Spiders and snipers...

As we headed south from Rainbow Beach we passed through the unfortunately named town of Gympie. The drive was a long one by UK standards, but probably perceived as pretty pathetic by Aussie ones. In the old days distances in Queensland used to be measured by the number of beers you would quaff at the wheel en route; ‘How far’s that mate?’ would provoke a response along the lines of ‘Oh about four cans’.

Driving up a knife-edge ridge road we climbed onto the Springbrook Plateau, our van making indignant straining noises and releasing foul burning smells like the Human Torch with chronic constipation. From the top we could see over the remnants of what is the biggest volcanic caldera in the southern hemisphere, rocky peaks surrounding the crater that once flooded this landscape with lava. The sharp spike of Mt Warning dominated the area, known as ‘Wollumbi’ or Cloud-gatherer in aboriginal it’s the first point on the Australian mainland to receive the first light of a new day.

We then stayed with friends in Newcastle whose garden had a lively colony of Funnelweb spiders. ‘They’re not that big, but they have serious attitude’ said our host Colin, demonstrating in gangly fashion the aggressive way Funnelwebs rear up and ‘gnash’ their gruesome fangs when threatened. Armed with venom that is peculiarly only toxic to higher primates, the experience of being bitten by a Funnelweb is usually described as ‘excruciatingly painful’ and compounded by their frankly horrifying tendency to hold on and bite repeatedly.

A few days later up in the Blue Mountains we were walking a rough over-grown bush track and one of our companions raised the potential danger of snakes. ‘Don’t worry’ reassured our friend Scott, ‘the spiders have eaten all the snakes’.

This is the nature of wild dangers in Australia. Unlike the wolves and bears of Russia and Mongolia or the big cats of Africa, there’s nothing to really stalk or hunt you down here. Instead you suffer accident and ambush angst from lethally poisonous arachnids and snakes, lunging attacks from sharp-toothed crocs and sharks, sting lashings from box jellyfish or if you’re really unlucky an invariably fatal paralysing nip from the tiny, innocuous looking blue-ringed octopus. The concentration of dangerous beasties led Billy Connolly to conclude that the only explanation was that ‘God hates Australians’.

We contrasted these natural world hazards with the security paranoia that enveloped Sydney around the APEC Summit. As world leaders from across the region gathered in town, security forces ‘locked down’ a substantial chunk of the city centre. The resulting traffic disruption appeared to interest Sydneysiders more than the political agenda under discussion. 'Enough about climate change already! Why can’t I drive through the CBD?!'

Around the iconic Opera House, burly armed guards patrolled on jet-skis and rifle-toting marksmen trained their sights on the streets from the rooftops. Such was the ostentatious security overkill that practically the entire nation applauded the antics of TV pranksters ‘The Chasers’. They drove a convoy of limousines, ostensibly flying the Canadian flag, straight through a series of supposedly secure checkpoints and into the ‘Red Zone’. The casual way they were waved through was understandably a source of not inconsiderable embarrassment to those in charge.

The thunderous, red-faced response of the authorities was to brand the stunt ‘irresponsible and dangerous’. ‘We had snipers in position and they weren’t there for show’ intoned the Chief of Police in solemn and menacing fashion. The prospect of an active ‘shoot to kill’ policy seemed to me somewhat more reckless than the Chasers hot satirical knife through security butter japes.

Even without the disruptions of APEC public transport in Sydney was decidedly testing, due to the time spent travelling. Despite being slow travel advocates our patience was strained. After a pleasant but prolonged six hour round trip to visit mates in Parramatta Fi and I were sat on the harbour ferry that took us from Circular Quay in the centre of town back to our base in Manly. We were halfway across the unusually calm, dark harbour when Fi suddenly lost it. ‘Argh! It takes hours to anywhere here!’ she grumbled, then leapt up and went stomping off down the boat. Moments later she sheepishly returned. ‘I didn’t realise we’d already left!’ she confessed, having marched off to bend someone’s ear about the late running of the vessel. I thought it poor timing to remind her that the ‘journey is the reward’.

A man called Hope...

Our campervan escapades continued as we headed north on the Steve Irwin Highway. Huge hoardings advertising his ‘Australia Zoo’ bore 20 foot tall images of a wide-eyed Irwin, a mock-shock expression on his face, grappling with a largely disinterested looking crocodile, accompanied by his signature exclamation ‘Crikey!’. Irwin was to David Attenborough what our Wicked camper van is to a Rolls Royce, crass, colourful and comedic but utterly devoid of class. His heart was in the right place though…and I shall avoid making a tasteless Stingray joke here.

We took a rainforest walk as the Kookaburras cackled among the trees like a bunch of coked up PR bunnies in a Soho ‘style’ bar. Other birds made a ‘Peeow-Peeow’ calling noise, like a cheap sci-fi laser battle in the branches above. Strangler figs in various stages of development squeezed the life out of their unfortunate hosts, thickening roots enveloping the helpless tree beneath. The process almost inexorable from the moment the first tentative tendril descends from the seed lodged in the host’s branches. When the host is dead and rotted its demise fertilises the surrounding soil and leaves a hollow ghost-like chamber inside the successful fig.

In the forest we met Geoff a grizzled, grey and just retired museum worker (‘I’m only officially retired’) who was merrily dousing Araucaria trees with insecticide to collect weevils. Geoff explained that they lay their eggs on the male cones of the tree and their grubs gorge on the nutritious pollen when the cones open up. ‘The female cones are big enough to brain you if you stand underneath the trees at the wrong time of year’ warned Geoff as our eyes involuntarily scanned nervously upwards. We left him shaking the blue plastic sheets he’d arranged around the trees, collecting the culled invertebrates into a specimen jar. ‘Happy hunting!’ I cheered. ‘Oh yes’ Geoff replied ‘Great fun…killing things’.

‘One thing I promise is not to get stuck in the sand’ I said to Fi later as we drove along the Inskip Peninsula to camp by the beach in the Great Sandy National Park. Ten minutes later I had the van’s back wheels firmly wedged in the soft surface. As I grubbed around in the sand digging out the van in the morning a voice called out ‘Need a hand with that?’. Richard Hope had spotted our difficulties whilst patrolling the beach campsite with a metal detector. ‘I’m looking for gold!’ he roared gleefully as the machine bleeped at my feet and he triumphantly dug up an inch long piece of rusty cable.

Beneath his battered leather hat sat a pair of twinkling blue eyes and a nose expressively wrinkled by sunshine and booze. He was the epitome of a good old Aussie bloke, all larrikin charm and bonhomie. ‘I’ve got sixteen grandchildren’ he enthused ‘All female! If I lived another hundred years we’d take over this country’. He was deeply proud of his multi-ethnic brood. ‘My wife’s been in heaven ten years, she was Indonesian and when we got married in the fifties it was hard, Australia was a racist country then. But I was tough in those days and could handle the trouble. Now I’ve got the whole world in my family’ he grinned ruefully as he listed the various nationalities and ethnicities his offspring had married ‘Isn’t that marvellous? Multicultural Australia? I started it!’

He’d not left the country his entire life ‘I meet everyone here, even though I’ve never been out of Australia, never will now. After the war I wondered what I’d do when I met a German. Then I met one and I was like ‘Shit! He’s just like me!’’. After lending his still impressive septuagenarian strength to helping shift the van we said our farewells. ‘Enjoy your life!’ Richard called as we pulled away. He clearly had.

It's a Wicked world...

Our inaugural cargo ship sojourn ended in the Port of Brisbane. We edged our way gently through Moreton Bay escorted by a pod of dolphins as the sun tore a spectacular crimson sunset across the sky. The weird-shaped crags of the Glasshouse Mountains created surreal silhouettes along the horizon.

Above us the shadow of the earth edged into the creamy moon as an auspicious lunar eclipse welcomed us to Australia. The romance of this moment was only slightly undermined by our obliviousness to this celestial alignment – we thought it was just a thick cloud until the Aussie customs officer pointed it out later.

Our hulk loomed along the ‘runway’ of harbour lights guiding us up the deepwater channel to the wharf, the closest thing to landing an aircraft we’re likely to experience this year. A tiny fishing boat was heading straight for us unaware of our 30,000 tonnes of danger bearing down on them in the darkness. ‘Give them a blast of the horn’ ordered the Captain. The thunderous boom that followed unsurprisingly sent the small, startled vessel scuttling swiftly to safety.

So we’d reached Australia without the aluminium sausage. Like the convicts of old we’d arrived by sea and it had taken us six months! It didn’t feel real – how could we get here without an airport? This sense of unreality wasn’t helped by the fact that I could hardly remember a thing from my 6-month stint living in Brisbane a decade previously. I failed to recognise anything or even recall the district in which I lived, let alone the address. ‘I can’t believe you were actually here!’ Fi exclaimed as I fumbled uselessly around in the dark, empty room of my memory. It was at this point I began to suspect I had been drunker during my last stay than I thought.

Two days later we headed north in a ‘Wicked’ converted panel van with an oh-so-subtle ‘Smurfs’ motif spray-painted on both sides. The legend ‘All I ask is a chance to prove that money can’t make me happy’ was scrawled across the rear end. What would have actually made us happier was a van that worked.

To prevent twatty tourists destroying the aged van’s engines through overheating in Australia’s oven-like climate Wicked fit a warning buzzer. When this sounds you’re supposed to pull-over and allow the engine to cool before proceeding. As we left Brisbane an occasional ‘tweet’ emerged from the dashboard, like a cute animal was trapped beneath. An hour into our journey we hit our first steep climb and the ‘tweet’ rapidly became an ear-splittingly loud twittering shriek as if something was eating our small cute animal alive. We were forced to stop with the radiator boiling and bubbling noisily beneath our bums.

Three hours later a replacement van arrived, this one was adorned with a pneumatic woman against an azure blue sky on the left hand side and an equally pneumatic woman amid roaring flames on the other. As we were registering at our campsite the old guy on reception asked for the vehicle registration. I glanced down at the key fob where this information is usually found for hire-cars, ‘Er, Heaven and Hell’ I replied hesitantly. ‘A Wicked van eh?’ he smiled.

(You can see a video of our van being spruced up with it's Angel/Devil paintjob on YouTube, as posted by www.wickedcampers.com.au by clicking this link.) Or below...

Karaoke cruise...

My latest Observer column has been published today and there's a live link to their website here.

I've also been updating the Google Map and the Photo Archive - adding more pictures from Cambodia,Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and the good old MV Theodor Storm.

Life on the ocean wave...

It was with some trepidation that we’d boarded our container ship the Theodor Storm for the ten day voyage from Singapore to Brisbane. We were the only two passengers on the 30,000 tonne vessel, joining a crew of Russian and Ukrainian officers and Fillippino merchant seamen. Relations amongst the crew seemed entirely amicable but tensions on a voyage at the end of last year led to the Fillippino bosun killing the Russian second engineer. ‘He wouldn’t have died’ noted Pavlo the Ukrainian second officer who had joined the crew since the incident, ‘but he was left injured for several hours unreported’. Nice.

We sat on the ship for 36 hours in Singapore whilst loading was completed having been encouraged to board somewhat prematurely by the enthusiastic shipping agent. Instead of sipping cocktail slings in town, we had an extra day and a half on the ship watching cargo being loaded. Hmmmm.

Once at sea we quickly found a routine based around mealtimes, at which we were fed within an inch of our lives, which combined with our slightly sloth-like existence threatened to swiftly undo the travelling weight loss of the last six months. To stave off the return of looming fatness we embarked on a regime of intensive table-tennis sessions, deck walks and avoidance of the tempting lift, instead making the effort to walk up and down the six flights of stairs between our cabin and the galley. Well, some of the time at least.

Other recreational activities included learning Spanish from the gravely tones of a series of Michel Thomas CDs, whale-watching and extended drunken sessions of karaoke with the Fillippinos. The music was inexplicably accompanied by what looks like home videos that sought to enhance the audio-visual pleasure of the experience. The film for KC and the Sunshine Band's ‘Please don’t go’, starred a spectacularly be-mulleted Lionel Richie look-alike who mooched about imploring his girlfriend not to leave. The video then cut to footage of his beloved looking mournfully through a wire mesh, apparently trapped in the chicken run at the end of the garden. Weird.

We found it fascinating talking to the crew about their lives and how spending months away at sea at a time affected them. Pavlo showed us some pictures of his historic hometown of Odessa on the computer on the bridge, discretely skipping the mouse over the folder entitled ‘Playboy Calendar Album’. For the Filippinos a life at sea was comparatively lucrative if ‘very boring’ rued Rene, who was 30 but looked 20. ‘When we go home we say you are ‘Millionaire for a day’’ laughed his friend Lito, ‘You make a big party with all your family and friends. After that you must be careful’ he smiled ruefully. ‘When people come to the house and ask for me I tell my wife to say ‘He is at sea!’’ he chuckled, thus avoiding acquiring a retinue of hanger-ons. ‘This is a good ship though’ observed Rene, ‘Much better than an oil tanker’ he said referring to the terrible hydrocarbon fumes and vapours that pervade those vessels. ‘We call that ‘Killing me softly’’.

They earned around US$1300 a month but at some cost to their relationships, especially their reproductive cycles. Rene once went to sea for a 15 month stretch and came back to a wife and year old daughter he’d never met. Other seamen had problems (or semen problems) conceiving during their short stints at home and some vow not to return to sea again until their wives are pregnant.

Whilst english was the official language of the ship, the range of accents aboard (Ukranain, Russian, Fillippino and Fi’s Scottish brogue) made for some entertaining pronunciation and comprehension challenges. On a previous voyage one of the Fillippino crew had suffered a serious accident at sea and the ship was met in Brisbane harbour by an ambulance. ‘Don’t worry mate’ said the Aussie paramedic ‘we’re taking you to hospital today’. Instead of the expected reassurance the poor invalid immediately began to panic. Misinterpreting the Australian twang he’d heard that he was being ‘taken to hospital to die’.

We were given a tour of the ship to familiarise us with our new home. The vast engine room was hotter and noisier than a dark drum and bass club. Afterwards it was clear why the Russian engineer who worked in this mechanical nave was so quiet at mealtimes, 12 hours a day in 3 four-hour shifts in this punishingly loud and uncomfortably hot space was hardly conducive to being ‘chatty’. We stood on a metal grille above the massive spinning drive shaft, all gleaming, greasy copper before it passed through the ship’s hull to the propellor. Spinning the blades at a bewildering number of revolutions per minute the brutal behemoth of an engine burnt through a monstrous 100 tonnes of diesel a day. So much for low carbon travel*.

The ship ripped along at over 22 knots, or just over 25 miles an hour. This may not be enough to arouse Jeremy Clarkson but you can waterski at this speed. Having seen the titanic jacuzzi effect of the huge propellor at the stern I’m not sure you’d want to attempt it. At the bow we enjoyed the sensation of speeding through the water in almost total silence as the engine was a mighty 170m behind us. However just being on deck felt like getting buffeted in a gale, as great blustery gusts ripped across the water. Despite this wind whipping the waves stayed mercifully low and gentle, unlike our queasy first crossing of the Bay of Biscay.

All the crew seemed to have Bay of Biscay anecdotes, calling it ‘The Ship’s Graveyard’. Alec, the Russian Chief Officer described one storm where ‘We lost 22 40-foot long containers over the side, with another 20 broken loose and shifting dangerously around on deck’ he reminisced. ‘A gangway was ripped from the side of the vessel and repairs took over a week. It was lucky no-one was hurt’ he added with considerable understatement. ‘The best thing was one of the damaged containers was full of chocolate! And all the crew…’ he grinned gesturing cabins chocka with contraband candy.

Our pacific (with a small ‘p’ before some smartarse points out we were actually travelling through the Arafura Sea) passage was thanks to those millions of unselfish shellfish and coral beasties that make up the Great Barrier Reef. This pile of dead chalky animals and it’s living crust, along with the conveniently placed archipelagos of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea meant our whole passage from Singapore to Brisbane was excellently (say this in a Monty Burns voice it sounds better) sheltered, almost approaching millpond status.

A pilot joined us close to midnight near Booby Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. His job was to steer us through the treacherous tidal reefs, narrow channels and shallow shoals of the Torres Straits between Cape York and Papua New Guinea. ‘What are you doing here?!’ he expressed in surprise when spotting Fi in the darkness of the bridge. ‘What’s wrong with the plane?’ came his response after we’d explained. The following morning he pressed me further about the climate change angle of our trip ‘Is it happening?’ he probed sceptically. As a marine pilot I would have hoped he might be a little more aware of rising sea levels. ‘I think it is just another way to make money’ he concluded, ‘like drinking milk, they told us to do that too!’ I hesitated to point out that failing to tackle climate change will probably have more serious repercussions than not imbibing enough cow-juice and that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change might be just a little more venerable and august an institution than the Milk Marketing Board. ‘I went home to Poland at Christmas’ he continued in appropriately ruminative fashion, ‘and there was no snow to go skiing! It was all grass!’ he exclaimed. Go figure Einstein.

For more pictures of our cargo ship journey click here.

*Note; The UK Department for Transport recommended figures on carbon emissions for bulk carrier vessels are 0.63g/CO2/passenger/km. In contrast a long haul flight emits 210-330 g/CO2/passenger/km (short haul flights emit between 330-460g/CO2/passenger/km – these figures include radiative forcing effects) i.e. travel by bulk carrier is up to 500 times more carbon efficient than flying.)

Time Travel...

Just to confuse and further befuddle everyone who is bewildered by our apparent ability to move more freely through time and space than a heavily greased geezer from Gallifrey here are the links to my latest two Observer columns:

Mud-wrestling in Dalat - 26.8.07

Old Malaysian Dying Farts - 9.9.07

There was a minor hiatus in the publication of these articles due to a clash of content when the above piece on Dalat somewhat overlapped with a feature article also on Vietnam by Lynn Barber. To avoid Vietnamese overload my column skipped a week, creating a bit of a backlog. The column is thus about 3 weeks behind where we are now, the blog content about a fortnight and the Google Map almost up to date. All clear? Probably not, just enjoy the content and don't worry too much about the chronology...

Thai me up, Thai me down...

At the Cambodian/Thai border we swapped our dusty, rusty bus for a rather swanky new mini-van, the relative prosperity of Thailand compared to its impoverished neighbour immediately apparent. Brick and concrete houses replaced wooden shacks, there were shops instead of stalls and large numbers of bigger, newer more expensive vehicles thrummed along smooth, surfaced roads. The driver whizzed us along at a cracking pace, our nerves only tested by his repeated and unsuccessful attempts to snatch a mosquito from the air whilst doing 120km an hour.

But as we hit Bangkok the red mist descended. Mr ‘Cool, Calm and Collected’ became ‘Captain Exasperation’. Swerving in and out of the thronging lanes of Traffic, constantly seeking the tiniest advantage in the motor vehicle melee, it was hair-raising stuff as he tutted, sighed and noisily vocalised his frustrations. We flew along raised highways that snaked through the city skyline, then plunged down amongst the gaudy tuk-tuks to roll along tree lined boulevards dripping with fairy lights past gold-roofed palaces.

Avoiding the overt sleaze of the Khao San Road we found ourselves a room a few, much quieter, streets away in the Banglamphu Guesthouse. Run by a very sweet old lady, a retired teacher called Saiyout, the room was bare apart from two orthopaedically hard beds and a fan. We also had a midnight curfew. So much for us running wild in Asia’s city of sin.

We rode the river ferry into town. Carving through the choppy grey waters of the Mae Nam Chao Phraya was a great way to travel. Smaller, dart-like vessels sliced past, powered by what looked like enormous cappuccino milk frothers, churning the river into white foam in their wake. Hopping off at the Harbour Department we asked a security guard the way to Hualamphong Station. Thai men seem to have a penchant for extremely tightly tailored uniforms lending a slight homoerotic air to their outfits, or maybe that’s just me. Maybe if American policemen were issued with similarly snugly fitting attire they wouldn’t get so fat.

Thai hospitality and helpfulness are legendary and they’ve practically turned smiling into a national, cultural art form. We were completely disoriented on the way to the train station as no fewer than four different smiling people offered us entirely unsolicited but welcome directional assistance. The station itself was all calm, clean and orderly, completely unlike every other station we’d been to in Asia. Where were the people lying on the floor? The ragged sacks of belongings? In the air-conditioned ticket office we took a ticket from the machine and waited our turn beneath a sign promising ‘Hearty, Speedy, Quality Service’. That summed it up ‘hearty’ (defn: sincere and expressed in a cheerful and enthusiastic way). When was the last time you got service like that in a British railway station?

In ‘Little Arabia’ we tucked into falafels and hummus, washed down with fresh watermelon juice and hand-quiveringly strong Turkish-style coffee. Stubbled men in dark sunglasses smoked sheesha pipes at neighbouring tables and a group of burkha-clad women ate their meals through a sort of ‘food flap’. ‘Excuse me sir, but what is in your flask?’ asked the waiter of my metal water-bottle ‘Its not alcohol?’ I was slightly insulted by my implied ignorance, ‘No’ I replied, just stopping myself pointing out the hipflask full of fine single malt whisky in my bag. The laidback tolerance of the rest of Bangkok suddenly felt a world away.

That night we went for a voyeuristic gawk on the Khao San Road. Tiny mobile bars sold cheap cocktails and blasted out music through distorted speakers as overstretched as the bargirls skimpy outfits. They were touting for business outside less salubrious establishments while under the naughty neon lights a carnal carnival procession filed past. Hawkers and hustlers hassled, shifty types shuffled and improbably matched Western/Thai couples sauntered along amongst the stalls selling streetfood and tourist tat. I did however spot possibly my favourite t-shirt slogan of all time adorning the chest of a slim Thai girl it bore the legend ‘Fat people are harder to kidnap’. So that’s the American anti-terrorist abduction strategy explained in full then.

We were trying to swap some books for our forthcoming cargo ship journey, not wishing to be caught in the middle of the Timor Sea with nothing to read. We managed to sell a cheap Vietnamese photocopy of Graham Greene’s ‘The Quiet American’ to one stallholder who wouldn’t swap or buy our other slightly larger than standard paperbacks as they ‘wouldn’t fit on his stall’. In another bookshop we tried in vain to establish whether there was a filing system of ANY description. The stock was so effectively jumbled it could not have been simply random and must have been the work of an evil, maverick librarian. The available titles were also dismal. Chick-lit, Tom Clancy, self-help and pseudo-religious mysticism predominated. ‘Books are a load of crap’ as another maverick librarian Philip Larkin once put it. In this shop they literally were.