Highlander IV: Not a Flower

After spending time in Baguio and Sagada recently, I was happy for another chance to enjoy cool air and pine fragrances when our route east from Kuala Lumpur to the Perhentian Islands was rudely interrupted by the Cameron Highlands.

This was one of my favourite stops in Malaysia the first time, and judging by the disproportionate number of Europeans hanging around here, I can only presume my blogs were successful in boosting its tourism profile. Coming back meant I was able to tick off the final outstanding item on the region's conveyor belt package tour itineraries by trekking deep into the forest to find the world's biggest flower that isn't even a flower and isn't the biggest of these even if it was, which it isn't.

Still, nice walk.

Kep calm and carry on

When I left Australia I thought I'd strolled along my last patronisingly well-maintained mountain trail, but with Kep Mountain squatting right behind my cabin it would have been rude to ignore it. Plus, I'd just spent an evening dealing with the incompetence of HM Revenue & Customs and getting nowhere, so getting scratched to pieces by branches and being found dead on a hillside wasn't an entirely uninviting prospect.

No, seriously, I'm fine. Stop calling.

Exorcising the ghost town

Isn't progress annoying? The devastated colonial ruins of Cambodia's Bokor National Park have been a favourite stop on the tourist trail since the country opened its gates in the 1990s to let in the eager hordes of backpackers looking for something edgier than Thailand. These tourists, in typically thoughtless fashion, proceeded to benefit Cambodia's economy significantly, to the point that the country now has the resources to clean up some of the ugly and depressing eyesores from its war-ravaged past and build lucrative casinos and resorts in their place.

How DARE they? If you've ever visited Cambodia, YOU are responsible for this desecration of this arbitrarily defined heritage. I wanted to see the black and burnt ruins of a 1920s hotel jutting tombstonelike out of a serene hill, not a polished building ready for renovation and a new lease of life. When will you people realise that by aiding the economic recovery and development of these countries, you're ultimately only serving to make your travel photos look slightly less poignant and yourself look a little less adventurous as a result? You make me sick.

Before Anonymous chips in, I should point out that not everything I write here is completely sincere. Though I am glad I got the chance to see the Bokor Hill Station and some of the other surviving, grotty buildings around here before they were torn down to make way for the Chinese Las Vegas of Cambodia, even if they don't look so exciting these days.

I'm blue, da ba dee, almost died

Oh good, there's only a high risk of this place catching fire. That's put my mind at ease

My final day out from Sydney was almost my final day on this planet, as I inadvisedly tackled a hiking trail rated 'Hard' that did turn out to be a step beyond the usual well-maintained jungle paths I've come to expect around here. There wasn't even a diagonal train to carry me out of the valley floor at the end, talk about roughing it.

Alright, there wasn't any actual mountain climbing involved, and there was a clear trail to follow most of the time so it wasn't as trying as my treks across islands, but the problem came on the return journey when I lost sight of the trail completely and found myself scrambling around the edge of sheer cliffs, trying to work out which boulder to head towards.

Being a bit of an idiot with little concept of his own mortality and unnatural dedication to his blog, I took the opportunity to take some quite nice pictures of the Mount Victoria area, and when I felt the twigs sliding beneath my feet and the branches supporting me started to bend, I made sure to lift my laptop bag to safety before following it. I'd done a couple of hours' work on the train that I hadn't been able to e-mail yet, and there's no way I was going to write all that again.

My compulsive photo taking finally turned out to be useful though, when I was able to compare a certain rock-'n'-tree combo to one I'd photographed near the start of the trip and found my way back to safety, so there are mixed messages here. The only thing that's certain is my enthusiasm for nature walks has been curbed for a while.

Kind of Black(heath)

I didn't have much of a plan for my trip to Australia, beyond spending as long in Sydney as it took for my new passport to arrive or to see in the New Year, whichever came sooner. Both of those tasks were complete by January 1st (can you work out which came sooner?), but faced with the prospect of spending the three weeks until my flight slumming it in hostels along the east coast or spending longer in my excellent pad complete with even more excellent dog, there was no contest.

I'd already planned to come back to Australia in a few months time when I was more in the mood for sightseeing (this kind of erratic, planet-destroying flight schedule is typical of me), and for some reason I wasn't even sick of the Sydney area yet. So I settled in for another fortnight of working on the train, walking around more of the Blue Mountains and writing more repetitive national park blogs.

Luckily for you, temperatures reached ridiculous heights during that time and I found it a chore even heading out for the thrice-weekly Pepsi run, so you only have to put up with two more of these. At least there's some mild peril.

Farscape tour of Sydney

My name is John Crichton, an astronaut. A radiation wave hit and I got shot through a wormhole. Now I'm lost in some distant part of the universe on a ship, a living ship, full of strange alien...

Oh no, wait - that's not my life, that's the Jim Henson Company's prematurely cancelled cult sci-fi drama Farscape. I'm not an astronaut, I'm just an aimless wanderer with too much time on his hands, looking for ways to fill his last few days in Sydney.

Hang on, wasn't Farscape filmed in Sydney? I smell another pointless and frustrating challenge!

Kind of grey

The Southern Highlands was my last port of call in the wider Sydney area before my travel card ran out. I'd planned to visit twice to see different parts of the region like I'd done in the Blue Mountains, but a lengthy and convoluted commute in and out of these remote villages meant I only made the trip once, and when I did it was raining.

That wasn't entirely a bad thing though, as at least grey skies and gloomy lighting lend some desperate variety to these outdoorsy blogs and I didn't have to worry about my skin burning again. Actually, due to the inclement weather, high elevation and being ever-so-slightly closer to Antarctica than ever before, this is one of the few places I've been in the past year where it's nostalgically a little too cold to walk around in just a T-shirt. So I decided to wear pants, shorts and shoes as well.

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.

Kind of red

Day two in the Blue Mountains as I continue to tick off the region's most easily accessible, well-travelled tourist trails and leave the more creative bush walking experiences for less lazy people with ambition and cars.

At least I saw some wildlife this time, even if it was only birds, lizards and insects.

Kind of blue

I've felt pretty damn content since I arrived in Australia, and walking around the cool rainforest trails of the Blue Mountains National Park was definitely the high point - not only in the literal sense. I always love escaping from the urban sprawl and losing myself in the wilderness, especially when I don't have to actually get lost, can stick rigidly to easily accessible, well maintained trails and get home in time for dinner.

But all peaks must have their troughs (again, I'm not literally talking about terrain, but it is stylistically helpful that my mood changed in direct proportion to my elevation above sea level) and the illusion shattered when I got back to Sydney centre and had to deal with rush hour traffic for the first time since I got here.

It's so much more annoying being able to actually understand the inane banter taking place around me after spending so long in the non-English-speaking world, like a guy loudly narrating every stage of the journey over the phone and some teenagers dissecting a recent episode of Geordie Shore with more reverence and enthusiasm than necessary. I forgot how terrible people can be. Utopia my arse! Australia has the same problems as anywhere.

So the next morning I escaped to the mountains again, returned to the city in the evening and repeated the cycle for the rest of the week, riding the sine wave of stress into the sunset. Wheeeeee!

Rockin' the suburbs

I'm not sure how I'm rockin' them exactly, unless 'rockin'' means 'living in and walking around,' in which case I am a bloody rock god. If 'god' means someone who walks around for a few hours at a time trying to photograph elusive birds until he gets tired, a bit bored and sunburnt, so goes back to his comfortable room to watch QI (there must be some obscure religion, surely?)

I stayed in Sydney Suburbia for six weeks in the end, which has been plenty of time to get to know one specific area intimately, on days when I wasn't stubbornly insisting on extracting the maximum value for money from my travel pass by making six-hour round trips to see some slightly different cliffs. This month's blogs may get a little repetitive, sorry. I hope you like green.

Where it all Bagan

Enough of these pristine pagodas with inflated ticket prices, give me a one-week pass and the freedom to wander around a load of dilapidated old ruins to my heart's content, before an impending return flight and the need for something approaching a reliable electricity supply and internet access drives me back to what could be called 'the city' by a loose definition of the term.

Welcome to Bagan! It's very nice, for a day.

Ha Long is a piece of string?

That depends on the scrupulousness of the travel agent you book your tour of Vietnam's tactically voted Wonder of the World with, and how stubborn you are to fight through their deliberately ambiguous sales pitch and outright lies about 'VIP' boats and 'superior' bungalows before they admit that everyone just gets handed the same length of tatty old string frayed at the edges and with a couple of frustrating knots that they've tried loosening with scissors, but that just made it look worse.

If you enter the tour company's office prepared to deal with their bullshit, and don't get indignant when the tour guides advise you that you shouldn't leave any valuables in your boat cabin because the crew routinely breaks into rooms to look for anything salvageable, you'll probably have a great time in Ha Long Bay. Once you've accepted that you're going to be scammed, the satisfaction lies in minimising the collateral damage.

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.

Sploosh!

Who said I never take pointless risks? Oh yeah, it was me. But after I missed out on the deadly tubing in Vang Vieng I was excited by the prospect of swinging Tarzan-style into the raging torrents of Kuang Si Waterfall, forgetting for a second that I hadn't been swimming in more than a year, was never all that good at it anyway, and that any time in my life I try to show off or join in with anything that requires physical fitness I just end up embarrassing myself.

It all came flooding back when I managed to swing back into the tree and get carried further out than I intended in the fast-moving river, but I somehow didn't end up dying. I guess it's back to the safety of temples and museums from now on. But first, here's some waterfalls and bears.

There's snow snow anymore

Seoraksan was one of my favourite places in South Korea last time, but I didn't get to see much of it due to the winter weather making things unreachable without decent boots and ice picks. So it was inevitable that I'd come back in the summer to spend more than a couple of hours here and see Korea's first national park at its third-best.

Everyone seems to agree this place looks most spectacular in the autumn, so I guess I'll have to come back again. And then I'll feel compelled to come back in the spring to see the pink cherry blossoms and complete the set. Normally, those sort of self-imposed obligations would be a cause for annoyance, but I'm already looking forward to it. Any excuse to justify coming back to Koreagainagain.

And if I accomplish nothing else in my life, charting The Four Se(or)a(k)s(a)[+o]ns would be legacy enough.

Buk, Buk, Bukchon

I failed again today. It's nice to be back on form after the uncharacteristic success of the used panties vending machine quest and Geisha hunt. That thing I said about Korea not being the easiest country for tourists is holding up - they're even going to the length of closing down tourist spots without letting anyone know. That's commitment!

So I didn't get to visit the egg-di-frying ('edifying') Museum of Chicken Art in Bukchon today, but as I'd already worked out that egg-cellent ('excellent') pun title in advance, ei (that's German for egg) had to find something to make the trip worthwhile (like a worthwhile egg. Watch Histor's Eye for more desperate egg puns).

Despite signs like this one, I couldn't find the museum anywhere in the neighbourhood and the pretty waitress in the cafe nearby told me it had recently shut down. Who'd have thought that basing a museum entirely on poultry-related art wasn't a recipe for success? This waitress was also one of two people who told me I was a 'very handsome guy' this afternoon, which is probably more times than this has happened in my entire life before, so I recommend that any single men visiting Korea don't bother shaving for a month, don't comb their hair and walk around in a slightly sweaty T-shirt, it seems to do the trick.

Though she did specifically single out my big nose and big ears as particularly attractive features, so maybe she was taking the piss. Or maybe these women are bored of preened Korean men and want a bit of rough? Whatever the reason, I was too chicken to do more than just laugh about my bad Korean and bid them 안녕히가세요.

Speaking of chickens, here's what you can do in Bukchon when the museum's clucking closed.

Bukhansan and Gretel

I didn't see a lot of Korea's green side last time I was here, mainly because the green was covered in white and the routes carved through the wilderness for my convenience were frosted over and more treacherous than if I'd just crunched through the snow and branches.

I don't know what's happened in the months since I've been gone, but miraculously the country is now warm and its national parks are more accessible. Well, as accessible as Korea gets for people who don't speak Korean, anyway. At least this meant there were no other bloody foreigners. I've noticed that tourists don't really seem interested in visiting these pastoral places on the outskirts (I only saw Japanese people in Takaosan), maybe because a mountainous forest is admittedly much the same in any country with bumpy terrain and a temperate climate. The only distinctive features are the occasional temples, tombs and shrines, but international visitors can see those more conveniently by hanging around in the city centre or boarding the tour bus.

I didn't come here for the temples though, and while Korea's national parks don't have much else that can't be found in the English Lake District, the Scottish Highlands and other places back 'home,' I'm not there right now. So I enjoyed getting away from civilisation and spending the day wandering around Bukhansan National Park accompanied by the rustic folk tales of the Brothers Grimm narrated by amateurs.

As I've pointed out before, I'm like a combination of an old man and a child, with none of the stuff in-between.

I saw Mount Fuji today... honestly

Mount Fuji from Mount Takao, as seen with my natural eyes.
Photo: Japanory

This may not be news to you, but Tokyo is pretty big. So big, you can travel on an express train for 90 minutes and still be well within the city limits. So big, you can escape the squashed city streets for the serenity of the mountains and not even get close to the edge of the local rail map.

I've been trying to pack in as much as I can during my brief stay in Tokyo, and filling my 'off' days with work due to inflated worries about how much Japan's costing me (not too much and I'm doing fine, but don't waste your effort trying to assuage my paranoia with facts and maths). So discovering that the day trip to tranquil Mount Takao would only take about an hour and 1000 yen or so each way, this seemed like a great way to spend the best part of my Saturday.

I love nature walks, and from the websites I read, this seemed to be my perfect type of national park - not too far out, well signposted trails, the teasing prospect of monkeys and easily accessible even by old women, so I can clamber over tree roots past the old dears and delude myself about my physical superiority.

Unfortunately, this promise of Zen serenity was splintered into annoyance and more financial worries when I arrived at Takaosanguchi station and dug around in my bag to find my camera was missing.

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.