banyanman's blog

Jetstar’s crazy cyber-bureaucracy

2011-11-04T21:47:00.001+08:00

A couple of months ago I booked a flight for my wife on Jetstar from Darwin to Manila. The flight was scheduled to leave at 7.00 pm and arrive at 9.40 pm.

About a month after booking the flight I received an email from Jetstar stating:“Jetstar is sorry to inform you that since you made your booking, your flight schedule has been changed. We understand it can be frustrating when plans change, and we apologise for any inconvenience caused. While we try to avoid any changes to our timetable, in this instance it was unavoidable. The change to the schedule has been made so we can maximise our aircraft utilisation and continue to offer you everyday low fares. Please click the button above to be directed to our website. Once there follow the prompts to accept the change. If your new flight time is not acceptable please contact our Reservations team for other available alternatives.”

When I checked the flight schedule I discovered that the only thing that had changed was the arrival time – which had been amended from 9.40 pm to 9.45 pm.

Who cares? Flights rarely arrive right on time, and five minutes is neither here nor there after a four hour international flight – especially when weather and air traffic congestion regularly causes much longer delays, and you can spend anything up to an hour queuing for immigration and waiting for baggage.

But the email asked that the change be “accepted” by clicking a button, so I thought I’d better do that to make sure the reservation was retained in the system.

The button took me to the Jetstar website where a screen asked me to click a box accepting the change and print the page and attach it to the e-ticket.

I did not print the page and attach it to the e-ticket (it did not state what the consequences of that would be – “Sorry Madam, you will not be permitted to board the flight as you did not waste a sheet of paper and costly ink to print an extra page to attach to your e-ticket to show that your flight will be arriving five minutes late”) but I did click the box and then the ‘Accept’ button.

That produced a pop-up panel which said: “Are you sure you want to acknowledge the changes made to your reservation?”

I looked for a button which said “No, I don’t care whether I acknowledge this or not, I am only doing this because you are the ones who started this stupid cyber-bureaucracy”.

But there was no such button. My only choices were ‘OK’ or ‘Cancel’.

I pressed the “OK” button. But that just returned me to the same screen as before. I tried it again a couple of times, and it kept returning me to the same screen.“Maybe I am supposed to press the ‘Cancel’ button,” I thought. But I was hesitant to do that fearing the next screen I would see would be: “Congratulations, you have successfully cancelled your reservation”.

So I gave up.

About a month later I received the same email again. I guess that was because I had not yet accepted the late arrival change.

I tried all the above steps again with the same result, alternating between the screen that said “Accept” and the pop-up box that said “OK”.

So I gave up again.

My wife is due to travel in about a week. I fear that when she gets to the check-in counter she will be told: “Our computer records show that your brainless husband has spent one hour and twenty minutes of his valuable time trying to accept our advice that your flight arrival time has been changed from 9.40 pm to 9.45 pm. As he was not able to work out how to accept this change, you will be required to leave the aircraft at 9.40 pm”.

NBC News - Nothing Beyond California?

2011-10-12T23:32:00.002+08:00

Today BBC World disappeared from our channel line-up at home. I knew it was going to disappear because our cable service provider, SkyCable, had been running a crawler across the screen for the past week saying that if we wanted to continue to watch BBC World we would have to get a ‘digibox’ – whatever that is.

We only have two international news channels on our service – BBC World and CNN International – and apart from an occasional movie, they are the only channels I ever watch (most of my other TV viewing is done online these days, and movies downloaded to my iPad).

When I turned on the TV this evening the screen was a ghostly grey as I had left it tuned to the BBC channel number (I normally watch BBC for about 70% of the time and CNN for the other 30%). I switched over to CNN, but there was just another boring Piers Morgan celebrity interview on, so I went surfing through the other channels to see if I could find any English news anywhere. To my surprise I discovered a channel called Talk TV that seemed to be a compilation of NBC programmes from the US. At that moment the Today Show was just starting which included a national news bulletin from their New York studios.

I watched the full bulletin which led with the story on the plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington DC, had lots of stories about the Republican candidates vying for the nomination to run against Obama next year, and finished with a story about a woman who got lost in a cornfield maze (a maize maze?) and couldn’t find her way out. She had apparently called 911 from her mobile phone and the police went to ‘rescue’ her from the maze (which took them about one minute according to the reporter).

I realised then that the bulletin had not contained a single story about anything that had happened overseas, so I guess that the NBC news editor had decided that a woman lost in a maze would be of more interest to US viewers than the final battle for Sirte, the passing of the carbon tax in Australia, the release of political prisoners in Myanmar, the devastating floods in Thailand or the jailing of the former Ukrainian prime minister.

Is it little wonder than the average American has no clue about what is going on in the rest of the world?

I’d better call SkyCable in the morning and find out how much they are going to hit my pocket for one of their ‘digiboxes’. As much as I like some of the programming on CNN (Fareed Zakaria’s GPS is one of their best offerings), I need an alternative when Piers Morgan is on his soapbox.

The good luck/bad luck bird

2011-03-06T22:33:00.000+08:00

I posted this photograph to my Facebook wall yesterday to see if any of my Malaysian friends could identify the bird. I took the photograph last December in the restaurant at the bird park in Kuala Lumpur (where it had landed next to my table and was watching me eat) so I had assumed that it was a bird from the Borneo rainforest, given its striking colours.

However, I was wrong. Turns out it is an African ground hornbill (thanks for identifying it, Angie). When I looked it up on the Internet, I discovered quite a few interesting facts about this bird. Apparently female birds lay two eggs, but they only raise one chick, leaving the other to die within a few days.

According to some information posted by the Honolulu Zoo (which has two of the birds) the African ground hornbill is classified as ‘vulnerable’ in South Africa now (which is the next classification down from ‘endangered’) because they can now only be found in reserves (with about 700 birds in the Kruger National Park). The zoo’s website states:

“In South Africa there has been a large decline in their numbers for a number of reasons. They are popular to use as ‘muti’ or tribal medicine among some of the indigenous people of South Africa. The brain of a ground hornbill, if kept in a village, is reputed to bring the village luck. Irate homeowners kill them because they will attack windows, breaking them, if they encounter their reflections. They are also vulnerable to picking up poison baits that are set out for predators. Currently there is a conservation project underway in South Africa, in which the second chick from a nest is taken before it dies and raised and released to help increase their numbers.”

That’s good news that efforts are being made to help prevent these birds from becoming an endangered species.

Some other facts on the website that I found interesting related to the local folklore surrounding the African ground hornbill. The Masai believe that the bird should never be killed because it will bring bad luck, but if one lands on the roof of a house, the occupants must move immediately or they believe death will ensue.

Seems this bird has a split personality in African folklore. In some circumstances it brings good luck, on other occasions it brings bad luck.

I am pleased to report that death did not ensue after it landed next to my table at the Kuala Lumpur bird park!

Monkeys suck their thumbs too

2010-12-17T22:09:00.001+08:00

I was walking back to my car after having lunch at the Kuala Lumpur bird park today when I spotted a monkey on a waste bin across the road eating banana skins from the bin. I took a few photographs as she had a cute baby monkey hanging onto her chest. When I got back to the hotel in the evening, I downloaded the photos onto my laptop. On a larger screen the baby didn’t look quite so cute (their faces look like old men!) but I noticed it was sucking its thumb. I guess that must be something that monkey babies and human babies have in common.

Water views, but caveat emptor

2010-12-01T17:58:00.009+08:00

We arrived in Manila today after an 11 hour flight from Honolulu - the last leg of our four and a half months' trip around the Pacific. As we were flying in over Laguna de Bay, I noticed that a new sub-division of houses had been built on low lying land close to the water. Up until now I had only seen predominantly squatter homes in this area.

Why on earth would the local authorities permit building on such flood prone land? It is not long since Manila was devastated by floods, and there has been so much debate since then about the need to build away from flood prone areas because of global warming and rising sea levels, yet new homes are continuing to be built in areas that will be at risk of inundation by water in future years.

It was difficult to see from the air exactly how high above the surrounding water the houses have been built, so I shouldn't be too critical until I have had a look at the area from the ground. So I made a note to go and have a look at this sub-division in the next wet season. Might make an interesting case study.

American Airlines – a goddamn awful airline

2010-11-24T23:33:00.007+08:00

Over the past four decades I’ve flown on most of the world’s major airlines – except one that is: American Airlines (AA). Up until 9/11, that wasn’t for any particular reason. It just happened that way. After 9/11, I made a point of avoiding AA because of its name. It seemed to me that AA would be the first choice of Al Qaeda in any future attacks because of its ‘American’ name.

But that was until today when I found myself on a codeshare flight from Toronto to Honolulu that I had booked through Qantas but turned out to be on American Airlines planes. It was actually two flights because it was via Dallas-Fort Worth and we had to change planes there. It was an early departure out of Toronto – 6.45 am – so we checked in at 4.45 am. The lines for immigration and security were a mile long, so we only had time to grab a yoghurt parfait and a coffee before boarding. That didn’t worry us as we knew AA was a full service airline in the One World alliance, so we looked forward having breakfast on board on the three hour flight to DFW.

After take-off the flight attendants came through offering a drink. After an hour or so I was getting hungry and started wondering when the meal service would start. I looked back down the plane to see if there was any activity in the galley – but there was none. So I walked down the back and found the flight attendants sitting in the rear seats, one reading a book and one filling in a crossword puzzle. I asked when breakfast would be served. One of the flight attendants raised her eyebrows, then frowned, and replied: “there is no food on this flight”. She frowned again as if to suggest I was crazy to think the airline would be serving breakfast, and turned back to her crossword puzzle without any further explanation as to why a three hour 6.45 am flight on a supposedly full service airline would not be serving breakfast. There was no food for sale either, so AA wasn’t even offering as good a service as a budget airline.

I had read stories in the past about American airlines cutting costs and imposing extra charges for checking baggage, but I’d not heard anything about them cutting out the food service entirely.

When we got to DFW, I went to an AA service desk and asked the clerk there whether a meal would be served on the flight to Honolulu. I had assumed that perhaps AA had cut out its meal service on shorter flights, but surely on an eight and a half hour flight to Honolulu there would be meal served. But I was wrong. She asked if I was flying first class. I said no, to which she replied “you can buy a sandwich on board”.

There were three hours between the flights so I took the opportunity to have some lunch at the airport and buy some snacks for the rest of the trip, but what I found quite incredulous was the announcement at the boarding gate before our flight left. The gate clerk announced that due to the incoming flight being full, the cleaning of the plane would take longer than usual and therefore the flight would be leaving 15 minutes late. She then went on to suggest that passengers use this time to go buy some food because “we’ve got some food on board to sell but there’s not enough for everyone and eight hours 40 minutes is a long time” (referring to the estimated flight time). Not the sort of announcement I would expect from a full service airline!

The flight actually left 50 minutes late because after the cleaners had finished they announced that there were some “technical problems that had to be fixed” but eventually we were on our way – or so we thought.

About three hours into the flight the pilot came on the PA to advise that we would be diverting to San Francisco because there was a technical problem. He said it was nothing serious but he didn’t want to fly over the Pacific with it. He said parts were available in San Francisco and it should take about an hour to fix on the ground. “Nothing to worry about, folks” he said.

Nothing to worry about? Maybe not, but when we landed in San Francisco we were quickly surrounded by fire engines.

AA never did tell us what was wrong except that they “needed to replace a switch”. That took two and a half hours instead of one. When we were eventually airborne again I wondered whether AA would try and make up for all the delays by offering passengers a meal (after all we were now running over four hours late, and wouldn’t arrive in Honolulu until 3 am Toronto time). But no, all we got was a recorded announcement saying “American Airlines and One World airlines thank you for choosing to fly American Airlines”. I wonder how many passengers would have been thinking “for the last time”?

All we got was a single drink again and then the flight attendants disappeared until it was ready to prepare the cabin for landing in Honolulu. And I wasn’t impressed with the condition of the plane either. The headset socket in my seat wasn’t working so I couldn’t watch the movie (which was only on a small screen about five rows in front of me; so difficult to see) and the passengers about three rows in front of me kept complaining about a bad smell around their seats (fortunately I only got a few whiffs of it).

I’ve not flown on many airlines worse than AA. I’d rate it on a par with Uzbekistan Airlines. Maybe slightly better because Uzbekistan Airlines probably wouldn’t bother landing if they had a technical problem – but at least Uzbekistan Airlines offers a meal service on flights that are eight hours long (although admittedly not very appetizing).

What amazes me most about the atrocious AA service is that they are still part of the One World alliance. Having flown on most of the other One World airlines, I can say without fear of contradiction that AA is not in the same class. It puzzles me that One World would still want to have an airline in its alliance that doesn’t even match the service standards of many budget airlines in the US (e.g. JetBlue who offer free drinks and snacks, and have flight attendants who are attentive throughout the flight).

So I will put my two flights on AA (which turned out to be three) down to experience, but I certainly won’t be flying on them again.

No age limit for this Cuban model

2010-11-04T23:10:00.000+08:00

Whilst walking around Havana’s old town this morning, I came across an old woman sitting against a concrete wall in one of the side-streets, puffing on Cuban cigars and posing for photographs in exchange for dollars.

I don’t normally like to pay for posed photographs - to me they look too touristy - so I just walked on by. But after walking another couple of blocks I regretted not taking advantage of the photo opportunity, because she looked such a character. So I turned around and went back, and she was still there, seemingly doing a roaring trade posing for tourists who were snapping away with their cameras and handing over dollars.

I took my photograph (above) and paid my dollar and went on my way. I guess she was making a good living ‘modeling’ for tourists – certainly enough to keep herself well supplied in Cuban cigars. Not sure that the cigars were doing much for her complexion though (click on the photo to enlarge and you'll see what I mean!)

A day with the Embera Indians

2010-10-24T20:57:00.001+08:00

Today we visited an Embera Indian village north of Panama City. It was a fascinating experience providing an opportunity to learn first-hand about their culture and how they live. To reach the village, we traveled by road for about an hour out of Panama City towards Colon, and then about 30 minutes by dugout canoe down a river and across a lake. The village has no road access.

The Embera are one of eight indigenous groups that live in different parts of Panama. Sometimes the Embera and Wounaan (which have similar cultures but speak different languages) are referred to as Chocoe Indians, so that’s why there are references to there being seven indigenous groups, rather than eight. The village we visited comprised 16 families, most of whom were relocated from the Darien Gap about 15 years ago (due to raids on their villages by FARC guerrillas from Colombia).

It was a wonderful day. We were welcomed by one of the village chiefs, and it looked like the whole village came out to meet us.

Later the village medicine man showed us around, and then they cooked us a lunch of fresh fish and fried plantains.

It was so peaceful (the visitors comprised just four people – me, my wife, an American film maker and a guide/interpreter) and so far removed from the reality of modern day living, that when it came time to leave in the afternoon, we really didn't want to go.

This teenage girl looked so sad the whole time we were there (but I took quite a few photographs of her as she was very photogenic). I guess she was about 13 or 14 and maybe suffering ‘puberty blues’. In the Embera culture, girls get married soon after puberty. Most are married between 14 and 17. They will marry only other Embera or Wounaan. It is rare for them to leave their villages to live in the ‘outside world’. It’s hard to know whether they are better off living the simple lifestyle that their culture provides, or whether they should be given the opportunity to join the modern world. That’s a question that can be debated for hours.

This little girl was another that I photographed quite a lot during the day as she had a cheeky smile and was happy to be photographed.

These children (they looked to be between 4 and 7 years old) were paddling a large dugout canoe across the lake to feed some monkeys living on a island in the lake. They were doing it without any adult supervision. Parents in western countries would probably freak out at kids so young doing something like that, but I guess in the Embera culture this is how kids have fun.

The medicine man told us about some of the many medicinal plants that they grow in the village. Illnesses are treated almost entirely with herbal remedies. All of the villagers looked very healthy, so I guess his remedies must be effective.

He also told us that he is alive because of this tree. He said his mother drank a tea made from the leaves when she was 60 years old – way past menopause – after which she gave birth to him.

If you'd like to see more of the photos that I took at the Embera Indian village, please follow this link:
http://www.xyzasia.com/other-photo-albums/embera-indian-village

The fascinating Uros islands

2010-10-08T21:33:00.005+08:00

After settling into the Intiqa Hotel after our arrival from Copacabana, we strolled down the street and had a nice lunch at an Italian restaurant that the hotel had recommended in the town square. The lunch was excellent – probably the best food we had eaten for about 10 days – and there was an interesting array of shops along the street between our hotel and the town square. Puno looked to be a much more interesting town than it appeared from what I had read on the Internet, so we were somewhat disappointed that we had planned the itinerary to spend less than 24 hours here. On the way back to the hotel I bought a knitted Alpaca wool sweater from an old woman on the street. It was less than US$20 and a good fit for me.

In the afternoon we took a boat with a guide out onto Lake Titicaca to visit the famous Uros Islands – a group of about 40 floating islands in the northern section of the lake.

The islands are made of totora reeds. The roots of the reeds are used to construct the base of the islands – several metres thick – and cut reeds are used for the surface which is soft and spongy to walk on. The islands are anchored to the lake bottom by ropes tied to sticks.

The Uros are descendants of pre-Inca people and they still live a traditional lifestyle – although these days they have modern technology such as solar panels and motor boats (the traditional reed boats with the puma heads that you see in some of these photographs are now used just for giving rides to tourists).

Between three and 10 families live on each island. Children go to school on the mainland by boat. Tourism provides additional income for the Uros, but it is a challenge for them maintaining a traditional lifestyle in the face of rising tourist numbers.

It was a most interesting afternoon. We had hired a private boat so there was just the four of us and our guide, so the visit was more intimate (I don't think I would have enjoyed it so much joining an organised tour). There were five families living on the island that we visited and they took us around a few of the other islands in one of the reed boats.

If you'd like to see more of the photos that I took on the Uros islands, please follow this link:
http://www.xyzasia.com/other-photo-albums/uros-islands

Maybank shows how to screw up a global brand

2010-05-20T23:13:00.005+08:00

If any Malaysian students of marketing are looking for a good case study on how to degrade a good brand, they need look no further than the outcome of the 'Strategic Alliance' between Malayan Banking Bhd (Maybank) and American Express Inc (Amex).

I've had an Amex charge card since 1980, and they've always been the most efficient credit card company that I have ever dealt with . . . until about three or four years ago that is. Back in 2003, Amex was a stand alone charge card in Malaysia, like it was in Australia where I had my first Amex card. But then on 3 December 2003, Amex and Maybank announced a 'Strategic Alliance' that would purportedly offer “the combined strength, convenience and rewards of two leading institutions”.

The 'Strategic Alliance' would involve Maybank taking over “all operations . . . including billing and accounting, customer service, credit management and charge authorizations, as well as marketing”.

I didn't notice much change for about three years (knowing now how inefficient Maybank is, I guess that it took them that long to start doing any damage), but then one day towards the end of 2007 I got a call from Maybank asking why my Amex account had not been paid. I told them that it was on auto-debit from my RHB bank account – and always had been since I transferred my Amex account to Malaysia in 1998 – so the problem must have been at their end.

Over the next few weeks I kept getting the same call from different customer service agents, and I kept telling them to check the auto-debit, until one day one of the agents said “Oh we don't accept auto-debit from RHB accounts any more – you will have to open a Maybank account”.

Well, then the fun and games started. Just trying to open an account with Maybank was like trying to get a visa for an Israeli to visit Iran, and over the next three years I started to gain some insights into why Malaysians complain so much about Maybank. I had always found Malaysian banks fairly efficient – I had banked mainly with RHB but also did a fair bit of business through CIMB – but OMG it is hard to describe the bureaucracy and inefficiency that I have experienced as a Maybank customer since early 2008 when I had to open a Maybank account.

But that's not the reason for this blog post. I could write a book on some of the crazy things that I have had to endure on visits to Maybank branches. The purpose of this blog post is to comment on Maybank's latest fiasco with the American Express website in Malaysia.

About a month ago I went to log onto the Amex website to check the exchange rate on some hotel charges I had put on the card in Jakarta, so that I could complete my expenses claim at the office. To my surprise I discovered a notice on the website that said:

“Due to a systems upgrade on 5 April 2010, all Online Services users will be unable to view their transaction history. New Online Services registrations have also been temporarily disabled. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and expect the upgraded service to be available in May 2010. Should you require any assistance, please feel free to contact American Express at 1800-88-9559.

I think it was about 18 April that I logged on, so that meant the website had been down for about two weeks by then. I had seen banks do upgrades to their websites many times and take it offline overnight – but never for two weeks.

So I rang the 1800 number and asked how I could check my account. The customer service agent said that I would have to wait until 1 May when the website would be back up, but in the meantime they could link my Amex account to my Maybank account, so I could access it through the Maybank online banking system.

He told me that it would take two days to do that, so I waited for a couple of days, checked my Maybank account – and there was no Amex account showing there. I called back and a different customer service agent couldn't tell me what had gone wrong, but said she would link the accounts straight away – but it would still take two days before I could access it. Another two days went by, no sign of the account, so another call to the 1800 number and same apology and same promise to link the accounts.

It is now more than a month since I first called, and the accounts still aren't linked.

In the meantime I called and asked how else I can access my charges. The customer service agent suggested that she could send me a fax of my statement – but again that would take two days. So I asked her to do that, but no fax came after two days. Another call, another apology, another promise, and still no fax to this day.

Up until the end of April the customer service agents were promising that the site would be back up by 1 May. When that date came and went, they promised it would be back up by the middle of May. It is now 20th May and the website is still not back online. I have no idea what the latest promise is because every time I try to call them now, nobody answers the phone. I just get a continuous recording saying "Sorry, all our executives are busy" (I guess they are busy fielding complaints).

In a few days time I expect the dead-tree copy of my Amex statement to arrive by snail mail, so I will eventually be able to see what I have spent a month ago and do my expenses claim. But it has probably cost me more time on the phone to Maybank in the past month than my claim was worth.

In the past four years my opinion of American Express, on a scale of one to ten, has gone from about a nine to zero. My opinion of Maybank was never much better than about a one, and that's gone to zero too.

It puzzles me as to how a global brand like American Express can let a local bank, whose customer service if bordering on incompetency, take over management of their brand and drive it into the gutter.

So what’s the take on this for students of marketing? Simply that if a multi-national company franchises its brand (which is effectively what Amex did with Maybank through its ‘strategic alliance’), there should be some mechanism by which the brand owner can monitor and if necessary supervise day-to-day operations to ensure that the reputation of the brand is not damaged through sub-standard customer service.

In 2002 BusinessWeek magazine rated American Express No 15 in their Top 100 Global Brands listing. In 2009 American Express had slipped to No 22 in the same listing. I wonder how much Maybank contributed to that?

Strange stares at Zouk Cafe Bar

2010-03-07T13:44:00.004+08:00

Here is a short review of the Zouk Cafe Bar that recently opened in Kuala Lumpur's Gardens Mall:

Excellent food – lousy service.

Okay, maybe I should explain the 'lousy service' bit.

My wife and I went there for dinner last night. She had eaten lunch there a couple of times since it opened in December, and said the food was good. We seated ourselves when we arrived because the staff seemed too busy to notice us standing at the entrance (even though the place was only a third full). We then asked one of the passing waiters to bring us some menus, which he did promptly. It was a while before he came back, and when he did he said: “Are you ready for me to take your order?”. “Yes” we replied. He then picked up the menus and took them away – and that was the last we saw of him! We sat there somewhat bewildered, and after it was apparent that he wasn't coming back, we called one of the waitresses over to take our order.

I ordered a Caesar salad with chicken and a glass of Chardonnay. “Sorry we've run out of white wine”, she said. “Okay, well just give me an iced lemon tea instead”, I replied. And then she walked off without taking my wife's order! My wife called her back and said: “Aren't you going to take my order as well?” to which the waitress just stared at her as if she was making a very strange request.

Our food came about 10 minutes later, and I had no complaints about the Caesar salad – the lettuce was very fresh (a rarity amongst many other KL restaurants where the lettuce always has brown edges from being cut up hours before) and I liked the fact that Zouk provided the dressing on the side – but it was a very small portion. I finished my salad when my wife was only about a third of the way through her meal, and one of the waiters took my plate away – and then tried to take my wife's plate away as well, even though it was clear she had not finished eating. Then twice before she had finished eating, other waiters came by and tried to take her plate away! It reminded me of one of those episodes of Fawlty Towers where Manuel the waiter had decided that it was time for the guests to finish their meal (or was it Basil Fawlty?).

As I was still hungry, I asked for the menu again and ordered a bowl of wild mushroom soup. As I was waiting for the soup, the waitress that had originally taken our order walked by with a glass of white wine for one of the other tables. I called out to her and said: “Hey I thought you said you had run out of white wine?” to which I just got another strange stare as if she didn't understand a word I was saying.

My soup came about 25 minutes later after several reminders to other waiters (I think they had forgotten about it). Again it was excellent – freshly made and very tasty (and a better sized portion than the salad).

So no complaints about the food at Zouk – but OMG the service is woeful.

The strange logic of Jetstar's change fees

2010-03-05T23:53:00.001+08:00

I recently booked a flight with Jetstar from Kuala Lumpur down to Singapore for travel in July. The fare including taxes was a very reasonable MYR95 (about US$27) – can't complain about that.

Today I decided to go down a day earlier and went to check the fares on their website – still the same MYR95 – that's lucky I thought.

I retrieved my booking and changed the flight, but then up popped a change fee – of MYR110.

So if I want to change my flight to the previous day it will cost me MYR110. But if I just forget about the flight I had already booked and do a new booking for the previous day, it will only cost me MYR95.

What is the logic of that?

It's actually encouraging people to abandon existing bookings and buy a new ticket, which would mean I wouldn't turn up the following day and Jetstar would have an empty seat that they could have sold if they had made the change fee a more reasonable price – at least less than the cost of doing a new booking.

I thought budget airlines were supposed to be efficient inventory managers.

The amazing Delhi Book Store

2010-02-25T23:40:00.002+08:00

I visited the Delhi Book Store today – reputed to be the largest book store in Asia - and what a strange experience that was.

I had read that the Delhi Book Store stocked many books that were not available in other countries, so I thought I would check it out to see what books they might have on tropical horticulture. Their website says they have 99,000 titles on display in a 20,000 sq ft showroom on five floors, so I was expecting to see a flashy store-front like a Borders or a Kinokinuya. But it is located in a grey and very unimposing building in a busy backstreet of Darya Gani (see photo below), about 10-15 minutes in a taxi from the centre of Delhi, which you would never guess was a book store but for the sign on the front of the building.

Inside, the place looks much more like a book store, although the ground floor felt more like a library with chairs and tables for reading:

My first surprise was to discover that I was the only customer. It was late morning, so I would have expected to see many more people in the store (although there were plenty of staff about). The two lower floors were devoted to medical books – tens of thousands of titles on everything from brain surgery to parisitology. Some of the titles I saw were on very obscure topics such as 'Intestinal Anisakiasis in Japan' (which I gather is something you get from eating infected fish in Japan) and 'Percutaeous Lumbar Discectomy for Dummies' (okay, I admit I partly made that second one up).

I asked one of the staff where the titles on tropical horticulture were, and one of them took me up to the third floor and handed me over to another staff member. There were no elevators, so we walked up some narrow marble staircases which were stacked with thousands of books against the wall. I guess they must have run out of storage space elsewhere in the store. In any other country that would be regarded as a fire hazard – but hey this is India!

The sales guy on the third floor explained that they did not have any Indian books on horticulture (which was really what I had come for) because all their titles were imported, but showed me what they had. I discovered a few interesting titles that I had not seen before – a book on botanical orchids, an encyclopedia of mushrooms (an English translation from a French book) and a book titled 'Creative Propagation'. The sales guy who had been watching over my shoulder as I browsed the shelves said: “That's an excellent book on propagation, sir. I would highly recommend it to you”. I wondered whether he was a student of horticulture in his spare time, or whether that was just standard sales spiel that they were taught at the Delhi Book Store. I didn't feel entirely comfortable having him hanging around all the time whilst I was browsing, but at least it was convenient having him hold the books for me.

I also found in one of the other sections on the same floor a book on digital imaging that looked interesting, so I added that to the other three and then asked the sales guy how much the books were (none of them had price labels). This is where things got interesting.

The sales guy took me and the books over to a portly Sikh with a bushy beard, looking resplendent in a bright turban, sitting behind a large empty desk on the other side of the third floor, in front of what looked like one of those home altars with carvings of Indian gods and incense sticks burning in bronze urns (the smell of burning incense permeates the whole book store). He pulled out a pad of blank paper from a drawer in the desk, and after glancing at each book, wrote down on the pad: 1 x 400, 1 x 500, 2 x 750.

He tore off the top sheet and showed it to me. “These are the prices of the books. Okay with you?” The prices looked fine to me – much cheaper than I expected. Even the most expensive books (the book on botanical orchids and the encyclopedia of mushrooms) were only 750 rupees (about US$16) and I was sure that you would not be able to buy those for much less than US$40 anywhere else in the world. But what I was amazed about is how he quickly priced the books with only a glance at them. Did he know the price of the 99,000 books in the store in his head? Or was he employed as some sort of estimator to price them on the spot?

After saying I was fine with the prices, the sales guy took the books and the sheet of paper on which the prices were written over to a girl sitting behind a desk on the other side of the floor. I thought she was the cashier, but she only entered the details into a computer and printed out a list of the titles with their prices.

Then we had to go back down to the ground floor where it turned out the cashier was located. The sales guy accompanied me the whole time carrying the books, so I felt like I was getting very personal service. I paid for the books with my credit card, and the cashier then write out an invoice by hand and gave that to me with my credit card receipt. I thought that was the end of the sales process – but no, we had to then go to another desk near the entrance where another girl behind a computer entered the details of the books into her computer from the hand-written invoice (I am guessing that was some sort of inventory management system). After that the sales guy placed the books into a canvas bag and handed them to me, thanking me for my custom.

As I headed out to the street, I saw two other customers entering the store (the only ones I saw in the half hour or so I had been inside), so wondered how this place with all its staff, manual sales processes and enormous inventory made any money – but I suppose as labour is so cheap in India, they don't need to bother about the more modern sales practices that book stores in other parts of the world have adopted.

The Delhi Book Store is certainly bigger than any other book store I have seen in India. It's hard to tell if it really is the largest in Asia, because it's hard to compare with the big book stores in Singapore and Hong Kong which are more spread out. I suppose I could try counting the books next time I go into Kinokinuya in Singapore to see if they have more than 99,000 titles in stock.

(PS added 28 February: When I got home to Kuala Lumpur, I looked up the books on Amazon.com. The botanical orchids book was listed there for US$39.50 – so looks like I got some real bargains in India)

In defence of TripAdvisor ratings

2010-02-06T23:18:00.001+08:00

It seems government officials in the Malaysian state of Melaka have got very upset over two of its hotels – the Mahkota Hotel and the Seri Costa Hotel – being included in TripAdvisor's 'Dirtiest Hotels in Asia 2010' listing.

A story in The Star today commenced:

“State tourism authorities have brushed off traveller's reviews in TripAdvisor, which ranked two hotels (in Melaka) as among the top 10 dirtiest hotels in Asia.

It was not an accurate representation of the situation here and was carried out without a proper rating system, said state Tourism, Culture and Heritage Committee chairman Datuk See Har Cheow”.

With all due respect to Datuk See Har Cheow, let me enlighten him about something: Regular travellers trust TripAdvisor's ratings far more than any 'official' ratings system. Why? Because they are written by REAL travellers who have experienced first hand the services and conditions of the hotel.

I guess that what Datuk See Har Cheow is thinking about when he refers to a “proper” ratings system is one where government officials visit a hotel and give it a rating after ticking off a check-list of items.

First of all, in most south-east Asian countries, such a system would be open to graft and corruption. Nothing new about that. And even if there was no money changing hands, it would be unlikely that such inspections could take place without advance notice being given. But even if government inspectors could conduct inspections unannounced, and were given the budget to stay several nights at the hotel (because that would be the only way they could properly experience the service of the hotel), a single stay is not going to be sufficient to 'properly' rate a hotel.

That's the great thing about TripAdvisor ratings – they are based on feedback from many visitors (over 30 million in fact) over a number of years.

For example, the Mahkota Hotel has (as of today) 63 reviews. Of those, 6 rated it as Excellent, 7 as Very Good, 10 as Average, 12 as Poor, and 28 as Terrible. That in itself illustrates the different perceptions that people have staying at different times, in different rooms and interacting with different staff. For a government officer to make an objective rating based on a single visit (or even two or three visits) would be near impossible because of the obviously variable service and experiences that travellers have experienced at that hotel.

Overall 76% of people who wrote reviews did not recommend the Mahkota Hotel. Instead of complaining about TripAdvisor's ratings, the state government should be chiding the hotel for not doing enough to improve its service. TripAdvisor's reviewers provide independent and objective feedback that hotels should be grateful to receive to lift their game.

As is well illustrated by the fact that the Mahkota Hotel has received ratings from 'Excellent' to 'Terrible', different travellers have different perceptions of what makes a good hotel, but by reading the reviews you can get a good feel of what is right and what is wrong with a hotel.

I have come across a few hotels on TripAdvisor where they have had 50+ reviews and nothing below 'Excellent' or 'Very Good' (and I've stayed in a few of them too and rated them likewise). When hotels get ratings like that it shows that they have worked hard to deserve the top ratings. As a result they achieve high occupancies, but then they have to work even harder to maintain those ratings because people staying there based on the TripAdvisor ratings have high expectations.

So, Datuk See Har Cheow, rather than complaining about TripAdvisor's ratings not being “proper”, you should be using them to identify those hotels in your state that need to pull their socks up.

Going underground in a paddle boat

2010-01-06T23:03:00.001+08:00

Palawan’s most famous tourist attraction is its underground river system which is a listed UNESCO World Heritage Site (its official name is the ‘Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park’). We hired a van and driver for the day to take us there. The price was a very reasonable 3,500 pesos (about US$75). We had to pay another 350 pesos for a permit, 300 pesos for a boat to take us there from Sabang Beach, and entrance fees of 200 pesos each on top of that. Lunch cost us 200 pesos each, so all up the day worked out to less than US$50 a person. The alternative would have been to take an all-inclusive day tour for 1,500 pesos per person which would have been cheaper, but then we wouldn’t have had the flexibility to stop off where we wanted on the way there and back. The boats that operate out of Sabang Beach to the entrance of the underground river system cost 700 pesos per round trip, but we found four people who were willing to allow us to share their boat (they take a maximum of six passengers) so that’s why we paid only 300 pesos for the boat trip. That also enabled us to jump the queue at Sabang Beach because there were already 50-60 people waiting for boats when we got there.

We left Puerto Princesa on the east coast at 9.00 am and arrived at Sabang Beach on the west coast at 11.00 am, after a couple of short stops on the way. Our driver, Danny, drove carefully so it was a comfortable two hours drive through some quite attractive scenery as we crossed from one side of Palawan to the other.

The road was sealed for most of the way, and as we approached the west coast we found ourselves riding on a very good concrete road. Only problem was that the local rice farmers were using half the road to dry their rice. It was good that traffic was light. But on one occasion, as we came around a corner, there was a vehicle on the clear side of the road, so Danny had to drive over the rice in order to avoid it. I asked Danny whether the farmer would be angry that he had driven over his rice. He replied: “Well, if they are going to use half the road, they have to be flexible.” I guess he’s right. The road was built for motor vehicles, not for drying rice.

When we arrived at Sabang Beach, after Danny managed to locate the other two couples willing to share their boat, we boarded for the 20 minute ocean trip north to the entrance of the national park.

That part of the trip on the sea was a bit choppy so I had to keep my camera covered to avoid it getting splashed with sea water.

On arrival at the national park we transferred to a smaller boat to enter the underground river.

The cave system through which we paddled was pitch black and completely natural. There were no lights or any man-made constructions inside. The orange lights that you see in the photos below are from the spotlights that the boatmen use to point out features in the caves.

I have been in so many cave systems in developing countries before – and been disappointed with what I saw (they are usually damaged and polluted) - that I wasn’t expecting that much from this trip. In fact we arranged the trip more to see the west coast of Palawan. But I was very impressed with what I saw in the national park. I lost track of the time that we spent inside the cave system. I suppose it was something like 30-45 minutes, and we traveled for maybe a kilometre or so up the river. The cave system goes on for another 7-8 kilometres, but you need a special permit to go further. There was a lot to see, and I was particularly impressed by how well everything was preserved. My only criticism was that I would have preferred the boatman’s commentary to be a bit more scientific than pointing out stalactites that looked like Sharon Stone’s bum and cracking corny jokes about stalagmites that resembled part of a man’s anatomy. But I guess he wasn’t joking when he told us not to open our mouths when looking up because there were thousands of small bats hanging from the roofs of the caves (the last of the four pictures above shows about 100 bats hanging from a small section of the cavern roof).

As we were walking back to the beach from the entrance to the underground river, our boatman saw a monitor lizard crossing the rainforest track. He ran forward to grab it by the tail to show us. I don’t think the lizard was that impressed!

Back out on the beach there were about a dozen boats waiting to take their passengers back to Sabang Beach.

We had lunch at Sabang Beach before driving back to Puerto Princesa. The beach was completely deserted and stretched for as far as the eye could see. I guess if the west coast of Palawan was not so far off the beaten track, there would be high rise condos behind the trees and hundreds of western tourists soaking up the sun on the sand.

On the way back, Danny stopped on the crest of a hill where a friend of his was building a house. He told me that his friend had bought 2.5 hectares there for 800,000 pesos (about US$17,000). This is the view from his land:

Can there be many other places in the world where you can buy 2.5 hectares with a view like this for $17,000?

Natural farming with worms and microbes

2010-01-05T22:56:00.000+08:00

We visited Aloha House today – an orphanage and organic farm near Baker’s Hill on the outskirts of Puerto Princesa. We met with its director, Keith Mikkelson, who showed us around the farm. He is growing a very wide variety of vegetables and herbs, and also has a fish pond and is raising livestock in quite a compact area.

He has an extensive vermiculture operation as well, and is using African Nightcrawlers which he propagated from the native worms found in water buffalo dung. He is using a method of top harvesting the vermicast that is different to what I have seen in other vermiculture operations. It ensures that only casts are harvested and avoids worms and manure ‘contaminating’ the vermicast.

He has also recently started growing organic mushrooms:

Whilst touring the farm I noticed that the leafy greens had very few holes in them – a problem that you often see with organic vegetables that are attacked by caterpillars and grasshoppers in the absence of them being sprayed with pesticides. Keith said his ‘secret’ was in their technique of inoculating the soil with beneficial microbes that helps the plants to take up more of the minerals (calcium especially) and trace elements that are needed to make them unpalatable to insects (but still tasty for humans!).

I bought a copy of Keith’s book ‘Sustainable Agriculture in the Tropics’ and look forward to learning more about his obviously successful growing techniques. Keith also runs three-day seminars on organic farming every month, along with a local horticulturalist, Simon Gill. We made a note to book one before we start growing vegetables at Mandala Farm.

Windows but no Vista on Cebu Pacific

2010-01-04T23:49:00.001+08:00

My New Year’s resolution for 2010 was to keep my blog up to date. (I didn’t do a very good job of that in 2009!). So here I am four days into the new year and posting my first entry for the new decade. And unfortunately I have to start with a gripe – about Cebu Pacific airlines. We arrived in Puerto Princesa (Palawan) earlier this evening after two flights with Cebu Pacific from Singapore via Manila. On both flights the aircraft – an A320 and an A319 – had the dirtiest windows I have seen on passenger aircraft since a flight I took with Ariana Afghan Airways about six years ago.

I know not to expect too much from budget airlines, and I am normally very tolerant of shortcomings if I have paid a low fare, but if they never bother to wash the windows, it does make you wonder what other areas of maintenance on which they may be taking short-cuts. For a photographer like myself, one of the pleasures of traveling by air is being able to capture the odd good aerial shot – but there was no chance of that on my Cebu Pacific flights – the windows were so dirty it was like looking into fog.

The picture below was taken under a clear blue sky over the South China Sea and ought to show the distinctive outline of Linapacan Island as a green land mass in a turquoise coloured sea – but through the dirty window of my Cebu Pacific A319, it was only barely possible to see.

But maybe you have to pay extra to have a clean window? These days with budget airlines, everything is an extra. An extra 200 pesos for a seat with extra legroom, an extra 400 pesos for another 5 kg of baggage, and so on . . . so maybe I missed clicking the box that said “Clean window: 200 pesos extra”.

But to finish on positive note, we’ve just had a nice meal at Kinabuch’s Bar and Grill in Puerto Princesa of fresh tiger prawns, vegetable curry and rice, a buko shake, and a mango and ginger shake – all for the grand price of 625 pesos (about US$13) – that’s about half the price a similar meal would cost at a restaurant of equivalent quality in Malaysia.

It started raining lightly about halfway through the meal, but we were seated under a coconut palm so the fronds kept most of the rain off us. It was nice and cooling given that it was a very balmy evening.

We took a tricycle back to the hotel – that set us back all of 20 pesos.

A feast of the Rana Maharajas

2009-04-30T23:18:00.006+08:00

I had a one day stopover in Kathmandu today for meetings with Radio Nepal and Nepal Television. The radio meetings were in the morning, and afterwards I was treated to lunch by Radio Nepal at Babar Mahal Revisited – a complex of old palace buildings that were built in the early 1900s and which have now been renovated into upmarket shops and galleries selling clothes, antiques and handicrafts:

The complex was nearly deserted when I was there. The shops looked expensive, so I guess they were catering only for wealthy overseas visitors. My hosts told me that the political unrest in Nepal was deterring many tourists from visiting the country, and those that were coming were mainly backpackers – and they certainly wouldn't be shopping at Babar Mahal Revisited.

We headed to a restaurant upstairs called Baithak from where we had a lovely view over a central courtyard, shaded by a jacaranda tree:

The restaurant was almost deserted too, except for two locals who were having an early lunch ahead of us:

The maitre d' handed us a menu prepared specially for us on parchment paper which explained the background to the food that we would be eating. It read:

“For a little over a century (1846 – 1951) the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Nepal was ruled by the Rana Maharajas, a dynasty of hereditary prime ministers popularly remembered for opulent European palaces and autocratic rules. The glamour of court life in the Rana years derived from an eclectic mix of the best from many worlds, imported worlds that is, from Japanese horticulture to French musical instruments, Belgian crystal, British tailoring. Italain marble and Chinese decorative arts”

(I wondered who had written this and described the prime ministers as being “popularly” remembered for their opulent lifestyles. But I didn't like to ask and spoil the atmosphere).

The menu went on:

“While artistic taste leaned to the West, the cuisine of the Ranas stayed closer to home, borrowing heavily from the nearby Moghul Court of North India. From the Moghul palaces came Muslim cooks called khansamas who developed an array of Nepalese-Indian hybrids in tandem with the traditional Nepalese Brahman female cooks (bajais). The Rana cuisine is at once more refined and subtle than the Nepalese and Moghul dishes which it incorporates.”

That all sounded pretty good to me as I love North Indian food, and I was not disappointed when the starters arrived. They comprised:

Chicken Momo (steamed chicken dumplings)
Maas Daal ko Bara (ground black lentils deep fried into fluffy balls)
Aaloo ko Achar (marinated and spiced potatoes)
Syamali, Kerau, Badam Sande ko (spiced marinated peas, riverweed and peanuts)

The riverweed was a little bitter, but everything else was very tasty.

Then came the main course served on individual silver platters:

The dishes on the platter comprised:

Khasi ko Bhutauwa (cubes of mutton cooked with spices)
Chara ko ledo (chicken cooked in an aromatic tomato gravy)
Lapsi hale ko Daal (black lentils cooked with lapsi – a fruit that that the maitre d' said was found only in Kathmandu)
Aaloo tare ko (spiced fried potatoes 'Rana style')
Kaauli Hariyo Pyaj (sautéed cauliflower with green onions)
Golbeda ko Achar (charcoal grilled tomatoes, spiced and ground to a pickle)
Kakro, Syano Kerau ko Achar (spiced cucumber and chickpeas marinated in a light yoghurt paste)
Basmati Bhuja (long grained rice simmered in water and clarified butter)

Every dish was delicious and combined on the one platter provided a real kaleidoscope of flavours and textures. We finished off the meal with something called Malpua Kurauni which was a Rana pancake with concentrated milk.

It was a delicious meal and I thanked my hosts letting me experience such interesting cuisine. I wondered how much the meal cost (I thought that it would have been quite expensive) but when I looked up a review of the restaurant on a Nepalese website later, it said the restaurant offered a 12 course Rana feast (which I guess is what we had) for 995 rupees (about US$13). Yes, that is very expensive by Nepalese standards, but for many overseas visitors it would be quite affordable for the quality of the food offered and the ambiance of the restaurant.

Mugabe holidays in Malaysia

2009-01-28T22:31:00.002+08:00

I just received an update from Avaaz.org on the latest situation in Zimbabwe. An extract from their newsletter:

“Zimbabwe's crisis - cholera, hyperinflation, hunger, and Mugabe's brutality - keeps worsening. But as the stakes rise, the movement for change is growing stronger and bolder. The European Union just tightened sanctions targeting Mugabe's regime. Hunger strikers in Southern Africa, trying to deliver a petition to leaders Monday, were blasted by riot police shooting rubber bullets. And Tuesday morning, after all-night talks, Mugabe's latest attempt retain control collapsed as the opposition refused to join a false 'unity' government that would leave Mugabe's party in power, political prisoners in jail, and Zimbabweans' urgent needs unmet.” (end of quote)

Of course, Mugabe doesn't have to worry about things like cholera, hyperinflation and hunger. He's just had a nice vacation in Malaysia.

How sad that the country in which I live chose to let this brutal dictator holiday on its shores. They should have kicked him out on arrival.

Oh, I almost forgot, they couldn't do that because Petronas – Malaysia' national oil company – has big investments in Zimbabwe.

I wonder if Mr Mugabe got a private tour of the Petronas Twin Towers? Or maybe he preferred to keep his feet on the ground fearing that someone might kick him off the top. (What a service to the world that would be!)

The bias of the Malaysian press

2009-01-26T23:29:00.000+08:00

One of the English language dailies in Malaysia carried a big story today – the defection of a government politician to the opposition. It was something that had been predicted by the opposition for some time and which the government had constantly been telling people would never happen.

According to the story in The Star the crossover had left the leaders of the Barisan Nasional (the ruling coalition) in a state of shock.

But where was this big news story. On page 1?

No, the front page story comprised a photo of a happy family celebrating Chinese New Year and an innocuous story about the fact that the use of debit cards in Malaysia was growing by 13% per month.

Page 3 then? No, that page comprised a photo of Kuala Lumpur's empty highways (after the CNY exodus) and a 'colour story' about the resilience of people born in the Year of the Ox.

The story about the defection to the opposition was buried on page 12. And the other English language daily, the New Straits Times, didn't even carry the story at all.

Now of course if it had happened the other way around – a member of the opposition defecting to the government benches – then it would have been all over the front pages, and probably occupied another two or three pages after that.

After the opposition made its massive gains in the election last year – despite the blatant bias of the government controlled mainstream press – the new Information Minister promised that in the future there would be more balanced coverage.

Hollow words it seems.

Or maybe the papers have been entrenched for so long in reporting only government propaganda, that they are no longer capable of recognising what is news.

Malaysian roads to be star rated

2009-01-04T23:26:00.002+08:00

The front page story in one of the local papers, The Star, today featured an announcement by the Malaysian Transport Minister that roads in Malaysia were to be star rated like hotels – which according to The Star would cut the road toll by 30%

This will mean the worst roads will be rated one star and the best roads five stars.

The announcement was in response to a story a few days ago that there had been 5,976 road deaths in Malaysia in the first 11 months of 2008.

That is an appalling figure. It means that Malaysia's annual road death toll of about 6,500 persons is four times that of Australia (around 1,600 a year), even though both countries have a similar population.

It clearly reflects the lack of regard for road rules in Malaysia, and shows the effect of a small but significant percentage of drivers that use the roads like a racetrack and show utter contempt and disregard to others who may be driving more safely.

But that's not the point of this commentary. The point is that nowhere in the story did it explain how rating the roads would cut the road toll – and the story didn't say who had made the claim (which is bad journalism in itself).

The story didn't carry a byline, so perhaps it was written by a junior reporter who didn't have the initiative to ask the question “how”.

One of the problems with journalists in Malaysia is that there is a culture of not challenging authority, and this often flows through to press conferences and not being prepared to challenge statements made by Ministers and others in authority.

I recall once I was observing a press conference by a Malaysian Minister and a young female reporter asked a searching but extremely relevant question to the Minister. I could see looks of surprise on some of the other reporters' faces that she had the 'audacity' to ask such a question – and clearly the Minister didn't like it.

Instead of answering the question he scolded her by saying: “Don't ask questions about subjects that you don't know about lass – leave that to the experts.” It was clearly a question he didn't want to answer (and probably didn't know the answer to). It was a question that should have been followed up by other journalists in the room – but they had got the message from the Minister and left it alone.

The quality of journalism unfortunately still has a long way to go in Malaysia.

A trip to the hill temples around Solo

2008-12-28T22:07:00.013+08:00

My local friends were busy this morning whilst I had been doing my tricycle tour of Solo, but one of them had agreed to accompany me to Candi Ceto and Candi Sukuh – two temples up in the hills, about an hour's drive to the east of Solo. However whilst I was having lunch at Rocketz, they called me to say that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to go up into the hills because it had started to rain, and even if the rain cleared by the time we got there, the temples would all be shrouded in cloud. But sometimes taking photographs in places like that when it is misty and drizzling, can produce some nice images, so I convinced them that we should go.

At a little after two o'clock, the taxi driver that had driven us from the train station yesterday picked me up from Rocketz. We had decided to take a taxi because my friend's brother – who had driven us around Jogjakarta yesterday – was still busy running errands. Taxis are not expensive in this part of the world, so if you find a good driver with a reliable car, it's a better option than hiring a car yourself.

We picked my friend up from one of the shopping centres in the city, and headed out towards Karanganyar. The rain was really pouring down at this stage, and it didn't look good for us, but after we turned off the main highway at Karangpandan, the rain eased off and it looked like we were going to be lucky with the weather.

As we headed up into the hills we stopped for a few photographs of the tea plantations:

We decided to go up to Candi Ceto first, because that was the higher of the two temples at about 4,500 ft, in case it got too dark to see them both. When we reached Candi Ceto the rain had stopped completely and there were already about a dozen visitors at the temple:

Looking back down from the top of the temple complex, which is spread over a terraced hillside, we could just make out two volcanoes in the far distance:

Candi Ceto and Candi Sukah were built in the 15th century, and they were the last two Hindu temples to be built in Indonesia outside of Bali. The architecture is very reminiscent of the temples that you see all over Bali:

Whilst wandering around the temple complex, a man asked me to take his photograph. I don't know who he is, or where he comes from, but if he sees this blog, here's your photo:

Next to the temple complex, there was a vegetable farm with beautiful volcanic soil:

As we made out way back down to the taxi from the temple complex, the weather looked like it was clearing up nicely:

We headed back down the hill to Candi Sukuh, passing many tea plantations and villages on the way:

We reached Candi Sukuh as the light was fading, but we managed to get off a few shots before it got dark. Candi Sukuh is quite a bit smaller than Candi Ceto, and the main structure in the temple complex reminded me of the architecture of the Mayan temples in Mexico:

There are more carvings of figures here than at Candi Ceto, but they are not as erotic as some guidebooks make out:

With one exception maybe! I asked our taxi driver to pose for a shot by this little man. He didn't realise what he was leaning on until I told him to have a look at the front of the statue (after I had taken the picture!). He recoiled in shock – although I am not sure whether he was genuinely shocked or whether he was just putting an act on for me:

Candi Sukuh is at a height of about 3,000 ft, and as we headed back down the road from the temple, it wasn't long before the sky over the hills below us started to turn a bright orange. We stopped on top of a ridge overlooking a valley and watched the sun set, with its rays reflecting against the remnants of the afternoon's storm clouds. It turned out to be one of the most beautiful sunsets that I have seen in a long while:

My friend's brother had invited us to have dinner at his house which was on the north side of Solo, so we cut across country and got there about an hour after dark. He has a lovely house of which the front half has been constructed out of recycled timber with open walls, shielded only by bamboo blinds – such a practical design for this climate:

I took another shot of the house from the front. You can see the TV in the back – that's the enclosed part of the house. Note the shoes on the front steps. Like in Malaysia, it is customary to remove your footwear before entering a home in Indonesia:

We had a lovely meal and then we said goodbye to the taxi driver (who had been invited to join us for dinner). The taxi fare for the whole afternoon, including all the waiting time, showed 340,000 rupiahs on the meter (about US$30) but I gave him 400,000 and he was very happy with that.

I wonder if there are many other places in the world where you can hire a clean, late model air-conditioned taxi, with a uniformed driver, from about 2 pm to 9 pm and drive 3,000 ft up into the mountains on a three-hour plus round trip for US$30? Central Java is definitely good value for money for travelers who like to get off the beaten track.

A Sunday morning tour of Solo

2008-12-28T13:40:00.003+08:00

This morning I woke up early to take a tricycle tour of Solo. I'd read on an Internet blog that a trip across town in a tricycle should cost around 3,000 rupiah (about 25 cents US), so I walked from the Alang Alang Cafe up to the nearest street corner and hailed a tricycle. I asked the driver how much to the Puri Mangkunegaran. He said 12,000 rupiah. I assumed he was inflating the price because I was a westerner, so I just said “too much” expecting him to come back with a lower offer. But he just shrugged his shoulders and rode off. I hailed another tricycle and asked the same question – and got the same answer. I said “yeah, that's the foreigner price, what about the local price?” He replied: “same price for everyone, you want to go for 12,000?” “No,” I said, thinking I was still being ripped off. So he rode off as well. I had to wait a while for another tricycle to come along, and this time the driver asked me how much I wanted to pay. I said 3,000 – and he just laughed. “Minimum price 8,000 for short trip, your's is long trip, minimum 12,000.” By this stage I was starting to wonder whether the information I had read on the Internet was wrong – or long out of date. However we bargained for a while and he agreed to take me to the Puri Mangkunegaran for 10,000 rupiah. I settled on that. He said it was because he needed the money but that the price was really “too low”.

Later I felt guilty about having driven him down to 10,000 rupiah (about 90 cents US) because after taking a few more tricycles around the city, I realised that the information on the Internet was indeed wrong. The going price is apparently 8,000 for a short trip (up to 1 km) and 12,000 for a 'long' trip (up to 2 km) – and the ride from the Alang Alang Cafe to the Puri Mangkunegaran was certainly the longest one that I did all morning (at least 2 km). I later checked the Lonely Planet guide book, and that said the price was 7,000 rupiah from the train station to the city centre (a long trip) but that was published two years ago, so I guess inflation has pushed the prices up since then.

So I wasn't being ripped off because I was a foreigner after all. In fact, I didn't see another foreigner the whole morning in Solo, so I guess the practice of ripping off foreigners which is so prevalent in most Malaysian cities and towns hasn't spread to Solo. The tricycle drivers in Solo seem to be very honest. That made me feel even more guilty about having forced the first driver to pedal me halfway across the city for a mere 90 cents. I think if I had seen him again I would have given him an extra dollar to apologise for thinking he was trying to rip me off. The moral of this story: Don't believe everything you read on the Internet and what you do believe, make sure it's up to date!

I took a few photographs from the tricycle as we rode across the city (they were slightly bumpy rides so most of these were shot at 1/2000th sec at ISO800 to avoid blur from the movement):

The city was very quiet even for a Sunday, and there wasn't much traffic around:

We passed the Matahari shopping centre and a couple of other tricycle drivers gave me a wave:

Along some of the streets, vendors were setting up stalls to sell plastic trumpets and horns for the forthcoming New Year celebrations (they like to do it noisily in Indonesia!)

The Puri Mangkunegaran (the palace which is the home of the second royal family) was not very interesting, but as I walked across the field next to it I noticed these four men pushing a trolley and what looked like some drums (that's not the palace in the background – that's the Kavallerie Artillerie):

It wasn't until they got closer to me that I noticed the man on the left had a monkey on a lead. The monkey was riding a small bike and wearing a waistcoat and trousers, so I guess they were on their way to some sort of performance:

After Puri Mangkunegaran. I walked along Jalan Ronggowarsito for a while, and down Jalan A. Dahlan taking 'daily life' photographs along the way. I rested for a while near a restaurant in Jalan Yos Sudarso where we had had dinner the night before. The meal – fish, rice and vegetables – had cost only 9,000 rupiah (about 75 cents US). I wondered why there were no backpackers in Solo, because this would be a very cheap town for them to visit. Maybe it is because of Solo's reputation as a 'bad town' with links to extremist groups like Jemaah Islamiah and the memory of the riots of 1998 when mobs went on a rampage through the city, looting and burning shops. But it's a quiet city right now.

By now it was getting very hot, so I hailed another tricycle to take me to the Mesjid Agung – the largest mosque in Solo. It was only a short trip, and the driver had agreed to take me for 8,000 rupiah, but when we got there he demanded 20,000, and got very angry when I wouldn't pay him more than 8,000. He actually took 10,000 off me because he claimed he didn't have any change for 10,000. So there was at least one 'bad apple' amongst Solo's tricycle drivers.

The next tricycle driver was much more accommodating, agreeing to take me to the Pasar Gede for 8,000 rupiah. That was only about a kilometre away, but he was an old man, and his tricycle wasn't in the best of condition, so I gave him 10,000 when we reached the market.

Pasar Gede is Solo's largest undercover market and had many stalls selling local fruits and vegetables:

I tried some of the local salak palm fruits, which were much tastier than the Malaysian variety:

The market was not just selling produce, but meat, poultry and fish as well, but the lack of refrigeration would make me hesitant to buy anything from those sections:

There was quite a lot of food being prepared on stalls within and around the market too. One stall that had a lot of customers waiting was this one just outside one of the side entrances. I don't know what the man was deep frying (gourds or cassava maybe?) but it looked to be very popular given all the people patiently waiting. Whatever it was, it didn't look very healthy though!

After Pasar Gede I took another tricycle down to one of the modern air-conditioned shopping centres to buy some batik shirts (half the price of shirts in Malaysia). When I had finished there I discovered I had a problem getting back to the Alang Alang Cafe because none of the tricycle drivers had heard of it, and none of them wanted to take me, not knowing where they were going. So instead I decided to take a tricycle to cafe called Rocketz that I had seen along Jalan Slamet Riyadi the previous day where I had an espresso (yes, even Solo has an espresso placethese days!) and a memorable lunch – memorable because halfway through the meal I noticed something moving in my broccoli. It had several small yellow caterpillars wriggling around in it. I wondered how many I had already swallowed!

A full house in Solo

2008-12-28T07:33:00.002+08:00

Yesterday afternoon after the wedding reception we headed down to the railway station in Jogjakarta to catch a train to Solo – an old colonial style building in the centre of the city. (Solo's proper name is Surakarta. Solo is the colloquial name of the city).

As soon as we entered the station it became clear that we were going to have a fight on our hands to get a seat on the train – the station was packed.

When the train pulled in we could see there was no point fighting for a seat because they were already all taken by passengers who had boarded at the previous station – so the challenge was more to make sure we could get onto the train before the doors closed.

We managed to squeeze in, and fortunately it was a fast train so only took an hour to get to Solo. I wanted to take a photograph of the inside of the train, but we were all squashed in like sardines in a can, so there was no way I could get my camera out.

When we got to Solo we took a taxi to a hotel that my friends had recommended that I stay at, but were told it was full. We then went to another hotel, and that was full. And then another, and another, and after about an hour of driving from one hotel to another we realised that I was going to have a problem finding anywhere to stay that night. It seems that as it was the weekend of the eve of the Javanese new year, everyone had decided to treat themselves to a weekend in a hotel (by ‘everyone’ I am referring to locals because I saw only two westerners the whole weekend I was in Solo).

I had almost given up when someone suggested that there was a place called the Alang Alang Café behind the palace that might still have a few rooms left. We drove past the palace and down a backstreet:

and stopped outside this place:

“Oh dear,” I thought. “This doesn’t look good.” But then I realised this was not the place to which we were going – it was in front of us behind some massive gates:

“This doesn’t look like a café and it doesn’t look like a hotel,” I thought whilst my friends went inside to see if there were any rooms available. They came back and said I was in luck – they had a room available for 200,000 rupiah (about US$17). We had a look at the room – it was what they described as a ‘traditional’ hotel room (I wondered whether the live parrot chained to a stand outside the room was part of the tradition). It was very very basic, but as there was nothing else available in the city, I said I would take it.

But my friends weren’t happy with it. They felt I should be staying in something better. They questioned the man who had shown us the room as to whether he had anything better, and he said that he did have a larger room for 350,000 rupiah, so we went to have a look at that.

We set off across the large courtyard around which the other rooms were located. Within the courtyard there was a large open structure which looked like a mini-palace:

We walked down the side of that and through an open doorway:

Into another smaller courtyard where it looked like some old buildings had been knocked down:

Then through an archway:

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This was looking less and less like a hotel to me! We got to a small block of wooden rooms behind a concrete wall and had a look at the one which was available.

Unfortunately the air-conditioner didn’t work (and the floor felt like it was going to fall-in) so we rejected that. Pressed again, the man admitted that there was one more room available, but it was 500,000 rupiahs. So we set off to look at that.

We walked around the back of the block we had just been in and made our way down a narrow path:

And through yet another archway which was almost obscured by raphis palms:

And then after negotiating our way around a large banyan tree we saw some small bungalows:

One of them was the ‘room’ that was available (actually two rooms, but one was empty except for a wooden table and two chairs) but it looked nice from the outside with its marble floor, verandah and little garden:

Inside I discovered it was not so impressive – it was quite basically furnished with a bed, a sheet, a pillow and a blanket (and a straw brush on the bed to brush the insects off before retiring), but it was a big improvement on the other two rooms I had seen, so I said I would take it:

The place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned properly for months:

And the electrical wiring looked a bit dodgy:

But at least the air-conditioner worked (sort of) and a good spray of the room with an aerosol can of mosquito killer (supplied) got rid of most of the insects.

The tap in the bathroom didn’t work (well, it did in a way, if you count spraying the water all over the bathroom when you turn it on) but the shower did work and (surprisingly) there was actually some hot water.

I took a photograph of the toilet too, but decided against posting that as it was a sight better forgotten.

After brushing the dead insects off the bed, I settled down for a reasonably comfortable night’s sleep. It was very quiet there – deadly quiet in fact. I don’t think a woman on her own would feel comfortable in that room. It felt like I was sleeping in a ghost town.

In the morning my biggest challenge was trying to find my way back to the entrance.

I never did find out why it was called the Alang Alang Café. There is definitely no café there. Maybe there was in years past. There was no reception, no registration (payment was in cash – I wasn’t even asked my name) and only two employees – a very strange ‘hotel’ indeed.

But at least I had found a place to sleep.

The moral of this story is that if you are traveling in Java around the Javanese new year – book in advance!

An out-of-place wedding guest

2008-12-27T22:56:00.004+08:00

I was invited by my Indonesian friends to attend a wedding reception this afternoon so that I could photograph some of the traditional clothes that they would be wearing. I asked whether I was appropriately dressed, as I was only wearing an old polo shirt and jeans, and very dirty walking shoes, as we had been out photographing old temples and buffalo ploughing rice fields on the southern slopes of Mt Merapi in the morning - but I was assured there would be no problem.

I thought that meant I could photograph the reception from a discrete distance, but when we arrived at the reception I discovered it was in a large hall and I had to walk past some family members who were lined up in traditional dress to greet the guests. They probably wondered who this scruffily dressed foreigner was, camera in hand, but they just smiled as I filed past.

We didn't stay long because my friends just wanted to pay their respects to the bridal couple and leave a gift. That's just as well because I felt the most out-of-place person in the hall (and I got a few strange glances from some of the guests) but I managed to get off a few shots to capture the atmosphere of the occasion.

Many of the men were wearing the traditional keris knives in their belts, so this was definitely an event where you wouldn't want to pick an argument with anybody!

Beautiful dawn at Borobudur

2008-12-26T22:30:00.006+08:00

The main purpose of this trip was to take photographs of the sunrise at Borobudur, so I had booked the pre-dawn entry to Borobudur through the Manohara Hotel which is inside the Borobudur complex. I couldn't get a room at the Manohara Hotel as it was full, but I managed to get a room at the Saraswati Hotel (a very nice boutique hotel – much nicer than the Manohara) which is less than five minutes drive away, just outside the main gate to Borobudur.

The pre-dawn entry ticket gets you into the complex at 4.30 am – an hour and a half before the official opening time of 6.00 am. The cost is 250,000 rupiahs – around US$20-25 depending on what the exchange rate is at the time (if staying at the Manohara the cost is only 115,000 rupiahs) – but it is worth every cent because the experience of seeing the volcanoes around Borobudur appear out of the darkness as the first light appears is just magical.

The ticket price includes a torch and a guide for the short walk from the hotel to the temple complex (you need a guide because it is pitch black at that time of the morning and you would get lost in the gardens of the hotel).

There were about 30-35 people taking advantage of the pre-dawn entry, and most were just sitting up on the top dome watching the sun rise, so I didn't have any problem getting photographs without any people in – something that later in the day is impossible to do. (They call the pre-dawn entry a 'sunrise tour' but it is not really a tour as such, because just sitting up on the top of the Borobudur complex, taking in the magnificent 360 degree views in the early morning light and the silence of the temple complex is all most people want to do – the guides all look very bored!).

The 'sunrise tour' is an experience that every visitor to Borobudur ought to do because once the gates open to the general public, the complex becomes over-run with tourists and the early morning ambiance quickly disappears.

By the middle of the day the tourists climbing over Borobudur are like ants swarming over a nest, and the peaceful atmosphere is completely gone – you only have to compare the three pictures above with the three pictures below to see what I mean.

The people in the picture above who are reaching into the bell shaped stupas are trying to touch a Buddha statue inside – there are 72 of them around the main dome on the top platform of Borobudur. I was told that if you are a woman, and you touch the Buddha's foot, any wish that you make will come true, and if you are a man, you have to touch the Buddha's arm (much harder to do as the feet are much closer to the holes on the outside of the stupa).

After several attempts through different holes, and much straining of my arm muscles, I managed to touch the arm of one of the Buddhas. I made a wish - but it hasn't come true yet.

Borobudur is a ninth century Mahayana Buddhist temple complex that was 'discovered' in the early 19th century over-run by jungle and partly buried in volcanic ash. It was reconstructed in 1973 with funding from UNESCO but was badly damaged by bombs planted by Muslim extremists in the mid-80s. Borobudur fortunately escaped damage from the 2006 earthquake that damaged Prambanan.

Today Borobudur is Indonesia's most visited tourist attraction – with over two million people passing through the gates every year – all the more reason why it is worth getting up at 4.00 am in the morning to see before the crowds arrive.

Christmas Day in Central Java

2008-12-25T23:15:00.006+08:00

I headed down to Jogjakarta this afternoon on Air Asia. When we touched down, the pilot braked every hard and used the reverse thrusters for most of the landing. I thought he was just trying to stop before the taxiway to the terminal to save turning around at the end of the runway – but when we stopped I saw that we were already at the end of the runaway.

The short runway reminded me about the Garuda B737 that ran off the end of the runway and crashed in March. There didn't seem to be much margin for error in Jogjakarta. As I was waiting for my bag in the tiny baggage hall in the terminal building, out of curiosity I looked up on my BlackBerry what the runway length at Jogjakarta was. I saw it was 1,850 metres. That's only 150 metres longer than the minimum runway length for an A320 (which is what I was flying on).

After collecting my bag and a nice cappuccino at the Oh La La cafe outside the terminal building, I headed with friends to Prambanan – about 10-15 minutes up the road towards Solo.

On the way I spotted these cyclists riding along the road. I have never seen a bike like the one at the back (except in a circus). I wondered whether the rider had constructed it for the monsoon season floods that are common in Indonesia, or whether he was was just getting prepared for global warming when seas levels will rise all around the world. Technical quality of photo is not very good as it was shot against the sun on auto focus from a moving car (although the 2000th of a second shutter speed kept it reasonably sharp - I was using a very fast 50mm prime lens).

Prambanan is a 9th century Hindu temple complex – the largest in Central Java – and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Some of the temples were damaged in the 2006 earthquake, so parts of the complex are off limits to visitors at present whilst reconstruction work is undertaken.

It was starting to get dark when we arrived, and we felt a few drops of rain as we walked towards the main temples, but the rain held off long enough to get a few shots away in the fading light.

The cloudy sky produced quite a nice sunset behind the silhouettes of the temples.

Descent to KLIA in pictures

2008-12-13T17:22:00.013+08:00

Flying up from Singapore this morning, the pilot came on the intercom when we reached 22,000 ft and announced that we would be cruising at that level for three minutes before commencing our descent to Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA). As there was no time to get my laptop out, I decided to pass the time by shooting a few pictures out of the window as we descended into KLIA.

The sun was to the east, so I had some good light on the west side of the plane, looking towards the Straits of Malacca, for these shots. The technical quality is not that good as I was using only a pocket camera, but given that the windows of the plane were quite dirty, I doubt that even using my Nikon would have improved the quality much.

The descent commences over the Muar river which is easy to spot because of its very well formed horseshoe bends. That is Bandar Maharani around the mouth of the river.

Three minutes later and we are descending over the outskirts of Melaka. I didn't realise that Melaka had an airport until I spotted it in this photo. (Click on image for a larger version if you can't see the airport)

In the distance I noticed what looked like large banks of silt along the coast just to the north of Melaka where there are a number of high rise holiday apartments. I wonder if that is land reclamation or whether it is silt from the river in the picture? (that's not the Melaka river – that goes through the city slightly to the south of this picture)

As we pass over the Linggi river, we have descended to below 10,000 ft

As we pass by Port Dickson the plane takes a slight turn to the right to line up for its final approach to KLIA

I didn't realise that there were oil tanks so close to the holiday resort at Port Dickson until I noticed them in this picture

One of many scars on the landscape as land is cleared for redevelopment

We are down to a couple of thousand feet as we cross over the Sepang river

As we approach the airport we pass over many oil palm plantations. That's a palm oil processing plant in the top left

On final approach from the south, the oil palm plantations stretch as far as the eye can see

Bugis Street nights remembered

2008-12-11T23:33:00.007+08:00

Tonight I attended a function at the Intercontinental Hotel in Singapore. I arrived a little early so killed some time by wandering around the air-conditioned streets (yes, air-conditioned!) of the adjacent Bugis Junction. This was where Singapore's once famous Bugis Street was located. Although I have been to Singapore dozens of times since it was redeveloped in the mid-80s, I had never been to the 'new' Bugis Street before. The contrast between the old and the new is like chalk and cheese.

The 'old' Bugis Street was to where most western tourists headed on their first night in Singapore back in the 70s and early 80s. At the hawker stands along both sides of the street, the noodles were cheap and the beer was cold – but that wasn't what attracted the tourists – it was the nightly parade of transvestites up and down the street. Most of the trannies were there in a spirit of fun, looking to earn a few dollars by posing for photographs with the tourists, although later at night some would be there for more specific reasons, looking to pick up drunken tourists who at that time of night couldn't tell the difference between a man and a woman.

Actually, even those who were sober had difficulty telling the difference in the case of the Bugis Street transvestites - the saying was that those that were drop dead gorgeous were the trannies, the rest were the women!

In the middle of Bugis Street was a flat-roofed public toilet block on which the transvestites used to climb up (no idea how they got up there) and put on a 'show', which often involved removing some of their clothes. Then sometimes a group of sailors (Australian more often than not!) would climb up and in unison expose their bare bums to the crowd. It was all pretty uncouth, but it attracted hordes of tourists from countries where in those days you couldn't see that sort of behaviour in public. The local police used to occasionally 'raid' the toilet block, but in the main they let people get on with their misbehaving - provided they didn't start any fights or other trouble. I don't think the Singapore police today would be quite so tolerant.

Back in those days I suppose you would describe Bugis Street as sleazy. Today the best word that I can think of to describe it is 'sterile'. Everything is neat and tidy. The rats from the open drains are long gone, as have the transvestites. In fact the street looks so clean these days you could probably eat your dinner off the artificial cobblestones. Glass domes have been constructed over the streets of Bugis Junction so that they could be air-conditioned for the comfort of visiting tourists. Those who remember Bugis Street from sitting on the plastic chairs at the hawker stalls, perspiring in the evening heat and humidity, would find it hard to recognise Bugis Street today.

The air-conditioned streets of Bugis Junction for sweat-free shopping!

Bugis Junction looks more like a Disneyland shopping mall these days

The hawker stalls have been replaced with spotlessly clean food courts

Public transport Philippines style

2008-12-06T21:15:00.002+08:00

Driving through San Mateo (Rizal province) this morning I spotted a tricycle with seven people on it. That's not the most I have seen on one tricycle, but this is the most I have seen when I have had my camera to hand. (I once saw in Vietnam seven people on just a motorcycle).

I wonder if there are supposed to be any regulations about the number of people a tricycle is allowed carry? And if the driver has more than the three passengers that the tricycle is designed for, does he give them a discount if he carries twice that number?

The answers are probably yes and probably no, but this is the Philippines, so I doubt anyone is going to worry about details like that. At least it's an efficient way of moving people around – albeit not quite up to western safety standards for public transport.

What 18,000 people per sq km looks like:

2008-12-02T22:45:00.001+08:00

Flying into Manila I am always reminded how densely populated the city is (Metro Manila has a population of about 11.5 million packed into an area of 636 sq km, giving it a population density of over 18,000 people per sq km). That makes it the fourth most densely populated city in the world after Mumbai, Kolkata and Karachi, and on about a par with Lagos. Some sources list Shenzhen, Seoul and Taipei as more densely populated than Manila, but from my own experience in those cities, I don't think that is right. I guess it depends on how the boundaries are defined.

Shenzhen, Seoul and Taipei all have more high rise apartments than Manila, but once you have spent some time on the streets of these cities, I don't think there is any doubt that Manila is the more densely populated.

"MH stands for Malaysian Hospitality"

2008-12-02T22:00:00.001+08:00

One thing that Malaysian Airlines is very good at is . . . inconsistency.

Like many other Asian airlines, monitoring of hand baggage rules is very haphazard. On many MH flights I have seen passengers carrying on bulky and heavy suitcases, and when they find they won't fit into the overhead lockers, or are too heavy to lift, the crew run around trying to find spaces in various storage lockers to accommodate the oversize bags (at least Malaysian don't pile them up on seats at the back of the plane like some CIS airlines do).

But that wasn't the case today - at least not on my MH flight to Manila. When I got to the gate at KLIA to board my flight, I found about 170 people queuing in front of me. The queue was moving quite slowly and when I eventually got to the front I found out why.

The MH ground staff were weighing any bag that looked oversize and a fierce looking female supervisor was shouting at passengers: "You, take out 5 kg. You, take out 3 kg."

Some of the passengers were protesting, but to no avail. I heard her say to one man: "You take out, you fly. You no take out, you no fly. You got three minutes - so do it now!"

People were on their hands and knees around the gate struggling to take things out from their luggage. I don't know what they were doing with the items they took out as I was traveling light and was ushered quickly through.

But as I turned back to look at the chaos around the gate, with the supervisor still barking orders at the hapless passengers, I was amused to note an advertising sign behind her that said "MH stands for Malaysian Hospitality."

Executed for talking to Taiwan

2008-11-30T18:55:00.000+08:00

Whilst different courts and different judges in one country can hand down sentences for crimes that seem to lack consistency (see last blog post), that's nothing compared to the inconsistencies between countries.

I was horrified to read in today's papers that China had executed one of its citizens for “talking about the health of senior leaders” - according to one AFP report, that's a crime in China that is punishable by death.

Wo Wiehan, a 59 year old medical scientist, was put to death on Friday morning for “leaking state secrets” to Taiwan.

His trial was held in secret and the evidence against him never made public.

The US and EU have rightly condemned the execution.

China's abuse of human rights has attracted so much international criticism in recent years that last year the Chinese government announced that in the future the death penalty would be confined to cases where the crime was “extremely serious” or “a heinous crime that leads to grave social consequences”.

It appears that China was only paying lip service to improving its human rights record.

18 years for bashing, 3 years for killing

2008-11-28T20:04:00.000+08:00

A couple of other stories that caught my eye in the local papers were about sentences handed down by local courts – one on a woman who had bashed her maid and one on a man who had caused the death of a teenager whilst trying to snatch her bag.

The woman who bashed her maid (who had recovered) received a sentence of 18 years in jail, whilst the man who had killed the teenager got off with three years.

I thought for a moment that the court had got the sentences mixed up, but that was not the case – different courts and different judges.

Whilst both crimes were serious, there doesn't seem to be much consistency between different courts when it comes down to handing out sentences.

Driving instructors fail their own test

2008-11-28T19:53:00.000+08:00

Browsing the local paper this morning I spotted a story about 396 driving instructors attending a seminar in Ipoh who had been given a written test on the Malaysian road rules – 65 per cent failed!

And the 35 per cent who did pass only had to get 42 out of 50 multiple choice questions to pass, so even those may not have got all the answers right.

No wonder there are so many Malaysian drivers who don't have a clue what the rules of the road are.

Bali’s chocolate currency

2008-11-17T23:10:00.002+08:00

I went into a supermarket this evening and noticed this sign near the checkout till:

The grammar is not so good, but I think most people understood what it meant.

(For those not familiar with Balinese culture, the items in the small palm leaf tray in the bottom left are offerings to the spirits – I guess some of the spirits in Bali still enjoy a smoke! I suppose if you’re already dead, a cigarette is not going to do you much harm.)

Traffic jams in the Strait

2008-11-16T22:07:00.001+08:00

I flew down the Strait of Malacca – one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world – en route to Bali this afternoon. As we approached Singapore I could see hundred of tankers and container ships lined up waiting to enter the port. From 27,000 ft they looked like goldfish waiting to be fed.

Over 50,000 ships a year pass through the Strait carrying about a quarter of the entire world’s traded goods. The Strait has become so busy in recent years that the maritime authorities are placing limits on the number of ships that can use it because it is getting so jammed – and that gives rise to risks of collisions.

It is interesting to see from this picture how Singapore is still pushing its land area out to the west with massive reclamation projects. That’s Malaysia in the top left, and the channel disappearing towards the top centre is the channel that separates Singapore from Malaysia.

Using Barack's name in vain

2008-11-11T23:09:00.005+08:00

The US election is barely over, and already computer criminals are using Barack Obama's name to target suckers who might be persuaded to download malicious software in exchange for the promise of a few dollars.

I just received the following email, purportedly from AOL:

Dear AOL user,

After the elections, the new president asked us to rise the level of protection of AOL accounts.

All accounts will be secure and users will receive the bonus amount of 25 dollars from AOL Custumer Service.

This bonus will be allocated directly into your account after you do what you ask for the page below.

We remind you that Barack Obama is the new president. All this for a better protection and for a new America.

To upgrade your account please click the link below:

Yeah sure. Bad grammar, spelling mistakes and Barack is not even President yet, but I wonder how many AOL subscribers will still fall for this. I read on a bank security website about phishing attacks that despite people being warned time and time again never to click on links in an email that they are not 100 percent sure about, between one and five percent of people still do.

So I suppose that as AOL has about eight million subscribers, if this email reached all of them, between 80,000 and 400,000 people in the US will today be clicking on that link in the hope of getting $25 credited to their account – but will in fact only be getting a download of malware (viruses, worms, trojan horses, key loggers, etc.)

I can't understand how many people still fall for these thinly disguised scams. I suppose I should though, because even in my office there is a very senior person, intelligent and well traveled, who said to me earlier this year: “I got this email with a link to a nude video of Paris Hilton, but when I clicked on the link there was nothing there.”

I felt like tearing my hair out. No wonder his computer crashed not long after that.

And no wonder Internet security is in such a mess these days.

Here's a link to an interesting story on an IT security professional's blog (a guy by the name of Didier Stevens) who ran an experiment to see if people would click on a Google ad that said: "Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!"

http://blog.didierstevens.com/2007/05/07/is-your-pc-virus-free-get-it-infected-here

And yes, over a six month period, 409 people did just that.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

A lesson in how to eat passionfruit

2008-11-06T22:06:00.000+08:00

The strangest things sometimes happen when you are traveling. This morning I found myself giving lessons to a Norwegian man on how to eat passionfruit!

I had ducked into one of the lounges at Jakarta airport for a quick coffee and to download my emails before my flight, when I spotted some very large passionfruit near the coffee machine. They were almost as large as oranges and more of an orange colour than the usual yellow passionfruit that you find in the tropics (the purple variety is usually grown in sub-tropical climates).

I was eating one whilst I was downloading my mails, when a Norwegian man sitting nearby asked me what I was eating. It turned out that he had never seen or eaten a passionfruit. Of course they won't grow in cool climates like Norway, so I guess he hadn't traveled in the tropics or sub-tropics very much.

I showed him how to cut the fruit open (just slice it in half) and then scoop out the pulp with a teaspoon.

He asked how to take out the seeds, but I explained you just swallow them (not crunch them because they are quite hard) with the pulp – which he didn't seem very comfortable doing. I had to assure him that they would just “slide through the system” with no after effects at all.

Unfortunately the passionfruit he sampled turned out to be a little sour and rather bland in flavour. I tried to assure him that there were many varieties of passionfruit available, and some of them had a very tasty and fruity flavour with a nice tang that was both sweet and slightly tart at the same time. But he didn't seem impressed, so I don't think I converted him to being a passionfruit eater.

The new US President: Barry the Menteng Kid

2008-11-06T10:50:00.000+08:00

The headlines on this morning's Jakarta Post said it all: Barry's done it!

They were of course referring to the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the U.S, who is affectionately known in Indonesia as Barry.

You often seen references to him in the Indonesian press as the 'Anak Menteng' (the 'Menteng Kid') because Obama lived in Jakarta as a child from 1967 to 1971, and for some of that time went to a school in the suburb of Menteng.

My taxi driver to Jakarta airport seemed ecstatic about the news.

“Who would think son of Muslim man could be elected President of United States,” he said. “I so happy.”

In somewhat broken English, he went on to explain that he believed that because Barack Obama had a Muslim father who was black, and a Christian mother who was white, he would be able to transcend racial and religious boundaries and bring more understanding to the world.

“Barry is best man to bring peace to the world,” he said.

“That George Bush – he no good – he always want war. That McCain man – he worse than Bush. And that Salem woman – she worst of all!” he exclaimed. (I assume he was referring to Sarah Palin).

In a way, that Jakarta taxi driver reflects the aspirations of people all around the world. Whilst in the U.S. about 48% of the population still voted for McCain (final results not tallied yet of course) in other parts of the world Obama was the clear favourite – and in some countries would have polled up to 90% of the vote.

I read a story in a paper on the plane back to Kuala Lumpur that said that surveys taken around the world showed that if Obama had been standing for President of the World, he would have won in every country except Israel, Georgia and the Philippines.

The rest of the world – as well as the majority of Americans – have high expectations for Obama.

In my lifetime there has only been one other U.S. president that I can recall as having attracted so much adulation at the time he was elected – and that was John F. Kennedy who was elected in 1961 at the age of 43. Some have likened Obama to JFK because of their oratory skills and their ability to inspire the electorate with their visions.

I was only a kid when JFK was assassinated two years later – but I remember how the news stunned me at the time, and the outpouring of grief around the world.

Many people have already expressed the fear that the same might happen to Obama. That would be a tragedy for the world. However, we should take comfort in the fact the the U.S. Secret Service is no doubt a hundred times better equipped than it was in 1963 – and they must all have in the back of their minds what happened in Dallas, Texas, on that fateful day nearly 45 years ago. Let's hope they live up to the reputation they have earned over the past four decades.

Conference in the clouds

2008-11-03T22:20:00.002+08:00

I’m attending a conference at Two ifc in Hong Kong today. At 88 stories high, Two ifc is the city’s tallest building, but if it is raining (or drizzling as it was in Hong Kong this morning) you don’t get to see very much. In fact, even on the 56th floor where our conference is being held, this is all you could see out of the window at 10.00 am:

But after the cloud had lifted after lunch, this was the view:

What a difference!

A quiet afternoon at KLIA

2008-11-02T23:36:00.005+08:00

I checked in at KLIA for a flight to Hong Kong this afternoon. I have not seen the airport look so quiet for a long time. The Cathay Pacific check-in area was deserted:

When I got to the check-in desk I said to the clerk: “Am I late?”

“No,” she replied.

“Am I early,” I asked.

“No,” she replied again.

“So why are there no passengers around,” I asked

“It’s a light flight,” she explained

“Does that mean we get there quicker?” I quipped.

She glanced up at me, but didn’t reply. She was probably thinking: “Stupid man."

Sarah Palin takes the bait

2008-11-02T14:51:00.005+08:00

Yesterday, US Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was well and truly fooled by a prank call made by two comedians known as the Master Avengers from a radio station in Canada.

The call was purportedly from the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy.

A friend sent me the transcript (below) but the recording is even funnier:

I would have thought that one of the first things Sarah Palin’s advisors would tell her not to ever do was to take calls purportedly from world leaders, without checking out their bona fides first, because these sorts of prank calls are often staged by radio station DJs and comedians during election periods.

But even if she wasn’t given such advice, you would think she would have figured something was not quite right when the fake Nicolas Sarkozy (who had a really 'over the top' fake French accent) started telling her how good Carla Bruni was in bed. Does she really think that the President of another country on his very first call to her is going to start telling her that his wife is good in bed!

But no, Joe Six-Pack’s pin-up girl fell for it hook, line and sinker.

Here is the transcript because if you don’t speak French you need to understand some of the translations to appreciate the full humour of this (thanks Fernand for sending this to me):

Ring ring . . .

Sarah Palin’s Assistant (SP Assist): This is Betsy.

Master Avengers (MA): Hello, Betsy. This is Frank l'ouvrier [Frank the worker], I'm with President Sarkozy, on the line for Governor Palin.

SP Assist: One second please, can you hold on one second please?

MA: No problem.

SP Assist: Hi, I'm going to hand the phone over to her.

MA: Okay thank you very much I'm going to put the president on the line.

SP Assist: Okay he's coming to the line.

Sarah Palin (SP): This is Sarah.

MA: Yeah, Governor Palin?

SP: Hellloooo . . .

MA: Just hold on for President Sarkozy, one moment.

SP [To someone in the room]: Oh, it's not him yet, I always do that. I'll just have people hand it to me right when it's them.

Fake Nicolas Sarkozy (FNS): Yes, hello, Governor Palin? Yes, hello, Mrs Governor?

SP: Hello this is Sarah, how are you?

FNS: Fine, and you, this is Nicolas Sarkozy speaking, how are you?

SP: Oh . . so good, it's so good to hear you. Thank you for calling us.

FNS: Oh, it's a pleasure.

SP: Thank you sir, we have such great respect for you, John McCain and I, we love you and thank you for spending a few minutes to talk to me.

FNS: I follow your campaigns closely with my special American Advisor Johnny Hallyday, you know?

SP: Yes! Good!

FNS: Excellent! Are you confident?

SP: Very confident and we're thankful that the polls are showing that the race is tightening and . . .

FNS: Well I know very well that the campaign can be exhausting. How do you feel right now my dear?

SP: Ah, I feel so good. I feel like we're in a marathon and at the very end of the marathon, you get your second wind and you plow to the finish . . .

FNS: You see, I got elected in France because I'm real and you seem to be someone who's real as well.

SP: Yes, yeah, Nicholas, we so appreciate this opportunity.

FNS: You know, I see you as a president, one day, you too.

SP: [Muahaaa...weird laugh], maybe in 8 years. Ha ha

FNS: Well, ah, I hope for you. You know we have a lot in common because personally one of my favorite activities is to hunt too.

SP: [Giggle] Oh very good, we should go hunting together.

FNS: Exactly! We could go try hunting by helicopter, like you did, I never did that.

SP: [Giggle]

FNS: Like we say in France, "on pourrait tuer des bébés phoques aussi" [Translation: “We could also kill some baby seals”]

SP: [Giggle] Well I think we could have a lot of fun together as we're getting work done, we can kill two birds with one stone that way.

FNS: I just love killing those animals. Mm, mm. Take away a life, that is so fun!

SP: [Hahahaha]

FNS: I'd really love to go as long as we don't bring your Vice-President Cheney, ha ha ha.

SP: No, I'll be a careful shot, yes.

FNS: Yes, you know we have a lot in common also except that from my house I can see Belgium. That's kind of less interesting than you.

SP: Well, see, we're right next door to other countries that we all need to be working with, yes.

FNS: Some people said in the last days, and I thought that was mean, that you were not experienced enough in foreign relations, and you know, that's completely false, that's the thing I said to my great friend, the Prime Minister of Canada, Stef Carse [Stephen Harper is actually the PM].

SP: Well, he's doing fine, too, and yeah when you come into a position underestimated, it gives you an opportunity to prove the pundits and the critics wrong. You work that much harder.

FNS: I, I was wondering because you are also next to him, one of my good friends, also, the Prime Minister of Quebec, Mr Richard Z. Sirois [a famous Quebec radio host], have you met him recently? Did he come to one of your rallies?

SP: Uh, haven't seen him at one of the rallies, but it's been great working with the Canadian officials in my role as governor; we have a great cooperative effort there as we work on all of our resource development projects. You know I look forward to working with you and getting to meet you personally and your beautiful wife, oh my goodness, you've added a lot of energy to your country, even, with that beautiful family of yours.

FNS: Thank you very much. You know my wife, Carla, would love to meet you. You know even though she was a bit jealous that I was supposed to speak to you today. [Ha ha ha ha]

SP: [Ha ha ha ha] Well give her a big hug from me.

FNS: You know my wife is a popular singer and a former top model and she's so hot in bed. She even wrote a song for you.

SP: Oh my goodness! I didn't know that.

FNS: Yes, in French, it's called Du rouge à lèvres sur une cochonne [Translate: “Lipstick on a smutty girl” (some say this translates to “lipstick on a sow”)] or if you prefer in English, Joe the Plumber, [sings] It's his life, Joe the Plumber . . ."

SP: Maybe she understands some of the unfair criticism but I bet you she is such a hard worker, too, and she realizes you just plow through that criticism like . . .

FNS: I just want to be sure, I don't quite understand the phenomenon "Joe the Plumber," that's not your husband, right?

SP: That's not my husband but he's a normal American who just works hard and doesn't want government to take his money.

FNS: Yes, yes, I understand, we have the equivalent of Joe the Plumber in France, it's called, "Marcel, the guy with bread under his armpit, oui."

SP: Right. That's what it's all about, is the middle class, and government needing to work for them. You're a very good example for us here.

FNS: I seen a bit about NBC even Fox News wasn't an ally, an ally, sorry, about as much as usual.

SP: Yeah that's what we're up against.

FNS: I must say, Governor Palin, I love the documentary they made on your life, you know, Hustler's "Nailin Palin" [a porn film featuring a Sarah Palin lookalike]

SP: Oh, good, thank you. Yes.

FNS: That was really edgy.

SP: [Laughs] Well good.

FNS: I really love you. And I must say something, so, Governor, you've been pranked.
By the Master Avengers. We're two comedians from Montreal.

SP: Oohhh have we been pranked? And what radio station is this? [tries to force herself to sound nice but you can tell she's cranky]

FNS: This is for CKOI in Montreal.

SP: In Montreal? Tell me the radio station call letters

[SP leaves phone, continuous griping in background, sounds like, "For chrissakes . . . that was ??? Just a radio station prank . . . chrissakes . . . "]

MA: Hello? If one voice can change the world for Obama, one Viagra can change the world for McCain.

[Man's voice in background: “Hang up, hang up”]
SP Assist: Hi, I'm sorry, I have to let you go. Thank you.

Of course, since yesterday there have been thousands of comments posted on the Internet – most ridiculing Palin for how easily she was sucked in.

But one comment on a Huffington Post story about the prank struck a more serious note. It said:

“Do you really want a VP who gets pranked that easy? Come on, just imagine those guys were from an Israeli radio station telling her that Iran just bombed Tel Aviv. Sarah Palin would believe it and push the red button.”

Fair comment.

Has Microsoft has lost the plot?

2008-10-28T00:15:00.006+08:00

The online search business is getting super-competitive. I just received an email from points.com telling me that I can earn frequent flyer points if I switch my online searching to Microsoft Live Search.

Sorry guys, Google is far superior to Microsoft Live Search, so I have no intention of switching to an inferior product just to earn frequent flyer points.

In any event, another condition of earning the points is that your browser has to be Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I use Firefox – and I have no intention of changing that either.

These days I use Microsoft products ONLY when there is no viable alternative (such as the XP OS on my PC).

Microsoft made me super-cranky in 2006 when they deleted more than 600 travel photographs from my MSN Groups site 'David's Asia Pix' which had taken me years to build up and caption. I never did find out why they did that.

I tried writing to Microsoft to find out what had happened to my photos, but there are no contact addresses for technical support on any of the MSN Groups sites. Even when Microsoft sent me the notifications for the annual charges for storing these photos in MSN Groups, and I replied to those mails, all I got back was an automated response saying they were ‘unmanned’ addresses.

After several weeks of trying to hunt down an email address to report technical problems in MSN Groups, I eventually found a ‘feedback’ mail address to which I was able to send my email. But lo and behold all I got back was another automated response saying my feedback “would be taken into consideration” but I wouldn’t get a personal reply.

So after wondering whether Microsoft was being staffed by robots, I tried sending emails to various corporate addresses that I found on other Microsoft sites, asking them to forward my query onto the relevant technical support department – but no responses and no replies.

At the end of the year I even resorted to sending a snail mail letter to Microsoft in Seattle, but that was nearly two years ago and I still haven't got a reply.

So I came to the conclusion that Microsoft must have grown into such a large monolithic organisation that it is no longer possible for ordinary human beings to have any contact with them.

I put a lot of work into posting my photos and writing the captions, so to say that I was displeased with Microsoft is an understatement. I vowed never to buy another of their products if I could possibly avoid it.

But there is a silver lining to this story. My annoyance at not being able to get any reply from Microsoft prompted me to buy a Mac – and WOW, I never knew what a pleasure personal computing could be. No crashes, no viruses, no blue screens and the software actually works ALL of the time. So perhaps I should be thanking Microsoft for ignoring me because otherwise I would have never have known what life was like on the Apple side of the fence.

POSTSCRIPT: Out of curiosity I just checked my old MSN Groups (it's always been there minus the photos) and now I see there is a notice on the top of the page advising MSN Groups users that Microsoft will be closing down its MSN Groups sites in February 2009.

I clicked on the link that said 'Why is MSN Groups Closing?' and this is what you will see:

“Because we are dedicated to providing our customers with the most current and user friendly technology available today we made the difficult decision to close the MSN Groups service.nbsp; This decision is part of an overall investment to update and re-align our online services with Windows Live. In the long term we believe that closing the service is the best way to continue to offer innovative, best of breed services that help you stay in touch with the people you care about. We plan to launch a new Groups service this fall, but unlike MSN Groups, Windows Live Groups will focus on offering a place for small groups to collaborate. A service for small, medium and large groups is available now with our online partner Multiply.”

“Because we are dedicated to providing our customers with the most current and user friendly technology available today . . ."!!! Have you ever heard such garbage?

If Microsoft were truly “dedicated to providing its customers with user friendly technology", it would seamlessly transition its MSN Groups to the new platforms – not shut down a service that tens of thousands of people around the world have put millions of man-hours into developing.

Other web providers always make sure new services are backwards compatible – it's a golden rule if you don't want to alienate your customers.

I really think that Microsoft has lost the plot.

(I also wondered whether the 'nbsp' at the end of the first paragraph of Microsoft's explanation in italics above was really a non-breaking space HTML entity accidentally left in, or whether the writer was intending to say – as the Urban Dictionary defines the acronym 'nbsp' - “no bullshit please”)

The ASEAN Golden Melodies Festival

2008-10-26T00:05:00.018+08:00

I have been trying to log onto the ASEAN Golden Melodies website during the week (www.aseangoldenmelodies.com) to get the list of winners from the event that I attended in Ho Chi Minh City last weekend, but I keep getting error messages.

I managed to get hold of a list of the winners direct from the organisers yesterday, so I will post those here in case anyone else is looking for them. I've also posted a few photographs from the concerts below. The photos are a bit soft as I shot them all at 1000 ISO from where I was sitting (the distance was too far to use flash).

ASEAN Golden Melodies Festival 2008 winners:

Folk categories -

- Gold Medals: Ms Hong Ngat (Vietnam) and Mr Reynaldo Raymond Pagi (Malaysia)
- Silver Medals: Mr Dam Vinh Hung (Vietnam) and Ms Nur Nadia Fadilla Abu Bakar (Malaysia)
- Bronze Medals: Mr Hendra Sudarmanto (Indonesia) and Ms Putri Norizah Ibnor Riza (Brunei)

Pop categories -

- Gold Medals: Ms Nur Nadia Fadilla Abu Bakar (Malaysia) and Ms Ngoc Anh (Vietnam)
- Silver Medals: Mr Minh Quan (Vietnam) and Mr Dam Vinh Hung (Vietnam)
- Bronze Medals: Ms Nykó Macá (Philippines) and Ms Dio Annisa Hapsari (Indonesia)

The two photos above were taken during the opening sequences

Above: Dam Vinh Hung of Vietnam won silver medals in both the folk and pop categories

Above: 14-year-old Pimnara Varahajirakul from Thailand was the youngest performer

Above: Daw Lé Lé Win and Ye Yini Wai Lwin from Myanmar perform a folk song

Above: Guest artiste from Korea

Above: Hong Ngat of Vietnam won a gold medal for her folk song

Above: Putri Norizah Ibnor Riza from Brunei won a bronze medal in the folk category

Above: Guest artiste from China

Above: Dio Annisa Hapsari of Indonesia picked up a bronze medal for her pop song

Above: Nykó Macá from the Philippines was the other bronze medal winner in the pop category

Above: Minh Quan and Dam Vinh Hung from Vietnam (left) were silver medal winners whilst Nur Nadia Fadilla Abu Bakar from Malaysia (right) picked up both a gold and a silver

Above: Reynaldo Raymond Pagi of Malaysia won a gold medal in the folk category

Above: The three girls from Indonesia (Dio Annisa Hapsari), Brunei (Putri Norizah Ibnor Riza) and the Philippines (Nykó Macá) were my favourites – they didn't win golds but at least they won bronze medals. Dio Annisa's singing partner from Indonesia, Hendra Sudarmanto, also won a bronze medal – he was very good too.

Cute Vietnamese girls & hot Kazakh music

2008-10-19T16:56:00.007+08:00

I was looking for some information on the Internet this afternoon about the Vietnamese singers who appeared in the pop section of the ASEAN Golden Melodies Festival last night. I couldn't find what I wanted but my search did lead me to this video on YouTube labeled 'Cute, pretty, hot and sexy Viet'. The song is great (and the girls are pretty cute too).

The person who uploaded the video - which has been watched more than half a million times (I wonder if it's the music or the girls that's pulling them in) - said he wanted to demonstrate that Vietnamese girls have 'class' - apparently someone had posted a comment that Vietnamese girls don't have any class. (I am not so sure that all the girls in the video are Vietnamese though).

I initially thought it was a Vietnamese pop song, but after listening to it a couple of times I realised that the language was not Vietnamese. The language was familiar, but it wasn't until I did a bit more research that I identified it as a song by a group from Kazakhstan called Do-Mi-No (in Kazakh the name is written as Do-Mи-No).

The name of the song is variously written as Ayim ai, Ayimay or Ajimaj.

I also found a video of the group performing the song live at a concert:

I will check to see if they have anything on iTunes when I get back to KL. I like their music.

Massage upselling, Saigon style

2008-10-17T23:15:00.001+08:00

After two nights on planes and six days in conferences and meetings in the past two weeks, I felt like I needed a good massage to loosen up my stiff back.

As the next two festival concerts are not until Saturday and Sunday nights, I headed down to Dong Khoi in the evening where I knew there were a couple of reputable massage places. In fact there turned out to be six or seven now, and all were using attractively dressed hostesses in colourful ao dais handing out brochures to attract customers to the competing establishments.

One of the hostesses approached me to offer a one hour massage for US$11. That sounded like very good value for money – even for Vietnam – so I said okay.

As I followed her towards the entrance of the nearest massage place (which was where I thought she was from) she beckoned me to carry on walking past. We then crossed the road, and went around a corner to another place. It seems some of the massage places plant their hostesses near the entrances to their competitors to draw customers away.

As we walked down the street I became a little concerned about where she was taking me, but the place we ended up at was very well equipped – clean and modern with showers and lockers and proper massage tables.

When we arrived in the reception the manager greeted me and asked me if I would like 60 minutes for US$20 or 75 minutes for US$25.

I replied: “But your hostess just told me that one hour is $11.”

The manager then said that the $11 was for a ‘hard’ massage without any oil, but the $20 massage was for a ‘more relaxing’ massage with genuine aromatherapy oils.

“Chinese men like the hard massage because they like pain,” she said. “But foreigners like you don’t like pain.”

“But your choice”, she added. “You can have the $11 massage if you like,” beckoning towards a heavily built middle-aged masseuse who was sternly staring at me as if to say “you’ll regret it if you choose the $11 massage.”

“Or you can have the relaxing $20 massage,” this time beckoning towards a slim and very attractive young masseuse who was smiling sweetly at me.

I imagined the heavily built woman kneading her knuckles into my muscles muttering “pain, pain, pain” as she dug deeper. And then I thought of the slender young masseuse running her soft fingers over my body and the relaxing aroma of the essential oils.

“I’ll take the $20 massage,” I said.

It was a good choice. It wasn’t quite my fantasy of the soft fingers running over my body, but she was a very good masseuse. She had an unusual style – a sort of cross between Swedish massage and Thai, and she did a lot of stretching of the muscles. In fact I would say it was one of the best massages that I have had for a long time, and I felt very energised after it.

Massage in Ho Chi Minh City is very good value for money and those places along Dong Khoi are clean and reputable (I expect there are some ‘dodgy’ places around like there are in any big city, but I don’t think you’ll find them along Dong Khoi) but beware of the prices that are quoted by the hostesses on the street – it’s just the ‘Asian way’ of getting customers in the door before they start the ‘upselling’.

More toxic food from China

2008-10-17T16:36:00.000+08:00

A story in yesterday’s Straits Times reported that some people in Japan had been taken to hospital after eating green beans from China. Their mouths had become numb. Tests subsequently revealed that the beans had 34,500 times the permitted residue of pesticides on them. After the recent melamine cover-up and last year’s food scandals, I wonder if anyone going to feel safe eating food from China again?

More fun with Air France

2008-10-17T10:33:00.000+08:00

The rituals with the wigs wasn’t the only ‘fun’ I had with Air France yesterday.

As I was heading to Ho Chi Minh City to be an honorary judge in the ASEAN Golden Melodies Festival, I didn't want to risk losing my suit if my bag went astray en route (both Paris and Bangkok have bad reputations for losing bags) so I packed my suit trousers in an overnight bag and carried my suit jacket on the plane.

When we arrived in HCMC yesterday I asked for my jacket back (one of the flight attendants had hung it up in a closet for me) but they couldn't find it. As the rest of the passengers left the plane they checked all the closets at the front and back of the plane, but still they couldn't find it.

So I was left on an empty plane, sans jacket, with the flight crew discussing amongst themselves where my jacket could possibly have disappeared to. Then one of them noticed a blue Air France steward's jacket hanging in one of the empty closets. Apparently the jacket didn't belong to any of the flight crew on board. It then dawned on everyone what had happened - one of the flight crew from Paris had got off in Bangkok and taken my jacket instead of his (they were both dark blue in colour).

As this flight crew was returning to Bangkok, they promised to find the steward and recover my jacket, and send it back to HCMC with a crew on Saturday (which was Air France’s next flight to HCMC).

That left me in a dilemma because I needed a jacket for last night, as the opening concert of the festival was going to be televised and I would be involved in making some presentations to the contestants. So although I really needed to have a couple of hours sleep before the festival opened, I had to spend the time chasing around HCMC looking for a jacket to fit me.

That wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Vietnamese men are much slimmer in build than most western men, and I couldn’t find a jacket to fit me. If it fitted across the shoulders and the arm length was right, I couldn’t button it up at the front. If it fitted around the chest, then the shoulders were too big and the arms too long. So I ended up having to buy one that fitted across the shoulders, but which I couldn’t button up at the front – at least that would look better on TV than one with arms that were too long.

The concert started at 8.30 pm and went for two and a half hours. By 9.30 pm I was having great difficulty staying awake. I had to keep suppressing yawns and forcing my eyes open whenever one of the cameras panned across the judging panel seated at the front. By 10.30 pm I felt I needed matchsticks to keep my eyes open. Somehow I managed to make it through to 11.00 pm when the concert finished. I was back at the hotel a little before midnight and I was asleep 10 seconds after my head hit the pillow.

PS (added 18 October): My jacket was delivered to the hotel at 5.00 pm on Saturday afternoon. Thanks Air France – that’s very efficient service given the number of pairs of hands that my jacket must have had to pass through from Bangkok to Ho Chi Minh City. Ironically if I had packed my suit in my suitpack as I normally do, my jacket wouldn’t have gone missing (because my suitpack arrived fine) – but alls well that ends well.

A fun flight with Air France

2008-10-16T16:00:00.006+08:00

I managed a few hours sleep on the flight from Paris to Bangkok. It's been a few years since I've done a long haul flight with Air France and I was pleased to see that the quality of the food onboard was still very good - much better than most other airlines.

After a brief stopover in Bangkok we took on another crew for the flight down to Ho Chi Minh City. After take-off the captain came on the intercom to announce that this was a 'special flight' because it was the last flight of one of the flight attendants. After the captain's announcement most of the male flight attendants donned women's wigs. I am not sure of the significance of that - maybe it's some sort of ritual for Air France flight attendants who leave the airline.

The female flight attendants all had the same hair style too - but in different colours. Their hair was like that when they boarded so I wasn't sure if they were wearing wigs as well. I was going to ask one of them, but then had second thoughts in case she was not wearing a wig and might be offended by me asking.

CDG airport's friendly security staff

2008-10-15T18:32:00.001+08:00

I wasn't looking forward to my transit at CDG this afternoon. It isn't my favourite airport (although I would rather transit in Paris than Heathrow). I usually go through terminal 1 - which always reminds me of an ant farm with all the tubes connecting the various levels - but as I was traveling with Air France all the way to Ho Chi Minh City, I would only have to transit between terminal 2F and 2E. They are much newer than terminal 1 but it's a long walk from F to E and there are no luggage trolleys for transiting passengers. I was carrying my camera bag as well as an overnight bag, so I had sore shoulders by the time I got to 2E's security check. By that time I had decided that CDG was an airport that I definitely didn't like.

But my opinion was somewhat tempered by the time I got through security. They were extremely efficient - and surprisingly friendly. In fact in all the travels I have done, it would be probably the only airport security that I would describe as friendly.

That is not to say it was an easy transit. Everything had to come off - jacket, belt (but fortunately not shoes) and for the first time ever I was asked to remove all the items from my camera bag - camera body, lenses, flash unit, chargers and filters - and place them on a tray to be separately scanned. But the security staff were polite, smiling and friendly - and all spoke good English, apologising for the 'inconvenience' - and then wished me 'bon voyage' as I left the security area. Traveling would be much less of a hassle if all airport security staff were as friendly.

Kiss and fly

2008-10-15T13:52:00.000+08:00

As my taxi approached Nice airport we took a lane that was marked 'Kiss and Fly'. I was worried for a moment that the taxi driver might try to kiss me for a bigger tip, but fortunately he made no attempt to do so (I was keeping my distance though as he was unloading my bags - just to be on the safe side).

I suppose the 'Kiss and Fly' label is a tourist-friendly way of saying 'No waiting'. I thought it was a nice touch.

Late starters in Juan-les-Pins

2008-10-15T11:38:00.003+08:00

I had booked a taxi to take me to Nice airport at 12 noon so I decided to take a stroll down to the beach at about 10.00 am after packing my bags.

I stopped at a café for an espresso and noticed how quiet Jean-les-Pins is in the morning. There was a couple having an orange juice in front of me, but otherwise the main street was deserted.

I walked down to the beachfront at about 10.20 am and still none of the shops were open.

When I got to the beach, that was completely deserted too. The beach chairs and umbrellas had been set up, waiting for customers, but it seemed that nobody was out of bed yet.

I headed back to my hotel at 10.30 am wondering whether the residents of Juan-les-Pins had been abducted by aliens overnight, or whether 10.30 am is just too early to start the day in the south of France.

Cool autumn days in Cannes

2008-10-14T18:17:00.003+08:00

I’ve just finished two days of meetings in Cannes. It’s a beautiful time of the year to be here. Clear blue skies (albeit a little hazy) and the temperature hovering around 20 degrees. For me, this is what I would describe as a pleasantly cool day. But not everyone would agree.

I was sitting on a bus waiting to go back to Juan-les-Pins when the guy in front of me answered a call on his mobile. In a distinct north-country English accent he said: “Yes I am in Cannes now. It is so hot here - boiling hot in fact.”

If he thinks this is hot, he should do a trip to the middle of Australia in the middle of summer where the temperature can be more than double what it is here today. Then he really would be ‘boiling hot’.

As I was waiting on the bus I was watching people play pétanque in a park across from the bus stop.

According to Wikipedia, about 17 million people in France play the casual form of pétanque. I noticed it was mainly men who play the game, but there were a few women as well. I suppose you could say that France is the only country where women have boules.

Friendly service at the Hotel Ambassadeur

2008-10-13T23:00:00.002+08:00

It’s quite common to see people staying in hotels leave the restaurant where their breakfast buffet is served with a muffin or an apple in their hands – for a mid-morning snack I suppose.

But not so at the Hotel Ambassadeur in Juan-les-Pins where I am staying.

Here nobody dares take anything out of the restaurant. There is a large sign on the door that says any guest who takes any food items from the restaurant will be charged 40 euros extra. I guess that’s more in the nature of a fine than a ‘charge’ because the breakfast buffet is only 22 euros (I use the word ‘only’ in a comparative sense because in Malaysia 22 euros would buy you dinner for two with wine included).

Maybe the hotel manager is a graduate of the Robert Mugabe School of Hospitality.

But I don’t think whoever designed the layout of the rooms went to any school at all. Check out the photo below to see where they located the in-room safe.

The most beautiful village in France?

2008-10-11T22:07:00.007+08:00

A short tour to Les-Baux-de-Provence (usually known as Les Baux) was organised this morning for those conference delegates who were not leaving until the afternoon. I will actually not be leaving until tomorrow as I am going down to Cannes for a couple of days of meetings there, so I joined them. Les Baux promotes itself as The Most Beautiful Village in France, so I wanted to see it for myself.

Les Baux is not far from Arles - about 20 km or so to the west in the Alpilles (‘little Alps’) - and on the way we stopped by the famous windmill near the village of Fontvieille which is the subject of Alphonse Daudet’s collection of short stories Letters from my Windmill.

Due to time constraints we had less than an hour at Les Baux, but it was just enough time to walk up to the top of the rocky outcrop on which it is built to see the lovely views over the Alpilles and the Provence countryside.

To the east and south of the village there are olive groves as far as the eye can see:

And to the west many large mansions built in the typical Provence style of architecture with swimming pools and beautiful gardens – country retreats for the rich and famous I suppose:

The actual village was quite interesting – narrow cobbled streets and old buildings which have been well preserved or renovated – but I think the claim to being the most beautiful village in France is a little misleading because it not a ‘real’ village anymore, in that it has been given over entirely to the tourist trade with lots of restaurants and souvenir shops (the restaurants looked good though – although we didn’t have time to try any of them).

Only a couple of dozen people still live in the village now – most of the people who work in the tourist trade live in the valley down below:

I learned that bauxite – the rock from which aluminium is extracted – was first discovered at Les Baux in the early 1800s, and that’s how bauxite got its name. Somewhat surprising I thought because bauxite is a rusty red colour, and all the hills around Les Baux are made of white and grey rocks.

Whilst its claim to being the most beautiful village is France is a little suspect, it’s definitely worth a side trip whilst in the area, if only for a lunch stop and to see the beautiful country around Les Baux.

Arles: City of dog turds

2008-10-10T23:24:00.001+08:00

I elected to skip the farewell dinner tonight to catch up on a backlog of emails at the hotel. After a couple of hours on the laptop I decided I needed some fresh air to clear my mind, so went for a short walk along the stone ramparts between the old city and the Rhone river. It seemed to be a popular spot for the locals as well, as many were walking their dogs along the river in the cool evening air. But I wasn’t getting much fresh air. All along the ramparts there were dog faeces - syn: excrement, turd, shit, crap – call it what you like, it was everywhere. And it stunk. Combined with the smell of stale urine every time I passed a tree, I was holding my breath more than I was breathing. After a couple of hundred metres, I gave up and went back to the hotel.

I do not understand why Arlésiens allow their dogs to defaecate along what would otherwise be a lovely river walk, thus spoiling it not only for themselves but for visitors to the city.

In metropolitan cities of France, dog owners these days are required to scoop up their pets’ poop and place it in a plastic bag for disposal in special bins (for sure, visitors to France know that it wasn’t always like that) but it seems that provincial cities like Arles have yet to catch up with these modern practices. That’s a pity because it spoils the attraction of Arles as a tourist destination. Arles – an ancient Roman city with many well preserved monuments – is worth a visit, but when you have to sightsee by walking along the road casting your eye to the ground every five seconds to be sure that you don’t step on a dog turd, it detracts from the enjoyment of the visit.

The only place that I can recall going to which was worse was Naples.

I took a photograph along the river walk, but it’s a pretty disgusting sight, so I will post a few photographs of the old city instead. I don’t want Blogger listing me as an adults-only site for posting obscene content.

Arles is also famous as the city where Vincent van Gogh painted many of his best paintings (it’s also where he cut off his ear when suffering depression). It is also where Jeanne Calment, the person with the longest ever recorded lifespan (1875-1997) was born and lived all of her life, and the birthplace of Christian Lacroix, the fashion designer.

So it’s a place that deserves to be cleaned up. Mr Mayor, please note.

A swinging soirée and a smoky suit

2008-10-09T23:55:00.000+08:00

I thought last night’s speeches were bad enough, but tonight was even worse. Tonight’s dinner was hosted by the President of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur regional council, who is also an MP. So I suppose that justified him talking for twice as long as the Mayor last night. I thought he would never end.

We arrived at the dinner venue – a place called Patio de Camargue - at 8.00 pm, for what was billed as a ‘swinging soirée’ with ‘Chico and the Gypsies’. Chico and his musicians kept us entertained whilst we waited for the dignitaries to arrive, which wasn’t until after 9.00 pm. By the speeches started I was getting really hungry. Whilst the President was talking, the catering staff started bringing out plates of pizza and placing it on the tables. I leaned over to take a piece and one of the waitresses brushed my hand away saying “Not yet!” So I waited until she wasn’t looking and then grabbed a piece. When she saw me eating it she gave me a real dirty look. I just grinned back at her.

Whilst we were waiting for the formalities to start, I wandered around outside where some cooks were preparing paella and goulash in some enormous cast iron skillets. I was about to take a photograph of one of them when one of the cooks threw some logs on the fire underneath. That caused a cloud of ash to explode into the air (see photograph below) and I suddenly found my blue suit covered in grey ash.

I tried to brush the ash off my jacket but wasn’t very successful. I ended up with grey streaks all over it. I only brought one suit on this trip as I needed to travel light as I was using trains and buses in France. So I can’t get it dry cleaned until I get home. I will have to tell people that it is the latest fashion from Malaysia – blue with grey streaks.

I managed to get a better picture after the ash had cleared. Some of the ash must have settled on the food (that’s raw prawns that the cook is stirring in, not ash) so I guess that explained the slightly smoky flavour. My suit has a distinctly smoky aroma now too.

Shut up, s’il vous plait

2008-10-08T23:22:00.001+08:00

This evening the conference delegates were invited to a cocktail reception hosted by the Mayor of Arles at the Cloître Saint-Trophime off the Place de la République.

It was a nice venue for a reception (see picture above) and there were some lovely French wines on offer, but the speeches were way too long. About 15 minutes into the Mayor’s speech, some of the Asian delegates at the back started chatting amongst themselves (they were getting bored as there had already been one speaker before him and I don’t think many of them understood French). After a couple of minutes of this, one of the mayor’s aides came down to the back looking most annoyed and started ‘sshhing’ all the delegates.

Obviously he had never been to a cocktail reception in Asia. I don’t think I can ever recall a reception in Asia where everyone stopped talking. Of course, if politicians would learn to speak more succinctly, they might hold the attention of their audience a bit better.

Double take number plate

2008-10-07T17:20:00.001+08:00

Walking along the road near my hotel this morning, the number plate of a car parked by the side of the road (illegally I assume because it had a parking ticket) caught my eye:

For a second or two I thought: “How can this car have two numbers – 81 AND 13?” Then of course I realised that I was in France, and the word ‘and’ doesn’t mean anything.

But I wondered how the parking inspectors in the UK would handle writing the ticket if the driver took it over the Channel and parked it illegally.

French checkout etiquette

2008-10-06T22:33:00.001+08:00

After a comfortable 13 hour flight to Paris, a three and a half hour TGV ride down to Avignon, and 50 minutes on a local bus, I eventually arrived in Arles where I am attending a conference this week.

After checking into my hotel I took a walk up the street to a supermarket to buy a few provisions.

When I got to the checkout I placed my basket on the checkout counter and waited for the cashier to finish serving the customer in front of me.

The cashier handed some change to the customer, closed her till, and then turned to look at the goods in my basket.

“Monsieur!” she exclaimed.

“Oui?” I said, wondering what the problem was.

“Monsieur!” she said again, pointing to the basket.

“Oui?” I said again. I looked at what I had in the basket – two bottles of water, a bag of grapes, a packet of nuts and some yoghurt. What had I bought that was causing her so much consternation?

Then she stepped back from the counter and put her hands on her hips and said again – this time in a very exasperated tone: “Monsieur!”

She seemed to be quite annoyed, and there was a queue building up behind me, so I said “Quel est le problème?” (“What is the problem?”).

Suddenly she relaxed. She must have realised from my poor French accent that I was not a local.

“Monsieur,” she said – much more quietly now – “It is not my job to lift the items from your basket.”

I had just had my first lesson in French checkout etiquette.

The incongruity of the Malaysian press

2008-10-05T19:07:00.001+08:00

What is it about the Malaysian press that prompts them to report on a person's death in so much gory detail?

For example, a story in today's Sunday Star about a bus crash in Johor Bahru includes the following paragraphs:

“The impact of the crash caused the driver's heart to be torn from his body and sliced into two. One part of the heart was in the bus and the other flung outside.

“The victim's son, in his 20s, was seen weeping over his father's body while the heart was placed inside a tissue box.”

Do we really need to know that?

I would imagine that kind of reporting would cause a great deal of distress to the victim's family.

And when I was getting a haircut yesterday, I was reading another local paper which had a photograph of some jewelery shop robbers who had been shot dead by the police after a high speed car chase.

The photographer had taken a low angle shot (for dramatic effect no doubt) showing one of the robbers with his brains blown out in the foreground and blood trickling from his mouth towards the camera.

And yet if a newspaper in Malaysia publishes a photograph of a stone statue in a park or a museum, or the work of a master painter in an art gallery, they must place a black box over any bare breasts.

There's something incongruous about pictures of dead bodies being okay for the public to see, but not the top half of a stone statue.

Moore's Law applied to flash drives

2008-10-02T19:27:00.001+08:00

Today I bought a 4GB USB flash drive from a local supermarket for RM39 (about US$11). Coincidentally I came across an old receipt in my desk drawer for a 64MB flash drive that I had bought almost exactly six years ago (4 October 2002 to be exact) which cost me RM299 (about US$80).

I suppose that could be cited as a excellent example of the application of Moore's Law. Not only has the price come down to about one eighth of what it was six years ago, but the capacity of the flash drive has increased by over 60 times.

If that trend continues we'll be buying 4TB flashdrives in another five years for a couple of dollars. The mind boggles.

I suppose if that happens there'll be no need for CDs, DVDs and so on. Everything will be on cheap flash drives that you can just plug into your TV, computer or whatever. People will be able to carry movies on a key ring.

An interesting consequence of that will be for all those countries in Asia that currently prohibit the import of DVDs unless they have been submitted to their country's censorship board for approval.

When DVDs become a thing of the past, will they require every traveller to declare their flash drives in case they are carrying on their key ring a movie that is contrary to their political, cultural or religious beliefs?

I wonder if those countries have even started to think about how technology and Moore's Law is shortly going to make all of their archaic censorship laws redundant.

Palin 'ready to be President'

2008-10-01T22:39:00.007+08:00

I came across a blog today written by Dr Alan J. Lipman, a US professor, author and media commentator. His political leanings are pretty obvious, but some of the stuff he writes is very funny. This story of the meeting between Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin and the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, for example:

http://headofstate.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah-palin-meets-with-afghani.html

But some of his blog entries are more serious. I hadn't seen this transcript of an excerpt of one of Katie Couric's interviews with Sarah Palin until I read his blog. I've reproduced below his blog entry as well as the transcript because the comments Dr Lipman makes before and after the interview excerpt is what makes it so scary to realise that this woman could be just a heartbeat away from being President of the United States of America (Dr Lipman's comments are in italics):

John McCain chose (Sarah Palin) as his Vice Presidential candidate.

He is 72 years old. He has been treated for a very serious illness. Four times.

He says that Sarah Palin is "ready to be President."

We are currently in what may be the most serious economic crisis in American history.

COURIC: “Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?”

PALIN: “That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the—it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.”

Read the above again.

Carefully.

Online Photoshop lessons

2008-09-26T23:22:00.001+08:00

If you are teaching yourself Photoshop (like me), you’ll just love this YouTube clip!

Panini tuna or tuna Panini?

2008-09-25T23:00:00.002+08:00

I stopped by a café outside the entrance to Isetan in the Gardens at Mid Valley today for lunch. The waitress gave me a menu and after studying it for a few minutes I decided on the tuna Panini sandwich which was listed on the menu as ‘Panini tuna’.

“I’ll have the tuna Panini please,” I said to the waitress.

“No have, lah,” she replied. “Only got Panini tuna.”

I pondered for a moment. Should I try to explain to her that a tuna Panini is the same as a Panini tuna, or would she think I was trying to be funny and pop an extra hot chilli in my sandwich to pay me back for giving her trouble.

She was looking at me, patiently waiting for my order. She was probably thinking: “Why is this stupid kwai lo ordering something that is not on the menu.”

I decided to play it safe.

“Um, no tuna Panini, huh?” I said. “Well, (long pause, with eyes scanning the menu), in that case I think I will have the Panini tuna instead.

“Okay, lah,” she replied.

Only Malaysians will understand.

God help America

2008-09-21T22:45:00.010+08:00

I was browsing the Internet this evening and came across an excellent article titled ‘When Atheists Attack’ by Sam Harris of Newsweek

It’s about the US Vice-Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. A few days after her candidacy was announced and reading about her background in the international press, it occurred to me that given McCain’s age and health problems, it would not be beyond the realms of possibility that if elected, he could kick the bucket whilst in office. And then self-proclaimed hockey mum Mrs Palin – who has only been overseas once and who believes that the Iraq war is “God’s will” - would be holding the most powerful job on earth.

God help America and the rest of the world I thought.

Sam Harris’ article completely encapsulates all of my own thoughts about Mrs Palin’s candidacy, but I can’t write as well as he does, so instead I will endeavour to share his views with as many other people as possible by publishing the link to his article below:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/160080/page/1

and also reproducing his article in full - just in case the link is not working and an American voter happens to pass by this blog. If I can save one American voter from voting for the McCain/Palin ticket, I will feel that I have made a small contribution towards saving the world.

This is his article:

When Atheists Attack

Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin's speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer who—being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy—could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.

Then came Palin's first television interview with Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady's misfortune—and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.

The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface (she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story—but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.

The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.

We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.

Palin's most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been widely discussed. The truth is, I didn't much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase "Bush doctrine." And I am quite sure that her supporters didn't care, either. Most people view such an ambush as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things Palin is guaranteed not to know—or will be glossing only under the frenzied tutelage of John McCain's advisers. What doesn't she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth.

I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with mil-lions of Americans—but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country—even the welfare of our species—as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.

In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the "end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing—as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all non-believers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that "God's going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you"?

You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"?

It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska. But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin's impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if, instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who "intends" to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation to speak of "the dysfunction in the black community"?

Teen pregnancy is a misfortune, plain and simple. At best, it represents bad luck (both for the mother and for the child); at worst, as in the Palins' case, it is a symptom of religious dogmatism. Governor Palin opposes sex education in schools on religious grounds. She has also fought vigorously for a "parental consent law" in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning—or, indeed, of the 21st century.

We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a "higher Father" before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist. Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to "talk the talk" between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to "walk the walk" until the Day of Judgment.

What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:

"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"

"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."

"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."

"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."

The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization. (end of article)

If you feel depressed after reading that, here's something to cheer you up:

Trees, Teresa and dangerous thoughts

2008-09-19T23:09:00.002+08:00

I was going to write a letter this week to my local Member of Parliament, Teresa Kok, after I learnt that a local residents action group was lobbying to have all the street trees in our suburb cut down (apparently because some of them don’t like sweeping up the leaves). But then she was arrested at the weekend and detained under Malaysia’s infamous Internal Security Act (ISA) which enables the government to lock up people that they deem to be “a threat to the security of the nation” for up to two years without charges being laid and without them being brought to trial.

So what dastardly act was my local Member arrested for? Did she try to set fire to the headquarters of the ruling party like they did in Mongolia recently? Was she caught driving a truck bomb towards the PM’s office?

No – apparently she was accused of organising a petition to ask a local mosque to turn down the volume of the call to prayer in the morning. A day after she was arrested, officials from the mosque confirmed that she had nothing to do with the petition, but still she is in jail in solitary confinement.

According to her parents who were allowed to visit her a couple of days ago (she was brought to police headquarters blindfolded so she couldn’t tell them where she was being detained) she is being fed unhygienic food that is only fit for dogs, and she is suffering diarrhoea as a result.

Is this the way to treat elected Members of Parliament?

Oops, better watch what I say, another blogger was detained today under the ISA (that makes two this week, as well as a mainstream newspaper reporter). Apparently the blogger suggested people should fly the Malaysian flag upside down to protest about something or other – and that’s enough to be deemed to be “a threat to the security of the nation.”

I really can’t understand how Teresa Kok can be a threat to the security of the nation. She doesn’t look like a terrorist (she is a bespectacled slightly-built woman of Chinese descent in her mid-forties). She works hard for the community that she serves, has won her seat three times in a row, and her popularity is illustrated by the fact that at the last election she secured the largest majority of any Democratic Action Party member over a government candidate.

Uh, oh. Just had a thought. I wonder if that has something to do with it. No, better not speculate. I’ve just seen a police car drive by. Their ISA radar might be sensing that I’m thinking something that is not permitted. I’d better click save, close and publish before I get myself into trouble.

In the meantime there’s probably not much point writing my letter about the trees. I don’t think they deliver mail to the ISA jail.

Snakes on a Plane – for real!

2008-09-05T22:00:00.003+08:00

I’ve never watched the 2006 movie Snakes on a Plane because snakes give me the creeps, but today Indian air travelers might have been worrying about a real life rerun of the movie plot when it was revealed that a snake had evaded capture on an Air India flight after it had arrived in Delhi from Srinagar.

According to news reports, the snake was found coiled up under a seat and the crew was unable to catch it as it slithered around the plane. It evaded capture by slipping into an air vent, and even after mechanics removed panels inside the fuselage, they could not find it.

An airport spokesman was quoted as saying: “There was a commotion which scared the snake and it went further inside.”

Apparently the snake was never found, and the aircraft was not grounded (“We don’t think it was a cobra”, an Air India spokesman said), so flying around Indian skies today is an Airbus A319 with a snake on board. I only hope it doesn’t find its way into the cockpit and bite the pilot.

In the meantime, I think I will avoid flying on Air India for a while.

Living in the 13th century

2008-08-20T23:51:00.010+08:00

Today I headed 130 kms east of Ulaanbaatar to check out a ‘13th century park’ to which we are planning to take delegates attending a conference in Ulaanbaatar next year on a day-long excursion.

It was raining when we left, but that didn’t deter our driver from driving at what seemed like a dangerous speed, splashing through pools of water on the road at 80-90 kph so that the whole windscreen was obliterated in muddy water. I guess my guide could sense that I was a bit nervous, because after we had to swerve suddenly to avoid an oncoming car that had itself swerved to avoid a pot hole, he turned to me and said: “Don’t worry, the driver is very experienced – just look out of the side window and then you won’t be scared.”

After about an hour and a quarter we stopped by a massive steel statue of Chinggis Khan that was being built by the side of the road. It is out in the middle of nowhere, but is intended to be a halfway stop for people traveling to the 13th century park. It is nearly finished, and when completed will house a restaurant and a souvenir shop.

The scale of the statue can be judged from the size of the large earthworks vehicle on the left hand side of the photo below and the four-wheel drives on the hill to the right. (The picture is quite dull because it was taken in a light drizzle).

After an another half an hour or so we turned off the main highway onto a dirt road across the steppes – at times sliding around corners on the soft mud (good job we were in a four-wheel drive – there was no way a conventional vehicle could have made it through some of the soft spots today).

The scenery was beautiful – so green at this time of the year – and occasionally we would see one or two gers in the distance.

After about another half an hour we reached the 13th century park which is a 350 hectare National Park in which about 35 people are living like they did in the 13th century. Yes, it is a tourist park, but not one where people come and dress up as 13th century warriors for the day and then go home at night – these people live in the park 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, just like they did in the 13th century – with no power, no running water, and no modern utensils of any kind.

About 50 tourists a day come and visit the park in the summer months, and only a handful in the winter. There are eight camps in the park with 2-6 people living in each camp following different lifestyles as they did in the 13th century. Each camp is several kilometres from the next one, so each one feels very isolated.

The photograph below is of the hunter’s camp, and the one below that is of a fortified camp of the type in which a king and queen would have lived in the 13th century.

One of the hunters inside the ger that you can see in the first photograph allowed me to take a few portrait shots of him. I didn’t bring my external flash unit with me, so had to rely on the built-in flash which unfortunately produced a bit of shine on his face. But it didn’t turn out too bad.

We also visited the guardians camp near the entrance to the National Park and a teachers’ camp where gers are set up like classrooms were in the 13th century.

We called it a day after visiting four camps because the rain was getting heavier, and I was getting quite wet and cold. Our driver – a large Mongolian man – gave me his coat to put over mine (which helped a bit), but so that he didn’t get his shirt wet, he took it off and was driving us around the camps topless! I couldn’t believe how cold he must have felt, but I suppose people who are used to braving winters where it gets down to minus 40 (Celsius), must feel relatively warm when the temperature is hovering around the low teens.

I hope it is not too cold when the conference delegates visit the park next year, because it is an interesting place to visit. I am not usually into tourist parks like this – but Mongolia’s 13th century park is quite unique and I’m glad I had the opportunity to see it.

On the way back to Ulaanbaatar I spotted a ger not far from the road that had a satellite dish set up outside (my guide told me that because the owner had a motorbike AND a horse, as well as the satellite dish, he must be quite a wealthy nomad). I asked the driver to stop, and after getting out of the vehicle started to walk towards the ger. But then a black dog – one of three sitting outside the ger - started racing towards me barking and growling. So I quickly snapped the shot below and ran back to the vehicle, just making it back before the dog. It didn’t look to be a very friendly dog!

Half way back to Ulaanbaatar my driver and guide decided to stop for a cigarette. It was still drizzling and quite cold, so I stayed inside the vehicle. I snapped the shot below through the side window. That’s the driver on the left. By this stage he had put his shirt back on but hadn’t bothered to button it up. I still had two coats on to keep warm.

When we reached Ulaanbaatar it was apparent that the rain had not let up for most of the day because there was water everywhere.

A beat-up Bluebird and a burned building in UB

2008-08-18T11:05:00.003+08:00

By the time I cleared immigration and customs at Ulaanbaatar airport last night, it was just on midnight as I exited the arrivals hall. I thought my office had arranged for someone to meet me, but nobody was there, so I had to take a taxi.

I saw lots of taxi touts hanging around the arrivals hall, so I asked at the information counter how much a taxi into the city was. The girl behind the counter said “9,000 tughriks,” (about US$8) but then she added: “but those guys will want at least 15,000 or 20,000,” gesturing towards the taxi touts.

I wondered why she was bothering to tell me that because I knew there was a proper taxi rank outside, so I headed out the glass doors towards the taxi rank ignoring the touts on the way. One of the touts followed me, and when I got to the taxi rank I could see why, because the ‘official’ taxi stand had been taken over by the touts. There were no proper taxis in sight. Just a line of beat-up old cars with young guys sitting on the bonnets waiting for weary travelers who had no other way to get into the city. It looked like the normal taxis don’t bother to come out to the airport at night, so the touts had taken over the taxi service completely.

The guy who had followed me started to put my bags into the boot of his car, which was the first one on the rank. I said to him: “How much to the Ulaanbaatar Hotel?” He replied: “30,000.” I said: “No way, the fare is never more than 10,000,” to which he replied: “Okay, I’ll take you for 20,000,” and we settled on that.

I had already decided that I would pay him 20,000 because when taking unlicensed taxis in the middle of the night, I don’t want the driver to think I have screwed him down too much otherwise he might be tempted to rob me on the way (although I don’t believe that Ulaanbaatar has a reputation for that – if it was Russia I would be much more apprehensive).

His car was an old right-hand drive Nissan Bluebird (probably a second hand import from Japan where they drive on the left hand side of the road) with a cracked windscreen, no seatbelts in the back, and no shock absorbers. He drove into the city on high beam all the way, with a red engine warning light flashing on his dashboard. It was a bumpy ride, but I must say he drove quite safely – I’ve experienced a lot worse in other countries.

When I woke up this morning, I drew the curtains of my hotel room to find I was right next door to the headquarters of Mongolia’s ruling party that had been set on fire by an angry demonstrators last month after the announcement of the election results (they believed that the ruling party – the MPRP - had ‘fixed’ the June elections).

The demonstrators also alleged that party members were getting rich from ‘donations’ from Russia and China for giving them preferential access to Mongolia’s natural resources, whilst the rest of the people in Mongolia remained poor.

A state of emergency was declared on 1 July, but that lasted only four days and things settled down quickly after that. Most Mongolians I have spoken to feel ashamed of what happened and now the burnt-out headquarters of the MPRP seems to be the only reminder of this blot on Mongolia’s history. Five people died on that night.

I wondered how I would have reacted if I had been staying in room 403 of the Ulaanbaatar Hotel on 1 July. I guess I would have started taking pictures from the window at first, but it probably would have got quite scary after that.

Traveling light to Lagos

2008-08-17T20:35:00.000+08:00

This evening I took a flight up to Ulaanbaatar for some meetings I needed to fit in whilst the Olympics were on. I went a little earlier than usual because I’d heard that it was taking longer than normal to get through security – and just as well because there were long queues at the check-in desks. The queues were caused by passengers having to open their check-in bags after they were put through the x-ray machines behind the check-in desks. Apparently they were not allowing anything with batteries or which looked ‘electrical’ in the check-in baggage. I was carrying two portable hard-drives that I was taking to Mongolia as gifts, and I was asked to remove those from my check-in baggage and hand-carry them. The security even asked me to do the same for my electric shaver. It was just as well that I had left some of my gear in Beijing, so I was able to find room to stuff them into my briefcase and camera bag.

As I walked away from the Mongolian Airlines check-in counter, I noticed five Nigerian guys checking in at the next counter where passengers were queuing for an Ethiopian Airlines flight (I assume they were Nigerians because their bags were all addressed to Lagos). They had about 15 baggage trolleys between them on which were piled about three times that many cardboard boxes.

I wondered firstly how much their excess baggage charges would come to, and secondly whether they had any electrical items in the boxes. If they did, I wondered whether they would be asked to hand carry their boxes onto their flight. Knowing Ethiopian Airlines, they probably wouldn’t even bat an eyelid.

Rubbing shoulders with famous people

2008-08-11T19:54:00.001+08:00

Lydia went to one of the swimming finals in the Water Cube this morning. She called me halfway through to say: “Guess who is sitting behind me – George W. Bush and his wife and daughter!” I assumed that meant she was sitting six rows in front of them and there were five rows of secret service men between them, but when I got back from work in the evening, she showed me a photo she had taken over her shoulder – and she really was in the row right in front of them. I was amazed that the President’s security people (who seemed to be nowhere in sight) would have let other spectators that close waving cameras in his face. Maybe they feel more relaxed in China knowing that there is already a big security presence in Beijing.

After studying the photograph for a few moments, I said: “But did you notice who was sitting behind George Bush?” She hadn’t. She was too busy trying to take a snapshot of Bush to notice Bill Gates right behind him.

The greatest show on earth?

2008-08-09T12:44:00.006+08:00

Wow, what a night last night was. Many are already saying it was the greatest show ever staged on earth. The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing was nothing short of spectacular. But it was a long (and hot) night. We had to leave our hotel at 3.45 pm in the afternoon in order to go to another hotel, from where the buses to the stadium would be leaving, for security screening. We had been told the buses would leave the hotel at 4.30 pm, but that was probably just to get us there early because they didn’t actually leave until 5.00 pm.

It took us less than 30 minutes to get to the National Stadium – or ‘Bird’s Nest’ as it is known – because most of the roads to the stadium had been closed off. We were in a convoy of 12 buses which had a police escort – but there was little need for that as there was hardly any traffic on the road. There was a policeman about every 20 metres along the road between the city centre and Olympic Green where the stadiums are located, numerous checkpoints around the stadiums, and hundreds of soldiers inside the plaza between the ‘Water Cube’ aquatic centre and the ‘Bird’s Nest’ where our bus dropped us off.

But despite the high security, there was a very relaxed atmosphere inside the plaza and people were wandering around taking photographs of the ‘Water Cube’ and the ‘Bird’s Nest.’

As more convoys of buses pulled into the plaza, we decided to go into the stadium to get a good seat. Our ticket showed the section that we would be sitting in, but we had been told it was free seating inside that section. Just as well that we did, because not long after we were seated (we managed to find two seats at the top of an aisle so that we had a relatively unobstructed view of the whole stadium), many more people started pouring in, and the seats started filling up despite it being only 6 pm – two hours before the start of the opening ceremony.

There was already some pre-opening entertainment going on. At first we thought they were artists rehearsing for the opening ceremony, but as none of them appeared in the opening ceremony we realised later that the entertainment had been put on to keep us from getting bored as we waited for the opening. There were dancers and singers from all parts of China, and some of the acts were very good.

About 25 minutes before the start of the ceremony, people started wheeling in thigh-high Chinese drums into the stadium. They came from all four corners like columns of soldiers on the march, and they kept coming and coming. After about 20 minutes there were about 2,000 drums filling the floor of the stadium and we knew that something special was about to happen.

The lights went down, the 91,000 spectators were asked to turn on the coloured torches that had been placed in bags under their seats, and suddenly the sound of 2,000 drums filled the night air with a tremendous crescendo – and then what happened surprised everyone – the drums lit up and formed patterns across the stadium floor in beat to the drumming – the Chinese drum had gone hi-tech!

And then came the count-down to the ceremony using the drums to form the numbers, finally ending in an explosion of fireworks around the rim of the stadium – it was a spectacular start to the opening ceremony.

As the drummers left the stadium in the dark, the Olympic rings seemingly magically appeared on the floor of the stadium and then gradually rose into the sky to a thunderous applause.

And then a giant scroll started to unfurl in the middle of the stadium which subsequently became the centerpiece of a story that dancers and other performers told of the history of China and its culture. The programme that had been provided to us in the bags under our seats told us that the “long scroll of Chinese painting demonstrates the unique concept of time and space and the philosophy of Oriental aesthetics.”

It was a bit hard to match some of the performances with what was listed in the programme, but I think the appearance of thousands of ‘scholars’ in the picture below was related to the part of the programme which was titled ‘Written Character’ and described as: “In the civilization of mankind, the written Chinese characters show their graceful and beautiful forms. They originated from pictography, which then became symbols. The symbols, though small, have numerous changes, and contain everything of the universe. They convene the most ancient philosophy – that harmony is precious – the relations between people, and between people and nature.” (You would think that after spending US$40 billion in staging the Olympics, someone could have thought about paying a native English speaker a few dollars to correct all the grammatical mistakes in the programme before printing it!)

Next followed some performances of Chinese opera which the programme described (with a few more errors of grammar) as: “Beautiful music come from people’s heart. The traditional Chinese operas have deep roots among the people. This piece of vast land has given births to hundreds of types of traditional operas. With the passing of seasons and years, the Chinese people have gone in pursuit of the eternal Harmony.”

About 20 minutes further on into the ceremony there was a dance sequence that was particularly impressive when dancers in light-emitting costumes came together in a big swirl to form a dove of peace:

I think the pictures above were taken during a sequence called ‘Starlight’ which was described in the programme as: “We live with the Heaven and the Earth; the nature and mankind are in harmony. Human beings have dreams, in the vicinity of nature, and the air of Taiji (the Supreme Ultimate) fills the whole universe”, but I am not a 100 percent sure because in the second part of the ceremony, which the programme called “Episode Two: Glorious Era,” I had difficulty relating between what was happening in the stadium and what was in the printed programme. I only managed to work out where we were when the athletes’ parade started.

The section where we were sitting was the next section along from where all the VIPs were. We could see George W. Bush about 20 rows away, and when the Cuban athletes marched on with a very loud cheer from the Chinese spectators, I tried to see what his reaction was – but he was a little too far away for me to see. Apart from China, the other two countries that got very loud cheers were Iran and North Korea. I bet George was grimacing by that stage!

Usually the athletes enter the stadium in alphabetical order of their countries, but we were told that in Beijing they would enter in an order determined by how many strokes of the pen there were in their Chinese names. Under this arrangement Australia (pictured below) entered second last before China (the hosts always enter last) which didn’t seem right to us because the Chinese name for Australia looks like it has much fewer strokes than the names of many other countries (for example, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, which entered 66th out of the 204 countries looked like it had twice as many strokes in their Chinese name as the Australians). Even the student volunteers in the stadium that we asked about it seemed puzzled as to how the order was determined.

Some of the Australian athletes gave the Chinese marshals a hard time when they kept running off the track to make faces at the TV cameras (the Italians were the only other ones who were a bit unruly).

The athletes’ parade took about two hours to conclude, and during this time many of the spectators went for walk to get a beer from the bar or something to eat. Eventually about 10,000 athletes filled the centre of the stadium, and the formalities began with the Chinese President declaring the Games open, the Olympic flag was raised and a runner entered the stadium carrying the Olympic torch.

Just before the torch arrived, some white doves were released to symbolise the Olympic objective of using sport to promote peace. As I read the programme description which said: “Under the blue sky and white clouds, wind blows gently; people of different colours from five continents are blessing for peace” I wondered whether the copywriter realised that this part of the ceremony would be taking place at night (and the sky - if you could see it - was definitely not blue) and whether he or she had contemplated that this would be the very day on which Russia would declare war on Georgia (and Prime Minister Putin seemed quite unruffled about that sitting in the section next to us).

The Olympic flame was carried around the stadium, passing between torches being held by eight of China’s most famous former Olympians, and then the final torch bearer – Li Ning who won six medals at the 1984 Olympic Games – was hoisted up on a wire track that enabled him to run around the inside of the top of the stadium to light the Olympic cauldron which had been constructed in the form of a giant scroll torch. The picture below was taken just as the cauldron was lit. You may just be able to pick out Li Ning in the middle of the spotlight to the right of where the flame starts to the right of the cauldron.

And then fireworks exploding in the sky formed the Olympic rings – very impressive:

After the ceremony was over, we headed outside of the stadium to find our bus. There were plenty of student volunteers holding up signs to help us find our way, so despite the large crowds we found our bus very easily (not like in Doha two years ago, at the end of the Asian Games opening ceremony, when nobody had a clue where we had to go!).

As we headed across the plaza to where the buses were parked, the ‘Water Cube’ looked very impressive in the dark.

40 minutes later we were back at the hotel which we had left seven hours earlier, and from there it was a 15 minutes walk down Wangfujing Street to the hotel where we were staying. People were still partying in Wangfujing Street (they had been watching the opening ceremony on big screens) and the beer bars were still open.

It had been a stifling hot night in the stadium and extremely humid. Most people came away with their clothes soaked in perspiration and sticking to their skin, so we stopped for an ice-cream on the way down Wangfujing Street to cool us down (the first time we have ever had ice-cream in Beijing at 1 am in the morning) and then made our way back to the hotel to sleep after a long but enjoyable night.

Torch bearers in Tiananmen Square

2008-08-06T12:29:00.006+08:00

This morning John Barton and I had the privilege of carrying the Olympic torch through Tiananmen Square. We were two of 29 foreigners that had been invited to carry the torch in Beijing today after it had arrived overnight from the earthquake-stricken province of Sichuan.

Originally John was going to carry the torch in a province a long way out of Beijing at the end of July, and I was going to carry it in Qinhuangdao on 3 August, but they changed those relays to earlier dates because of the earthquake in Sichuan province, (they wanted to leave Sichuan until last, before Beijing).

Neither of us could change our schedule (it was too late for me to get an earlier flight to Beijing – everything was full) so we asked the organising committee if they could give us slots in Beijing. And a few days ago they confirmed that we could run here.

When we were originally invited to be torch bearers, we thought we would be running about 250 metres like in previous Olympics, but then we heard that the relay slots had been cut back to 100 metres because they were trying to fit in more runners.

But when we got to Tiananmen Square, we found that the relay slots had been cut down to about 30 metres (the committee was probably under pressure to squeeze more people in) so it turned out to be a pretty short run!

There was an opening ceremony to receive the torch in the Forbidden City, and then about eight torch bearers, starting with Beijing Communist Party boss, Liu Qi (who also heads up the Games organising committee), and China’s first astronaut, Yang Liwei, carried it through the Forbidden City to the Meridien Gate where it was handed to Yao Ming, the Chinese NBA basketball star. He carried it out into Tiananmen Square and then it went once around the perimeter of the square and once around the inside.

John and I were positioned on the eastern side of the square near Chairman Mao’s mausoleum. We arrived on a bus with the other torch bearers, and they dropped us off at 30 metre intervals along the relay route. As we were driving along the relay route, about half a kilometre in front of the torch (at one stage the torch was almost catching us up so we had to speed up) I noticed that all the ‘public’ lining the relay route were dressed in uniforms or had t-shirts on of the same type. There didn’t seem to be any ‘ordinary’ people there.

I learned later that thousands of people had turned up for the torch relay that morning (and hundreds had slept over night in the square to get a good spot) but before the torch relay started, the police had moved them all out of the square and bussed in thousands of people from dance and martial arts clubs, and community groups and associations whose members had been ‘screened and approved’ by the authorities.

Along the road where John and I were positioned, the spectators were all old women (probably from a retirement village or something) who were wearing ordinary street clothes but were all wearing a large badge and waving a Chinese flag.

So we realised then that the whole of the Tiananmen Square torch relay was being stage managed for television. And as the torch passed by the ‘approved’ crowds, the cheering and waving was not necessarily spontaneous, but what they had been told to do and probably had been practicing for months.

That’s not to say that there was anything artificial about the crowds’ enthusiasm, because it was clear to see that they were excited about being there, and it certainly was a great spectacle as the torch was carried through Tiananmen Square.

John was running before me, so he was to pass the flame to me, and then I would take it to the next runner – a Chinese man who told me that he was just a ‘shopkeeper’ (although I wondered whether his ‘shop’ might have been one of those multi-million dollar emporiums that have sprung up around Beijing in recent years).

The organisation of the torch relay was as efficient as it could possibly be. Just prior to being dropped off we were handed our torch, and then as we got off the bus someone checked our uniforms to make sure the Olympic rings were on up the right way (I had my headband upside down), and as John came down the road carrying the torch, one of the escort runners who was running about 10 metres ahead of the torch used a key to turn on the gas cylinder inside my torch.

We had been instructed to pass the flame by holding the torches at a 45 degree angle. We were told that we were not allowed to shake hands, but we could give each other a high-five before I set off on my short run.

We had also been told to ‘smile and look happy’ and to look at the media truck that was in front of us (it had two TV cameras and about a dozen press photographers sitting in the back) as we waved to the crowds.

The atmosphere was electric, so we hardly needed to be asked to ‘smile and look happy’, but I had to keep remembering to look at the media truck.

But it was all over in a flash. It seemed that hardly had I started running, I was approaching the next runner, so had to pass the flame having borne it for probably no more than 15 seconds.

Along came another escort runner who turned off the gas in my torch. He was followed by a bus on which I was ushered. Someone sitting in the front seat of the bus took my torch, opened it and pulled out the gas cylinder, and then gave me back the empty torch.

(We had been told that we could keep our torches, which was very generous of the organising committee because in Athens in 2004, torch bearers had to pay US$250 if they wanted to keep their torch).

After the bus had filled with torch bearers that had done their bit, we headed back to the China People’s Palace Hotel where we had rendezvoused earlier that morning.

I must say that even though the whole thing was stage managed, the enthusiasm of the people involved was impressive. I had read reports about the escort runners pushing and shoving the torch bearers and shouting commands at them to hold the torch higher when the relay was held in other parts of the world, but here in Beijing they were as polite as could be and everyone was saying things like “nice to have you here”, “have a good day” and “hope you enjoy your torch run”.

When we got off the bus at the China People’s Palace Hotel, that was our first encounter with ‘ordinary’ people. A crowd had gathered around the front of the hotel (I guess they wanted to catch glimpses of people like Yao Ming who had rode on the bus along with the other torch bearers). A few came up to us and ask if they could touch our torches, and before long we were surrounded by crowds of people holding onto our torches and having their pictures taken with us. They wouldn’t have had a clue who we were, but must have thought we were someone famous from the western world.

We were asked to autograph caps and t-shirts (whilst people were wearing them) and it took us about half an hour before we could tear ourselves away from the crowd.

I went inside the hotel where the organising committee was providing packing tubes for our torches, and even there I had hotel managers and staff asking to be photographed with me holding the torch. One smartly dressed female manager took off her jacket and asked me to autograph the sleeve of her white silk blouse. I tried to tell her I wasn’t anyone famous, but she didn’t seem to understand and insisted that I deface her crisp white blouse.

It was certainly an experience to be treated like a celebrity – but I don’t think I’d like to be one for real. People grabbing you, pulling you, thrusting caps and pens in your face – I can understand why pop stars and the like get tired of pandering to their fans after a while.

My only regret about the experience is that because the public couldn’t get into Tiananmen Square, neither Lydia nor any of my work colleagues could take a photograph of John and me running – so that was a disappointment, but lots of people said they saw us on live television, so we are hoping someone we know might have recorded it.

Postscript added 23 August:

Today I was given a DVD recording of the Tiananmen Square torch relay, so at least I was able to get a few screen shots off it (see below) to keep as souvenirs. The quality is not very good, but it’s better than nothing.

I’ve uploaded two shots of John first as he came before me (he was runner No 95), followed by two of me (I was runner No 96).

Smog, fog or ‘humidity haze’

2008-08-05T23:22:00.003+08:00

The haze is back in Beijing. At the weekend the China Daily was rejoicing about how all the anti-pollution measures had worked (we had one and a half days of fairly clear skies over the weekend) but on Monday the skies were grey again and visibility was down to about one kilometre.

The China Daily didn’t mention anything about the haze yesterday, but today carried a story acknowledging that the haze was back, and criticising the western media for calling it ‘smog’.

A spokesman for the Chinese government was quoted as saying that the air was safe to breathe as it was in the 50-100 ‘moderate’ bracket on the pollution scale and that it was not ‘smog’ but a ‘humidity haze’.

In a story in the South China Morning Post (a Hong Kong daily that is not controlled by the Chinese government) environmental activists accused Beijing of fudging the figures and claiming that their own measurements showed that the air was in a ‘danger’ zone above 250.

So who do you believe?

Based on my own experience of living in Kuala Lumpur and experiencing smoke haze for 11 years from the illegal burning of rainforests in Indonesia, the present haze seems to me to be something around the 150 level. So maybe both the Chinese authorities and environmentalists are fudging the figures a bit.

Where the Chinese government loses credibility is the fact that any reading under 100 is classified as a “blue sky day” – yet there has not been a hint of blue in the sky since the weekend (see picture below).

If the above is classified by the Chinese government as a “blue sky day” then I guess some people might think that the government is trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

A government official was only yesterday proudly announcing that Beijing had had 154 “blue sky days” this year. Now it’s 155 – but I wonder on how many of those 155 days the sky looked like that in the picture above.

If the government was a little more honest about what is blue and what is grey, then maybe people would start to believe their pollution readings.

Beijing spick and span for the Olympics

2008-08-02T23:33:00.007+08:00

After catching up with a backlog of emails this morning, I took a stroll down Wangfujing Street to find somewhere for lunch. I could hardly recognise parts of the street. Many of the old buildings have disappeared and have been replaced by new shops and large billboards promoting the Olympics. On one side of the street there are flashy new 5-6 storey department stores, but on the other side there are blocks of 1-2 storey shops which look like they have only been built temporarily to support large Olympics billboards (see pictures below). Behind them are vacant lots, so I suppose they will be torn down after the Olympics for more permanent buildings.

I am sure there used to be large trees along both sides of the part of the street pictured above. All those have gone so it looks like everything was razed to the ground for the new developments (although at least they have planted some saplings in their place). Walking along this part of the street where there is no shade, it is noticeable how hot it is compared to walking one block further north where the original street trees remain. It’s a good example of how much the presence of street trees can help keep pedestrians cool in a hot and humid summer climate like Beijing’s.

Further south down Wangfujing Street (which is the main shopping street in central Beijing), towards the junction with Chang’an Avenue, many temporary cafes have been erected in the pedestrian mall section – actually they are more beer bars and drink stands because I couldn’t see any of them serving food – but they give the street a more cosmopolitan atmosphere – something that Beijing lacks.

The whole city is looking spick and span for the Olympics. The gleaming new airport terminal – the largest in the world – is a sight to behold, and there is a brand new six-lane freeway in from the airport on which the asphalt seems only to have just dried. There are beds of flowers everywhere, street sweepers in Olympic uniforms are ensuring that the streets are clean, the beggars have been run out of town along with the DVD peddlers, and there are no prostitutes hanging around the hotels. Beijing has certainly cleaned up its act!

All the city needs now is some clean air. After taking half the cars off the road, and closing factories for hundreds of miles around, Beijing’s air was looking better this weekend than I have seen it for years – but the August humidity is still stifling, so I wonder how the athletes in the endurance events are going to cope next week.

I read a rather amusing story in the Asian Wall Street Journal this morning. Apparently the Beijing Municipal Council has issued a booklet telling its citizens how to behave during the Olympics. It includes some advice on how to dress, recommending that people do not wear their pajamas in the street, and not to wear white socks with black shoes.

I only saw a couple of old women wearing their pajamas on my walk down Wangfujing Street, and nobody wearing white socks with black shoes, so it looks like most of Beijing’s citizens are taking heed of their Council’s advice.

Maybe the Council should also include in their advice that it is not polite to mow down foreign tourists on pedestrian crossings. It seems that one thing that hasn’t changed in Beijing is that the pedestrians still cross the road on the ‘Don’t Walk’ sign and the drivers still cross the crossings on the red lights.

The locals seem to have dodging the traffic on pedestrian crossings down to a fine art, but several times today I saw foreign tourists who had dutifully waited for the green ‘Walk’ sign, only to freeze in fear halfway across the road as a trolley bus bore through a red light with its horns blasting, sending the pedestrians scattering in all directions.

China relaxes its Internet censorship – for now

2008-08-01T18:42:00.001+08:00

Surprise, surprise! I can access my blog from China – the first time I have been able to do that ever since I started my blog on blogger.com – it seems the Chinese have kept their word to ease restrictions on Internet censorship during the Olympic Games.

It’s not completely open, but there’s a lot less censorship than there has been in the past.

I said “surprise, surprise” because I didn’t expect to be able to access my blog after reading the South China Morning Post during a transit in Hong Kong yesterday. The SCMP carried a story on its front page stating that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had admitted to cutting a deal with China to censor the Internet during the Games.

And it said that the chairman of the IOC’s press commission, Kevan Gosper, had apologised for misleading foreign journalists about press freedom during the Games during an interview with the SCMP.

Since the Games were awarded to China seven years ago, Mr Gosper, IOC President Jacques Rogge, and Chinese officials have many times promised that there would be uncensored access to the Internet during the Beijing Olympics. But Mr Gosper was quoted as saying two days ago: “If you have been misled by what I have told you about there being free Internet access during the Games, then I apologise. I am disappointed the access is not wider. But I can’t tell the Chinese what to do. You are dealing with a communist country that has censorship. You are getting what they say you can have.”

I got to my hotel only about 2.00 am this morning, after my Dragonair flight from Hong Kong was delayed, so didn’t get around to logging onto the Internet until late this morning. And by then, I discovered, a lot had changed in the previous 24 hours and many Internet sites that had been blocked up until the previous day were now accessible.

During that 24 hour period, most international news services and newspapers had been hammering the Chinese government over its Internet restrictions.

And by the time I logged on this morning it seems that the government had bowed to all the pressure and had relaxed many of its restrictions. However, the government didn’t make any announcement on the issue, and a spokesman for the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG), Sun Weide, was quoted as declining to confirm whether there had been a change in policy.

BBC News reported that its Chinese language news site was now accessible, along with Voice of America. The International Herald Tribune reported that the Radio Free Asia website had been unblocked, along with those of human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Websites mentioning a certain spiritual movement whose activities are banned in China were still being blocked (I daren’t mention their name otherwise the Chinese filters might block my blog) as well as some pages on Wikipedia*.

Although the government was keeping mum on the issue, my guess is that they decided that having the international press spend the week leading up to the Games complaining about not being able to access their news sites would take a lot of the ‘glory’ away from hosting the Games and prompt the media to write more negative stories about China.

I expect that seeing front page stories in the South China Morning Post criticising China’s censorship of the Internet, one week out from the opening ceremony, was not what the government was expecting by way of publicity in the lead up to the Games.

I don’t expect the government will admit to backing down (that’s not the Chinese way), but by relaxing the censorship for a couple of weeks - but not actually admitting that they have done it - is a good way of ‘saving face’, even if it does mean that some Chinese citizens get to read a few stories that the government doesn’t really want them to see.

But I would also guess that the shutters will go up again on 25 August - the day after the Games finish.

*Out of curiosity I looked up the section in Wikipedia on ‘Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China’ to see if they had an updated story on the developments of the last 24 hours. I was able to log onto Wikipedia okay, but when I went to the China page, it was blocked. And then when I tried to log onto other Wikipedia pages, they were also blocked – so it seems my attempt to read the China page had triggered some sort of blocking mechanism directed at my computer. But fortunately when I tried some non-controversial pages later in the day, I was able to gain access again, so I decided not to tempt fate and have since stayed away from any pages on Wikipedia that might trigger the blocking mechanism for fear of it restricting my Internet access for the next four weeks.

Blocking blogs in China

2008-07-31T18:47:00.002+08:00

I will be heading up to Beijing tonight for the Olympic Games. I have not been able to update my blog on my last few trips to China because blogger.com is one of the Internet sites that has been blocked by the 'Great Firewall of China'.

However, when China was awarded the Olympic Games, it promised that there would be no censorship and unrestricted access to the Internet during the Games.

I hope they keep their promise otherwise I will not be able to update my blog until I return at the end of the month. If there are no posts within a few days of this one, then it will be apparent that the Chinese have not kept their promise.

A cultural night in Bali

2008-07-23T23:49:00.007+08:00

I’ve been attending a conference in Bali this week, and tonight the delegates were taken to an outdoor drama performance in a temple in Karambitan village. It was about an hour’s drive north of Denpasar – at least I think it is north because I haven’t been able to find it on the map yet.

I guess this was a ‘real’ performance and not something put on for tourists, because we went up in two buses (there were about 60 of us) and there was nowhere for the buses to park (they caused a bit of an obstruction on the narrow street outside of the temple) and there were just as many locals watching the performance.

Before the performance we were invited to have dinner in an inner courtyard of the temple which was hosted by the headman of the temple (he is the distinguished looking gentleman in the white suit and traditional headgear in the second photograph below).

It was a beautiful night, and the atmosphere was exotic with the courtyard lit by lanterns and the perfume of the frangipani trees drifting through the still night air.

Drama is as an integral part of Balinese culture as dance, and the two are often intertwined in temple ceremonies.
I believe what we saw was called a barong play – a drama that depicts the fight between good and evil. It was interesting to watch, although I didn’t really understand what was going on. As it seemed to be staged as much for the locals as it was for us, there was nobody to explain what was happening.

However, I did learn that the character with the fiercesome mask in the bottom two pictures below – one of the main characters in the play – was called Rangda, a child-eating demon queen who leads an army of evil witches against the forces of good.

She is said to haunt graveyards, feed on corpses, and at night fly through villages, trailing her entrails, trying to find pregnant women to suck their babies’ blood.

As we were watching the drama performance, a group of local kids were sitting on the ground close to the action, but when Rangda appeared, they all ran away!

No flash photography was allowed during the performance, so the photographs below are a bit noisy because they were shot at ISO-1600.

Putrajaya from the air

2008-07-16T22:41:00.000+08:00

I’ve been trying to get a good shot of Putrajaya – Malaysia’s new administrative centre – from the air for quite some time now, as it’s located just east of the northern approach to KLIA, but I always seem to be sitting on the wrong side of the plane, or it’s night or it’s raining, or we make our approach from the wrong direction.

Today I thought we had a chance when my flight from Singapore came in from the south and I found myself on the right side of the plane (‘right’ meaning correct side, but it was actually the left side) and we flew past KLIA and did a left hand circle over Putrajaya. However, the shot I got (below) wasn’t as good as I had hoped for because there was quite a lot of cloud around and the window of the plane I was on (a Jetstar A320) was quite dirty.

However, the shot does show quite well how Putrajaya is developed around lakes – which are actually old open-cut tin mines that have filled up with water. I’ve heard that some of the cat fish in these lakes are enormous – perhaps that’s due to a heavy metal diet?

Rich photographers? No way!

2008-07-15T23:39:00.000+08:00

On my way back from dinner this evening, I noticed a small exhibition of photographs of Indonesia in the shopping centre next to my hotel. Most of them were very good landscape photographs, and they were being offered for sale in a nice frame. But they seemed to be quite expensive for Indonesia – most were priced between two and six million rupiah (US$200-600) – and I’d question whether some were worth that because they were rather over-saturated.

As I was standing looking at the photos, I heard a couple behind me remark about the prices. The woman said: “Oh, I didn’t know photographers made so much money – it must be a good way to get rich.” How I wish! I don’t think there are many professional photographers that would regard themselves as ‘rich’. Most struggle to make ends meet, practising a profession that they enjoy – but doing it more for the love of it than the money. If you could get rich by taking landscape photographs, I’d give up my day job in a flash! (And anyway, none of the photographs had a ‘sold’ sign on them yet).

Crash helmets or clash helmets?

2008-07-15T18:37:00.001+08:00

I had some meetings in Jakarta today. As I was riding in a taxi on my way to the first one, I noticed how nearly all of the motorcyclists on the busy roads are now wearing helmets. The Indonesian authorities have apparently done a good job of educating riders about the benefits of wearing crash helmets – unlike many other Asian countries where the majority of riders still get around without any form of head protection.

It seems in Jakarta that motorcycle riders like helmets with lots of psychedelic designs and colours – in fact some were so gaudy they would be better named ‘clash helmets’. I only saw only one that I would have described as ‘plain’. It was a white helmet with three black words stencilled on it that read: “Fuck the USA” (he rode past too quickly for me to get a photo of it). I guess the guy wearing it isn’t a fan of George W. Bush.

Burning buttocks on a bronze boot in Budapest

2008-07-06T23:07:00.004+08:00

I’d heard that the Statue Park (or Memento Park as it is called on the park’s brochure) outside of Budapest was worth a visit. It is a display of some of the statues that were removed from Budapest’s streets and parks after the fall of the communist dictatorship in 1989. In many other ex-communist countries, such statues were destroyed when the communist regimes fell, but in Hungary it was decided to put them on display to commemorate democracy by reminding people about dictatorship.

It was about 40 minutes away by bus on the western side of Budapest (the Buda side). At the front of the park there is an imposing statue of Lenin:

Inside there are about 40 politically themed statues, the most impressive of which is the bronze Tanácsköztársasági emlékmű (Republic of Councils Monument) which was produced by Kiss István in 1969. It was derived from a 1919 poster of a worker proclaiming: "To Arms! To Arms!"

I observed a British tourist taking some photographs of it, after which one of her companions, another British girl (I could tell from their accents) sat on the right boot of the statue to have her photograph taken. After about five seconds, just as her photographer friend was about to snap the shot, she suddenly jumped up and screamed: “Argghhh – I’ve burnt my ass!”

I don’t think she realised how much heat a bronze statue can absorb on a hot day.

After walking around the park for about 30 minutes and snapping a few shots, I walked over to a small building where they were showing a film about the life of secret agents in Hungary’s communist era. It was quite interesting – in fact I found it more interesting than the statue park itself.

There was also an interesting display of photographs and press clippings from the Hungarian revolution in 1956.

On the way back to Budapest, I spotted what looked like an old London double decker bus parked in a second hand car yard of Audis and other prestige vehicles. It looked quite out of place and I wondered how it got there. Maybe some travellers had bought it for a trip to Eastern Europe, but got tired of traveling in a bus and traded it in for an Audi.

(The smudge around the front of the bus is from the reflection of the window of the bus I was traveling in).

A quick trip to the puszta

2008-07-05T22:20:00.007+08:00

With the week’s meetings over, I joined some of the attendees on an excursion to see the horsemen of the ‘puszta’ which someone described to me as the ‘Hungarian steppe’. From that description I was expecting to see wide open spaces like the Mongolian steppe, but after driving for an hour or so through quite well developed and cultivated farm land, we pulled into a farm with some large horse stables – and that turned out to be our destination.

We were met by two horsemen dressed in traditional costumes cracking whips, in a car park that had parking spaces for about 20 coaches, and I immediately had the feeling that this was going to be a very touristy experience, and not at all what I was expecting.

We were ushered to a grassy area where a man served each of us a glass of ‘home-made’ apricot brandy.

It was potent – and I could only take one sip. If I had drunk the whole glass I am sure I would have passed out.

We were then led over to what looked like a small racetrack, and about 20 horses were let out of a stable and galloped around the track. I guessed this was as close as we were going to get to see wild horses. I got a few good photographs as they went around, but they only did it once so it was all over in a couple of minutes.

Next stop was a open area back next to the car park where the horsemen put on a show displaying their riding skills for about 15-20 minutes.

The guy in the picture below riding four horses – standing on the bare backs of the two behind – was very impressive, but the rest of the show was quite tame.

After that we were taken to the farm’s restaurant for a meal of traditional Hungarian food – goulash, sausages, etc – and then it was announced that we would be having an afternoon of ‘games.’

At that stage I lost interest and decided to leave early and make my own way back to Budapest to catch up on some outstanding work. The farm was worth a visit for an hour, but not for a full day excursion.

Virtuosos work up a sweat in Budapest

2008-07-04T23:59:00.006+08:00

I went to a concert tonight at the House of Traditions performed by the Budapest Gypsy Symphony Orchestra. This world famous orchestra is also known as the Orchestra of a 100 Violins – but there were far fewer tonight, so maybe this was a sort of cut-down performance given that the stage of the House of Traditions wouldn’t accommodate many more than about 50 musicians.

I was intrigued that in the middle of the orchestra there was a female violinist dressed in a long black evening dress – whereas all the other musicians were wearing traditional gypsy attire. It wasn’t because only the men were wearing the traditional clothes because there was one other female musician on a viola who was wearing the same traditional dress. It sort of looked like the woman in the black dress had got dressed for the wrong concert!

Even though the orchestra was ‘cut-down’ for this performance, it still featured some of its top musicians including Oszkár Ökrös, who is reputed to be the best cimbalom player in the world (and a very big man at that). He certainly worked up a sweat for his solo pieces (see picture below).

The orchestra was led by Sándor Rigó Buffó and Lendvai Csócsi József (pictured below). They too worked up a sweat in one of their ‘duets’ (not sure if that is what you call a performance by two violinists).

Lendvai Csócsi József (below) led the orchestra for most of the performance. His position is officially Leader of the Orchestra.

But for part of the time it was led by Sándor Rigó Buffó (below) who is also the President and Artistic Director of the orchestra. I guess that was to give Lendvai a rest. Lendvai’s a big man as well and he looked like he needed it. I wonder why these virtuosos are such big men?

I enjoyed the performance because it was live. It’s not the sort of music that I would download to my iPod though. (That reminds me, I came across a great album by Chantal Kreviazuk the other day called ‘Colour Moving and Still.’ I downloaded five tracks from the iTunes store – I love the combination of acoustic and electric guitars on the track called ‘Blue.’ I was listening to it over and over again on the plane coming over).

Hungary’s magnificent Parliament building

2008-07-03T23:42:00.002+08:00

I attended a reception in Hungary’s Parliament building tonight. It is a magnificent structure - constructed in a Gothic Revival style and completed in 1904 - that is the largest building in Hungary and the third largest parliament building in the world.

We didn’t get to see a lot of the inside (we entered through entrance No 7 and then walked upstairs to the Hunter's Hall overlooking the River Danube), but what we did see was very impressive. The photos below are of the grand staircase, the ceiling of the domed hall at the top of the stairs where the royal crown is on display, and the last picture is of the Hunter's Hall where our reception was held which had some large murals on the top half of the walls and the ceiling.

PS added 4 July: I replaced the first picture of the exterior of the Parliament House with a better ‘blue hour’ shot that I took tonight from a boat on the other side of the river.

“Flying's a wonderful thing”

2008-06-30T14:38:00.000+08:00

. . . that was the title of a short promotional video that was shown on my Malev Hungarian Airlines flight to Budapest this morning.

Although apparently produced by IATA, I hadn't seen it on any other airlines before - which is a pity because it contained one very thought-provoking message. And that was that although the world's airlines are responsible for two per cent of the world's carbon emissions, their activities account for eight per cent of the world's economic activity.

Those are interesting figures because the first is lower than I thought it would be and the second is higher. If the figures are right, there must be a lot of other industries where the percentage of carbon emissions produced is higher than their contribution to the world economy. I wonder if anyone has ever analysed the ratio between each industry’s percentage of carbon omissions and their percentage contribution to the world economy. It would make interesting reading and perhaps show which industries should be targeted most for carbon emission reductions.

The video also mentioned that airlines employed 32 million people around the globe – that was also a surprisingly high figure. I hope IATA are being honest in their counting and not inflating figures in an effort to justify their carbon emissions.