down under / nz2

Geyser near Rotorua

Remember that TV advert for NZ butter with the happy, dancing cows and the impossibly green grass and the impossibly blue sky? Well, it’s all true! Well, OK not the dancing bit but the colours here are simply not avaiable in other parts of the world. The air is so clear that even when the sun sets it stays white.
I’ve been up in what Kiwis call Northland, the furthest northern penisinula of North Island, and it’s brilliant, in every sense.
This is where the Maori first arrived, and also the Brits. At Waitangi, in the area they call the Bay of Islands, the treaty between the local Maori and the Brits was signed that set the seal on the colonisation of the islands. The fact that the Maori translation that the tribes agreed to was different from the English version is typical of perfidious Albion and all her works. I visited the house where the treaty was signed, a modest place that was the home of the first British ‘Resident’– there to keep the peace between the locals and the British whose only interest was whaling and gold. The town just across the bay was known then as the ‘Hell-hole of the Pacific’, far more lawless than Dodge City ever was. Darwin, who visited, described the inhabitants as ‘of the lowest sort’, which is rather interesting. Now it’s full of craft shops with a ban on liquor in the streets.
I stayed in a rather smart hotel nearby in Paihia with an excellent restaurant. Have I mentioned the food here? It’s generally of a pretty high standard – lots of local fresh produce, lamb, green lipped mussels, oysters, lots op lovely fish – though they are still a little shy of spices. The bay is spectacular and well worth a visit.
In the extreme north of the island is 90-mile beach, which is exactly what its name implies. Totally empty, you can drive along its length (I didn’t; fearing a breakdown of my hire-car miles from any possibility of contact with the outside world). But it’s fun to com to the end of the road onto the beach and meet a 100km speed limit sign.
I drove back down toward sAuckland through the Waipoua National Forest, which has the best remaining kauri trees. These were much sougt after by Maori and Brit alike and hence mostly cut down by the last century, but there are still some spectacular examples left. The largest is thought to be 2000 years old, 51m high, its trunk with a girth of 15m. I saw it in the midst of a major rainstorm and it was still impressive.
Next up was the Coromandel penisinsula, south east of Auckland. Again the scenery is amazingly beautiful. NZ generally feels like your childhood images of England – before Dutch elm disease and the EU hedge culling policy – but to be honest it is more spectacular than England ever was. Though lumpy. The terrain is definitely lush but lumpy. This is because, though the underlying geology is ancient, it has for the last 25m years or so been lying over one of the most active stretches of the Pacific ‘ring of fire’, the junction of two tectonic plates. So, like Iceland, it is hugely active and entirely covered by ejecta from volcanoes. So things are not so rounded and pacified as England.
I continued down to the area around Rotorua. This is a town on the edge of a huge lake-filled caldera and throughout the town and nearby there are fumaroles and geysers showing the instability and sheer energy just beneath the surface ready to burst out at any time. Many of them are right in the town, which has therefore become a spa with hot mineral and mud baths. There is so much activity that thee town smells of eggs (ammonia/sulphur) or sometimes of burning plastic. There are many volcanic attractions in the area, and I visited 2 of the best: at Whakarewarewa (try saying that 3 times quickly!) in the suburbs, and further south at Waimangu. The first site has a series of boiling mud pools and geysers, one of which reaches 30m in height every hour or so.

Waimangu - in some places the water emerges at boiling point

At Waimangu, the history is extraordinary. Until 120 years ago there were 2 volanoes. The largest had a history of erupting every 2000 years or so. In between there was a lake with superb terraces of hot springs that were NZ’s No 1 tourist attraction. Then one night in 1886 the whole thing was ripped apart, A huge eruption created a split 16km long with craters up to 500m deep along its length, destroying the smaller and ripping a huge gaping hole in the side of the larger volcano. The lake was vaporized and the column of lava, dust and super heated water rose to 15km before falling back as waves of mud which swamped the land for 6km all around, destroying all life. Eventually a new lake formed, much bigger and deeper than before, and the landscape around was re-colonised by plants and animal life. All over the area there are still steam vents and boiling water emerging from the depths. Just below the surface the soil temperature rises rapidly to 100C. No doubt there will be another event there one day.
It makes you feel very small and very helpless to go around an area like this, and realise that we are just the scum on the surface of this raging unstable mass that is the earth.
So back to placid, stable, calm Auckland. But even that is built on a series of volcanoes, some of them very recent. Anyway, tomorrow I’m off to a new continent.
NZ has grown on me. The people are calm and stoic. Perhaps because of what lies so close beneath their feet.

update

*** The missing posts from New Year have now been added

I am now more or less up to date ***apart from 2 entries around New Year, which I wrote online only to lose them during that Asian inernet slowdown caused by an earthquake in Indonesia.

I have also loaded up the picture site at www.picturetrail.com/k-e-i-t-h-m

I'm now half way round in New Zealand, but of course 4/5 of the way in terms of time, which is something of a shock. I now have a few more days in NZ then a quick look at South America before returning via Spain where I have some family business to attend to with my brother.

I'd love to hear any comments.

down under / nz

View from the Sky Tower






Prince Andrew and I are in Auckland for a few days. He's opening the newly restored cenotaph and visiting the naval dockyards. I'm just doing the tourist thing. Whatever.
Actually Auckland got off to a bad start. I checked into what I thought was a delightful Victorian guest house but turned out to be a backpackers' hovel with communal showers and dorms. The other guests peered at this old codger arriving with his big suitcase with curiosity tinged with (I thought) menace. So I promptly checked out again just before midnight and with the assistance of a friendly taxi driver found something with at least a few stars.
The first day the weather was heavy grey clouds, heavy winds, driving drizzle (you'll know what I mean if you've ever been to Edinburgh) and cold. Cold! I haven't been in cold for three months. I had to buy a garment that I believe is called a 'fleece'. Very popular here apparently - must be all those sheep. And the cold.
Auckland felt like a bad black and white reduced reproduction of Sydney.It has a harbour, but it's less enclosing. It has a harbour bridge, but less impressive. It has a commercial centre, but the buildings are dull. It has restaurants by the docks, but they are empty. It has redeveloped quays, but not impressive. It has a Sky Tower but - OK it's taller than Sydney's but only because the top third is a comms mast.
The next day the weather bucked up and I started to see it in a better light. I went up the Sky Tower and saw the whole place laid out before me in briliant clear sunlight. Auckland is on an isthmus - North Island is almost cut in two here - with harbours north and south. It is peppered with conical hills, evidence of recent volcanic activity. In fact the whole place is a series of dormant volcanoes that could blow at any moment.
I later visited the wonderful Auckland Museum (next to the Cenotaph - Andrew was doing his stuff as I came out but I left him to it). This has a really clever simulation of what would happen if there was a new eruption.
It also has a lot of information and art from the Maori culture of New Zealand and from the Pacific islanders. A fascinating exhibition showing how they spread across the Pacific is now on. Systematic exploration using skilled navigation techniques led to the last great human wave of original migration, by sea rather than by land. New Zealand was the last to be discovered and populated. See
http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/vakamoana/
I have now left Auckland and am in the Bay of Islands in Northland - the far north of NZ. I can hear the waves crashing on the beach below as so often on my trip - a sound I love. Actually Auckland wasn't that bad. I feel very content tonight after travelling through wonderful countryside and I think my 2 weeks in NZ is going to be really good. Tonight I've checked into a spa/resort with probably too many stars for my budget, and had a great dinner in the restaurant and a few glasses of rather good NZ wine. All's right with the world (and the trip) once again! I hope Prince Andrew's OK...

down under / oz

So here I am further from home than ever before.

4 months in and a month to go and I'm still not half way round. Now it's home the long way.

I'm really impressed by Sydney.

The place and the people. And not forgetting the food.

I wish I'd spent more than 3 days here. Most of the time I spend walking, and jumping on ferries across and around the harbour.

The weather is superb and the air is so clear and the sun is so bright that it feels like I've spent the last 4 months in a faded print. This is technicolor, fresh from the lab.

It is also much more multi cultural than I imagined.

I meet up with a delightful Taiwanese Australian who, on my last morning, offers to drive me round the harbour for breakfast and show me the bits the tourists don't usually go to.

There are a lot of substantial late Victorian period buildings; these and the street grid going up and over the topography combine to remind me of San Francisco, but here there is an even better relationship with the harbour and the water.

After Singapore it seems so much more lively, busy, thriving and enjoyable.

I will definitely be back.

I got the ferry over to Manly Beach and yes, there are real surfers with real bleached blond hair, boardies and flip flops, jumping into real surfing waves. But actually the thing I noticed most was the number of elderly citizens walking, jogging, sailing, fishing and just generally getting out there and doing stuff. I got exhausted just watching them. If they could bottle the energy and the positive vibes here the Australian economy would be booming!

The bridge and the opera house are very photogenic and I took millions of pictures.

singapore

Offices dominate the last old shop houses, now restaurants and bars for (financial) traders.

My last Asian stop.
And how different from Thailand. This is the Asian success story par excellence. If you like that sort of thing.

The bookshops are full of books about self imporvement and how to maximise your investments. there are whole universities devoted to business and MBAs.

Thailand is quietly successful in a funny sort of way - and without its peole losing their grounded sense of fun. Singapore, by contrast, is aggressively successful.

All managed by a government that has turned control freakery into an art form. Everyone has good housing; the streets are clean and tidy; the public transport is superb; and everyone is bored.

So, they have built an arts centre and a theme park and a zoo and an aquarium. But the people I spoke to have been once and then what?The fact is that no city state of 3 million people, with this little land, can really provide fulfillment in the wider sense to its people: this is why there is such an emphasis on material success, in my view.

I met up with Mo, who was with us at New Year in Bangkok and Bali, and he understands all this and gets on with life, liek everyone else I met, but with an underlying nagging feeling that there is more to life than this.

To be fair, it is a bit more buzzy than when I was here about 12 years ago, but only a bit. It does have a lot going for it - some of the things mentioned above. But I wouldn't want to live here.

From Sentosa, the 'pleasure island' just offshore, you can see a vast panorama of tower blocks and container port cranes. Finance and shipping are the backbones of the economy and as long as they thrive, Simgapore will thrive.

In the other direction across the strait you can see a vast array of smokestacks and huge factories on the near islands in Indonesia. All the 'dirty' industry controlled by Singapore and all moved offshore to the more lax regulatory climate of their neighbours.

Singapore is clean, tidy, sterile. They are thinking of removing the ban on chewing gum...

On the plus side, the journey to the airport is beautiful, tree and flower lined the whole way; not like the usual approach of catering factories and air freight sheds. The route to the promised land perhaps.

chiang mai

The Sunday market in the old town

A quick trip up to the north of Thailand, and somewhere I haven't been to for over 10 years. Chiang Mai is a very pleasant place to spend a few days, a good size to walk around and with a rather different feel to the other parts of Thailand I have visited. Once it was a separate kingdom and there is still a suggestion of a different culture. There are supposed to be 1000 temples in CM and I can believe it. The old city - which is a square, attractively moated city surrounded by the remains of defensive brick walls, like many in the east - has a slightly sleepy feel away from the main streets. You can find chickens pecking on the streets, there are plenty of trees, and if you wander into some of the temples they are deserted.
The older temples are built in lanna style, though many have been rebuilt in the more garish modern Thai style. The older temples are more atmospheric and elegant.

Lanna style temple

I have met up with Ian again and we make the most of the night market, eating in its food court for about £2 a meal. On Sunday the old town turns into a giant street market at night, with stalls in the main streets. It's hard to believe there can be so many people selling, or enough people to buy, everything that's available. But the streets were absolutely thronged, mostly with local people, and theret was lots of bargaining going on. Even the temples got into the act, throwing open their courtyards to stallholders. Lots of nice things, but I kept to my policy of travelling light.
Ian introduced me to some people he had met that ran a bar near the night market, and later I was befriended at another bar. In a friendly country, the people of Chiang Mai come across as very open and eager to talk to strangers. They also have the reputation amongst Thais of being the most attractive in the country, and I could concur with this! , All in all a slightly drunken few days, apart from the national holiday on the Saturday, described variously as Monks' Day or Buddha Day, when bars were made to close.

andaman sea

To Thailand's southern Andaman coast, where the huge bay between Phuket and Krabi is studded with limestone isalnds similar to Halong Bay. But the lush tropical vegetation and the blu crystal sea make it seem even better.
To stroll along the powder white sand and watch another spectacular sunset is perhaps what this holiday was always about - pure pleasure of the senses and total relaxation.
I stayed in a little 'resort' consisting of eight bungalows hidden down a dirt track, built by the owners, a French and Thai couple, They are nicely fitted out, grouped around a pleasant pool and set up just above their own stretch of beach.
Just along the beach is a little beach bar to which you can stroll for an aperitif and a game of pool. Meanwhile Olivier's mum, who stays there every winter for a few months, has whipped up with the local staff a delicious French-Thai meal, which all the guests and Olivier and his mum eat around a big table under the stars. The conversation drifts on in a complex mixture of English, French and Thai, and before long it's midnight and time for bed.

Olivier has his own long-tail boat and one of the staff takes guests out to the islands that stud the bay. One of them, probably, you feel, could be The Island. In fact one of them has an almost completely hidden lagoon, though it's far from secret. But it's a great place to jump off the boat and wallow in the warm water as kingfishers dart past and brown sea eagles swoop around the cliffs.
Later we picnic on the beach of another small island, shaded by coconut plams and tall, cool cliffs as the water laps against our feet. Fish swarm in the water and come to nibble bread from your hands.
Olivier is a great guy and has worked hard to get the place into shape, with more work planned - a beach restaurant is nearly finished and an open covered reception area is started. He is very content with his lifestyle and as lifestyle choices go, I have to say that it seems an increasingly good one. I ask Olivier about the empty plot next to his. It's up for sale...
I briefly visited some of the more conventional full scale resorts in the area. Phuket is now fully restored after the tsunami - there is almost no sign that anything happened, and the place is fully booked.

siem reap and angkor wat

Ta Phrom west gate

Up at dawn again for the express boat to Siem Reap, which is a good way to see a little of the country without getting shaken to bits. The first half is along the wide Mekong River, its high banks (at this time of the year as the water is low) are lined throughout with wooden stilt houses of the fishing and farming communities. There are also floating villages which migrate as the waters recede and expand. Later we enter the huge lake in the centre of Cambodia, Tonlé Sap, so vast that we quickly lose sight of the shore.

Mekong village

It’s slightly misty and – rather worryingly – the captain stops at a fishing boat way out in the middle and asks the group of rather sleepy boys it’s carrying for directions. They all nod and smile and point over there, roughly the direction we are going anyway. The fishing boats are dark silhouettes with their perfect mirror-image reflections below them, in a dead calm misty blue world of water and sky – until our wake hits them somewhere behind us, I guess.

It’s two years since I visited Siem Reap and it seems to have a much bigger range of tourist oriented restaurants and cafes, but still on a small scale, still rather charming. There’s an area everyone calls ‘Bar Street’ at the back of the Central Market, and there are the slightly better class establishments sprinkled along the tree-lined banks of the river. It’s all easily walkable – or you can jump on a moto at any street corner – and the dry heat makes it very pleasant at this time of the year, if you keep out of the direct sun. It’s a great base for exploring the temples. I also have found a delightful little hotel, really a series of tiny houses around a garden and pool, with friendly staff and ideal for relaxation after a hard day’s sightseeing.

Actually not that hard, just get a tuk tuk for the day and the driver knows all the places to go. However they tend to have fixed ideas so it’s best to push for your own itinerary. I think it’s best to see Angkor Wat itself in the late afternoon, and to climb Phnom Bakheng – another artificial mountain temple – first thing in the morning; whereas most people do the opposite of this.
My best memories are:
> being at the very top of Phnom Bakheng very early, with no other tourists there at all, seeing the distant shape of Angkor Wat in silhouette amongst the mist
> the elevation of ASngkor Wat seen from its outer courtyard, across a lily pond, in the late afternoon
> walking around one of the artificial lakes as children – some of them monks in their saffron robes – played and splashed in the water, one with his pet monkey
> a little guided tour by local boys on the side to a hidden gateway at Ta Phrom completely buried in the jungle. Vast tree roots had burrowed through the masonry and threatened to topple it. The giant Buddha-like faces with their inscrutable smiles gazed out, east, west, north and south.
> Seeing a troupe of about 15 elephants pass through the main Angkor Tom gateway at quite a lick, their mahouts joshing with each other and with their charges.

Angkor Wat from the inner courtyard

On this trip I have been to quite a few world heritage sites, and I believe that this makes the biggest impression. The architecture is stunning. I now have a much better conception of how this fits in with the other schools of Buddhist and Hindu architecture (both are represented at Angkor). There is a continuum of styles from India and Nepal right through to Bali: in fact this trip has turned into something of a field trip on eastern religious architecture. In Angkor Wat in particular it is hard to think of anything on this scale at any time or place, that has such a unity of vision, such certainty of purpose. Every part of the complex serves to enhance the whole.

year zero

I will never forget most harrowing site in Phnom Penh - the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. This is housed in what must once have been a model Corbusian style school, which was converted by the Khmer Rouge in ’Year Zero’ to a prison, torture centre and death camp. The contrast is stark between the innocent feel of the school as it must have been, and the crudely hacked and constructed cells, designed to intimidate and demoralise. It is reckoned that 20,000 people died after passing through this place, and the rooms are lined with photographs of them take as they arrived, often bloody and beaten, their expressions confused, lost. Old, young, small children, mothers with newborn babies, all were taken here. They were tortured until they provided the confessions demanded; then in most cases bludgeoned to death. It is hard to comprehend how quickly people can descend to medieval barbarity when the veneer of civilization slips for a moment. Possibly the most scandalous thing is that the west and the UN supported the Pol Pot regime for so long after the liberation by Viet Nam in 1979, on the basis that regime change was meddling in the internal affairs of a country. How ironic this seems now. Pol Pot is dead but many of the senior perpetrators are alive and at liberty and still untried. At the time of writing there is yet another attempt to put a trial procedure in place but this appears to be about to collapse.

phnom penh

The royal palace at Phnom Penh

Doing my bit for the ozone layer*, I travelled to Phnom Penh by road in a big bus, which was cheap and well organised. The staff of 4 on the bus managed all the passport stampings and shepherded us through the immigration building. Then we were taken to a breakfast stop (the trip started at dawn) all included in the price. The contrast with Viet Nam is immediate – the roads pitted and difficult (but with signs of major rebuilding has been a feature of my road travel on this trip, with Bhutan and the roads in Thailand also under major infrastructure development). The whole look of the place suggests a poorer lifestyle (although Viet Nam was hardly well off).
I was told Phnom Penh would be dusty and dirty, but I believe there have been major efforts to clean up in recent years and my impression was of quite a pleasant small city, with some good bars and restaurants, especially along the road facing the river, and in the diplomatic quarter, and not particularlry hassly – you do get a lot of touting and selling but not very persistent.
I did take up the offer of a guided tour on motorbike by a young man called Yout. What I hadn’t realised is that he didn’t actually have a ‘moto’ so we had to hire a moto taxi and go round all three of us on the back. Don’t try this at home – you will get arrested – but it’s very common here to see three or four people on a motorbike (even saw five on one occasion looking like sardines on wheels). Anyway the tour was comprehensive and I didn’t fall off.
There is a fairly limited number of tourist sites. All the temples were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge and though some have been rebuilt they are all modern. The main sites are the Royal Palace and its temple – the Silver Pagoda – a complex similar to that in Bangkok but with some very pleasant gardens as well; the Independence Monument; and Wat Phnom. This translates as Mountain Temple. Mountains or even hills being scarce in these parts, this is in fact an artificial hill and has given its name to the whole city. It’s an attractive temple at the top of a long climb through forest trees well supplied with monkeys, who live on a diet of bananas supplied by worshippers on their way up. Also worth visiting are the National Museum, a cloistered series of rooms around a central garden, housing a collection of art and sculpture, mostly from the Angkor Wat period; and the Central Market, a vast crumbling art deco hall with stalls spilling out all around into the surrounding square.
You travel between these for the most part along French style boulevards with huge mature trees, many of them in flower at this time of the year. Very pleasant on the moto.
Yout also gave me a bit of an insight into the city’s night life with a visit to some of the pavement bars and late night clubs, culminating in the Heart of Darkness, an aptly named dance club for ex-pats and the local rich kids.

*I know it’s a bit of a cop out but I am going to make my trip carbon neutral by having some trees planted. Anyone know a good/reliable scheme?

saigon

So to Saigon via Da Nang airport – like a bus station but smaller. Ian and I have both been to Saigon before so we didn’t redo a lot of the main tourist things. It’s just a nice city to walk around with pleasant cafes and tree lined boulevards. In the evening we met up with our friend Sean, who has been working here for the last two years. He took us to the latest hotspots. Saigon is on the up and up and I noticed the streets seemed a lot bigger even than a year ago – major traffic jams now at rush hour, with noticeably more cars (mostly flashy 4WD Lexuses and Land Cruisers). Someone is obviously making money here – but the two wheeled culture will not last much monger at this rate.
We visited the Ku Chi tunnels just outside Saigon and saw the amazing lengths to which the Viet Cong went to evade the colonial and later the American powers. There were huge networks of tunnels, sometimes on several levels, with spaces for all the functions of a guerrilla army, built over decades. We crawled through a claustrophobic section (specially widened for foreigners – the Viet Cong being somewhat leaner than most of us westerners) and I was glad to get out after two minutes.