An unplanned stay in Hong Kong (October 1992-April 1993)

With my return to the big city I had finished one leg of my trip. Next came south-east Asia, but I had made no definite plans. I considered options and bought a ticket to Bangkok with a free stopover in Manila, departing two weeks later. Then I spent my time not doing much of anything but reading and shopping. At Halloween my roommate invited me out on a double date with two of his students, and that swelled into a group outing as they invited more people. We went to a disco in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong’s trendy night-club area. Chinese women screamed in well-simulated terror as costumed guys stomped by wearing frightening masks. The world’s most obnoxious DJ played to English girls dancing in their bras and Chinese girls dancing with each other. My costume included a large bamboo staff, which parted the crowds nicely (I have noticed on several occasions that Hong Kongers are overly frightened of sticks and things like sticks). I danced for a while with a young woman in our group named Jenny. A second date with Jenny also went well and we met a third time and spent a day in Macau.

Hong Kong and Macau developed in very different ways, and it is easy to see the differences when visiting Macau. Only about 10-15% as many people live in Macau. A bit of wandering will take you to Portuguese buildings hundreds of years old, and Macau is much quieter than Hong Kong and in many ways more pleasant. In Hong Kong Macau is unfairly known as a gambling and vice haven. In fact, the gardens and food and sites make it a very pleasant visit, and one can see the highlights in a day by taking an early-morning ferry there and a late-night ferry back

I postponed my trip to the Philippines for two weeks, and then a month, and then I cancelled it entirely, opting instead to spend more time with my new-found girlfriend. At Christmas we took a boat to Hainan Island for a week-long beach holiday. Hainan at that time had just begun to boom. Haikou, the main port on the north side, was still somewhat sleepy, but the south coast had already sprouted hotels and condominiums and grown concrete everywhere. We stayed in a modern, albeit badly-built, room and ventured out following a concrete avenue still under construction. We dined in small concrete-box restaurants, and then we returned, taking the same ferry back. We arrived on New Year’s Day, just in time to hear that twelve people had been crushed to death at Lan Kwai Fong the night before in a crowd much like the one there the night we met.

I spent my spare time that winter in Hong Kong seeing the city with Jenny, preparing for my onward trip and watching strange people come and go in Chungking Mansions. While most tourists behaved normally, there were many characters exhibiting varying degrees of insanity and eccentricity. Some were paranoiac and would relate nothing of their lives, leaving the rest of us to amuse ourselves with hours of speculation. Others seemed ordinary until they cracked up, usually shortly after returning from China like the couple I had met in my first days in Hong Kong. I heard about more extreme cases. In one, a man collected all the bags in his hostel and sorted them into neat piles in the hallway during the night. Another man had a small misunderstanding with the desk clerk in the Traveller’s Hostel, which elevated until he started a frenzy of shouting. He obtained a refund by this, which he promptly threw all over the room.

Some old-time travellers, while not showing any obvious erratic behaviour, had obviously drifted a few years too long without any steady contact with people and lost any perspective they may have once had so that they would do just about anything for money. Many earned a meagre living as full-time movie extras. Drugs had also destroyed many, in particular a group of genuine hippies who lived on the ground floor of Chungking Mansions near the entrance and seemed to do nothing all day but smoke. Some other foreigners were traders. I met one Swiss man who travelled in a regular circuit. He bought electronic goodies in Hong Kong and sold them in Bangkok, where he bought silk. Then he had the silk made into shirts in Vietnam, and he carried the shirts back to Hong Kong, where he sold them and bought more electronics. Professional and amateur reporters, photographers and writers turned up regularly. Missionaries came and went. At Chinese New Year a flood of Koreans and Israelis appeared, illegally hawking counterfeit bags and clothes, and jewellery and oddities collected from as far away as Egypt. Still more foreigners worked as hostesses, leaflet distributors, hot dog salesmen, buskers, beggars, fortune-tellers, couriers, smugglers, drug dealers, forgers, and various more “mainstream” jobs such as bar staff, English teachers and salesmen. Some were whores, backpacking western girls who drifted into prostitution. Immigration regularly raided Chungking Mansions in the middle of the night, working from the top floor to the bottom and catching anywhere from fifty to two hundred illegal workers, overstayers, illegal immigrants and criminals but always missing or overlooking many things.

By April I was running out of visa time and getting bored. Then I met a Japanese man who had come overland all the way from Hanoi. This confirmed rumours I had heard that the China-Vietnam border was open. I began making plans to head south by land to Vietnam. Jenny arranged to meet me a few months later and I set off, back to China a third time.

South-East Asia (April-September 1993)

From Hong Kong I repeated my first voyage to Wuzhou. On this trip I had an entire afternoon to spend there, so wandered around Wuzhou. It consisted of much more than a bus stop. In particular a nice park overlooked the river. In the evening, I got on another horrible bus and rode overnight to Nanning. There I stayed only long enough to get on a train to Pingxiang, a little town near the border with Vietnam. This was an uncomfortable but interesting ride. I sat with my arm out the window and wondered why, every time we turned a bend, my elbow got wet and little black spots of dirt appeared on it. When I stuck my head out on one bend and looked, I saw it was a steam train! The engine was sending back a cloud of steam with little flecks of coal dust.

From Pingxiang I reached the border and there met two men, one Japanese and one Swiss, both going the same direction I was. None of us had proper visas, although we had made large efforts to get them, so we expected some trouble at the Vietnamese border post. We got it. Officials there threatened to send us back and we begged and whined and finally offered to pay a “special fine” to get across. It cost us $25 US in the end, quite expensive as these things go, but cheaper than flying from Nanning. That was the first time I’d been shaken down in my travels, but it wouldn’t be the last.

In Lang Son, on the Vietnamese side of the border, we made a serious error and took the bus instead of the train to Hanoi. It was the worst bus ride of my life. We waited about 7 hours for the bus to fill, and it filled completely, piled to the roof with goods in back and carpeted with people in front. I perched on a bench wide enough for one and a half people, with one more leaning on my lap and one on my shoulder in addition to the Japanese man sitting next to me. We were less than five minutes out from the station when we had our first breakdown. They fixed it and we moved on and it broke down again, and again and again. We had five flat tires. We waited three hours at a province border post while they collected enough money to pay off the police (a lot of the goods stacked to the roof were smuggled, apparently). Finally, after fifteen hours and one hundred forty km we arrived in Hanoi. I think it was about then that I first thought of travelling by bicycle.

At that time, the American government had yet to lift its trade embargo against Vietnam, so it hadn’t experienced the rush of investment and speculation that had swept the rest of Asia. Hanoi was still quite sleepy and quiet. Cyclos (tricycle rickshaws) zipped around everywhere, flying through intersections in crosswise directions at the same time. Old wood French buildings sat next to new concrete revolutionary museums and shops doing good business. The climate in April was maximally hot and humid, although in evenings it cooled somewhat. It was a fantastic place to eat with the best of French, Vietnamese and Chinese styles, typically for one or two US dollars.

Embargo or not, US dollars were the preferred currency and it was possible to change traveller’s cheques. Sometimes people made silly mistakes. One European man wrote “Hanoi” as the city when he tried to cash the cheque and the bank refused to take it because, due to the embargo they would then be unable to redeem it. A Japanese man changed a thousand US dollars at once and received a box of money. The largest bill then was worth one dollar.

A war theme seemed to pervade everything the Vietnamese did. Hanoi had museums and parks, full of glorious military memorials. To reach the east side of the river, one had to cross a bridge made largely of patches applied after successive bombing runs had destroyed bits of it. Their history seemed a collection of glorious war stories. Little children played bullying games which adults refined and continued. I found myself comparing them with the Spanish, both products of their long struggles to get rid of occupying foreigners, and I had to wonder what the Americans had thought they were doing when they got into a war with them.

My brief taste of Vietnamese buses had left me determined to stay off them. Trains overcharged foreigners (legally) by up to five hundred percent and had a reputation for being risky and very slow anyway. Flights were only slightly more expensive but less satisfying. I put aside southern Vietnam for a later trip, possibly with Cambodia, and concentrated on the north. For a few days I joined a group which had hired a jeep to go north to Sa Pa. This area had then only recently been opened to foreigners. While I don’t generally care much for silly notions about unspoiled places, I liked the reception I got there, where we were among the first European tourists to visit for forty-five years. The hill tribes near Sa Pa are a few of a seemingly endless patchwork of tribal peoples that occupy the hill country from Vietnam all the way up the hills to Tibet. They are sometimes called Montagnards. I had met similar groups before in China, living in similar conditions. They farmed terraced hillsides and brought the crops to market in central towns. In Vietnam they seemed a bit richer than in China. Interpol and the Vietnamese police had made these people stop cultivating opium, although a few poppies still popped up every now and then among the corn they planted to replace the opium crop.

People had many stories to tell of the 1979 Chinese invasion. It was never hard to find someone who would happily point out burned-out Chinese tanks, or less happily indicate buildings the Chinese had shot up before being forced out. On balance the invasion looked like a considerable defeat for the Chinese. They had less to say about the long civil war. In other parts of Vietnam other tribes had suffered badly in the war; I never learned how they had managed there in the far north.

I returned to Hanoi, bought a ticket to Laos and left Vietnam. While I sat in the plane at the airport waiting to take off, a cloud of mist worked its way up the aisle from the back of the plane to the cockpit. We left anyway and they served lunch. Dessert was a bar of horrible Vietnamese chocolate labelled “Chocolate as good as the Indonesians make it.” This modest boast wasn’t modest enough and didn’t speak well for either country.

Vientiane was then the only part of Laos one could visit without a pre-arranged tour. It sported a huge number of colourful temples and parks, and had a large expatriate community with the luxuries they expect. Many were foreign-aid workers, and some were perhaps working on the bridge going up across the Mekong, which would later connect Thailand and Laos by train. Until they finished building that, the border crossing had to be done in small ferries.

I had shared a room in Vientiane with two guys, an Englishman and an American, who I had met back at the airport in Hanoi, and as we were all going the same way we stuck together across the river to Nong Khai, in Thailand. At dinner in Nong Khai the American told us of his experiences teaching English in Cambodia. He related that marijuana was ridiculously cheap there, then commented that he still had some with him. At this the Englishman and I exchanged a stunned look that we had been travelling with somebody so stupid, and across two borders to boot. No matter how cautious you are, you’re never quite safe.

The others pressed on to Bangkok but I stayed a couple days in Nong Khai looking around. Vientiane and Nong Khai both had built fantastic sculpture gardens showing concrete statues of various deities and mythological creatures. They were broadly similar in other ways, both relatively rural towns with a lot of quiet lanes and a small central core. Of course, Vientiane was the capital and most developed city of Laos, and its similarity to a quiet Thai country town vividly demonstrated the poverty of Laos. Aside from the scultpure gardens there were few special sights in Nong Khai, just scenic river vistas, so a couple days sufficed and I, too, got on a train to Bangkok. I can hardly remember the confusion of arriving there now, but after a bit of casting about and a couple riverboat rides I settled in a room near Khao San road. The room had bedbugs (the first time I had seen them anywhere) so I quickly relocated to another guesthouse. I stayed a couple weeks in Bangkok at that point, touring the temples and sticking a curious nose into the red-light districts. Walking around the city guaranteed exhaustion quickly, but I sometimes escaped into parks and Dusit Zoo also offered a pleasant diversion. When the heat really got to be too much, the city abounded with air-conditioned fast food restaurants and bars, and for the first time in almost a year I could stop in Burger King and Dairy Queen and such places.

Bangkok also had a very big "scene", centered on Khao San Road. It was slightly more radical in 1993 than in 2000 but hasn’t changed too dramatically. The crowd of people there was mostly separate from the sex tourists and package tour groups to be found in various other areas of Bangkok; most were backpackers passing through Bangkok on their way to various destinations in south-east Asia. Within a five minute walk from any of the guesthouses on “Farang Street” one could find necessities and entertainment. In fact, it was quite possible to spend all of your time within the same two blocks, eating in the cheap restaurants and watching the movies they all played. Many people did so, and I succumbed for a while myself, tempted by cheap food and huge mounds of books for sale.

When I finally did manage to pry myself free of Bangkok the rest of my trip through Thailand went quickly. I saw the ruins of Ayutthaya and Sukhothai quickly; they consisted mostly of simple stone shrines and temples. I spent a few days up at Mae Sot on the Burmese border and goofed off for a few days at Kanchanaburi (quite a contrast from the historical picture there of slave laborers in World War II building the Burmese death railway). I was generally struck how almost the people in almost all of these places did nothing much almost all of the time. The heat encouraged this, and the height of activity for most foreigners seemed to be a binge of sex and drugs, not necessarily in that order. Thais seemed little more active. There were tourist sights in all these places, mostly temples and old ruins. However, the lure of temples wore off quickly and the ruins didn’t appeal for long. Tramping around Hill Tribe country again didn’t appeal to me, and when these attractions were taken away about the only remaining attraction in Thailand was its comfort and easy life. For a while I enjoyed that, but before long became bored and moved on south.

On my way south I stopped for the night in a village called Chumphon. In the hotel there I was woken from a sound sleep in a pitch black room by a loud sound rather like a cross between a machine gun and a space alien ray gun. “BRRR-RR-RR-RRR-RR”. I sat up straight, trying and failing to see anything in the darkness. I went back to sleep and it happened again. It sounded very close. Then it changed: “BRRRR-RRR-RRR-RRR GE-KO GE-KO GE-KO”. I turned on the light to see all that noise coming from a Gecko, a little lizard about 20 cm long sitting on a beam under the roof. I’d seen many of these before, all over Asia, but that was the first one I heard.

I arrived in Penang just in time to celebrate the first anniversary of my arrival in Asia. Then I continued on to Sumatra, landing in Medan and winding my way up on a clanking overloaded bus, to a high plateau. The local people, Bataks, had allegedly practiced cannibalism many years back but had long since been Christianized. They built interesting houses shaped rather like a pair of bull horns, and speckled the landscape with carved stone furniture and monuments. Despite the cool mountain air, wildlife to watch, and gross scenic attractions, a lot of foreigners there seemed interested in much the same things as in Thailand. Brastagi attracted a more athletic crowd of tourists, most headed for Gunung Leuser National Park and its Orang-Utan sanctuary, but Lake Toba had a large crowd of idlers.

The bus to Bukittingi stopped twice on its way south. First we toured a glorious hot springs area built high with accumulated sulfur deposits, holding pools of water coloured by dissolved minerals. Then late at night we crossed the equator and stopped to see the accumulated monuments the Indonesians had put up to mark the spot. Bukittingi overlooked a wide forested canyon, with scenery comparable to that in the Batak highlands. It lacked special tourist sights, offering a pathetic zoo and some nondescript tunnels carved by the Japanese in World War II. I found their mobile post office more interesting, a postal counter set up in the back of a small van.

From Bukittingi south I took a luxury coach which turned out to be a Karaoke bus, with a monitor set into the roof and passengers singing into a microphone that they passed around. If you thought video buses were a nightmare, you would find one of these a vision from Hell. Fortunately the Indonesians had better taste in music than many Asians so I didn’t go crazy. A few hours out of Bukittingi we came out of the hills and the rest of Sumatra sailed by, a sea of flat scrub. On the ferry crossing to Java we passed some large platforms in a bay, fish traps or farms of some sort. Then we drove on, skirting the hills as we headed into Java, to Jakarta.

Sumatra provided another lesson in travelling. I had made two mistakes here. First, I had committed myself to meeting somebody far ahead at a specific date, in such a way that I had to rush through places where I would have liked to spend more time. If I had asserted myself more and picked a date to meet when I was sure to be somewhere more convenient, it all would have worked out better. Second, I let myself be sucked into the soft tourist rut. Sumatra is typical of a lot of areas which have good facilities to keep people comfortable while they head off on their own to do more active things. Unfortunately it is all too easy to grow too comfortable and just stay in, enjoying the easy life. Clearly, though, this is a waste of time since one comes to these places for the environment. I should have taken a bicycle to Sumatra and forced myself out of the tourist rut, as I later did in Africa. The first mistake, on the other hand, is one I still make every now and then. It is hard at times to avoid committing yourself to some sort of schedule, and about the only real solution is not touring too much at one time at all!

Most visitors seem to think Jakarta is ugly, and I agree with their opinion. It seemed to consist largely of standard Asian concrete blocks, with a strip of modern skyscrapers and a backpacker’s ghetto with a few slightly older buildings. Back streets sported open sewers and walled compounds presumably containing houses. Old Jakarta looked slightly better, a bit like a typical European town. Jenny’s plane arrived, we took care of business, visited the National Museum, then left for Yogyakarta.

Yogyakarta appealed more than Jakarta, with interesting narrow winding streets and old buildings. The air smelled of spices as well. Outside of town stood some truly old ruins, most famous of which was the colossal Buddhist stupa at Borobudur. This loomed on a hill overlooking rolling countryside. South of the city we found a silver market selling choice items. In a day trip, I climbed the hills near Mount Merapi, a giant volcano not far from town. The volcano itself is a tough climb but there are easier hikes near it, offering a glimpse of jungle-covered mountain slopes. Finally we moved on again, passing the ancient Hindu temples at Prambanan.

From Yogyakarta we rode a bus to Mount Bromo. This volcano sits, with a few others, inside a gigantic caldera. We took the usual approach, staying at a nearby guest house then getting up in the middle of the night to see the sunrise from the volcano rim. The moon shone that night so we could see a sort of ghostly view of the countryside, and a long line of people tramping from the caldera rim up the volcano. They were pursued by an even larger number of very annoying and persistent touts trying to sell horse rides. The touts generated business for themselves; after spending hours fighting with them, one was much more likely to be so tired as to need a horse ride. At the rim of Mount Bromo, everyone turned left on the crater rim and sat on the same small piece of land to watch the sunrise. That is, everyone turned left except the two of us and a Japanese man. We turned right and had a nice view of both the sunrise and the huge crowd of people unable to see anything besides each other. All things considered, the night-time climb proved disappointing. The landscaped improved markedly in daytime, appearing grey and brown and dusty, with a stink of sulfur in the air and great belching clouds.

We headed down, then on to a marathon bus ride to Bali, getting off in Kuta. Depending on who you talk to, Kuta will sound like a paradaisical transplanted Australian beach resort or a hell hole transplanted from Tijuana. While not feeling much like Asia, it had its advantages; cheap food and drinks, nice beaches, and the omnipresent backpacker cafes with free movies.

From Kuta we ascended to Ubud, somewhat higher in altitude and a bit cooler. Ubud began life as a farming village, but then foreigners discovered it and various sorts of artists and travellers moved in. Concrete began to appear around town and guest houses sprouted like mushrooms. By the time of our arrival it had become an upmarket alternative to Kuta, attracting a less raucous crowd but nonetheless dominated by tourism It offered endless shops filled with handicrafts and clothes for sale, plus some pleasant walks and the usual sort of easy living.

After a few days there, we came back down the hill and caught a ferry across a narrow channel to Lombok. This smaller island is much less developed than Bali but offers similar attractions. For us, as for many people, it was merely a first step on to see further islands - perhaps Flores, Komodo and Timor. However, at this point Jenny rebelled at the thought of the gruelling bus rides it would take to move any farther, and as I was running out of time on my two-month Indonesian stay and becoming bored with south-east Asia, we decided to leave.

In short order we had flown to Singapore and booked tickets there to Istanbul, flying through Kuala Lumpur. We quickly toured Singapore itself. I didn’t think much of it; although pleasant, it resembled a big shopping mall. It did, however, have some good shops selling camping gear that we would use later, and the zoo was well worth visiting. We travelled north to Penang, stopping at Melacca and Kuala Lumpur. I found both pleasant but boring, a verdict that summarizes many places in Thailand and Malaysia. They were relatively well-developed cities with comforts and attractions but not offering a lot to visitors who only stayed for a very short while, as we did.. We continued to Penang, which is also not exciting but which has good food and a pleasant atmosphere, and is still my favourite place in SE Asia.

Jenny went on from there to meet her family in Phuket for a brief holiday, while I headed down the east coast, through Khota Baru and Kuala Terengganu. These two towns contrasted sharply with the west side of the island, being much more conservative and less developed. The eastern beaches, on the South China Sea, were nicer than those on the west side of the Peninsula, and the atmosphere was relaxing if not exciting. Here again I found myself in the same sort of situation as in Sumatra; the fun things to do here all involved tramping around nature in the centre of the peninsula, but I didn’t have time to do it then. After a few days of this boredom, I went back to Singapore to bury myself in preparations for the upcoming Africa leg of my trip.