RTW sort of by Accident

Last week we returned from quite a long trip as it turned out. We hadn't meant it to be like this, witness the number of times we had cause to change airline reservations, but it sort of just happened.  The plan, if you can call it that, was to be in Zurich when our first grandchild would be born.... yes, I just slipped that in. Quietly. And yes, both Viv and I are very excited indeed! Around the same time however were a different couple of dates that we would not be able to change but which had to be included: namely a board meeting for me in New York as well as a 90th birthday party for Aunty Blanche in Bermuda.

Due date for the big day was 1st October for the longest time then all of a sudden it was pushed back, then not again. Not something that could be set in stone, that's for sure. Our grandchild would come when he/she was ready and not before. This didn't help much in our planning for, as everyone knows, those paragons of customer care, let's just call them 'airlines', do not take kindly to last minute booking and changes despite what all those "I traveled the world on $100" smart Alecs say. The later it became, the more painful it was.... for us needless to say. And as I said earlier, we had to make changes seemingly every week all of which increased the pain threshold. Fair to say I am heartily sick of aeroplanes, airports, airlines, mindless bloody stupidity at the airports, endless security lines, aeroplane food (big time), not being able to sleep, immigration procedures that change seemingly change all the time yet when you comment 'this is new', the official gives you a blank stare so you try to remember not to comment on anything but smile in a sort of glassy and fixed way every time someone asks something arcane like 'what brings you to...' -- I mean, I just landed on a plane for goodness sake, what do you think I am here for? To visit.... derr!

Anyway rather than go through a blow by blow for each stage, I'll do it by photos:

1. England

The land of Brexit and Boris Johnson! It seems to have become the only topic of conversation. Will we exit on October 31st in Boris's words 'do or die' or was it he'd rather be 'dead in a ditch'? Doesn't matter, everyone was speaking in ridiculous hyperbole like this all the time. 'End of the world', 'total disaster', 'catastrophic'.... you name it, these are the words of the time. Made me glad that we wouldn't be spending a lot of time here, just a few days with Viv's mum Anna.

Reculver Castle on the Thames Estuary is an old Roman Fort, church, you name it what else. The twin spires seen here are only kept as markers for shipping otherwise they'd be allowed to fall down.

Just had to eat the best fish n' chips in the country! Still great.

That other institution, the Sunday roast. Random country pub and it was fantastic.

Visiting the Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham. Really interesting yet sad to me for it is now a tourist attraction seeing as there is very little Royal Navy left to service.

The Turner Modern museum in Margate I thought would have paintings of said Turner, a local lad who painted mid 19th century industrial type paintings, particularly steam ships, but it had the annual competition going on with artists like this doing modern stuff. The interpretation I found a little less than helpful.

2. Switzerland

Indy and Cat live in Zurich so it was there that we flew next. We stayed in an AirBNB in the centre of Zurich and found that the public transport was cheap, really efficient and on time. Trams, buses, trains... all really clean and a pleasure to use. We also found it was Oktoberfest time! So we had some fun before the big day arrived.

Quite a raucous affair it was too!

Taking our new grandchild for a walk. Felt like a supermarket trolley but of course just like everything Swiss, it really does work!

3. New York

After only a few days I flew through London again (ugh... horrible airport) to New York for my board meeting. Happily Dee Dee came to join me for a couple of days so we were able to hang out and go crazy. I dragged him all around Greenwich Village into bars and blues clubs.... great time!

Found time for the big steak too!

4. Switzerland (again)

Viv had stayed on in Zurich whilst I traveled alone to the Big Apple and I was looking forward to going back to join her, Indy, Cat and our beautiful grandchild for a few more days.

5. England (again)

One thing we have never managed is the knack of traveling light. I am always totally impressed by people that travel only with a carry on even when they are traveling for weeks or months. I imagine their choice of wardrobe is therefore limited but even with umpteen bags I find myself wearing the same trousers and shirt all the time. However this time we'd smartened up a little and actually managed the side trip to Zurich with just the one big bag... each, and had left the other two big bags in England. Hence England for a couple of days.

We took in a visit to a winery nearby which courtesy of global warming is now a producer of very decent bubbles, Balfour Estate. The tour guide explained that the owner had sort of bought the grape producing fields 'by accident' a few years ago and set to wondering what to do with just another 150 acres of decent arable land. He is very wealthy.

6. Bermuda

Thankfully we flew out through Gatwick, not Heathrow but I do have to comment on car rental firms. First time was Avis, second time Hertz. I go by price not loyalty so the companies change all the time for us. We get to see a variety of operators as a result. For some reason, this week no company had any cars to rent! This is Heathrow, one of the world's busiest airports. I'd booked ages in advance so was OK but people who rolled up on the off chance were totally out of luck. At Hertz, it was a pick a number and wait your turn thing! Unbelievable. 

It wasn't until our last day at Gatwick that we managed a full English breakfast! Very nice.

Great time of year to visit Bermuda by the way. Sunny and warm, yet no humidity. We stayed with Charmaine and David again and it was just lovely to catch up with friends. Dee Dee was working there too so we were able to  hang out with him as well.

Aunty Blanche's 90th birthday party was lovely. She got to sit next to her favourite person, Dee Dee, so was very happy. Very pleased to be there with her. Happy Birthday Aunt Blanche!

It was also lobster season so we just had to...

A week or so before we arrived, this hurricane came to visit. It was a bad one causing plenty of damage. Very unusual for Bermuda. No loss of life thankfully.

7. Toronto

We've a condo in downtown Toronto which is a lovely place to stay, however we have also found that the best long distance routing from Penang is first via Hong Kong and then onto wherever via Cathay Pacific. Direct to London and Zurich going west, and direct to New York and Toronto heading east. All are very long of course but the Toronto routing really works out best for us. Only for a few days this time.

8. Hong Kong/Penang

Transiting through HK still hasn't been impacted by the troubles going on there ... yet. 

Life and Death in Penang, well mostly Death really

We just came back for a trek that took us round the world, rather to our surprise. It just happened that way. We wanted to be with Indy and Cat when their new baby was born (our first grandchild!!) and then we sort of just carried on. I will write about that in a separate post but during our trek we for some reason realised that we have just done maybe two things as a tourist/visitor in the near two years since we arrived in Penang. OK we had sort of planned it this way thinking that we'd go with visitors, but when that happened we .... well didn't. Whoops and all that. So we decided we'd do something about it when we got back.

There's a monthly newsletter sent around by mailing list by a long time resident English lady named Michelle who just loves this place and just loves organising things, or so it seems to me. Anyway first up was a tour of the old graveyards in Georgetown narrated by a guy we'd run into one of our other tours, Clement. Very informative it was too. Particularly as Georgetown has magnificent colonial heritage dating back to first inhabitation in 1786 under the purview of one Francis Light and his employers, the East India Company.

Francis Light only lasted 5 years in Georgetown before he succumbed. He didn't want a fancy gravestone so was originally buried very simply but about 100 years later in full Victorian vanity, the local burghers upgraded him to this one.

Back then of course the population was tiny and the first settlers started in the area of the harbour from where the town expanded outwards. However small the population was did not deter the onset of death for this is the tropics, aka the white man's grave. So graveyards were needed and needed fast. Immediately however rose a problem... what to do about the catholics.

The Jackson family was particularly unfortunate

Sounds ridiculous today, but really does it? Back in the late 18th century, church was much stronger than today and from Great Britain it was solidly protestant, and in the early days solidly Church of England (CofE). The laws of the land (now including Penang) discriminated actively against catholics primarily via the Act of Settlement which prevent catholics from holding any high office (still do as this Act has never been repealed). The law itself is a hangover from the end of the Stuart era and start of the Hannoverians, which in itself is a longer hangover from the Civil War, and was aimed at securing royal succession in Protestant hands as both the last Stuart Queens (Mary and Anne) could not keep any of their children alive whilst Dad (the ousted James II) and his catholic heirs had no such problem (remember Bonny Prince Charlie?). Check it out on Wikipedia here for the fuller story. Anyway when the couple of hundred first colonists/settlers arrived, they included both protestants and catholics and the local bacteria and other bugs had no problem getting stuck into the pair of them irrespective of religion. So graveyards.

First, there was a sort of NIMBY thing regarding graveyards so they were set aside well out of town (then anyway, not so now) and on land that was rather low lying that nobody really wanted to build upon anyway. A wall was built delineating the protestant side from the catholic side with the lower land (and hence far more prone to flooding) given over to the catholics. Typical.

The very ornate gravestones apparently are all Scottish families, but you can see the wall in the background

Second, what to do about all those others who also showed up? In addition to the original settlers came traders from other nations as well as people from the mainland and elsewhere seeking work in the new bustling trading entrepôt (which immediately shut down Malacca as a place of importance). The Dutch retreated (actually they were ejected) to Java, their possession. Nearly forgot and backing up a bit, when the Dutch originally arrived in the early 16th century, they kicked out the incumbent Portuguese who were/are catholics. In the 150 years or so that the Portuguese had been in Malacca and elsewhere they had intermarried so virtually everyone was Eurasian by now and with the Dutch persecuting catholics, they simply left with many going to Phuket where by coincidence they met with the same but younger Francis Light who later founded Penang. He took up with a Eurasian girl (probably married her but this would have been a social gaffe of the first order back then, so he said nothing about it to his employers) and when he came to Penang and saw how many new settlers were catching everything going and dying in droves, invited the Phuket Portuguese to come along and pad out the numbers again.

Aaaagh! What a palaver. All these catholics but at least this lot were almost European. Can't have any of the new locals in the graveyards too.

Third, some of the locals (Chinese, Indians, Armenians, etc.) turned out to be terrific businessmen and did really well becoming extremely wealthy in the process. It also transpired that they were prone to dying too (although not so young as the newbies).

The upshot to all this was the typical British muddle/compromise. If you had the wherewithal, you were in.... except the catholics who went the other side of the wall.

However the Japanese were no respecters of well, pretty much everything if you read about their actions in WWII and simply bombed the place to bits.  Part of it anyway. The Catholic side was locked up so we couldn't go inside but looked pretty much empty of gravestones. If it wasn't the bombing, it was the flooding most like. No, most likely the protestants!

Spare a thought for the Jews though. They had been in Penang since the start but in far smaller numbers. Clement said the Jews that came to Penang were from the Middle East not Europe. Turkey, Persia, Mesopotamia. They were/are a different tribe to the Europeans and had their own ceremonies and ways. Francis Light when he set to creating Georgetown created enclaves for the various races and sects. The Jews had their own together with one synagogue and one graveyard.

The different Jewish tribes have different burial traditions. Some of the gravestones are triangular, some rounded. All are supposed to point towards Jerusalem.

All gone now. The Jews left after the Seven Day War in 1967 for Israel, the synagogue closed but the graveyard which was slated for redevelopment was saved by private donations (as it is to this day). It is maintained by an Indian family and remains beautifully cared for. This ensures that people don't break in and desecrate the gravestones (which did happen in the past).

These days the main Christian graveyard is on Western Road and is pretty huge. Again the theme throughout is that they are beautifully maintained. Clement tried to raise some enthusiasm for this graveyard but in reality it was far less interesting than the older ones. Exception being the mausoleum remembering the crew of a Russian warship which had the misfortune to be visiting Penang at the outbreak of WWI. A German raider, the Emden, snuck in at dusk one day and sunk the Russian vessel with heavy loss of life. Thankfully not the captain... he was tucked up in bed at the E&O Hotel with his mistress. History relates that he was recalled and court martialled. Every year the Russian ambassador visits the site where a remembrance ceremony is held on the anniversary of the action. Clement said this happened even during the Soviet era. Nice.

By now, all were going through graveyard fatigue so clearly this was the time for the visit to the new catholic cemetery. Typical protestant bias! I've driven past the graveyard a hundred times, its on a main road, but had never seen it before so this was nice.

The names were mainly Chinese with a few Portuguese names like De Silva and Perreira thrown in for good measure along with some Indian and western names. But really... no trees! In every other cemetery there were lovely trees giving pleasant shade but here... nothing! Hope some get planted soon.

Perspective

The world or at least the western world seems to be having a mass frenzy of self examination about the environment. The young girl that seems so angry about everything and is blaming big business (or so it seems to me, but it could as well be grown ups generally) for ruining her future is embarrassing large global enterprises into having a more eco-friendly corporate policy. It seems to be working (the embarrassing bit, not sadly the actual impact on anything bit) at least in the UK where all political parties are promising zero carbon this and that by what seems like the middle of next week if the electorate just vote for them at the 12th December general election. This is all just fine as I believe that the world is in an environmentally sticky position and something needs to be done. It's just that perspective is massively missing and the action is being focussed on in all the wrong places.

Now I don't want to sermonize, rant or moralise about things, particularly the rights and wrongs of the whole environmental question, but it does seem to me that turning off lights or no longer using single use plastic bags doesn't really help much despite what the media and environmental activists may say. This isn't a popular position to have but I recently found someone that agrees with me. Here's an excerpt (read the whole thing here):

But we aren’t very good at thinking about scales and proportions. In general, I think, we assign things a value of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and bracket them all together in those two categories. For instance, we feel good when we take a bag-for-life to reduce plastic bag use. But you can make 1,000 bags for 6kWh, while boiling a kettle takes about 0.1kWh, so you could make 16 plastic bags for the energy cost of just one round of tea.

From a purely climate point of view, your plastic bags are largely irrelevant. Reducing plastic waste is also good, of course, although again, Western countries account for a tiny fraction of the ocean pollution we worry about — almost all of it comes from Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, in fact.

This last comment caught my eye for as someone spending a lot of time in Penang, Malaysia, I see the evidence of this every day. The above article redirected me to the underlying statistics (see here) from the Our World in Data website from which I found a whole raft of data supporting this position. Basically, if nothing changes to the way in which pollution of all sorts is made, anything done by virtually anybody in the West is simply a rounding error.

Now...

... and projected

What a dismal prospect and I will leave you with this additional factoid:

None of this is meant to make you stop taking care over the small things: look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves, as they say. There’s nothing wrong with stopping using plastic bags, although you need to be very careful that you don’t lose your cotton bags-for-life, since they use about 100 times as much energy to make.

Keep your perspective.