so where've you been? 14 KL again

Impulsiveness is good. Impulsiveness I can do. Impulsiveness is pre-adolescent, and therefore fits in well with my general solipsistic narcissism.

So I SPLURGED a ridiculous amount on three flights today; on 28 hours in a range of aircraft. I went back to KL.

To find out I can just about remember the bahasa malaysian to enable me to order a beer at KLIA airport. I know it's 75 ringgits to get to the city, so I don't even bother. I don't bother with much I would once have felt obligated to do, these days.

Have you ever sat for 28 hours in a dodgy velveteen coach seat?

so where've you been? 13 Chiang Mai, northern Thailand; shadows

Watching people is slowly becoming the most important thing about travelling, for me.

Today I stood on the Thae Phae bridge over the river Ping, in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand.

I turned at too-close brake screech, and watched a small child be run over by a big car - he bounced for ten yards on the bonnet of the car hitting him, then slid slowly down the front, brushed himself off, and scarpered, unharmed.


Meanwhile, everyone watching stood frozen, listening to their hearts exploding.

M'aide

Well.

Thanks to my silence, nobody really knows what's going on here, do they?
Momentously frustrating times. Momentously life changingly good times.
All over now.

I'm in Bangkok. And I'm not really sure what to do next.

so where've you been? 12 Bangkok

I went out for an Indian meal. I was bitterly disappointed because the sag didn't taste British.

so where've you been? 11 Sa Pa, northern Vietnamese / China border

just checking in to say I'm alive here.

I'm in sa pa, 2km from the border with China. It's cold and misty and mountainous - really stunningly beautiful. The hilltribe people here are so alien looking to western eyes - they dye their teeth black to look more beautiful, the women shave some of the hair from their heads, then add hemp coils dyed with indigo and a little tin on top then add a scarf in a bright tartan pattern, and the colour of the scarf denotes what tribe they're in. I'm sat under a blanket I bought off a tribeswoman now - I have no use for a blanket, specially not as colourful and strange smelling as this one, but these old ladies are killer saleswomen, and I rarely get through a day without buying something. Yesterday I was off the beaten track visiting tribespeople's houses - they were in such beautiful valleys, surrounded by rice paddies and water buffalo, and red dirt - and they had next to nothing - dirt floors, walls supported by green glass bottles, and newspapers, dirt floors, big campfires and a dish for cooking rice wine. I helped grind some rice to make rice cakes - it was harder than it looked, I definitely wasn't as good as the old lady who usually does it. The one thing every house had was a tv and dvd player, though, so I'm not sure how long the idyll will last.

hugeover

orchard road consumerism.

Isn't it typical that you meet good people just four hours after you decide to give up having random crushes on people and are abandoning all of your Shag Plans, A through to D. (D was 'become a nun'). Bloody typical.
Last night I met a pop star, and Miss Vietnam 2001.

Time seems to move very very oddly at the moment - very slow and empty for days and days and days, then speeds up ridiculously.

Hey, that's good, I should blog that.

Ow, my hangover hurts. I can feel my hairs growing.

so where've you been? 10 vietnam; crap at languages

"I'm crap at languages," said the british expat whose hotel I was staying at. "I think it's a national characteristic. Don't you agree?"

No. While cheerfully admitting I've no real facility for picking up languages, I don't think we're so bad. In five days in North Sulawesi, I managed to learn bahasa Indonesia for the following phrases:
Hello, how are you, fine thanks, ok, good morning (7 variants), tasty, looks great (landscape), looks great (women), looks great (men), maybe, excuse me, really?, thanks, every type of food I could find, and happy birthday.

Sat on the prow of a dive boat, I'm practising my pronunciation with Ben, when an american missionary from the south jumps away from the sea spray. "Ohhh, ah git mahself < impronounceable word for wet >."
"See, she speak Indonesian. Is good. You should learn." says Ben.
I ask her. While it's pretty rare for *any* american or australian I've met to speak any other language, she's lived here spreading religious fundamentalism from the motherland for two years.

Later, underwater, Ben signals a request to look at my air gauge. I have 80 bar remaining, and he laughs and snorts (a deliberate show off tactic underwater, because it wastes more air) a double take of disbelief, and points to his own 140 bar of air. On the surface, he laughs about it again, and I ask him how long he's been diving. "Five years."
I point to myself. "Five weeks."

Yesterday was my first day in Vietnam. When I wrote down all the vietnamese phrases I'd tried to use at the end of the day, there were thirty three I could remember without looking anything up. I'm quite pleased with that.

Small steps. That la la.

And then someone explained the pronunciation to me, and I realised there are 45 more letters to the vietnamese alphabet than I thought, and I promptly forgot all 33 phrases, and I realised I will never ever manage this language. Ack.