Formosa by Ford Laser

Two great tours of Taiwan, a quick trip back to Yorkshire to see my lovely newborn nephew and finally, a week before I head to India, the rains have kicked in and I get a chance to blog. Lots of new tours are coming together, including a cycling trip of Taiwan, an incredible hilltribes trip in China (check out Ewen’s pix) and photography, cycling and unicycling (yes, you read that right) trips in India. Given the way the rest of the year is looking, it’s been great to have some time back at home in Taiwan, although, as always, a few weeks in one place and my feet were itching, so the opportunity for some research trips around the island in the car were welcome respite…

So several hundred miles of mountain roads, a rusty Ford Laser, me, Tot, Cocoa the dog and a stack of camping gear and we were off. Whenever I take time off from travel I manage to quickly forget how beautiful the island is. Sure, I tell everyone that it’s great and that they should come, but when we head out on the road with no set plan I feel like yelling it from the mountain tops. Of a route that took in remote beaches, the biggest spider I’ve ever seen, 3000m passes and hot spring pools surrounded by lush palms, the highlight was a visit to a mountain orphanage, predominantly attended by aboriginal kids. Smiling, friendly faces and a sense of inspiration in the face of adversity pervade, and we were both moved by the visit, and Cocoa liked chasing the lizards. We will visit again and will start contributing some of our tour proceeds to the orphanage.

Next it’s to India in the monsoon to research some tours and maybe even buy a little plot of land. India seems to supply curious, crazy and challenging experiences on a daily basis, so doubtless I’ll be back to blog soon … 

A Book is Born!

Following the year plus it took to write, I’ve been keenly following the printing process of my book: from my computer to the publishers’ offices in Florida via electronic mail and express courier (for the maps and photos), through painstaking editing, to the printers in India and then to the Hunter warehouses in the States. A few weeks ago I heard that my book had finally reached the warehouse and was ready for sale! A few days ago, after months of waiting, wondering and wishing I finally saw a copy of my book, then today I got an e-mail from a friend letting me know he’d seen it on the shelves of Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon! Happy times and though I say it myself I don’t think there’s anything on the market quite like it! It offers a new perspective on some of China’s most famous destinations and attractions and a range of adventurous possibilities unrivalled by any other China guidebook: cooking, tai chi, dragon boat racing, feng shui, calligraphy, traditional painting and kung fu are all on offer along with the more regular cycling, hiking, kayaking, golf, swimming and skiing. And there are some great photos (thanks Tot, Ewen and all others who contributed). So if you’re heading to Beijing, Chengde, Xi’an, The Three Gorges, Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Huangshan, Guilin, Yangshuo, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong or Macau, then get yourself a copy!  You can buy the book online at Hunter Publishing, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Powell’s.

Sabah Sabah

The freak snowstorms that hit China left Macau a chilly 9 degrees and so it was with relief that we stepped out in the balmy warmth of Kota Kinabulu, just a couple of hours’ flight to the south. Not sure what I expected from Sabah, but Borneo always sounds so remote and exotic that I was surprised to see so much of the territory cleared for palm oil plantations. Whilst some species such as spitting cobras seem to thrive in their new environment, others such as orang-utans and proboscis monkeys find their habitats smaller day by day. This has led to conservation measures such as the rehabilitation centre at Sepilok where stranded, abandoned or domesticated orang-utans are reintroduced to their natural habitat and way of living. The drive from Sandakan to the centre gives nothing away and it all feels very urban until a few miles from the centre. But once there, the forest is wild and there is abundant wildlife all around, not least the troupe of orangs who force their way through the crowds of visitors, whilst others arrive swinging through the trees. The feeding ritual is important and ensures that those recently reintroduced to the forest get their five-a-day, but the end game is hopefully that they won’t come back and will fully reintegrate themselves to their natural surroundings. I saw a similar set-up at Bukit Lawang in Sumatra ten years ago, and whilst that felt a good deal rougher, readier and wilder, the pleasure of watching these super-human creatures, so alike us and so different, was every bit as memorable the second time round. The proboscis monkey reserve is a simple story of tourism winning out over agriculture to the benefit of wildlife. The land belongs to a Malaysian Chinese businessman who has decided to leave a mangrovey third of his property in its natural state rather than convert it to palm oil plantation. This offers a wonderful opportunity to see the bizarre proboscis monkeys in their natural habitat. The alpha male sported a huge nose and a big belly and watched over his harem while they ate. We also saw a host of other wildlife including hornbills, cheeky silver langurs and slithering spitting cobras.
But the place that will stay in my mind when I think of Sabah is Sipadan Island. The resort off Mabul was reason enough to visit, with decidedly classy huts a-la-Maldives standing free out over the ultra-blue waters, but it was life in the sea we’d come for. Having sampled the waters of Fiji, Oz, Bali, Peninsular Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, the Red Sea, the Caribbean, I thought I’d seen the best of the big blue, but Sipadan was something else. Walking between the huts on paths elevated above the water revealed plenty of trumpet fish and giant lion fish, but once you actually got into the water it truly was another world. In a few short hours I swam with countless varieties of turtles, sharks and the biggest shoals of fish I’ve ever seen, most notably a giant school of circling barracuda, thousands strong. And this was all just snorkeling!

A Very Buddhist Birthday

35 today and another blinding & bizarre birthday on tour! Running a private tour of Taiwan and spent last night in a lovely hotel in Tainan with Tot, opening my pressies at midnight. Today we headed out to Foguangshan, Taiwan’s largest Buddhist Monastery, a huge complex stretching across the bamboo-clad hills, dotted with shrines, statuary, lanterns and orchids. We were shown round by a lovely, lively nun, radiant with inner belief. We meditated for 7 minutes that somehow managed to feel like 7 years (and yet 7 seconds at the same time) and then headed up to the giant gold Buddha which overlooks the complex as the sun was setting. It was here that the nun took it upon herself to sing “Amitofah Simon” to the tune of Happy Birthday. Afterwards we headed for a vegetarian feast at the monastery teahouse where a birthday cake was rustled up and my 35th was firmly sealed into my memory banks! To cap it all the monastery is only half-an-hour’s drive from our house so I headed home for a night with Tot; thanks Arlene & Don for being such lovely guests!

(2)007: License to Travel

Just got back from a brilliant week in Laos and Cambodia and can’t wait to get back to them, particularly Cambodia. Bit of a whistle-stop trip, but the laid-back charm of Luang Prabang made five days feel like five weeks, and however you long you spend at Angkor it will never be enough, so three nights was fine for an aperitif. Memories of Laos are a blur of orange robes, brilliant blue skies, glistening gold stupas, the rich ruddy tones of the Mekong, stunning sunsets, smile after smile and wonderfully decaying colonial architecture.

Cambodia was all about Angkor and Preah Khan was the highlight for me. OK so it’s decaying and overgrown and the carvings may not quite be up to those at Angkor Wat itself, but it has the whole Indiana Jones/Lara Croft thing going on, without the crowds to be found exploring the gargantuan roots at Ta Prom. A week might not seem like a long trip, especially when you’re used to several months at a time, but the absence of work really made it feel like a break and gave me the chance to reflect on what an incredible year it’s been:

January: France, February: England & Belgium, March & April: Australia, May & June: China & Tibet, July: Taiwan, August: Thailand, September: Philippines, October: Taiwan, November: China, December: Cambodia & Laos

I’ve always been a Bond fan so it’s fitting that 007 should be a big year, but couldn’t really have predicted quite how big. 2007 has seen the completion of my first solo book, an Adventure Guide to China for Hunter, the publication of the latest Australia Rough Guide for which I happily traipsed around the Northern Territories and Western Australia in a fully kitted out camper (see The Wilds of WANT) and my first Frommer’s assignment for which I traveled the length of the Chinese Silk Road (see Silk Road Rocks), took the new rail link to Tibet and spent time in Inner Mongolia.

This year I’ve also married my longstanding sweetheart, Tot, got a dog, moved into a house, started running tours of Taiwan for those seeking “The Other China” with Grasshopper Adventures and my sis has just had a baby.

And so to 2008 – a year of, you guessed it, more travel; a Taiwan tour and Borneo in January, the UK in February, more Taiwan tours in April and May, the US and Canada in September and our first Silk Road photography tour in October. I can’t wait!

 

Simple Things

Having spent the last year divided between China, Europe and Australia it was with great excitement that I once again set foot on Taiwan’s shores. Over the past year I’ve been asked a hundred times why, of all the places I’ve traveled and worked, I’ve chosen to live in Taiwan. There are a million answers spanning from bubble milk tea to hot springs and all of them are right. But it can be difficult to put your finger on exactly what draws you to a place and, when asked, I struggled to find a nice, succinct sentence to sum it all up. Then I got back here and one short bike ride simply crystallized everything that I love about Taiwan: we passed ornate temples and shrines, banana palms and betel nut girls, and headed down a timeless lane alive with old folks passing the time of the day, and amused by our presence. The lane led to rice paddies which reflected the towering mountains, ringed by cloud, lying beyond. Already I felt light years from the metropolis. Entering a forest the trees were alive with colour, the sun was cutting swathes of light through the bamboo and the cicadas were creating a cacophony. We stopped for a break and, sleepy from the heat, I thought I must be dreaming when I heard, then saw a procession of worshippers hacking through the undergrowth. Hot on their heels a Taoist deity was being shouldered through by four exhausted but elated devotees. Then they were gone, and we were left in silence (even the cicadas stopped), wondering if we had, in fact, imagined the entire event. On the way back we meandered into a pineapple field and a weathered farmer appeared. I expected us to be forcibly removed. Instead, he smiled as he passed me a pineapple!

Hat Yao Honeymoon

Just got back from China, a quick turnaround in Taiwan and now here I am sitting on the huge balcony on our hut on Hat Yao, wondering how I got lucky enough to marry Tot. The wedding itself was a lovely, simple, straightforward affair (aside from the fact that the whole thing was in Thai which neither of us speak) and then a plane, bus, boat and jeep ride later found us back at the same beach we spent a month enjoying shortly after we first met 6 years ago. We didn’t have any reservations so we agreed to a place on the boat, but when we got there it wasn’t what we’d remembered and we quickly left the small hut and its bat-crap stained sheets behind us, hiking along the road and then down to the beach. We walked to the far end of the beach and met another tout we’d seen on the boat. After a quick look round (guidebook research hangups leave me unable to look at just one room or hut anywhere) I knew this was the place and we splashed out a whole $20 a night for our wooden hut at the very tip of the headland, set up on stilts 20 feet above the gently lapping sea. The next day I set out to explore and 100 feet above the hut found our original $2 hut, ramshackle but standing and still complete with the artwork (Tot’s) and scrawlings (mine) we’d made all those years before. The circle was complete. Right now Tot is about 10 feet away from me on the far side of the balcony, wrapped up in a green hammock and nursing a copy of the latest Harry Potter, and looking every inch Mrs Foster, glancing occasionally at her husband, and wondering when he’ll detach himself from his laptop. Enough blogging for one honeymoon!

Silk Road Rocks

A man wearing an overcoat and a huge hat sidles up to me. Stones he whispers, barely audible above the cacophony of the street, as if he’s letting me into a secret. There’s an edge to his voice and he repeats stones a little louder and loaded with urgency. I’m intrigued. This is my introduction to the stone market at Khotan bazaar.

A few streets later and all around me there are hundreds of vendors selling magnificent collections of the stones for which the town is famous. As impressive are the different kinds of headgear being sported by shoppers and vendors alike. I check out some stones and the stall-holder busily oils the stone to show me its “true quality”, playing for the not insubstantial crowd which has now gathered. A few pebbles in my pocket and I try and find the sheep market.

Striking up a conversation with a man leading a sheep seems to be a likely option, so I approach the shepherd and ask the way. His response is ambiguous and could be taken to mean either that he’s going to market to sell the sheep or that he’s just bought the sheep and is going home. He’s a nice chap and we walk together for a while until we’re approached by a tall man with a large mustache who wants to buy the sheep. So I’m on the right track. The tall man inspects the sheep for quality as a connoisseur might address a fine wine, albeit with far more rough handling and tail grabbing. After some boisterous bartering the deal is done and both men decide to go home which leaves me back where I started, but fascinated.

The tall man speaks some Chinese and points me in the direction of the sheep market and soon herds of sheep and a mighty dust trail lead the way. Sheep bums stretch in lines as far as the eye can see and their handlers keenly clip the wool on their behinds like dog beauticians preening poodles. Groups of men with elegant knives slung in their belts walk the line and grab the odd bum, stopping for further inspection if the feel is right. This is just the first market of many to follow on my research route across the Silk Road and I think I can already smell the next!

The Wilds of WANT

It’s been 10 years since I was last in Oz, and that was just a month’s splash along the east coast with a brief (well as brief as 20-odd hours on a bus can be) trip inland to the catchily named Red Center. It rained, my girlfriend and I had the only major argument of a six-month trip (over a case of beer, which whilst appropriate to the country, was pretty pointless) and, well, let’s just say it was time to go back. So I was over the moon to be sent to WA and the Northern Territory (NT) for a couple of months updating the Rough Guide. It was the first time I’d been sent to do an update in a country where the principal language is English and I had a fully kitted out campervan, a stack of maps and only a smattering of settlements, geographical oddities and beaches to visit on my 7000 mile journey.

I soon discovered that the grand sounding Great Northern Highway was in reality just an endlessly straight swathe of tarmac cutting through the barren expanse of desert. My sis had been up this way a few years back and warned me of the sheer distances involved, but never one to listen to good, sound advice, I hadn’t really taken this on board. So proceeding a couple of inches up my grand map seemed like a reasonable proposal for my first short afternoon’s drive. Oh, how wrong I was!

It’s a lonely old business driving through the outback alone, but also a soothingly meditative one, with plenty of time to ponder, interrupted only by stops to photograph the odd wedge-tailed eagle scavenging on roo roadkill, or for a cup of tea at one of the randomly placed desert rest-stops. I’d never really researched anywhere like Oz before, in that the work was relatively straightforward and there were few major settlements to get my head round, but it was the distance that added the challenge. I’m used to traveling for long periods of time in rickety old buses, boats or trucks and interspersing these journeys with rapid research periods and on journeys I usually even manage to write up a few notes along the way, but my Oz routine soon proved to be very different.

Roughly, I’d get up, have brekky, finish up researching the tiny settlement I’d stayed in, stock up with food, water and gas and then drive, drive, drive, stop to check out the rooms at a roadhouse and refuel, drive, drive, drive, stop to check out an unusually large termite hill or a passing tornado, drive, drive, drive, stop for a snack, drive, drive, drive, make a seemingly short but actually 2 hour detour to a beach for sunset, drive, drive, drive (slower and watching out for roos), arrive, cook dinner, have a coffee, work, go to sleep in the van etc …

Living in Asia, and particularly Taiwan, it’s tough to get a sense of space and WA did exactly that for me. Probably too much space. I drove for over a thousand miles in 24-hours to outrun a cyclone to Broome and this also magically (for the first time ever) put me a day ahead of schedule. So with all this extra time to spare I thought I’d best create a problem for myself and took the campervan for a spin on the beach. And spin we did, and spin, and spin, until eventually a friendly local came and helped me out of my several feet deep hole with his 4×4. His only words were tryin to get home were ya mate? Anyhow after all this time alone and having watched Wolf Creek which I’d be passing on the road through the Kimberleys to Darwin, I happily agreed to take a couple of French lads (who had been sleeping in their car for the last month) along for the ride. They had next to no money and wanted to get to Asia as quick as possible, so urged me make haste for Darwin. It was great to break up the driving as well, although, sod’s law, the only time I got pulled over by the cops (in the middle of absolutely nowhere) I, the insured driver, wasn’t driving. Anyhow, the cops didn’t seem to care and after breathalyzing us (and letting us keep the tubes as souvenirs) we were on our way again. Tot was also due to meet me in Darwin and we were even thinking of getting married there, so we sped along.

After three weeks of relentless driving I don’t know what I was expecting from Darwin, but just as a plain old drink can take on monumental importance if you’re parched in the desert, I had made Darwin up to be a Las Vegas on the sea, a strip of bright shining lights drawing travelers through the desert. But it wasn’t. In spite of development and a stack of trendy bars, shops and restaurants, Darwin is still basically a one-street town. Late at night, when all the coffee shops, cafés and boutiques have closed down, but the pubs are still open, Darwin still manages to feel every inch the frontier town it once was.

Anyhow, the man bloggeth too much. Tot arrived, we burned down to Alice via Katherine, Mataranka (lovely springs) and Devil’s Marbles, spent a few days researching there and then headed to King’s Canyon, Uluru and Kata Tjuta. Compared to the huge distances I’d covered in WA, getting up and down the Stuart Highway seemed a breeze (it even had the odd traffic light), all the more so with the company of a good woman. The day we headed out to Uluru started with clear blue skies and so we raced across the desert to catch the rock in the sunlight. After mistakenly spotting Mount Connor as Uluru the weather turned downhill a little and by the time we reached the rock it was raining. Two visits, a decade apart, both met by rain in the desert. Did I do something really wrong in a past life? Anyhow, we watched the rock in the rain from the back of the camper with a cup of tea and soon noticed trickles of water running down the smooth sheen of the monolith. We drove closer to have a better look and were greeted by one of the most spectacular waterfalls I’ve ever seen, its white water racing its way down the red rock. The next day there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Nor the day after. So maybe I wasn’t so bad in my past life.

The Road Starts Here

Having finally (finally finally) sent off the text, language boxes, maps and photos I want to commemorate this momentous event in my life, my first whole book, with a blog where I can ramble, rant, use superfluous adjectives, and not worry about word counts or the wisdom of what I’m saying.

I am physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted, but happy, relieved and excited about a few weeks in the Philippines before heading back to Europe for Xmas and no work until March when I’m covering Western Australia and the Northern Territories for the Rough Guide.

This morning I caught my reflection in the mirror and it was a halloweenesque spectacle; translucently green pallid skin offset by a bright ginger beard, deep black rings under my eyes and the look of one who’s seen the dark side of the moon. The final 42-hour writing stint running up to my deadline really wiped me out. Much as I want to have a random wordfest, I can’t think of a single adjective. But given this is the first solo book I’ve written (albeit with bags of help from Tot), looking back on it it never got tooo bad. In spite of the workload I gave it, my computer didn’t pull any disappearing acts with any of the files, and the nearest I came to losing it was ripping my t-shirt off in a feeble impersonation of the incredible hulk when a repair man came to try and fix the window at a seemingly ungodly hour.

Of course, the edit process lies ahead, and whilst all I have to do is answer the odd question, past experience tells me that the road may be long and fraught with misunderstanding, but for now that’s the last thing on my mind. Bantayan Island Philippines here I come.