Oliver is... Paphosterous

Oliver is a bit busy and lazy to bother writing his own travel blogs these days, so since I'm lacking inspiration in my own boring life and seeking any escape from boring work writing, I wanted to help him out. He provided the requested photos without even commenting on what a strange request it was. That was nice of him.

I don't know what he got up to in Paphos, what he thought about it or what these photos are of, since I haven't been there myself. But I've tried my best to get inside his mind and emulate his style so it wouldn't be too obvious. I'm not going to do anything boring like research though.

Oliver, feel free to copy and paste this into Wordpress as is.

Island tale

We had a partly lovely time on Pulau Perhentian Kecil. I went snorkelling and swam in the sea for the first time in ages and magnificently failed to learn from my past experience of this exact island at the same time of the year as the parts of me that are still vampire-white and normally covered by clothes got painfully sunburned.

Thanks to our tiny, reclusive resort, we also got to enjoy/endure trekking across half the island or braving a bumpy water taxi any time we wanted to go anywhere and Jackie got to experience the on/off Wi-Fi annoyance that's plagued me for two years and might have led to a deeper mutual understanding. Now I just have to take her to Cambodia or Vietnam to experience the hassle of taxi drivers and street sellers and she'll never complain about my stress outbursts again.

I could present scattered photos of fond memories tarnished by sarcastic commentary, but instead I'll take the risk of posting a short story vaguely inspired by our tranquil island week, written in pain as I avoided sun, sea and surfaces while waves lapped outside our window, flying foxes tried to scavenge our biscuits and fluorescent fish flitted beneath the brilliant blue. It's a bit bleak.

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.

The Conquest of Monkey Island™

No sooner had I got my sea legs, than they were snatched from under me as we went ashore for some extremely medium-duty jungle trekking on Cat Ba Island™. After getting suitably sweaty, we took another short voyage to spend the night on Monkey Island™, which was inevitably disappointing given my impossibly high expectations.

Not only did I not see any monkeys, I didn't see a single pirate skeleton ghost or come across seemingly random objects for my inventory that would later prove ingeniously useful when combined with other objects or parts of the background. I feel like I've been the victim of an extremely long-winded marketing con by Vietnamese travel companies in collaboration with Guybrush Threepwood and the good people of LucasArts. I've heard they are contemptible sneaks. Still, I always enjoy a rickety wooden cabin.

Mm, that's nice too

Iiiiit's October 28th again, and you know what that means! No? It means I just noticed it's the pointless anniversary of a day when I presumably wasn't doing very much last year, so made a greatest hits compilation of photos of ace natural sights I'd seen over the previous year.

I'm not exactly running low on new things to show you - I've got almost two months of backblog scheduled in case I get hospitalised or something and can't provide you with your bi-weekly fix of disappointing, low resolution photos of things you'll have to trust looked spectacular when I looked at them with my eyes through slightly wrong prescription glasses. But a tradition's a tradition, even a pointless, non-existent tradition, so here's another year's worth of nice nature things.

Paradise is overrated

Travelling isn't all that stressful, it's life that's stressful. I get stressed at the drop of a hat, which is why I can never wear hats. I tried it once, let's never speak of that again.

Or at least I thought I got stressed a lot. It turns out all that time I was just getting a bit annoyed. Now I know what stress is, and what it's capable of doing to my formerly invincible body. I won't bore or sicken you with the details, but I have my reliably unreliable bank to thank for making an annoying situation steadily worse and piling on problems and bureaucracy like a stress Buckaroo until my digestive system couldn't cope any more. No, I don't have any formal medical training. Why do you ask?

The result was that I had to spend a lot longer limboing in Bangkok than I'd planned, or than Thai immigration allowed me, with a dwindling supply of emergency baht and no way of accessing my own money that I work for.

Then I remembered I was in Thailand, where there are loads of idyllic islands designed for just these situations, and sought to counteract the most stressful experience in my life with the most relaxing. It was going quite well for an afternoon until the typhoon struck.

Where's my goddamn escalator?

At some point in the last 23 months, someone told me there was a big Buddha statue up on a mountain in Hong Kong that you can visit, and someone else independently told me Hong Kong was home to the world's longest escalator. I assume that's what happened anyway, but for some reason or other (wishful thinking or idiocy - probably a sprinkling of both) I'd been convinced for some time that these entities were one and the same.

Needless to say, as someone who had a genuine passion for escalators in his youth, I was pretty excited when I had the opportunity to visit this tantalising attraction myself, and crestfallen to discover I was absurdly wrong.

It was only when I got about half-way along the satisfyingly long, multi-tiered cable car ropeway to the mountain village of Ngong Ping (where the Buddha lives) that I realised how impossible an escalator would be in this situation, and how ridiculous I must have sounded when I arrived at Tung Chung station, disappointed to see no signs directing me to the escalator and getting my friend to translate 'escalator' into Cantonese to baffled silence. Oh well, the cable car ride was pretty good. Actually, it was ace.

Hong Kong - The Edinburgh of the East

So it turns out Hong Kong isn't 'the Singapore of the North,' as I'd been expecting, but bizarrely makes me feel like I'm back in Edinburgh. From paradoxical Scottish street names and First buses complete with distinctively unpleasant purple-n-turquoise interior decor to the city's persistent use of fireworks long after most people have become jaded by the expensive spectacle, this place made me feel oddly nostalgic for early morning work buses. I've got to get out of here.

The comparisons fall pretty flat after that, but that's fine. The lazy journalistic device of superficially comparing one place with another place is never obligated to stand up to scrutiny, though Hong Kong's history as a British colony at least means this comparison holds more water than Chiang Mai being 'the Chester of Thailand' just because there's a wall around it or Singapore being 'the Isle of Wight of Malaysia' just because it's at the bottom.

There are also more white people here than I expected, which always surprises me after I've got so used to being around Asian people. Though if you're racist, blind or an idiot, you could make a wry point about Britain basically being a Chinese colony these days, right? Ha ha! Please stop reading my website.

Hey ma look, it's me!

I was gathering together some photos of me from this blog recently after someone requested them, so I thought I'd share them with you. This is the most self-indulgent post I've ever made, even by this blog's usual Onanistic standards, but this chronological collection could at least be useful for nutrionists interested in charting my weight loss throughout my travels (apparently I got fat before I left Edinburgh and was a shrivelled wreck again by the time I got to Thailand - really? How did I not notice?)

Putting this together, I noticed that I really don't take that many photos of myself any more - like I don't feel the need to get in the frame as evidence that I actually visited a place (unless it seems funny). Either the novelty of having a camera was finally worn off, or I've become less vain over time. Says the guy who just spent a couple of hours compiling a blog post all about himself, consisting entirely of images of himself.

This is just photos of me that you've probably already seen (though some are from slightly different angles - exciting!) It might be me next to a thing, me doing a thing or me wearing a thing, but the subject is still me. Seriously, there are about 50 of them - this is the equivalent of my Facebook tagged images or something. If you're not interested in me, don't read more.

Return to Hell

Image: yourenotfromaroundhere.com

Korea is covered in mountains but disappointingly low on active and deadly volcanoes, the bloody not-choking-to-death spoilsports. Even the stand-out feature of Jeju Island, Seongsan Ilchulbong, disappointed me slightly when I reached the summit and discovered it was a filled-in, Arthur's Seat-style extinct volcano rather than a Bromo-style sulphuric belcher. Well, it was a nice view.

But Jeju still had a few surprises left for me, including an extensive network of lava tunnels underground that made me feel like I was heading back to Hell. And we all know the ordeal I went through last time - I still can't look at a frying pan without wincing.

Jeju - The Isle of Wight of South Korea

The language barrier and ethnic homogeny clearly delineate South Korea from Great Britain, but in other ways this East Asian republic isn't a million miles away from England (actually, only about 5,400 miles). Take a look at this scene from Jeju Island, for example:

How am I managing to survive in such an alien environment?

South Korea is also roughly the same size as the UK and even its coastline doesn't look all that different, with South Jeolia jutting out to the south-west like some kind of Cornwall, and South Chungcheong basically being Wales. I guess that makes North Korea the Scotland of Korea? I can't see any problem there.

That means idyllic and slightly backwards Jeju Island, the southest you can get, is an ideal candidate for the Isle of Wight of South Korea - not its Hawaii, as the tourism industry wants you to think. Anyway, what's Hawaii got that the Isle of Wight hasn't? Exactly. Stop talking, I already said 'exactly,' which closes the debate.

Here's more stuff from Jeju.

Holiday

Because I don't celebrate Christmas or New Year, I usually get annoyed around that time of the year when the Western world shuts down and less work comes my way. This problem wasn't so severe in Korea (or in Taiwan the same time last year), but to curb any remaining Scrooge-style festive frustrations, I gave myself permission to take a holiday in the last few weeks of December. Everyone else bloody does.

Let's be clear that all this travelling around Asia and a couple of other places over the past sixteen months hasn't been a holiday - I've still been working as much as I can, and between work, blogs and the day trips necessitated by the blogs, there hasn't been much time to relax. I don't think I've been on what could be accurately categorised as a holiday since a weekend break to the Lake District in 2009, which was extremely rejuvenating and put me in a great mood for a long time after. I understand the value of holidays, I'm just not very good at taking them.

So last month I informed my editors that I'd only be able to do about two hours of work per day. I'm on holiday. And I had to be careful with my money due to an impending, whopping tax bill. Holiday. And I'd still be spending more hours than you think writing these blogs, of course - otherwise, what's the point of going anywhere? I'm on holiday. Then Kim Jong-il died and South Korea declared a state of emergency. Holiday.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Chang is

...an island, a beer and a Klingon played by Christopher Plummer in Star Trek VI. But let's start with the island.

This was my final destination in South East Asia, so I was determined to make the most of it. By doing as little as possible. It was nice. Here are my photos of absolutely nothing.

Mm, that's nice

After a slightly downbeat post summing up my disappointing experiences in the Philippines, you might wonder what I'm doing out here if I'm intent on not appreciating Asia or enjoying myself.

Sometimes I wonder that too, but then I look back at my amateur, blurry, overcast photos of the ace things I've seen so far, and then check out professional, idealised, Photoshopped images of what's to come, and I feel like I'm not completely wasting my time.

Here are some of my favourite natural sights I've seen in Asia so far. The quality of the photos won't be enough to make you go 'WOW!' or 'oh my god, how does that exist on the same planet that brought us Preston, Lancashire?'

But hopefully they'll be enough to make you go 'mm, that's nice.'

Mamma mia

After 26 years, I'd just about grudgingly accepted that hills in the real world don't look like the perfectly round domes found only in children's drawings, Postman Pat and Super Mario games.

Then I visited the Chocolate Hills in Bohol and realised I was right all along. Take that, experience! Let's a-go.

Except the clouds didn't really have eyes

(unless they were just looking the other way?)

Lil' bastard

Hooray! I finally actually did something in the Philippines, making the most of my last day in Manila.

I didn't spend it in Manila, obviously. I'm not insane. I went to a volcano inside a lake with a lake inside it.

I don't need to split costs with a lazy Canadian to make it more affordable either - I just relied on public transport, paid local prices and enjoyed a slightly stressful sightseeing adventure using 4 jeepneys, 4 scooter taxis, 2 buses and 2 boat trips to get from my Manila hostel to Taal volcano and back.

Paradise effing lost

It took until Day Four in Bali for me to begin to appreciate this tropical 'paradise.' Prior to this, you could say there were some 'hiccups' that prevented me from enjoying the experience fully. Though perhaps projectile vomiting occurring simultaneously with explosive diarrhoea would be a more fitting analogy (luckily this is only an analogy, and my kecks remain unsoiled).

If you're a fan of British consumer outrage, feel free to read more and learn all about the series of unfortunate events (only some of which were almost definitely completely my fault) that served to sour my first few days in Indonesia.

If you prefer your blogs happy and optimistic, take a look at the nice volcano picture and then sod off. You don't belong here!

Sentosa? No thanks, she already has a full complement of toes

These hopelessly oblique pun titles have been scraping the barrel for a while, but now I've dug through into a deeper barrel I didn't even know existed. It's a barrel of laughs!

Sentosa is Singapore's purpose-built leisure resort. It's as pristine, tedious and needlessly expensive as you'd expect.

Tea for the Tioman

It wasn't until I came to Pulau Tioman that I really appreciated a good island. This is a bally good island.

I've been to plenty over the last few months, gradually overcoming my Bill Hicksesque distaste for the beach and learning to relll. But when I started to miss Pulau Perhentian after my last island trip, I vowed to give myself as long as it took to get sick of paradise the next time around.

I've been here 12 days and counting, which by my restless standards is about eight months. It's not like I have some place I need to go. Really, I'd be crazy to ever leave.

Islander

I realise a fair few of my blogs over the last five weeks have been about my trips to beautiful tropical island paradises (that was only five weeks ago?), and that this may be getting a bit boring for readers. It's not like I've been to thirteen different places (cities, islands and Highlands) in three different countries during that time to mix things up a bit, right? (Cambodia still counts...)

Well, if you are sick of seeing me relaxing and enjoying myself in incredible surroundings, TOUGH NOOGIES! Here's some of the publishable stuff I got up to on Malaysia's most excellent Perhentian Islands. Featuring friendly sharks and massive lizards.