Chicken tale

Our neighbours raise fighting cocks, at least that's what I deduce from the fragments of virile-looking feed packets that occasionally blow into our garden. It's one of many wholesome pastimes that make them fine examples of the species.

The cocks' raucous dawn chorus wakes me up earlier than would be ideal most mornings, but when I look out over the unkempt field and see them crying out from solitary confinement in enclosures that amount to little more than rooster cosies, I can't feel anger towards them. It's directed elsewhere.

Time for another of my uplifting stories.

Deleted scenes: Year two

Another year's worth of photos, videos and blog self-flagellations that weren't good enough to be uploaded at the time, or just didn't fit in with whatever agenda I was trying to push.

Does not include South Korea, which has enough leftovers for a dedicated post.

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.

Circle the square

When I expressed the vague desire to travel up Australia's east coast, Byron Bay was the only place that received universal praise. You've got to go to Byron Bay, Dave. Byron Bay's so laid back, you'd love it there, Dave.

Do these people know anything about my personality?

I did actually like Byron Bay - as usual, when leaving civilisation behind and trampling through subtropical rainforest - but I don't get what I was supposed to find enthralling about the people of Byron Bay, who seemed to be the same self-absorbed, vegetating wasters in perpetual search of chronic drugs that I hadn't been impressed by when I'd met them in other countries.

Even if their lifestyle did appeal to me, why do I have to go somewhere to appreciate it? I understand that for surfing you need waves, but there are plenty of places where I can feel chilled out (yeah alright, not me, but people in general). Being surrounded by twats doesn't make me more inclined to be one.

Literally the Newcastle of the south

For a different perspective on these events (usually about two metres behind and to the left or right), see Oliver's exclusive behind-the-scenes report.

I can't tell you how Newcastle, New South Wales compares to its near-antipodean namesake because I never actually visited Newcastle upon Tyne. I never lived in North East England and never had any special reason to go there, so I felt no pressing need to make the 104-mile trip from Edinburgh or 185-mile trip from Crewe.

I never visited Newcastle under Lyme either, which was actually quite close to where I grew up. Assuming it to be just another boring market town like everything else around those parts, I never made the 14-mile trip from Crewe.

Come to think of it, I don't think I ever visited Old South Wales either.

However, I can confirm that the Newcastle of Australia is quite nice for a day out - just 10,462 miles from Crewe as the immortal crow that doesn't need to eat or rest flies.

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.

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.

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.

What are we doing here?

You get a very different perspective on Australia if you cross the planet in stages and take your sweet time getting here. Flying from London to Sydney with a compulsory stopover in Shanghai or Kuala Lumpur isn't enough to build an anthropogeographical map of the world and its people in your mind that can be utterly demolished when you land in this far-off country, inexplicably run by white people. What the hell are they doing here?

I've visited plenty of fallen colonies in the last couple of years, some of which have only shaken off the European influence relatively recently, but this is the first one I've been to where they stayed for keeps (I haven't discovered America yet). After working my way through East Asia and noticing subtle marks of ancient colonisation and migration - Chinese-hybrid Thais, Malaysia's migratory melting pot, the malleable Buddhist faith - it's very strange to head south and see white people where you'd expect people to be darker than that.

Admittedly, most of them are slightly tanned. And - get this - they only speak bloody English too! Or a close approximation anyway.

A month of Sydneys

I don't normally celebrate New Year, which gets the same attention from me as my birthday, Christmas and Ramadan. Despite spending my last three December 31sts in capital cities where they don't let the arbitrary turning of the Gregorian calendar pass by unnoticed (Edinburgh, Taipei, Seoul), I preferred to spend those pivotal hours like any other: on my computer, avoiding contact with revellers or just being asleep.

But when I ended up spending this New Year in Sydney, and was invited to see in the New Year from the best vantage point in the city and enjoy several hours of drinking in the park, sleeping through the event this time seemed a little disrespectful. And anyway, this might be most easterly (and earliest) New Year I'll ever have, which, combined with the equally redundant time zone system and the end of my month in Sydney, somehow resulted in a night worth celebrating. Happy Early New Year!

Oh yeah, I'm in Australia. Didn't I mention that? I should probably backtrack a little...

A childish day out again again again again again again again again again again again

It wouldn't really be a trip to Thailand without seeing some helpless animals forced to perform for my amusement, so after getting off the boat at Sriracha I was delighted to find out they had a Tiger Zoo nearby. Let the animal rights atrocities commence!

Mandalay me down to sleep

Look, it's a place you've actually heard of for a change! Though that's probably just because of that unrealistic song about the emancipated elephant. Trust me, Nellie wouldn't make it more than 10 metres down the dirt road before a 1980 Toyota Corona with no headlights smashed into her. That'd give her something to trumpety-trump about. At least wait until daylight to give yourself a fighting chance, you stupid pachyderm.

There were more pristine payas and crumbling colonial constructions to see in the old capital of Mandalay, but its most striking feature is the four-square-kilometre Royal Palace, which I was already debating over buying a ticket for before a soldier told me it was off limits anyway, making the decision a lot easier. Sod it, I went up a big hill instead.

Yangon a minute

If you arrived in Bangkok and found your illusions of technologically backwards Asia cruelly shattered by the ubiquity of smartphones, head to the Myanmar embassy and arrange your visa pronto, as visiting this emerging travel destination is really like stepping back in time. Specifically to about 1986, judging by some of the nostalgic Toyotas trundling along the dusty roads.

Yangon is where most flights go to, and with its mixture of painstakingly maintained government parks and appallingly run-down public buildings it gives a fair overview of this slightly mad country. You might know it as Rangoon if you're more than 100 years old or the sort of stubborn pedant who refuses to acknowledge that names change and still insists on calling Myanmar 'Burma,' Starburst 'Opal Fruits' and people with darker skin than you 'coloureds.'

There's something very distinctive about Yangon though, and it took me most of the first day to realise what it was. There are no motorbikes here. There aren't even any bicycles, apparently due to a government initiative to reduce congestion that seems to have targeted precisely the wrong end of the spectrum. After going back and forth to Hanoi a few times the previous month, where cacophonous bikes are standard issue, this was a welcome shock.

That's what real work looks like

When my tranquil mountain retreat in Sapa turned out to be less recuperative than expected, I got away from the computer and had the sort of really relaxing rest that involves trudging along muddy paths for hours getting burned by the sun and almost getting trampled by buffalo. I liked it a lot.

I've always been a farm boy at heart - my dad's a farmer, so I don't have to go back generations or anything. I love watching people doing the sort of real, practical work I would have been doing if I'd been born at any previous point in time and eaten my greens as a child. Though even if I'd been born in the 19th century I still probably would have forsaken the fields to write about ghost sightings in saw mills for The Cheshire Observer or something. Useless twat.

There are plenty of tribal vilages in the Sapa area, but Cat Cat (which isn't pronounced how it's spelled, sorry to disappoint) is easily the most accessible, just a mile or so downhill from the town. That would do nicely.

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.

Monkeytropolis

Another flight connection in Thailand meant another chance to finally get round to things I'd pointlessly missed out the last six or seven times I passed through immigration's revolving doors. The monkey infested historical town of Lopburi was one of them, and you could ask why this wasn't my first destination in Thailand back in February '11, and why I haven't been living here permanently in the nineteen months since.

Oh yeah. That's why.

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.

A childish day out again again again again again again again again

In retrospect, this looks less whimsical and a lot creepier than intended

I didn't have any kind of plan when I took the JR train to Ueno, feeling restless and assuming there'd be something to occupy me there.

It didn't take too long before I ran into some critters that inspired me to visit my sixth zoo in a year and a half (not counting sanctuaries and wild critters). By myself. With lazy beard growth and wearing a T-shirt of an infectious parasite. I wonder why all the parents and school group supervisors were making sure the kids kept their distance? Just courtesy, I guess.