Bleak tale

I've been contemplating mortality recently. Can't imagine why. And I've spotted a flaw (add it to the pile) in the way people traditionally think about souls, spirits and the like, which they sometimes decide are bound by the laws of physics (those who mistake Nigel Kneale's classic drama The Stone Tape for a serious documentary), but other times decide are exempt. Where do you draw the line?

It's the same fundamental flaw I spotted in time travel a while ago. I could have gone with either time travel or death for this fictionalised demonstration, but since the former would have turned into the latter pretty sharpish anyway, I plumped for the macabre option.

I hope this unsettles you as much as it does me. Winking out of existence is surely preferable to this horrific eternity you've created.

The Dark Museum Off

When I started travelling, I considered museums essential destinations. I'd always had a passing interest in ancient history, so the art museums of Florence, the National Archaeological Museum of Athens and the charmingly run-down Egyptian Museum in Cairo took me on a fascinating journey backwards through time.

I didn't visit many museums after that, at least not many mainstream ones, as curiosity led me to develop a taste for something more niche. Over the past 18 months, I've made a hobby of tracking down museums that are sometimes sinister, mostly morbid and definitely dark.

A harrowing day out

Last time I visited Cambodia I didn't get much beyond the 15th century when retracing its history, with the exception of a small shrine I came across housing jawless skulls and other assorted bones. This time around there was no hiding from the legacy of the Khmer Rouge regime, with the country's biggest Killing Fields memorial and execution centres just a short drive from Phnom Penh.

I'd been looking forward to visiting these places, partly out of a sense of obligation to spare a thought for the very unfortunate but also, admittedly, because I wanted to see what lengths they'd gone to in jazzing things up for the sake of tourism. It's impressively plain.

While Seoul's Seodaemun Prison combines wax dummies with Halloween sound effects to help visitors imagine what being water-boarded might have felt like, and Hanoi's Hoa Lo Prison distracted me with its blatant propaganda and covert anti-American sentiments, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and Choeung Ek Killing Fields have been left pretty much as they were found by the Vietnamese invaders, albeit with most of the dead stuff tidied away.

Kind of green

I can't drive and I have no intention of learning to drive. I'm not interested in cars or the responsibility of owning and operating one. It's just another one of those quirks you'll have to accept about me, like how I'm not interested in settling down, having a relationship last longer than six months or spoiling my blog with ads to make a few pounds a year.

Still, there are times when having a car would be bloody convenient, especially when my plans for day trips end up lying some way off the train and bus networks. Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park and Berowra Valley both looked tempting and conquerable on Google Maps, lying on opposite sides of the rail line and Pacific Highway just to the north-east of Suburbia, but when you show up eagerly at a train station to be greeted by a sign informing you that the Berowra Valley trail begins 10 kilometres in a non-specific direction, you remember the lesson you thought you'd finally learned a long time ago - that Australia is big, and even on a local map nothing is as close as it appears.

But I persevered and managed to get at least an abridged introduction to both national parks, joining the Great North Walk at several intervals within reach of public transport and turning back after a couple of hours before the sun started to set and the 136 bus ceased its limited Sunday service, rather than heroically carrying on and risking spending the night in the open air if I didn't come across a town. If you're under the delusion that I'm some kind of thrill-seeking adventurer and not just someone trying to fill his days with nice visuals to accompany his audiobooks, I don't know what blog you think you've been reading for the last two years.

I don't want Si Chang the world

I'm a sucker for an unnecessarily time-consuming challenge (examples here, here, here... actually just this blog in general), and when Thailand's wet season started to trickle away and I headed out to visit more islands, setting foot on all of them seemed like a satisfying and doable task. Then I found out there are 1,430 of them and it didn't.

I have all the time in the world, which in practical terms means as much time as a 30-day visa waiver gives me each time I come in and out of this country for the remainder of my mortal lifespan. Forever doesn't seem so long any more, especially when you take into account that I like to broaden my horizons and do different things now and again with this finite span.

All things considered, I've probably only got eleven or twelve Thaislands left in me. I'd better make them good ones. Koh Si Chang was a pretty good one.

Say Hoa Lo to my little friend

Sometimes you can learn too much about a country and lose those initial, innocent, ignorant impulses you might have had back when you weren't burdened by knowledge and experience.

I was in South Korea for over a month before I remembered 'oh yeah, this is that place they're supposed to eat dogs,' and it wasn't until my sixth day in Vietnam when I visited Hoa Lo Prison - which the incarcerated United States Air Force POWs sardonically nicknamed the 'Hanoi Hilton' - that I recalled 'oh yeah, there was that whole war thing...'

It's not like I hadn't seen 20,000 terrible films about it, all admittedly from the American perspective (though rarely with a positive outlook about the whole thing). So I was keen for the chance to redress the balance and see events portrayed from the other side of the conflict.

Though I wasn't quite prepared for the level of selective editing involved. This museum's white-washed trip down memory lane is the most darkly amusing cover-up I've seen since I visited the Korean DMZ and learned about the North's childish excuses when they were caught digging infiltration tunnels to the South. I may not be a historian, but my dad's a farmer and I know the smell of bullshit.

The dark side of Macau

I spent a little longer in Macau then I'd intended, having already booked my flight for the end of the month but cutting my time in the People's Republic of China mercifully short due to various stresses. I completely failed to make the most of this extra time though, and didn't even bother leaving the four square kilometres of the peninsula to check out the islands. There'll be more islands in other places - this was my China detox.

I always seem to end up getting stranded in these colonial outposts, and Macau is one of the nicer ones. For once, the colonists were Portuguese too, not British, so I didn't even have to feel guilty!

I don't really have a theme for these compulsory pictures of tourist sights. I notice all my pictures are usually taken in the day time, because my camera doesn't take very good night shots and I'm usually in bed by nine, so I stayed up late to get some blurry night time photos. Sorry to disappoint anyone who came here hoping to read about the disgusting stuff that goes on here - read this instead. But if you want a less depressing, conservatively bland experience, check out my photos.

Just as sloshed as Schlegel

I didn't feel noticeably wiser after traversing the Path of Philosophy (哲学の道) in Higashiyama, which connects many of Kyoto's most significant historical sites, though that could have been partly due to the fact that my soundtrack to the journey was Daniel Defoe's celebrated imperialist horror Robinson Crusoe, and the rage was clouding my judgement.

Don't read it unless you're the sort of person who thinks the extermination of backwards indigenous cultures by the progressive regime of Catholicism is a good thing, especially if you've visited countries where this has actually happened. If that sounds like you, you can stop reading my blog while you're at it.

Despite my unwise choice of audiobook, this was a nice walk and a pleasant way to spend my last few days in Japan. This time. It's ridiculous and very bad news for our planet that it's cheaper for me to leave this country and come back again later than it is just to take a train between cities. I'm screwing our environment and putting human civilisation in jeopardy. I'm like a 21st century Crusoe.

I won't lie to you, this post is pretty much all temples, shrines and pagodas again. But if you behave, I might throw in some more unpleasant schoolgirl costumes. Aren't you lucky?

Another totally disgusting museum

Another ghastly blog you shouldn't read if you're squeamish or were planning on eating today, about another macabre museum I urgently needed to visit as soon as I read about it.

The assorted tapeworms and other organisms displayed at the Meguro Parasitological Museum in Tokyo aren't as shocking as the deformed baby corpses and crushed skulls of Bangkok's Siriraj Medical Museum, but this research centre still probably isn't a place to take your kids on a family day out in Tokyo. Unless it's me as a kid.

We fort them hard, we fort them well

I regretted my decision to take the train down Sri Lanka's west coast before I boarded the vehicle, which began rapidly filling up with human cattle even before it came to a halt on the platform. Clearly, these people aggressively shoving past disembarking old women knew something I didn't, and my comparative politeness left me spending most of the sweaty three hour journey squeezing myself into the space in front of people's knees as an endless stream of snack sellers tried to mow down standing passengers with their aisle-wide carts.

Maybe that's why I was so relieved to arrive in Galle's historic Fort district, which felt a lot more peaceful and spacious than other cities in this country, and where I was only pestered by about one taxi driver per minute as I stubbornly walked to my hotel - an unprecedented improvement. I thought Kandy was quite nice, mainly for not being Colombo, but this place is properly nice. I couldn't wait to de-stress and get my work done before heading out early the next morning to take photos.

After a good sleep, Galle seemed less spectacular in the harsh light of day, but it's still the most attractive dilapidated colonial outpost I've visited - more relaxed than Georgetown and Malacca, less sterile than Singapore and the less said about Manila and Malang the better. I like it when people actually live in these heritage attractions, though I had a familiar sense of vague ancestral guilt that the place I felt most comfortable in Sri Lanka was the one largely built by Europeans.

Bye bye baby

I'm back in Bangkok for a bit, before taking another flight at the end of the week. For all its faults, Bangkok is a much better place to kill a few days than Kuala Lumpur, where I would have been otherwise, and this at least gave me the chance to tie up a loose thread from my last visit here in November, when the morbidly fascinating Siriraj Medical Museum was closed following the flooding. It was worth the wait.

Bangkok is many things to many people - for some it's a sex tourism paradise or a convenient place to get a realistic-looking driver's licence without having to go through the tedious process of learning how not to run people over. In my case, it largely serves as a Deep Space Nine-style spaceport connecting my trips around various parts of Asia - a Bangkok Nor, if you will. If you're such an irredeemable nerd that you understand the reference.

This city isn't so renowned for the quality of its museums, but what they may lack in educational value and dinosaur skeletons they make up for with a commendably non-squeamish approach to death and deformity. Readers of a sensitive disposition and pregnant women (or anyone who doesn't really like seeing dead babies) might not want to read more. Seriously, this could be a bit upsetting.

A childish day out again again again again again again (again)

If you're a white person, you might find it difficult to tell the age of people from East Asian countries, with their clear skin, cherubic complexions and more conservative style of dress compared to the wrinkled, sagging monstrosities you get back home.

I've met a lot of Koreans recently, who not only looked young, but bloody were, thanks to the Korean government offering extremely discounted rail travel to encourage foetuses to explore their country during study breaks. After a year and a half spent mostly in hostels where I usually represent the mean age, it was a bit of a shock to realise none of the people around me were even a glint in their father's cōleī when I was already at the height of my writing career. To rub it in, one person I met was even called 'Im So-young,' which is like a poor quality racist joke that actually happened.

If you're looking for ways to feel like a strange old man, I strongly advise hanging out with people seven years your junior. At least in Korea you have the advantage that age is counted differently than in Western countries, so when someone tells you they're 21 you can pretend they're actually 21 (and just on the border of socially acceptable), and not actually 19. If the alternative is spending my time with racist, out-of-work English teachers my own age, I'll take the local kids every time.

The Brixham of South Korea

The tourism industry likes to go for the Santorini comparison when promoting Gamcheon Village, but I haven't been to Santorini. Where I have been is Brixham in Devon, England, so that'll do.

Boy, have I been to Brixham. It was my Nana's favourite place in the world (based on her extensive travels in several parts of England and Wales, and that one time her son forced her to take a ferry to Calais and back in an optimistic attempt to broaden her horizons), so that meant I spent many formative summers relying on joke shops, Sonic the Comic and Bruce Coville's Aliens Ate My Homework saga to stave off the boredom in the coastal town they forgot to close down.

Yeah, like I would have been in my element in Ibiza or something. I'll clearly end up back in Brixham when this is all over.

The Valley of the Kings of South Korea

With its generous selection of important dead people buried in oversized tombs along the west bank of a river, walking around the necropoli of Gyeongju reminded me of Luxor's Valley of the Kings (and Queens - let's not be sexist, even though it was Egypt where that sort of thing is actively encouraged). It wasn't as good though, obviously. I knew when I toured Egypt that I'd peaked in terms of historical sightseeing, and it's all been a futile waste of my time and yours since then. Still, if it keeps me from Photoshopping my face onto Scott Bakula I'll take any excuse to get out.

I was surprised to see these Super Mario Worldesque mounds popping out of the ground when I arrived in Gyeongju, and even more surprised that no one seemed to be paying any attention to them, instead flocking to sites of negligible historical value that had briefly featured in some Korean TV drama or other. But at least this meant I'd get some clear photos to make up for my washed out photos of the similarly shaped Chocolate Hills in the Philippines.

It was probably around the time I reached the fifth set of identical, featureless mounds of turf that I realised why the Koreans aren't so enthusiastic. Still, they look quite nice at sunset.

Preah Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan

Admiral Kirk's least favourite Khmer temple. Right, that's the rubbish pun title over with. Come on, I know it's another Cambodian temple, but at least it's one of the nice overgrown ones and not another of those pyramid ones. You know you've visited too many temples in too brief a time when the prospect of clambering over a 1,000-year-old pyramid loses its appeal.

Preah Khan was the last temple I visited on my Cambodia trip, and is probably the one I'd least mind getting trapped within forever as some sort of malevolent spirit, doomed to haunt its crumbling passageways for eternity, or until someone builds a car park over it. The fact that I managed to muster some enthusiasm after feeling seriously templed out must mean it's something special.

Let's do Cambodia properly

I saw more than just the border this time, at least. Even if I still spent less time in this kingdom than I have in any other country (Brunei excluded), at a disappointing 72 hours - abandoning some of my remaining principles and booking a despicably lazy package tour from Bangkok.

These are my last few weeks in South East Asia, and I didn't feel like spending too much time and effort getting to grips with a new culture, a new currency (not that they even use their own currency as it turns out) and some new phrases to half-heartedly learn and be too embarrassed to use, for fear of pronouncing them like an idiot.

But even after just two days out in Siem Reap, I was pretty templed out and ready to go back to easy-peasy lemon polka-dot Thailand.

Crime and gunishment

Dave curbs his enthusiasm at meeting Uncle Tow

When I was a kid, I loved dungeons, haunted houses and the Chamber of Horrors section of wax museums (I still know the sequence of torture instruments at the Brading Wax Museum on the Isle of Wight like the back of my severed hand). I'm happy to report that I've never grown out of this.

It's no so much morbid curiosity or a disturbing gore obsession as the amusement of someone putting hard work and care into creating dummies and dioramas to really scare the shit out of children - especially when they contain more gore than is strictly necessary (Haw Par Villa in Singapore is the best example I've found in the world, so far).

I've been trying to find 'unusual' attractions in Bangkok on my most recent visit, so I was delighted to find out that there are a few museums devoted to death and suffering in various forms. Excellent! I was going to categorise these next few blog posts as The Dark Side of Bangkok, but then I remembered there are much darker things around here than that, which I have no interest in seeing. No matter how often tuk tuk drivers make the sales pitch.

He's changed

A few months ago, I might have settled for that Basic Dorm and risked suffering the snores and nocturnal telephone calls of 15 people. But my budget backpacking days are behind me, and I was happy to splash an extra 43 pence on air conditioned Superiority. Ooh, la-de-da - who does he think he is? He's changed.

The littlest bastard

Not my photo.
We'll get to my disappointing photos in a minute

The Philippine tarsier was one of the things I was most looking forward to seeing in this country - and not, like many people, because of their teddy bear style cuteness. I don't see that myself. To me, they look sort of like a cross between an owl, a lemur and a poo.

But I find all primates fascinating, especially these older types who were clinging to branches with their funny fingers long before our ape ancestors learned to walk upright and were taught to kill by a weird alien monolith. Go back far enough, and we might have been a lot like these guys.

I feel a particular affinity with the Philippine tarsier. They enjoy a solitary existence and don't like staying in one place too long. They only mate once a year and like eating crickets. We both look a bit like aliens as well, or at least when I was ill at school once, the popular concensus was that I looked 'like ET when he's dying.' These things look more like Ewoks.

A childish day out again again again again again

Sentosa didn't quench my thirst for immature days out in Singapore - luckily Singapore Zoo was on hand for all my incarcerated wildlife needs.

Because it's Singapore, I correctly anticipated something more in the conservationist style of Taipei Zoo than the slightly harrowing leg-irons and irresponsible feeding of Bangkok's Dusit Zoo. The animals are still here to be ogled and laughed at (especially the ridiculous proboscis monkeys), but not touched.