Another Road Trip

It has been a while since we went on another road trip from Penang ultimately down to Singapore via the orang utan reserve at Bukit Merah, Taiping, the Cameron Highlands and Malacca accompanied by our Bermuda friends Charmaine and Dave. I did the Track My Tour thing here but wanted to add some other bits as an afterthought.

Orang Utans

Everyone has seen these hairy but gentle apes on TV programs like the BBC's Earth or something like that and to my surprise we discovered that there's a refuge just over an hour away in Bukit Merah. I thought it was great as the apes are housed on an island but visitors are within a caged tunnel so you can view but the apes are free to roam. It is home to the early stage apes saved from death in the wild. There is another 2nd stage which gets the apes more used to fending for themselves and then its vroom, out into the big wide world.

The island at Bukit Merry

Except if you're a full grown male that is. The really big ones get to 200 kgs (that is huge!) and they don't much like moving around in the trees as that's a heck of a lot to swing from branch to branch. They also don't like the rain largely because they are massively hairy and if wet, that adds another ton of weight for them too. So all those pictures you see of those cuties swinging and playing are the tiddlers, before they are grown.

Growing up is tough too... and this isn't a comment aimed at the orang utans alone. It applies across the spectrum. They live in single grown male family groups and the only way for an adult male to live past a certain age is to kill the alpha male and take his place otherwise it is curtains for you! The one on the island comes in at a growing 145 kgs and he made it to number 1 by killing the former alpha male who was the 200 kg guy.

Talk about survival of the fittest. There must be an analogy to all grown males there somewhere.

Tea in the Highlands

One of the many things the British did during colonial times was to create hill stations. The Cameron Highlands is an example in Malaysia. Actually so is The Hill in Penang. At sea level it is hot and sticky and in past years, colonials may have ranked at the top of the social tree but they also ranked at the top of the diet for a multitude of bugs, bacteria and various viruses. You can see it anywhere there's an old church and cemetery. In Bermuda the big killer was typhoid and it seemed that almost everyone in the graveyard was less than 23. My doctor once told me during a physical that if I didn't die of a particularly nasty disease before I hit 70 that I should be OK for another 30 or 40 years. Not sure about that but I suppose that means if you have good resistance to fell diseases, you'll survive. At least from fell diseases.

The hill stations are particularly nice. Including Penang, I've now been to three (Penang, Cameron Highlands, Sri Lanka... the oldest) and I can certainly see why they would be popular. So much cooler, fewer bugs and great views. Also tea. Now of course tea isn't indigenous but introduced and even now it forms a massive part of the local economies. More in Sri Lanka than Malaysia but when we visited the Cameron Highlands, what is apparent is the massive scale of development. I should have thought about this before as every time you buy veggies in the supermarket here, all the local ones come from some Cameron Highlands farm or other.

Tea harvesting in action. No technology here

Sadly they are really, really ugly.

Endless greenhouses. They are everywhere

Tacky Stuff

I know that we are all sophisticated and would normally look down our noses at tacky stuff. I mean who needs another fake handbag or pair of Gucci shoes? We wouldn't go there, would we? Also who would want to ride around a Unesco World Heritage city that was one of the oldest European settlements in the Far East riding around in a floral pink trishaw decorated with little ponies also pink and a soundtrack of Asian rap?

Nyonya Cuisine

The term nyonya refers to Chinese immigrants who came to Malaysia during the 19th century mainly to work in the mainland tin mines or to escape one of the endless wars or famines prevalent in China. They settled and in many cases married locally and generally found they couldn't get the same ingredients for their cuisine as back home so they adapted to what was available locally... hence nyonya cuisine. The nyonyas are also known as Perankans and other names too, but this one seems to to be the one used mostly for cooking.

Some well known dishes have a nyonya twist. I am thinking of curries here and of course beef rendang is a nyonya curry varietal. So when I saw the chance of having a day of cooking classes, yes please!

Heavy coconut cream? Yup. Thanks Kathy, nyonya chef supreme

One thing we'd omitted to pay attention to was the fact that much nyonya cooking is really heavy so it was a little rash to expect to want to do anything energetic after eating as we'd originally planned. If you have the chance to try nyonya cooking, try it!! You do like chillies though, don't you?

Markets in particular Night Markets

One thing I have discovered here is that whenever guide books say such and such Night Market is a blast and shouldn't be missed, you should take that with a distinct pinch of salt. For sure markets and in particular night markets are busy places with hordes of probably mostly tourists scouring through endless stalls of vendors selling... well junk really. You may want a fake handbag for example or yet another little zip bag with elephants embroidered onto it, or some such like that. But you can go to daytime markets for that too. If you're expecting an authentic cultural experience, forget it. This is all about selling stuff to you.

The Jonker Street Night Market in Malacca was like that although the upside to all of these places is that the street food is fun, very creative and often very tasty. And at the end of the day, yes it is still pretty fun too. Remember that decorated pink trishaw I wrote about before? Well they also have fairy lights on them for nighttime so in addition to all the other stuff, they are a cascade of lights too!

First take wooden satay sticks about 8 inches long. Lay them in what looks like a waffle press like this but in the specially crafted grooves. In the little holes that are under these grooves, crack small quail eggs and wait for a second or two et voila you now have a yummy snack of 5 cooked quail eggs on a stick that you can drench in your favorite chilli...

Cricket

There's a guy at the Penang Sports Club, John, who is a long time ex-Singapore hand and at some point was the President of the Singapore Cricket Club. Now I've been playing cricket for over 50 years and know quite a few club presidents. Most are nice guys but have had a history of presiding over, say, Leigh on Sea CC whose pitch is one of the two connecting pitches on the big field at Chalkwell Park in Southend on Sea. My home town. It has a nice elevated view of the Thames Estuary too but can in no way compete for the location of the Singapore club. My goodness. It reminds of the story of the rollers at Centre Court Wimbledon. The lovingly maintained grass courts depend on this big, heavy roller to keep the surface so pristine and one year someone asked to borrow the roller for Court One. The groundsmen said OK, hasn't been asked for before and then tried to move it over discovering in the process that the roller was too big for the exits. It simply could not be moved from Centre Court. This caused much head scratching until the early records were consulted and it was discovered that because in the old days there was no lifting mechanism capable of moving the thing far away from Centre Court, they simply built the stadium around it. Yes folks, the roller came first.

It strikes me that Singapore CC is very much the same. It occupies an unbelievable location on the Esplanade and if you know Singapore and can visualize the sky scrapers and development in the city, you'd be amazed that such an anachronism could still exist. But exist it does and it is, yes, right there in the middle of the most expensive, most exclusive, most desirable, most demanded part of town. I guess they simply built the new city around it.

IP Theft

My school in Southend was called Eton House and was for some years after I left school the cause of much confusion. At one interview when I was I think 21 or 22, the first thing I was asked was "who do I know from my school days?" Well of course I know loads of people: Pete, Kev, Gary, Ronnie. It took a little while for me to realize that the interviewer was looking for something else. As in which member of the royal family, nobility or political class was I at school with? It made me laugh sort of (I didn't get the job as after I explained and we all dutifully laughed, they lost interest completely) as I knew that our Headmaster (and owner of the school) chose the name in 1926 specifically for this reason. He felt that Southend School for Boys may not have had the same cachet and PR hook as a vague and unexplained Eton connection.

In Singapore! Bloody cheek!!

He was an interesting character all by himself. His nickname was Bubble as that was what his bald head looked like in later years but his name was SHT (before the acronym became tarred by another similar word made by inserting the letter 'I'). His twin died in WW1 and he took part in the Los Angeles Olympic Games as a 400 meter runner ("too upright, see, so no good, flagged at the end due to me gassing at Loos in 1917"). He was an unforgettable character!

Management on Steroids

I think you either love or hate Singapore. Maybe not, but its just a gut feel that I have for what they have done to transform a tiny island swamp into this sparkling megalopolis is just stunning. And to think that most of it happened after independence and the rather embarrassing split with the rest of Malaysia. I have heard it described as 'Asia Light' and the more I think on that, the more apt I think is that description. We have friends that spent a couple of years working there that seems to have given them a bedrock in life and while they visited Angkor Wat and some of the other cultural high points, I'm pretty sure they never visited a hawker centre, or Little India, or some of the more Asian bits. Certainly Singapore is in the midst of Asia, but at times it doesn't feel it.

I loved it and going back to the tacky comments from earlier, who wouldn't love to stand on a balcony 57 stories up in a 3 tower hotel that reminds you of Las Vegas? The view is stunning.

Talk about planning. I simply cannot imagine the meetings they all had. I worked in a quango for a time in Bermuda and the meetings we had barely rose above the mundane. There must have been some powerful thinkers, strategists and personalities to get this done.

Great trip though with my favorite traveling companion!!

A Very Bad Year

I subscribe to various news services to keep up to date with what's going on. I have to say that it is really difficult to get balanced reporting on most issues. Every media outlet has its own agenda that it is trying to put out and I suppose if you share those views then you like that. But if you don't the reporting on the other side is just as slanted. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy that people then tend to read only those things they agree with. That is sad and in my view quite dangerous as in many instances (say 50%) you are most likely wrong so hearing another view can actually be pretty helpful.

Don't worry though I don't plan to preach or anything like that. It is just that I read a truly fascinating piece that suggests that the year 536 was the worst ever time to be alive.

So this is a non-controversial subject as nobody alive today would have been back then either and if you read the full piece it seems that simply managing that (i.e. staying alive) was a real big win.

So what happened, Michael? The year 536 AD was just about 100 years after the fall of the western Roman Empire when the barbarians trampled over the remnants of that once great empire... but only 200 years into the eastern Roman Empire's over 1,000 year history, most latterly as Byzantium. In Europe the barbarians were not intent on making too many friends, they were far more intent on rape, pillage and enslavement as a pastime. So simply by virtue of the fact of being in Europe in what was a pretty horrible time was made worse by something???

Now this is climate change.  I sometimes complain about the weather but...

Given that this has now been documented, how on earth did people actually verify this? And this was the bit that fascinated me and caught my attention. It was the polar ice cap. Antarctic not Arctic.

Inside this thing scientists bore into the ice cap and from studying the various levels and aging them, they can tell pretty much what happened scientifically. Given this data, historians are able to interpret it from the often weird writings of contemporary scribes and come to amazing conclusions about our world's history, both natural as well as social.

This is the full litany of woe...

I would post the full article or at least attach a link but somehow I have lost it and cannot find it at the moment. It is definitely worth reading and remembering that climate change is just as much about natural phenomena as it is about human interference. That doesn't of course mean that we should be complacent about things but it is worth remembering. A couple of days ago, for instance, I read another piece about how the global insect population is down 70%+ since the 1970's with the result that some parts of China have to employ people to pollinate their plants as there's nothing else left to do it for them. Now that was human interference.

The Honorable Lanka

Living in Penang you see the word 'Sri' all the time in front of a group of other words and for the longest time I had no thought really about what it meant, if it meant something, or it was something else. It took our visit to Lanka in October to settle things. The word 'Sri' is an honorific which I take to mean something like 'the honorable' or something like that. As the pre-Colonial name for the country was Lanka, that is what they first named the country after 'Ceylon' was ditched after independence adding the 'Sri' only a little later. Claro?

I used Chris' wonderful app Track My Tour for the day to day stuff and if you want to follow that you can do so here but wanted to add some other bits that I didn't write about or thought about after.

First up, great country. Lovely people. Hopeless infrastructure. My goodness, does it rain. Animals everywhere.

OK that's it all done.... well not quite. Any people that do read my posts know that I probably drone on at too much length so a post this short and sweet just isn't going to happen. So here it is, the memories that will stay with me in no particular order.

1. Elephants

Nothing more to add, just that it was fabulous to see them in the wild

2. History

In a later post I will refer to Malacca in Malaysia as part of a recent road trip that Viv and I did with some friends from Bermuda. It bears striking similarities to Sri Lanka as it was the Portuguese who were the first colonial settlers and it was they who were summarily kicked out by the next settlers, namely the Dutch, who in turn were removed by the British who then never left and generally fixed the things that the others hadn't.

The Portuguese settlements were very much at the fringes, seaside settlements in the south with just the one in the pointy bit at the top, which is Jaffna. So easy meat for the Dutch who came in force over 100 years later and kicked them out. They tried to take over the entire island but couldn't manage the middle section (which was where Buddha's tooth ended up, Kandy) and made a big mistake by not preventing the British from settling Trincomalee (sort of top right, below Jaffna but above the middle fat bits on the right hand side) and creating a naval base there opposing the French in Madras. The British liked the place so when the French marched into Holland in 1792, the Dutch presumably much against their will and definitely their better judgement asked the British to care of things for a while. Until the French left. No problem, thanks. Trouble was when in 1815 they asked for it back (as they did in Malacca and other places further east) the British said no thanks, we like it here. Oh yes and if you want to try and take it back, let me introduce you to the Duke of Wellington who just thrashed Boney up and down Europe... and some of his friends in red jackets.

Well that wasn't going to work so getting the best deal out of a pretty poor situation was all they had left so the Dutch said OK you can have Ceylon (they called it Ce-lun apparently, a corruption of a misheard Portuguese word) and Malacca and if you must Singapore, but we wouldn't mind having back Java and Sumatra. Probably don't fit in with your imperial plans. The Brits had no imperial strategy of course, only the East India Company, a bunch of penny pinching capitalists and absolutely no desire to take on anything else after that ruinously expensive 30 year war against the French so said thanks and generally history moved on.

Having acquired the new territories though meant actually doing things with them and in general the British did fairly well by Ceylon, as it was now called. Or so it seems to me. Certainly when we visited the big historical and archaeological sites, it was the British who 'discovered' them. Apparently even the locals had forgotten about these places as they were abandoned centuries beforehand and the previous colonizers being typically inefficient and generally useless had walked right past them.

3. Tea

I suppose if you don't much care for tea, then this bit will be irrelevant for you, but as a tea lover I was totally taken with the tea plantations. Even today, the tea industry is the single largest industry in Sri Lanka. 

This picture tells you all you need to know about when, where and how tea came to be in Sri Lanka. Apparently the original plants were not from the already entrenched Indian plantations but came straight from original Chinese plants which is what gives Ceylon Tea its distinct flavor. We bought loads!

4. Infrastructure

The subtext to the above note on tea is actually a very sad one as reliance on a tea industry as the number one component of the economy means that that economy is not very developed. It isn't. One of the key reasons why stems from the 30-year civil war between the majority Sinhalese (mostly in the south) and the minority Tamils (in the north). Add religion into the mix too: Buddhist vs Hindu, and the mix was very toxic indeed.

I read a little about it from my first point of contact for most things these days, Wikipedia, and what was written was sad enough but you just know the reality was worse.

So to dates. Independence finally in 1972, add 30 years and a few before and after the civil war and you come to now. The war itself ended within the last 5 years so there simply has been no time to repair or even build any infrastructure. Also factor in the unforeseen catastrophe that was the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 which absolutely devastated the southern part of the island particularly around Galle, and this is the situation Sri Lanka finds itself in. You can see it or rather the lack of it everywhere however all the people we met were some of the nicest, friendly, most optimistic people I have ever met. 

The tuk tuk is the solution!

5. The Weather

People in England talk about the weather all the time, particularly the rain and the deadly grayness of the country between November and March. That is true of course and I personally think it is the greyness that is the worst thing. After weeks of it, things are so depressing. My birthday is in February and it always rained.  Ugh. But not like Sri Lanka.

My goodness does it rain. I had to chuckle that the England cricket team were touring Sri Lanka just about at the same time as us and I really wondered if anyone that did the schedule actually bothered to ask what the weather would be like around then because it is in one of the many rainy seasons here and when they say rainy, they do mean rainy.

Facing a broadly similar issue in Penang about determining exactly when the seasons start and end I asked Fernando, our guide, and he told me that now was the rainy season. He may have said it was the North West monsoon but could also easily have said the South East one for apparently there are many rainy seasons here. Our time until December for one, then becomes dry for the month of January. After that comes the different direction (maybe SW) monsoon season for Feb-March and then another month of comparative dry before the NE monsoon season kicks in during May and which lasts to the end of July. August is most likely relatively dry but then you get the slow drag that is the beginning of the NW monsoon season that really gets going in October again and ....

So the island is very green and you often see scenes like this where only the day before was dry land.

Love the water buffaloes though!

Loved it. Ready to return at any time! And I didn't even get to talk about the dogs and cows ...