. And all we had to do to collect was attend a 90 minute presentation tomorrow! Welcome to the exciting world of timeshare sales. We did attend, had our free breakfast and endured the 3 and a half hour pitch (whilst repeatedly asking how much, how much, how much to no response), to find out that we had indeed won the weeks accommodation (not surprised at this), with a number of catches, not least of which is that we or whoever else used it would have to endure another similar pitch. Lesson learnt, but if anyone wants our prize they are welcome to have it, it was a nice 5-star place in Koh Samui with swanky AC bungalows with kitchens and en-suites. For the morbidly curious the deal was $US7000 upfront + US$252 per year for a weeks stay at this place or one of 10 other similar places in Thailand and another $100 to stay at one of several thousand other places around the world through a company called MCI. Not totally stupid but working out that US$7000 in the bank gives you about NZ$500 per year (more if you're paying it against a mortgage) it really isn't that cheap, call it NZ$1000 for the first weeks accommodation in places outside of Thailand and about $500 for subsequent weeks.
We hired a motorbike visited some beaches and a waterfall but after that we were all done with Thailand, almost. On our final night we went out and had a few drinks, generally avoiding ladyboys and coming home at 1am Jane fell asleep like the dead, but about an hour later there was an enormous ruckus as some deranged English speaker was charging around the hotel breaking stuff, throwing things out of windows, saying some very loud and uncomplimentary things about women and Thai's in general and trying to kick down several peoples doors, I was wondering whether I should get up and do something about it when several Thai voices joined the fray and there were a number of bangs and thumps before it all went quiet. Jane of course slept through it all.
We caught a plane from Koh Samui to Penang in Malaysia, the final country in our Asian Tour. Fun at check-in as they inform us that there is a 15kg checked baggage limit per person (20kg is standard international flight IATA limit) and we hastily move heavy items to our day-packs and put on boots and heavy clothes (in 30 deg+ high humidity), I am sure they are quite aware just how ridiculous it is to be doing no more than moving weight around the plane and adding to our discomfort in this manner for no benefit to the airline.
So now we are sitting in Penang an island on the south west coast of the Malay peninsula that extends down from Thailand waiting two days for a place on the ferry to Langkawi - apparently the ferry is booked out by all the Arabs fleeing hot weather in the gulf, they come to Malaysia in mid summer to escape it!
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