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!

A bad read

Image: What Japan's Wearing

I've been a fan of audiobooks since childhood, when it seems I pestered my parents into buying an assortment of books on tape covering everything from the nativity story to Batman. Maybe it was the parental comfort of being read to, back when I could read the same 30-page book endlessly without it getting boring (as if the Caped Crusader escaping a crushing room of spikes only to find himself tangled in the tentacles of a giant squid could ever get boring), or maybe I just enjoyed being ordered to turn the page when the bell sounded like Pavlov's bookworm.

I even went through a very strange phase (even strange by my standards) of recording books from my collection and my own stories for seemingly no purpose. I never listened back to these, and I don't think there were any commercial prospects for Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park being read slightly too fast by a nine-year-old boy who doesn't understand genetic engineering or chaos theory. Maybe there are, but it's too late now - I taped over them all with Offspring mixes when I was 15, partly because I was too embarrassed to let them survive.

Since I've been travelling, I've relied heavily on audiobooks to entertain me on days out, whether I'm exploring temples and national parks or just getting lost down residential streets trying to remember where that bus stop was. I mostly try to listen to something new, mixing in the odd old favourite alongside podcasts, radio dramas and the occasional Offspring mix for old times' sake.

One common problem I come across is how a lousy narrator can really ruin an otherwise good book. This is the guy or occasional girl who'll be speaking in my ear for anywhere between four and forty hours, and if I don't click with their line delivery, or find their attempts at voicing characters of the opposite sex distracting or plain offensive, it can really hinder my enjoyment.

So here's a list of some of the least successful audiobooks I've come across so far. It's far from thorough, so I hope I'll have more to add in the future. Though I mostly hope I won't.

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...

Blasts from the passport

10 August 2010 - 7 December 2012

When I first set off from Scotland with my shiny new passport, I was irritated that I didn't get any stamps in Italy, and then none in Greece either. How was I supposed to show people where I'd been without them? By writing overly detailed blogs with disconcerting regularity forever?

But then I left the Eurozone and my comfort zone behind and those pages quickly started gathering ink, especially in the last six months when I finally got round to visiting the countries I'd been lazily putting off precisely because of their visa requirements, which gobbled up entire pages with relish.

When a Myanmar visa left a single blank page remaining, I knew our time together was growing short. I spent the next month lying low in Thailand and debating whether to make the final trip to Malaysia or Japan, so I'd have a comfortable 90 days to wait for a replacement passport to arrive after sending the lame, old, useless creature back to its home country to be laid to rest. Then I impulse-booked a flight to Sydney instead.

So, as a celebration of those trips we took together - and because I don't have a passport right now, so don't have much else to do - here's a typically thorough gallery of all the passport stamps and visas I accumulated since October 2010. Farewell, dear companion; I shall not look upon thy like again. I plumped for a 48-pager for next time, that ought to see me through the next six months at least.

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!

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.

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

That's right, I spent my final, precious afternoon in Myanmar laughing at wheezing gibbons in rusty old cages in a dingy zoo that hasn't been noticeably renovated since before the First World War.

I pretend I'm interested in comparing how animals are treated in different parts of the world, but really I just like to discover obscure mammals I've never heard of before and see monkeys having amusing intercourse, so Yangon Zoo satisfied my fairly low requirements.

For anyone who's sick to death of golden stupas by now, this post comes with a stupa-free guarantee. I'm pagodad out.

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.